Demon’s Souls is a dark, mysterious opera whose theme, expressed through gameplay and the unfolding of a powerful narrative, is the lure and peril of Faustian bargains. By opera I refer not just to the game’s occasional bursts of swelling sound, or even to solely to its understated yet epic narrative. Rather, I use the term in the same way that Richard Wagner envisioned an ideal future form of opera as “gesamkundstwerk” or “total artwork,” in which every aspect of music, libretto, costuming, and set design fused together to create an interactive, participatory mythology.

Mephistopheles

Demon’s Souls strikes me as operatic both in its overarching structure and its minute details; I first noticed this aspect of the game when looking at the loading screens between the game’s areas. These screens are a joy to pore over, as they provide larger-than-life full portraits of the game’s various characters, each dressed in some variation of black and gold. The characters’ costumes, lovingly rendered with the lush visual textures made possible by the PS3’s high-end graphics capabilities, look more like opera costumes than the typical orcs-and-elves garb. And, as in the best opera, these details contribute to a larger aesthetic and thematic end that manifests partially in the game’s black and gold color scheme. From the first moment in the Nexus, the game’s central quest hub, the shining obsidian walls glow with overlapping layers of golden sigils right out of some arcane grimoire. As we discover through the game’s hard-won fragments of narrative reward, gold is the color of demonic magic or “soul arts” in the fallen kingdom of Boletaria. This visual symbolism lends a dark edge to one character’s reminder to the player: “you have a heart of gold . . . don’t let them take it from you.”

Many aspects of the game resonate to the tune of an overriding aesthetic principle, expressed in disparate parts working together. This principle takes the form of a question, which might be formulated with the Biblical question “what profiteth it a man if he gains the world and loses his soul?” In the case of this game, the “soul” of the verse might be better modified to “souls,” since the demon’s souls of the title are the currency of exchange in Boletaria and the only way of increasing stats, leveling up, buying items, and acquiring spells. Demon’s Souls is an arduously, unrelentingly difficult dungeon crawl in which success is possible only through the tireless trial-and-error of multiple deaths and the careful cultivation of community knowledge and cooperation. Other reviews, such as those of Michael Abbott (a.ka. the Brain Gamer) and Gamasutra, have offered excellent analyses of the game’s innovative online features and their close relationship to game’s educational element. I’ve also briefly written about some of these features in comparison and contrast to other online games in an interview with Randolph Carter at grindingtovalhalla.com.

In this entry, I’m less concerned with these features and more with a resulting experience of gameplay: the experience of temptation. While Demon’s Souls is unquestionably a game that challenges, it is also a game that tempts. Because each new corridor and secret passage bristles with difficult-to-reach exotic treasures and haunting encounters, the game constantly teases the player with the dilemma of continuing onward to fresh challenges, or retreating while one still can with one’s stock of souls. One misstep sends an unwary player back to the very beginning of a level and strips her of all unspent souls, creating a very powerful and excruciating form of negative reinforcement. One often knows, naggingly, in the back of one’s brain, that discretion is the better part of valor, that one should stop while one is ahead and cut one’s losses by returning to the Nexus after accumulating any sizable chunk of souls. Yet, the game quietly whispers in one’s ear: “come on, go just a little further, there are untold wonders around that corner.” More often than not, listening to that voice, to the suave devil on one’s shoulder, leads to the disaster of losing one’s souls.

And that is the classic Faustian bargain: recklessly seeking power and knowledge at the price of the most precious spiritual essence. The game quietly but insistently reminds players that such bargains are by their very nature losing games in which even apparent success can be as damning as failure. When one does efficiently spend souls, one can gain tangible power—power in some cases so great, as in the high-level spells earned through defeating a Greater Demon, that it intoxicates. Yet, the wisdom of this method of gaining power through the harvesting of souls (sometimes of demons and sometimes of their wretched, addled victims), seems dubious at best. Soul exchange is especially risky given the backstory element that Boletaria was corrupted, and the archdemonic Old One awakened, through the use of Soul Arts. There doesn’t seem to be much escape from Soul Arts for, while a pious priest condemns the use of magic as demonic, and his magician counterpart preaches the glories of humanistic progress over binding superstitions, both magical and priestly arts involve trading in souls. As Matthew Weise has pointed out, there are subtle but strong metaphysical implications in the game systems, through dialogue and other clues, that magic and orthodox religion are both highly similar in their methods and moral (or immoral) valuation. They are also both equally useful from a gameplay standpoint: priestly miracles serve the standard healing and protective functions, while magic provides a variety of offensive and defensive effects.

