Video Game Tropes Essay

Video Game Tropes Essay

1. Tropes

2. Experimentation in Unreal Engine 4

3. References

1. Tropes

Trope 1: Health Regeneration

Regenerating health systems are one of the biggest emergences in recent years in video games. Popularised by games such as Call of Duty, regenerating health slowly became integrated into many games. While the implementation is different between games, the recurring mechanics of how it works is mostly shared between games, with some exceptions which will be discussed. Regenerating health-based games often hide the player’s health and merely represent it with on-screen effects such as the player’s vision turning red and covered in blood as they take more damage. Unlike games with health-point based health systems, there’s usually no way to tell exactly how close you are to death, but also unlike most of those games, your health can regenerate.

After the player sustains damage, their health is reduced accordingly and after a period of not taking damage, they begin to slowly, or quickly regain HP. The time between taking damage and health regenerating, and the speed it regenerates at, varies from game to game but overall it mostly takes the player out of direct combat for a few seconds. This system allows players to take short breaks behind cover to regenerate health, and then immediately resume combat without having to search the level for health items.

Regenerating health devalues the need for traditional health kits and healing items present in HP-based games, and as such games using the regenerating health system are often devoid of health kits completely, or using them sparingly. Furthermore, the system changes how designing levels works for these games: The player’s health can regenerate infinitely if given enough time to do so, as such levels don’t need to be designed around health kit placement but instead cover placement and abundance. If there is an abundance of cover, the player will have many places to safely regenerate health, making the game easier, whereas limited cover will force them to be more considerate with how they sustain damage.

In games that don’t use this system, level designers must place healing items with consideration, and levels can often see many revisions to balance out how much is given to the player in rooms. For example, DOOM’s difficulty for players can often be decided by how many health items are available before, during, and after each combat encounter.

Wolfenstein: The New Order, released in 2014, is a game that is unique for its health system mechanics. Being the reboot to one of the first popular first-person shooter games, the game features both a regenerating health system and health kits, but the health system mechanics have been designed in such a way to make neither system redundant. The player’s health regenerates after a certain amount of time spent not taking damage, but only regenerates up to multiples of 20. For instance, being reduced to 21 HP and not taking damage long enough to regenerate health means the player’s health will eventually regenerate to 40 HP.

Where do health packs come into this? Health packs are the only way for the player to heal beyond the limits of their regenerating health and beyond. Not only do health packs allow the player to return to 100HP if their health was reduced to below 80, but it also allows the player to ‘overcharge’ their health, allowing it to go beyond their limit and slowly tick back down to their HP limit. I believe this mechanic perfectly blends the two styles together as it ensures that there is always an incentive to regenerate your health when possible, keeping you in combat longer, but also gives health packs the importance they have in games which only feature healing items.

Even when at full health, health packs still serve the purpose of overcharging the player, and are usually placed before combat encounters to allow the player to begin combat with overcharged health.

Trope 2: Suspicious Videogame Generosity

Another trope is ‘Suspicious Videogame Generosity’. This trope involves the purposeful placement of healing items and ammunition before boss encounters to prepare players for the spike in difficulty. Doing this helps players when they encounter a boss for the first time, making the battle more forgiving. This trope is notorious for how blatant and obvious it can be in most games, where players can find an abundance of all items in the room just before a boss fight. This is also for convenience, allowing players to get prepared without having to backtrack, if possible, to find any healing items.

Some games are notorious for this, such as Serious Sam, Doom and Half-Life 2, for different reasons. Serious Sam places healing items in remote locations and will proceed to spawn dozens of enemies around the player. Doom notoriously gave you an abundance of all items before the final boss fight, and often places a good amount of ammo before you enter a room containing a large number of enemies.

Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 use this trope in every finale level. The finales of these games often revolve around surviving in a single area against an overwhelming number of enemies, weak and strong, since the players are clearly at the disadvantage here the level designers provide a fair amount of items to give the players a chance at surviving many of the situations they’ll have to deal with. This is also used to a lesser extent at the start of each level, the players start off in safe rooms and there is almost always a pile of ammunition for each weapon they have and a health kit to heal the player to full health.

Half-Life 2 isn’t as obvious with this trope in general, ammo and health placement is relatively sparse and is done so that it seems natural, with the only exception being the large, infinite ammo crates that the level designers place so you do not run out of ammunition for weapons you need to use to pass the battle. An example of this any of the many battles against enemies that can only take damage from explosives, such as helicopters or ‘striders’. These battles usually have at least one of these infinite ammunition crates for either the RPG or grenades, meaning players will never run out of ammunition, if they did it would be impossible to advance any further.

This trope can make or break the balance for certain battles, some battles may be incredibly unfair and be impossible to win if the player doesn’t have enough ammunition or health, while some may be too easy due to the game giving too many items. Finding the balance between these two is integral for making battles challenging but also fair. Older games are notoriously for their brutal difficulty and that was often due to not providing the player with the items they might need if they are low on health and ammunition from their journey to the boss room.

Coincidentally, the usefulness of this level design decision is almost invalidated in games with regenerating health as the player’s health will have probably regenerated by the time they’ve passed the room. The only use this trope would have is restocking ammunition, if the game uses an ammunition system.

2. Experimentation in Unreal Engine 4
http://tjoyceuog.blogspot.com/2016/11/unreal-engine-4-experimentation-with.html
3. References

References

"Gamasutra - Understanding Balance In Video Games". Gamasutra.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 17 Nov. 2016.

