I'm an engineer at a technology development firm in the rainy Pacific Northwest, who loves gaming, writing, comics, photography, and many other things.
This blog tends to topic-drift, but constants include BioWare, Miraculous Ladybug, general fandom, and engineering. Also known as "Sparks" elsewhere.
I am, when life permits, a GM for tabletop games; I have a homebrew setting for D&D 5e in which I have run several games. And recently, I set out to try to use Midjourney to illustrate some of the locations in that setting.
In particular, Ennisbay and Dolindë, two of the most-often visited locations in the setting.
Ennisbay is a port city built as much on the water as it is beside it; I’ve always described it as something akin to Venice, if the architecture incorporated influences of Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire. It is also the headquarters of the Adventurer’s Guild, and thus serves as a common starting place (or place to return to, for that matter).
So here we have Ennisbay, as rendered by Midjourney.
Honestly, that’s far closer to what’s always been in my head than I expected. Dolindë proved more difficult.
Dolindë is the “city of scholars”, but it began as the crossroads of three trade routes: two caravan routes across the desert, and one barge route along the river that Dolindë was built next to.
However, a number of scholars soon realized that being at the nexus of multiple trade routes meant access to books and materials from all sorts of places. As the little cluster of scholars in this trade hub grew, so did the resources and references they amassed; over the course of several centuries, the library at Dolindë became the most comprehensive repository of knowledge in the known world. And now, people travel to Dolindë as much for scholarship as for mercantile goals… though it is still a huge trade hub.
Needless to say, when adventurers need to get answers to something, Dolindë may not be conveniently located, but it is often where they go nonetheless.
Dolindë’s architecture tends towards rounded shapes, to (somewhat) lessen the wear-and-tear of the occasionally sand-heavy dry wind (a'la the real-world sirocco). However, it is also a city that tends towards color where possible; the desert is so monochromatic, the city itself strives to provide some relief from that.
Getting Midjourney to spit out art that resembled Dolindë took a lot longer than for Ennisbay, and in the end I only ever got a couple of images that felt right; I will likely keep trying. But still…
As an added bonus, I did manage to get a spot-on image of a particular caravansarai on the route between Dolindë and the coastal port most accessible to ships from Ennisbay.
(The tower within the caravansarai is an alchemical engine attached to an underground spring. It uses an alchemical reaction to create negative pressure, drawing the water up and into a holding tank at the top of the tower; gravity then works to bring the water down as-needed for guests and their animals.)
I think I will continue to work on getting good illustrations of the locations out of Midjourney, and then I can make an illustrated player’s guide to the setting for future campaigns…
I’m a dork. (Reblogging from my computer-generated art blog.)
So while playing with Midjourney, an interesting image of a giant crystalline-blade-like tower with a chip out of it came up, and a friend and I quipped we’d love to see what the story behind that was.
Then we got to thinking.
This led to getting a text-generating AI (GPT-3) to write a summary of a nonexistent Final Fantasy game, and then trying to get an image-generating AI (Midjourney) to create concept art for it.
So, here we go.
For eons, the world of Eobenica has been protected by the light of the Silver Sanctuary’s Worldcrystal and the Essences it allows Spiritcallers to summon. The Spiritcallers have long held the Golwildom Empire and their magitek forces at bay, but when the Worldcrystal is damaged in an Imperial attack, the Spiritcallers must find a new source of power to save Eobenica. They journey to the lost city of Ivaldia, where they discover the Worldcrystal’s dark twin: the Shadowcrystal. With the Shadowcrystal’s power, they are able to drive the Empire back, but at what cost?
The dark power of the Shadowcrystal corrupts the Spiritcallers, turning them into monsters known as the Shadowspawn. The Empire takes advantage of this and launches a full-scale assault on Eobenica. The player must take control of a party of adventurers to stop the Empire and save the world from the Shadowspawn’s corruption.