(On a sidenote, the priest’s self-righteous, monotheistic glorification of the “God of this world” at the expense of other spiritual traditions evokes a mistrust in me that no doubt comes from many places, including a background in some Gnostic traditions, in which the apparent god of the visible world turns out to be synonymous with the demonic Archon. I’m anticipating a Lovecraftian switcheroo in which the priest turns out to be worshipping the Old One. I also notice slight implications that religion and solipsism may be mildly intertwined with each other, since the most costly Banish “miracle” allows players to negate the PvP aspect of the game, driving off the Black Phantoms of other players.)

Sage Freke

However, I’m also fairly sure that, despite my class decision to be primarily a magician who totes a miracle talisman in his left hand as a healing insurance policy, the more esoteric and humanistic ambitions of Sage Freke the Visionary are just as dangerous and reckless; the exchange of souls for magical power is, after all, the classic Faustian bargain. Even if a fighter-class player managed to avoid the lure of both talisman and wand, religion and magic, he would still have to level up. And every attempt to level is accompanied by a haunting question from the Maiden in Black, the game’s central quest-giver: “Dost thou seek Soul Power? Then touch the Demon inside me.” Based on observations of other characters, major and minor, who have had congress with demons, the results don’t seem pretty. The presence of a character named Mephistopheles in a loading screen (I haven’t encountered him yet) suggests that these Faustian parallels are quite intentional and self-aware on the part of the developers at From Software. How deep or sophisticated these intentions ultimately go is less important to me than the way that insinuations and implications emerge from the synergistic fusion of the game’s mechanics, aesthetics, and narrative, from the single-player and social interactions that develop from the game’s intricate and beautifully, if somewhat sadistically, balanced systems.

I haven’t finished Demon’s Souls (I’m 59 hours in, not counting 10 hours spent on an abortive character), but I’m going to go ahead and make a statement that I’ve been mulling over for a while now, reluctant to seem rash or fanboyish. Demon’s Souls may be the best game I have ever played. (There is still a bit of a running competition with my other favorite game, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, which remains an example of top-notch design that may even bear some aesthetic and gameplay resemblance to Demon’s Souls.) Each (comparatively rare) time I progress in Demon’s Souls, new mysteries open up, and these narrative discoveries are buoyed up by the inherent pleasures of persistent challenge, intermittent reward, and aesthetic gorgeousness.

Tower of Latria

(Possible spoiler alert): Last week, at the gloriously and disturbingly nightmarish second portion of the Tower of Latria, I suspected that Demon’s Souls may have finally reached the threshold of my expectations for inspired level design. Last night, during an unexpected sequence that resulted from a mysterious narrative backfiring of the now-routine attempt to summon a co-op player or Blue Phantom, I became pretty sure that this is a game like no other. I can’t describe the sequence without entering full spoilerdom, but I will say it involved a room full of chairs and a large orange turban.

It is a testament to the design of this game that it can both inspire enthusiastic accolades and a cautious reluctance—the feeling of falling into a trap, a metaphysical and moral conundrum that insidiously creeps up on unwitting players and then pounces, to a soundtrack of blaring brass and sweeping strings. Like the voice of a demon. Like the sound of an opera.

In Arcana Manor, the player wields a uniquely immersive and symbolic magic system to defeat the demons of a surreal Gothic mansion and unlock its secrets. Arcana Manor is a ceremonial magick simulator with a meticulously-researched system of gestural sigils, incantations, colors, and sounds that makes players feel like true adepts, not mere button-pushers.