"Regenerating Health - TV Tropes". TV Tropes. N.p., 2016. Web. 15 Nov. 2016.

"Suspicious Videogame Generosity - TV Tropes". TV Tropes. N.p., 2016. Web. 21 Nov. 2016.

"Videogame Tropes - TV Tropes". TV Tropes. N.p., 2016. Web. 15 Nov. 2016.

Unreal Engine 4: Experimentation With Video Game Tropes

This post will document some of my experiments with two video game tropes; Regenerating health and Health item placements in levels.

Health Regeneration:

A mechanic present in a lot of games, replicated in Unreal Engine 4 using the blueprint system.

By calling this function, Update Health, on each tick, the game will continually check to see if our health is more or less than the max health. In this case, the player starts with 1 health and that is also the maximum health. The first branch is used to make sure the player's health doesn't go past 1, always keeping the player's health a 1 and not letting the regeneration put it at 1.04 or anything else. The second branch is used to see if the player's current health is less than the maximum, if this is true then it will then check if the player has taken damage recently via the third branch and a variable called 'Damage Received'. This check is used to create a delay between the player taking damage and regenerating health.

After setting up a basic HUD, this health will be represented by a simple health bar.

Experimentation:

- What would happen if these variables were altered?

Changing these values can make or break the balance of the mechanic based on many things. For example, if the delay before health regeneration begins was removed, the only way enemies would be able to kill the player would be if they can deal more damage-per-second than than the health regenerates per second. This is an example of why the delay balances this mechanic, as otherwise the player could sustain damage infinitely as long as it is not too much.

By selectively changing certain values we can change how much the health regeneration has on gameplay. Increasingly the delay before regeneration begins can make it less common in battles, making players rely on the amount of health they started a battle with until they've won the battle and have enough time to regenerate health, or if they hide for an extended amount of time. Whether these mechanics would have a positive effect on gameplay is arguable and depends on the gameplay.

Changing these values in unison can effect how powerful the player is overall, for example, decreasing the max health, starting health, regen rate and increasing the delay could make the game incredibly hard and possibly unfair, whereas the reverse of this would make the player so powerful the only way to keep the game challenging would be to have enemies powerful enough to actually pose a threat.

'Suspicious Videogame Generosity':

This trope refers to the abundance of healing items and ammunition before battles, usually boss battles or encounters of similar description. 

An example of a common design of such rooms, an abundance of health items at the entrance to a battle.

Each of the floating cube is a basic health kit that provides the player with .25 health when the player walks into them. If being at 0 didn't kill the player, it would take 4 of these to heal the player to full health without a health regeneration system.

The health kit blueprint.

The health kit is relatively simple. When the player character overlaps a collision box in the blueprint, the blueprint checks to see if the player character's health variable is below 1, if so then the health kit will add .25 to the current health value of the character. The actor is then destroyed to make this a one-use item. The health kit can never increase the player's health beyond 1 as the player character blueprint checks to see if the player's health is more than 1 and, if so, reduces it to 1.

Experimentation:

- Removing the health cap forced by the player blueprint

By removing the maximum health variable, or at least increasing it to more than the player starts with, we can allow health kits to increase the player's health to more than they start with. This allows the player to begin the battle with more health than they would usually have.

- Adding an inventory system to allow the player to use the health kits later

If the player enters this area with full health, the health pick ups are useless to them, if an inventory system existed, these items could be kept until needed in the battle. This will avoid the problem with items being useless if the player doesn't need them immediately, and avoids the need for the player to backtrack to the room, if the game will allow them to do so.

- Altering the health increase

Altering how much health is given to the player per health kit could determine how many would be needed in this situation. For example, there could only one health kit that fully restores the player's health, circumventing this trope to a degree. Alternatively the amount of health restored could be lowered, making health kits less valuable and would mean that they would need to be more abundant to balance. If the level designer makes the decision to not place more health kits to balance the smaller health bonus, the level would become harder.

- Not removing the health kit after healing the player

The health kit would be able to be used endlessly until the player is healed fully, if the player's health cap was removed, their health would increase infinitely as long as the player continues to overlap repeatedly with the health kit.

- How does a health regeneration system affect this trope?

Due to the health regeneration system implemented earlier, this trope is largely useless as the player could just wait in this room for their health to regenerate. One way to allow these two tropes to co-exist is to allow health kits to increase the player's health beyond what the health regeneration ever allow the player's health to go to. For example, allow the player's health to regenerate to 100 at most, and allow health kits to increase the player's health to 150 or even 200. This would make rooms such as these still viable while also allowing the health regeneration to be important for the other parts of the games.

- Not including health kits at all

If a health regeneration system isn't in place, the difficulty of the following areas depends entirely on the player's skill and current health. Doing this will increase the difficulty of the game significantly to the point where players may just be tempted to restart all over again if they don't have enough health when they reach this point.

- Ammunition?

If this were a game where ammunition isn't infinite, placing ammunition in this room be the same as the placement of health kits, and possibly even more important. Some games have specific types of ammunition unique to each gun that can be supplied based on what enemies will be present in the upcoming battle. If the player can not pass the following area without ammunition, for example if they had no method of damaging enemies while out of ammo, such as a melee weapon or attack, then the importance of ammunition piles in these rooms increases.