The Ant Nest

In my previous post, I mentioned that I have been toying with some ideas for new directions in which to take my writing. This is the first product of those thoughts: I have decided to create a diary of the project I am building (which I’m currently calling just ‘Resistance’), as a series of posts here on The Ant Nest. I’m already a fair way into things, but I think I have enough archeological evidence to piece things together from the beginning, so that’s where I’ll start. This post and any future posts in this diary can be found collectively via this link.

Where to begin then? The initial starting point was easy for me to pin down. “Choose a medium you enjoy working with” and all that: I’m a big fan of the first-person perspective because of the immediacy and sense of direct engagement it gives a player. Knowing that I wanted to build a first-person experience, from a practical perspective, the Source engine was then the most natural choice for me. Valve have built a great set of tools that I was already pretty familiar with from building maps on the HL1 engine and a solid community has been nurtured around Valve’s products, which is sure to help out if I get stuck. Additionally, I don’t have the resources to start wildly creating huge quantities of new game assets, so whatever I make has to fall fairly close to what I can achieve with the existing Half-Life 2 assets and code.

So far, so simple, so boring: I’m making an FPS ‘mission’. But Quake 4 isn’t the same as Half-Life 1, which isn’t the same as Metroid Prime: there’s more decisions to be made before I have my basics laid down.

What distinguishes these games for my purposes is that, while they all involve moving around an environment and shooting, the narrative nature of that interaction is different for each. Metroid Prime is about exploration and discovery, whereas Quake 4 is about being a soldier and an unstoppable superhero. Every part of each respective game reflects this theme. Metroid Prime’s scan visor makes exploration an active activity, rather than a passive one, and Samus Aran’s suit and first-person perspective define a separation between her (the familiar) and the environment (the unknown). Quake 4’s enemies never quite pose a serious enough threat to stop your progress - they are just tough enough to make you feel like … well, the aforementioned unstoppable superhero.

At the time of its release, most of Half-Life 1’s peers in the FPS genre offered permutations of this ‘unstoppable superhero’ concept as their central gameplay theme. One of the biggest successes of the game was in proving that FPSs didn’t have to follow that theme and providing an alternative. Half-Life 1 was a journey of survival. Gordon Freeman wasn’t there to beat up the enemies and win the day (not initially, at least), but to save his own skin, in the face of a hostile environment, a hostile invading force and then a hostile clean-up crew. It’s not just executed on a purely storytelling level: The early jumping puzzles, hopping across perilous empty drops, and first combat encounters start this theme (remember trying to fight the first headcrab zombies with only a crowbar?) and later events carry it forward (such as arriving at the surface only to find yourself totally overwhelmed). The theme is still present towards the end of the game, as Gordon leaves the Black Mesa Research Facility to travel to Xen: The challenge then is to help a fellow scientist survive long enough to open a portal for you.

When it came to the sequel, Half-Life 2, some parts of this theme carry through from its predecessor. Ravenholm, most notably, is about raw survival, but numerous situations arise throughout the game where Gordon is utterly outgunned and flight, not fight is the solution. But overall, the game seemed to me to take a step away from survival as an overall theme. Gordon Freeman played much more of a superhero role, both in the story and in the gameplay. The game instead seemed to toy with themes of destiny and freedom (or lack thereof), both on a backstory level (as represented by the oppressed City 17 that seemed to be waiting for Gordon’s arrival) and a player level (the immediate appearance of the citadel as end-goal, the G-Man’s increased presence and the on-rails nature of the levels underline these themes).

The themes of Half-Life 2 are worth their own post, but while the game turned out great, I was slightly disappointed that this survival theme was largely left on the shelf. A strong part of Half-Life 1’s appeal, I feel, was that it was much easier to empathise with this theme - a (semi-)regular guy thrown into a situation he didn’t ask for and forced to make the best of it - than the superhero themes of the game’s peers, and this theme had a much greater potential for nuance.

With this in mind, choosing the theme for my project proved easy: Survival. The basics: complete.