Quests was recently included on Sean M. Baity’s amazon.com list, “Must Read Books for Aspiring Game Designers.”

http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/fullview/R1IL3PL3SI0X0U/ref=cm_pdp_lm_title_1

I’m very appreciative of this listing, and it’s cool to see Mr. Baity’s credentials in terms of the many games which he has worked on as senior designer at electronic arts.

http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,8377/

I just posted two new videos of gameplay footage from the most recent build of Arcana Manor (7-27-09).

The video has two parts.

The first part demonstrates several new features, including:
musical tones that correspond to colors and planets in the magic system,
mountable weapons based on the tarot suits,
elemental projectiles flung from melee weapons,
weapon cycling,
guard bots with basic AI,
an invisibility spell,
a demon model with flame effects from a procedural shader

The second part showcases these features:

a spell interface based on tarot cards
Moving platforms
A telekinesis spell
Collectible orbs whose colors and associated musical tones correspond to the seven planets of the ancients
A color-based and tonal magical interface corresponding to the orbs

I added two AI bots to my game prototype, and the process took a long time and a lot of work.  I ended up learning how to use echo statements to track the loading of the many files that I had changed and to determine where a particular file was erroring out.  This was useful debugging experience.

The way that I incorporated the AI bots initially resulted in my player character being chased by mirror versions of herself, which was eerie and reminiscent of similar Alucard versus Alucard doppleganger battles in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.  But I soon switched the AIGuard model out so that I was fighting two demonic space orcs.

I also changed the projectile scripts on my first-person spells so that the projectiles would do damage, as well as creating various other effects such as invisibility and healing.

Then, while working on loading the animations for the ai bots, my mission stopped loading and started crashing in the middle of phase 2 loading.  I can’t figure out why, so I’m building a debug version of the app with the hope that I can find the specific line where the mission load is crashing.

I’ve been working on several features of Arcana Manor which are starting to add to the magic system.  The first is that I re-sized all of my tarot objects (the suits like cups and swords) and placed mount nodes on them so that they can be equipped as weapons in first-person view.   I worked for a couple of days to get weapon cycling operational so that players can switch between these weapons with a button press.  Then, I modified the melee scripts so that swinging the weapons would cast spells that fire projectiles in first-person mode, targeting with the crosshairs rather than selecting with selectrons.  Next, I made a set of geometrical projectiles fired by the various tarot suits, starting with a sphere textured in a wave image that emits water droplets through particle emitters.  Equipping the cup allows the player to fling this watery sphere, and each of the other tarot suits can hurl similar projectiles that correlate with their traditional ancient elemental attributions as well as the appropriate Platonic solids defined that the Greek philosopher Empedocles associated with the four elements.  The wand throws a flaming pyramid, the sword shoots an airy octahedron, and the pentacle fires a purple sphere (technically, this should be an earthy cube, but I like the glowing purple plasma texture better).  In fact, I like the plasma filter in Gimp 2.0 so much that I made seven plasma textures for each of the seven colors of the visible spectrum and then applied these textures to seven geometrical primitives that can also be projectiles (including the delightfully obscure rhombicosahedron).  When I export these, I think they can be 3d jewels as well as projectiles, so they may end up playing into a 3d magic interface of the kind that I described in

I need to implement a power-up system that strengthens spells according to what objects and cards have been collected.

To do: put a mount node on each of the four tarot objects so that they can be wielded as weapons

Set up a different projectile effect for each object when it is swung/fired as a magical melee weapon

Perhaps also a different particle effect that is activated for each item

A room with four walls, each with one of the tarot suits and a Latin word (scire, audere, velle, tacere)

Maybe also murals representing a man/woman doing each

Bridges and hallways lead out from this room to four trials/levels of knowledge, courage, will, and silence

A Gothic platformer, but trying to strive for Psychonauts or Ico more than American McGee’s Alice

Well, I finished the polygon modeling portions of the ogre model and embarked on the uv mapping portions.  Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that Softimage Mod Tool 7.5 has some quirks that make this process a little more difficult.  First, the export as .obj file option has been removed from Mod Tool 7.5, which means that I can no longer export scenes into a form that could be opened by Roadkill, a uv unwrapping application.  Mod Tool 6.0, which still had the export as .obj option, can’t open scenes from Mod Tool 7.5.  The pelt unwrapping method, which is a smoother and cleaner way of uv unwrapping organic, curvy shapes, is not present in Mod Tool and maybe not in Softimage at all.  This is unfortunate, since Ward’s book relies heavily on pelt mapping.  I probably just need to learn to do basic cylindrical and cubic sub-projections using Mod Tool’s texture editor.