The adventuring party is made up of a diverse cast of characters, including:
A young man named Daryus, who is the last of the Spiritcallers and must come to terms with his new power.
A street urchin named Nym, who joins the party in hopes of finding a way to get revenge on the Empire.
An exiled knight named Sirra, who is seeking redemption for her past mistakes.
An enigmatic thief named Rixen, who has his own reasons for taking on the Empire.
Laika’s still up there. not her body, sure, but her soul is. i saw it through my telescope one night when i was looking for aliens. she was sniffing for table scraps under saturn’s ring. she chases comets and bites down on satellites. i saw her napping by neptune, she was kicking her feet. passing through the oort cloud is like the stroke of a hand on her fur. eyes like marbles and four little paws like flames. she bobs through jupiter’s moons like cold moscow streets. up there the stars are a great big field. and look, she’s running so fast. god damn, look at her go.
Really wishing I didn’t have ADHD so I could read all this
Oof.
“You have so much potential” is a phrase that I still wince to hear, and even now – after a diagnosis in adulthood of ADHD, and with full awareness that it is in fact ADHD that causes me to get stuck in executive dysfunction paralysis staring at a task I know I *can* do but somehow *can’t start*, and even knowing ways to force myself out of that rut – I still hear that echo in my head at times when I’m struggling, and my brain follows up with “you’re just a fucking flake, Pax; you need to try harder”.
“I went to school for game design! I am highly qualified to talk about any game out there!”
I bet you don’t even know how big an 8 year old’s hands are.
You cannot meaningfully understand a great deal of Nintendo’s game development decisions without understanding how a child holds and uses a modern game controller. People love to critique game companies like Nintendo, especially core gamers and educated developers, as if they are some authority on game design but in twenty years I have never seen this type of individual talk about how Nintendo’s game design is constrained by the size of a child’s hands.
So…how big are they?
Big enough to use a dpad on the playstation controller but not large enough to use the analog stick comfortably. The opposite is true on the xbox controller. The shape of the joycon is designed for easy access for small hands for both.
Still, the kid’s thumb will have difficulty reaching both so rapid switches are not possible. On the left hand of the switch the stick is above and the dpad below, and the opposite is true on the right. This is a direct consequence of how a kid might use the controller. In most games the left hand controls movement - meaning an analog stick - and the right hand controls discreet inputs - meaning the dpad/button diamond.
Children’s also struggle to reach shoulder buttons and have lower grip width, so the natural gamer grip in which two fingers are resting on the shoulder buttons does not work at all for children. They usually have to use all four fingers to hold up a heavy device. The shoulder buttons go from being the most easily accessed buttons on the controller to the most difficult.
A child’s grip strength is lower, and thus so is their ability to hold a heavy controller comfortably, especially one not designed for their hand size. A single joycon in sideways mode, often used in child’s party games on the switch, is a far better controller size for a child while it is uncomfortably cramped for an adult.
It is not a coincidence that the Switch, which is marketed as a family console, comes prepacked with the controllers that are kid friendly and adult friendly controllers are a secondary purchase.
There are more things you can point out, but in a practical sense you can see these design principles applied by comparing something like Kirby vs Metroid Dread.
Kirby is almost entirely controlled through the face buttons, with only the rarely used defense button mapped to the shoulder buttons, and you can really get by with never using it. The triggers are not used at all. You rarely have to combination press anything. If my memory is correct, the shoulder buttons are never used for any temporary transformation abilities. The difficulty of using new abilities should not be compounded by hard to reach buttons.
Dread on the other hand uses combination presses a lot and ties three critical abilities (free aim, missile use, and sliding) to the shoulder buttons. The omega cannon, a rarely used but critical and time sensitive ability, is tied to the shoulder buttons for the easiest and most intuitive possible use. The stress of defeating an emmi should not be compounded by fumbling with controls.