Here is the complete ogre model, which I finished last night, with all of the polygon modeling steps done.  Next comes UV mapping, followed by sculpting, normal map generation, and texturing.

For the last two days, I’ve been working on the ogre tutorial from Antony Ward’s Game Character Development. I went through two iterations of the main modeling portions of the tutorial, which entail building a torso, arms, legs, feet, and a head. The second iteration looks better than the first.

good ogre

Here is today’s update on Arcana Manor, in the form of a post I made to the ArcaneFX section of the Garagegames forum.  The only addendum I have is that after this post I managed to fix most of the object selection problems, thanks to the help of the user named Gibby.  They were in the playgui.gui file.  Next up is the more challenging problem of selecting objects in first-person shooter mode.

In the process of making many script and code changes to implement several different features, I seem to have interfered with the game’s ability to select objects with the mouse rollover raycast.  I can select the orc AI player, but only from certain angles (specifically from a slight angle while he is running toward the player, and sometimes from behind if the player is standing close to him).  I can’t select the orc corpse at all, even though “corpsehiddenfromraycast” is set to “0″ and “$TypeMasks::CorpseObjectType”  is enabled in “AFX::targetSelectionMask.”  If I run the AFXDemo from a fresh install of AFX 1.7.1, it is much easier to select the orc and the orc corpse from almost any angle and distance, which suggests to me that I’ve done something to mess up the rolloverraycast function or another piece of code or script related to object selection.

I’ve used WinDiff to check afxtsctrl.cp against the same file in the fresh install of AFXDemo, but restoring this file to its original state doesn’t solve the problem.  Could anybody suggest where else I might look for changes to try to fix this problem?  I also checked in GameConnection.cpp because I think some of the object selection code is in that file, but I’m wondering where else the problem might be coming from.

To provide a little context, I am working on a game in which the player can cast spells from first-person mode, like in Oblivion.  So, one of the ultimate goals here is to be able to select objects in first-person shooter mode by toggling the cursor or using the crosshairs.   Gibby’s AFXFps mod and tutorial has been extremely helpful with this, though his solution is to cast spells from a 3rd person “psionics” mode.  For some reason, I can select objects in Gibby’s 3rd-person mode but not in his first-person mode, even when I toggle the cursor on.  I’ve studied the commands.cs script that Gibby uses to switch modes (which involve showing the reticle and the shapenamehud in first-person mode), but I’m not sure which part of this script would be causing the conflict between first-person mode and object selection.

So, a second question once I fix the raycast problem would be: how can I select objects while staying in first-person mode?

It’s been a few days since I’ve updated progress on Arcana Manor because I’ve been intently involved in implementing an important feature: moving platforms.  These are moving planes or scaled cubes that players can stand on top of, moving along with the platforms as on an elevator.  These moving platforms are important, by definition, to a game in which platforming a key part of gameplay.

Torque Game Engine Advanced doesn’t have out-of-the box support for moving platforms, which means that they have to be added as C++ code, preferably by the addition of one of the downloadable resources on Garagegames.com.  To integrate such a resource with a codebase that I’ve already heavily modified, I had to use WinDiff, a program for comparing files and isolating their differences.  Once I isolated these conflicting code fragments, I had to choose how to merge them by incorporating relevant new lines of code from the resource and discarding irrelevant lines of code.  This process was complicated by the porting of the resource from TGE 1.5.2 to TGEA 1.7.1, especially since the resource itself was actually for TGEA 1.8.1 but had been compiled from multiple TGE versions.  In practical terms, these multiple versions and resources meant that I had to spend several days reading through C++ source code, puzzling out its logic and structure until I could figure out which lines of code were needed and which were not.  I re-compiled the engine dozens of time, de-bugging code changes to preserve the resource’s functionality while updating it and slotting it in with ArcaneFX, melee, and other code changes I’ve already implemented.

I now have moving platforms.  The key is making the player object a child of the platform, which is a pathshape moving along the nodes of a path.

Unfortunately, I have to use a rectangular dts shape that came packaged with an early version of the resource, because the player falls through any dts that I make myself in Softimage.  I think this has to do with the way that collision meshes are set up in the process of exporting the model from Softimage to dts format, but after spending a day on collision meshes I haven’t been able to isolate the problem.

I’m now trying to trigger the moving platforms with a spell so that I can incorporate telekinesis into my magic system.  Since the magic system is the focus of the game and the surreal mansion is the secondary focus, it would be best if these two aspects of gameplay could be tied together.  I have a telekinesis spell that can move an interior instance with the settransform() function, but the interior leaps all at once rather than animating smoothly and carrying the player with it.  If I can trigger a pathshape with a spell, the player could raise and lower bridges with the alterative school of magic, corresponding to the wands.

I was happy to discover that WorldCat, a database of online library card catalogs, lists 64 libraries that currently list Quests as part of their collections. The list primarily includes university libraries, with a few community and public libraries for good measure.

I’m excited to see that the book is available to an audience of students in many emerging game design programs.

I was even more excited to find this review, from a user named Veronika on weread.com. She writes,
“A must-have for every game designer or anyone who wants to understand questing in a more sophisticated way. This book has it all - mythology, Joseph Campbell, Carl Gustav Jung, some tutorials and a lot of wisdom Another shining piece in my bookshelf.”

That is a really kind review. Reaching an individual reader like that might be the best part of writing a book.

Over the last few days, I’ve been implementing some first-person spells in Arcana Manor, i.e. spells that look good from a first-person perspective, which is not really the format for which ArcaneFX is designed.  Gareth Fouche (a Garagegames community member and Torque designer) made a good spell-casting resource that uses projectiles to cast spells–an approach that resembles Oblivion (or Undying) instead of a third-person MMO.  Fouche’s approach is the one I want, but it will take some tweaking to get this going with ArcaneFX.

I also have been working through an excellent book by Anthony S. Ward called Game Character Development.  The book gives a very detailed overview of the processes involved in current-gen character development (i.e. Xbox 360 and PS3), which entails several more steps than the previous-gen workfolow.

In previous-gen character development, the game artist would use a modeling application like 3dsmax or Maya to build the character out of polygons, then UV map the character and texture it in Photoshop.

The main difference between the previous-gen and current-gen approach is the current-gen use of sculpting programs like Mudbox or Z-Brush to paint details onto a model which would have been too time-consuming and memory-intensive to be accomodated on previous-gen hardware.  The artist then converts these details into a normal map, which is an RGB image whose pixel colors indicate the directions in which the model’s normals should be transformed.  (Previous-gen character art tended to include bump maps, which were grayscale images that could indicate only elevation, rather than normal maps.  Current-gen development includes both bump maps and normal maps, as well as other shader-based modifiers such as parallax maps and ambient occlusion maps.)

All of which suggests one thing: I need to recruit a modeler so that I can focus on scripting and programing the game’s magic system rather than building its models.

Actually, it’s more a matter of emphasis.  It’s still good to work on 3d models (which could represent characters summoned by the player or custom aspects of the player, such as hands for first-person casting), but the production of art assets is so time-consuming that it would be best to recruit someone whose main talent and experience is in models.

That said, I’ve been working on an ogre tutorial in Ward’s book, and here are a few screenshots.

Today, I implemented two new Arcana Manor features that I’ve been wanting and working toward for a while.

I now have a rudimentary soundtrack in the form of a looping 30-second clip from Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens.  I also managed to fix a melee system that has been broken for a while because of the conflict between ArcaneFX, a melee resource, and shifts between first-person and third-person camera.  This means that the player can now alternate between sigil-drawing, various spell-casting interfaces, and running/jumping.  The player can do some of these things simultaneously, so there is a certain synergy evolving between the various mechanics (though integrating and balancing them is going to be a challenge, which is why the main focus needs to be the magic system).

I also have basic Xbox 360 controller support, which is smoother and faster than the keyboard for movement and combat.  Juggling the various magical interfaces on a controller will be another challenge, but (as I mentioned earlier), this will force me to organize and refine the control scheme in positive ways.