Smash Bros in particular is pretty cool in how its control scheme is set up. The most basic functions that a child might use are very simply mapped to the single stick and face buttons. As you learn to play better and try more advanced techniques (like an adult might) like timed grabs, dodging, and shield use you move away from the face buttons, incorporating more and more use of the shoulder buttons. It splits the difference for the best of both worlds. You can trace the principles of this design all the way back to the N64 and I would not be surprised to learn that the in game mechanics were built specifically to compliment this novice to expert transitional design, which is what makes smash bros so friendly to novice and expert gamers alike.
This is an excellent point as well, something I wasn’t going to get into but so much of game design just ignores accessibility issues like this all together. So many of the basic assumptions of game design from input device to button mapping to in game accessibility features are built around the assumption of fully abled adult between late teenager and middle age.
In light of Square-Enix’s recent reiteration of (and stronger enforcement of) their ban on third-party tools that modify the game, there’s actually been a chunk of discussion on the Final Fantasy XIV forums about accessibility and the assumption that “fully abled adult” is the default gamer.
The pushback I’ve seen in that thread from folks who hold the opinion that accessibility considerations require making the game “easier” on an objective level by making it hand-hold you is one I’ve seen from developers, too – including when I was in the game industry for my day job. And honestly, I fell into that camp (“I don’t want to make the game easier!”) when I was still doing games for my day job.
But I no longer think that’s necessarily the case.
What I find particularly interesting is that a surprising number of people who pushback against the idea of accessibility features are ones who already will talk at length in other threads about how they’ve customized control schemes for their own comfort.
(Which I do understand; I have small hands and the early stages of hereditary arthritis myself. I also game quite actively, and raid in FFXIV. As such, I have about half of my controls on the keyboard near WASD and the other half bound to the side-buttons on my MMO mouse.)
But I think people would strongly push back on the implication that it made the game objectively easier to allow them to change control bindings, and that therefore they were somehow playing it on an “easier” mode.
I think it’s perfectly possible to design for accessibility considerations without lowering the objective difficulty of the game; I tend to think that good accessibility is about making sure the game doesn’t make things subjectively more difficult than the baseline for people, rather than making it objectively easier by giving people tools to ‘play for them’.
The examples you give here of Nintendo’s philosophy with regards to controller design (and in-game control schemes) are excellent illustrations of this; they don’t make the game somehow inherently easier, they are instead intended to ensure they game doesn’t unintentionally make itself more difficult for people.
For instance, I’ve come to be of the strong opinion that anything I want the player to react to – a telegraph of an upcoming mechanic, for instance – should have both a distinct visual cue and a distinct audio one. They don’t have to be dramatically distinct, but if I’m telegraphing a monster’s attack by something subtle in the animations, I should have a sound associated with it too; a player who is visually impaired and cannot see fine details in the animation can thus learn to rely on the subtle differences in the sound associated with the telegraph.
Similarly, for deaf or hearing-impaired players, I should never rely only on audio cues. If it’s a sound, there should be a visual element as well. If my fight design is reliant on dialogue to know what mechanic is about to happen, then I need to have subtitles or something similar (even in combat, not just cutscenes) for those voiced lines. Things like that.
For keyboard bindings, I tend to think that instead of requiring a 1:1 mapping of input-to-control, it should be possible to use a many-to-one scheme – binding multiple inputs to the same action.
I had a friend who had severe nerve damage in his hands and had a lot of trouble playing keyboard-and-mouse games as a result because it was a strain for him to hit the correct keys. If he could’ve bound a given control to four different buttons, he could’ve functionally had keybindings that were areas of the keyboard instead of just a single key; while it would’ve required him to use more of the keyboard for bindings, it would’ve also made it possible for him to hit a given control more reliably since he’d only need to hit a cluster of four keys, rather than one specific one.
(It’s perhaps a little unfortunate that I’ve only become such a firm believer in this after I decided I’d had enough of crunch and the other less-fun parts of game development and went into consumer product development instead…)