Next Arcana Manor goals for features:

Set up a control scheme using the 360 controller

This will keep the magic system from becoming too unruly (a collection of chaotic key-presses) and more focused around a set of core mechanics

Fix melee system so that the sword can swing more than one time

Implement “platforms that move” for TGEA 1.7.1 using Windiff

Correlate spell-casting with platform movements via settransform function or applyimpulse

Finish modeling demon

Begin to script more spells

Script power-up mechanic for tarot items

Work on first-person spell-casting (such as casting animations for hands, effects that don’t require selectrons to target but work as projectiles as in Oblivion, effects that don’t depend on a zodiac

or make the zodiac vertical

or displace it in front of the player

Put more enemies into the game, make them customizable

Put music in background (e.g. Danse Macabre)

Finally, after six months, succeeded in attaching a particle emitter to the cursor.

This is the beginning of a gestural magic system, since the player can now trace sigils in the air because the cursor leaves behind a trail of glowing particles (in this case, fire) which look like a will o’ the wisp.

Here’s a video of the feature out of context

And here’s a longer video of the complete build, with the particle emitter feature in context

Interested readers might want to watch these videos in conjunction with this previous video of a recent build, which lacks the sigil drawing feature but also showcases the game’s spellcasting interfaces as they’re evolving.

I don’t think about theory much these days, focusing more on creative projects. For the last couple of days I’ve been doing some preparation for my classical myth and media class, which sparked a few theoretical thoughts.  Also, I’m continuing to think about magic systems, inspired in part by a podcast ( on which Roger Travis graciously invited me to be a guest) about this subject and its relation to Arcana Manor. Magic systems have become the focus of my creative design work and my research, and I tend to think about them through the lens of interactive or procedural allegory, a system of expressive rules.

This will make more sense to readers (hopefully) when the podcast is posted.

A magic system is a set of core mechanics (spell-casting is one of them, maybe the primary one) for  simulating supernatural powers and abilities rigorously and symbolically.

Quests, because of their relationship to narrative, tend to be scripted within an engine through quest flags and state changes.

Magic systems can be partially scripted within an engine (depending on the engine’s flexibility), but truly innovative mechanics have to be programmed.  New mechanics tend to require, at the very least, modifications to an engine’s source code and may require the development of new engines (or at least sub-systems within an engine).

What matters to me is allegory as system, as organized matrix of rules for generating symbolic meanings. This is distinct from a linear procession of symbols (i.e. narrative) or from free-floating pool of symbols merging into each other (collective unconscious, dream). In linear mediums, allegory manifests itself as narrative (although I wonder if poetry, in its capturing of de-contextualized images, may be allegorical without being solely or even primarily narrative). Rimbaud’s Vowels or Baudelaire’s Correspondences are dense symbols without narratives. Dante’s Divine Comedy does chronicle the adventures of one pilgrim (Dante) through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but the descriptive focus of the poem is the spatial organization of these realms and their inhabitants. The afterlife is a cosmological system for representing the punishment of sin and the rewarding of virtue.

A mythology (whether real as with the Ancient Greeks or invented as in the Cthulhu Mythos) is a system (a pantheon, a set of places, artifacts, recurrent events, themes). Many narratives can occur within a mythos, but many systems can also be generated by a mythology. When I was thinking about quests, I was trying to connect narrative and system, to explore their generative interplay. As I think about magic systems, I am more and more concerned with dynamic, procedural systems, which can be expressive in interactive, procedural, re-configurable ways.

Ritual is a key middle term.  Ritual is enacted myth, enacted symbolism.

Eric Zimmerman says that there is magic in games but argues that this magic is the thrill of creativity and problem-solving, which are distinct in his mind from a mage’s 8th-level fireball spell or the mystical experiences of organized religion.

I don’t see these three aspects of magic as inevitably distinct.  There are all sorts of connections to be woven between them.

That’s why I have a Clive Barker quotation above my desk, which in condensed form says “magic is the first and last of the world’s religions: a religion whose profoundest ritual is play.”  The quotation is longer but would require a detailed gloss to do it justice, because the idea is too important for me to treat lightly.  But the main point is that in Barker’s mind the three aspects of magic in games are intertwined expressions of one another.  (And he puts his money where his mouth is, since this quotation is from the introduction to his Imajica collectible card game, and he has also discussed the metaphysical implications of the magic system in Undying.  Incidentally, the magic system in Undying may be my second favorite magic system, just beneath Eternal Darkness.)

(A sidenote on Jung: Jung coopts the concept of the symbol for psychoanalytic purposes, but the term comes to prominence in Western thought in Romanticism (English, German, French), which precedes Jung chronologically. (e.g. Coleridge, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nerval).  In the game Eternal Darkness, the narrator invokes Jung, Freud, and Skinner as possible correspondences to the three Ancients, but then dismisses these psychoanalysts as inadequate to the horror and majesty of the beings represented by the runes. This is a nice way of suggesting that, while Jung is a key figure in understanding symbols, their content and operation eludes his unitarian and trans-historical attempts to explain all symbols as products of a psychoanalytic entity (the collective unconscious) which he invented. A theoretical entity which originates in his own German Romanticist/early modernist context and his Freudian training.)

And allegory precedes Jung also (Plato, Spenser, Dante).

I need to read Angus Fletcher’s Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode.

Question for further research: what are some of the most innovative magic systems, both in terms of mode of spell-casting, effects, and symbolism?

Mage: The Ascension and Mage: The Awakening (tabletop)

Magic: The Gathering (cardgame)

Betrayal at Krondor (crpg)

Arx Fatalis (crpg)

Loom (Adventure Game)

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

Castlevania: Lords of Shadows (Xbox 360)
The Lost Guardian (PS3)
Assassin’s Creed 2 (Xbox 360)
Dragon Age: Origins (Xbox 360)

As promised, here is a short video of the newest build of Arcana Manor.

This build features some experiments with a new spell interface, including a rotating 3d tarot deck and a hexagram gui with jewel buttons that summon magical sigils with spellcasting powers. The player can also shift between first person shooter mode for melee and third-person mode for cursor-based spell-casting in the interfaces. I’m using Jeff Faust’s ArcaneFX in conjunction with these interfaces to implement spell-casting effects, including a custom attack spell with my own zodiacs and rune rings and a modified levitation spell using physical zones. The build also features some custom items representing the minor arcana of the tarot deck, including an ankh wand, a glowing black sword, a cup, and a pentacle.

Finally got the beginnings of an original magic system working.

Customized two afx spells to become Call of Cthulhu and Eye of Ra, then linked them to the 3d tarot gui.

Figured out how to add an alpha channel to a png so as to make the background transparent.  By placing a sigil on a transparent background and building a gui around it, I can approximate the effect of “drawIng” many different grams (pentagrams, heptagrams) of many different colors, which hover in front of the player in first person mode.  Different grams can be brought up by pushing the many-colored gems at the points of a hexagram, which is itself transparent and centered in the middle of the screen, like a spellcasting/targeting HUD.

Screenshots and videos soon.

The aspect of designing a magic system (maybe of designing generally) that I like the best is interface design and special effects programming, when they are closely connected to gameplay.

The demon model is progressing.  Here are its horns.

modeling the horns

After completing the modeling of the Joan of Arc tutorial, I’m now working on a model of an original character in Autodesk Softimage (formerly Softimage XSI).   Ron Smith drew some excellent orthogonals (concept sketches that are exactly proportional to each other and can be placed at 90 degree angles to be used as guides for making a 3d model).

Here is the verbal description of the character that I gave Ron.

“Imagine a demon summoned by Knossos, the architect, when he realized that he needed supernatural help to build his manor but did not understand just how dangerous and corrupting this help could be.  The demon is in some ways a standard balor-type monster: large, red-skinned, winged, horned, and clawed.  He could tear a feeble architect’s head off, or his sister’s, without a second thought.  But there is something sad and thoughtful in his face, a pensively furrowed brow, a far-off look.  He has seen so many foolish humans sell their souls for so little, and even though he should be the Mephisto character in this Faustian drama, he takes no glee in the role.  He’s almost more of a genii in a lamp who has grown weary of the same 3 wishes and the way that they always destroy the wishers.  He holds a book in his hand: a giant, leather-bound, brass clamped tome, which is the Necronomicon-like architect’s notebook that will be so central to the unfolding of the manor’s mystery.  Eliza will be forced to summon this creature in order to find out what happens to her brother, but in doing so she takes all the risks of a conjurer, because the answers that demons give are never straightforward and they may turn on their captor at any moment if there is some slip-up in the ritual, some edge of the magic circle that isn’t drawn in fully.  So this character should look supremely ambiguous: pissed and menacing, but potentially helpful, depending on how skillful our player turns out to be.”

And here are Ron’s orthogonals:

And here are the orthogonals placed onto grids as guide images in Softimage.  I’m currently modeling one of the demon’s legs.

Here is a shot of further progress, including the demon’s haunches, torso, and shoulders.

Model the demon using Ron’s orthogonals

Write and/or implement new AI scripts to spawn more monsters

Download and apply new textures from cg textures (wood especially)

Script a telekinesis spell (raise one platform using a transform and/or apply impulse function)

Make the hexagram gui connect its points through pressing buttons that switch out bitmaps, preferably with an outer glow applied to each line segment

Have been working on customizing spells in ArcaneFX, a special effects program for Torque. The process of making spells is essentially advanced scripting, and I’ve managed to modify one existing spell (Light My Fire) to produce a larger and differently colored fire on the ground and the caster’s hands. I’ve also been working on modifying the Great Ball of Fire spell to be an Iceball, but I keep getting a connection error. Jeff Faust (the designer of ArcaneFX, whose Faustian name is delightfully appropriate) offers the following help in a forum: “It’s not unusual to have to do some debugging when writing advanced scripts like this.” No doubt. I’m keeping at it.

I’ve added these new Features to the most recent build of Arcana Manor:

Modified the mission selection gui to go directly to the Arcana Manor mission, along with an appropriate introduction in the loading screen

new gui: a hexagram with a colored gem at each point which lights up and makes a sound when the cursor is passed over it

the elven sorceress as the player avatar instead of the generic Torque Orc

This allows me to briefly switch to 3^rd person view rather than 1^st for spellcasting without embarrassment

22 3d tarot cards, modeled in Softimage and exported (each with one item script, one execution in game.cs, one custom material, one correctly named png texture and one folder)

Each card placed in the proper position on the sephiroth where the amorphous tarot cubes formerly were.

To do this, I finally got Matt Summers’ XSI Beta 2 Exporter working

Tarot cards corrected to not respawn, so that they are unique items, but still to play sounds when they are picked up and before they are deleted from the world.

A Stormbringer-style black runesword (modeled, UV mapped, textured, exported, custom shader applied, added to engine)

A custom sound plays when Stormbringer is picked up

An long wand with an ankh at its top (tribute to Ultima IV), to replace the generic short wand (which looked too much like a bedpost)

Can toggle between default first-person gameplay, with free look camera and cursor targeting, and spell targeting mode for the afx-driven spells (thanks to Gibby’s AfxFPS resource for this)

Here are some more intermediate steps in the process of finishing the modeling of Joan of Arc.

Joan of Arc's hair

working on Joan

I also recently returned to the Joan of Arc tutorial in Softimage, where I finished the modeling portions of the tutorial.  Among other features, I added hair, finished the chest armor, added a skirt, a leather corset, and upper arm armor.  Here is a screenshot.  More will follow displaying the various components of the model.

Joan of Arc model with modeling finished

I’ve been learning to model items, unwrap the uv’s of these 3d objects, then texture these uvs and re-apply them to the mesh.  Here is the textured uv mesh of a sword, which readers of Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga as illustrated by Robert Gould will recognize as Stormbringer, the black sword.  Here is the uv mesh after I unwrapped it and textured it.

Here is the textured sword.

textured model of Stormbringer

a GUI (maybe main menu, maybe spell-related) composed of jewels/gems of different shapes and sizes, which light up when selected.  I found a set of jewel brushes for GIMP that would make this very feasible to implement.