Re: [TuxKart-devel] Thoughts on Kart Models.

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

Ryan Flegel wrote:

> For SuperTux GotM we moved away from the geek-theme (ie, evil BSOD's)
> and made it a little more "realistic" (you know, walking iceballs and
> iceblocks :). I don't think that would be a bad idea for TuxKart to go
> thise route either. There seems to be quite a few linux-geek-theme
> games out there and to anyone new to linux (or that just doesn't get
> the "joke") it may look kind of dumb or not make sense.

Well, here's the deal.  You need characters...things *with* character.

Nintendo and Sony (and pretty much all the other 'cute' game companies)
have spent billions working up their characters and getting them identifyable.

There can't be many people who don't know who Mario is - and I'd be suprised
if there were any games players who didn't know who Peach, Luigi, Wario and
Bowser are.

Do they feel that they need to replace their characters because they've used
them too much?   NO!!  To the contrary - they even bring in characters that
are over-used from other pantheons to expand the set.  (Note the appearance
of Pikachu, DonkeyKong, etc in their more recent games).

Character identifiability is CRUCIAL to these kinds of games.

If we invent a new character then nobody will know who the heck it is,
whether it's a good guy or a bad guy, whether it's a stumbling idiot
or a cunning tactician.

In the Mario 'world', you know that if you choose DonkeyKong's kart,
you'll have banana 'privilages' (DK doesn't skid on them like everyone
else) - you also know that he's a big guy - so you aren't suprised that
his heavy kart is harder to steer but better in collisions.

You didn't need to RTFM to know that...you just knew it.

Now - if every OpenSourced game of the 'cute' genre goes off and invents
a new set of characters - we'll never build that set of characters that
people can identify.

Please don't come away with the idea that this was all an arbitary
decision - it was all well-researched.   It wasn't just me.  Here is the history:

So - we needed a set that everyone can use.  When TuxAQFH, TuxKart, TuxRacer,
SuperTux and ..some other one (I don't recall it's name) were being developed,
the developers got together and thought carefully about these characters.

Characters like Sonic, Mario, Crash Bandicoot, etc are CAREFULLY chosen and
people write huge 'style guides' for their artists to work with.  Did you notice
that Mario originally had a blue hat and red shirt rather than the red hat and
blue shirt he always wears now?  Do you think that was a mistake or a carefully
thought out design decision?  Read on...

BSOD was my idea - Gown came from that other game who's name I've forgotten,
I wrote a letter to SuSE asking them if we could use their Camelion and if
so, what was it's name?  Their response was a resounding YES - and they
ran a competition to choose the name ("Geeko" won - Susie came second).

The original Gown was just a baby-blue version of Tux with pink eyes - she
looked terrible.  I emailed a bunch of sites dedicated to women in OpenSource
(eg TuxChix) and asked them for their input on what Gown should look like.
They suprised me by NOT wanting some kind of strong 'grrrl' image but
almost universally wanted either the Foxxy character you can see on
my Tux history page (http://www.sjbaker.org/tux) - but some cross between
Minnie mouse and Daffy Duck.   I played around a bit and Tux's girlfriend
was born as a somewhat girl-shaped penguin in a red and white spotted
mini-skirt and with a bow on her head (so you can tell her from Tux when
she's in a GoKart!).  Her beak is a little shorter and more rounded
and her eyes are larger and blue instead of black.

It is extremely difficult to get 'name recognition' for your characters,
once you've got it, don't throw it away or screw it up.

It's MUCH better to pick a set that most players will recognise than it
is to invent a whole new set that nobody knows.

I'm frankly horrified that you guys changed that in SuperTux...it was a
really bad tactical mistake IMHO - and I can only guess that you didn't
think it through.

> I'm not saying that we *definitely* should get rid of the BSOD's
> (after all, I think it fits a lot better into a racing game than into
> a game like supertux), but I do think it's something we should think
> about. Also, if we invent new characters (so we have 6-8), it gets
> kind of repetitive when we have a bunch of boring geek stuff.

We need to add characters - that's for sure.  The only reason there weren't
more in the original TuxKart was because I'm not a great artist and four
were the minimum I could get away with!

Certainly I'd like to see the BSD Daemon ('Beastie'), Mozilla, and Wilbur
(The GIMP) added to our set.  Wilbur is difficult because he doesn't have
a body - which is the reason he's not in TuxKart right now.  I chose not
to do Beastie at the time because he absolutely requires a heck of a lot
of polygons what with the trident and all.  Mozilla wasn't the popular
package it is now - and back then when it was still pronounced "Netscape",
so I don't think people would have recognised the red dinosaur.

> Also, Gown should be renamed to Penny :P Ok.. maybe not. We ended up
> doing this in SuperTux because we found it sounded much nicer.

 > After a vote it won by a landslide (I'm pretty sure all votes went towards it
 > :)

AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!

See my previous argument for why this is stupid.   You guys were undoing
an awful lot of very carefully thought out work done by a lot more people
than (probably) participated in your vote.

We RESEARCHED Gown.  We asked female gamers - who might want to hit the
'Play as Gown' button.

We asked if they liked the name...they did.   We cared less about what male
programmers thought of the name than we did what female gamers thought.

We carefully made her the same basic size and shape as Tux so that in
games where it matters, the game designer can have them fit through
the same sized doors and have them not look stupid when they can jump
the same height and run at the same speed...maybe share the same 'bones'
to cut down on the animation workload.

We carefully made her the same basic colouration (requiring a change
to the game that made her blue) because it's easier to tune the
colours of the backgrounds when you know the colour of your characters.
If Gown is blue - then levels with a blue sky in them will make it
hard to see her.  (That's why there are so few blue Nintendo characters).
Notice that BSOD's blue screen has a white 'bezel' around it - so you
can still see him clearly against a blue background - since he MUST be
blue.

Gown *IS* called Gown - and hundreds of thousands of Linux gamers know
that. You can no more vote to change that than you could have Nintendo
change Mario's name to Bob.  What you have probably done is either confuse
people who already know her name - or introduct the possibility that Tux
is two-timing his faithful companion of all these years.  That in turn
damages Tux's character - which erodes the plot line of every other
game that uses Tux-is-rescuing-Gown or Gown-is-rescuing-Tux.   Changing
her name (or appearance) is vandalism!

Please understand - Game design is a SCIENCE - these decisions are things
you arrive at after careful thought - not just on a whim when you say
"lets have a poll about this".  If the reasons BEHIND such a choice
are not carefully discussed then the people doing the voting will make
bad choices that you'll regret later on.

Ack!

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
HomeEmail: <sjb...@ai...>    WorkEmail: <sj...@li...>
HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org
Projects : http://plib.sf.net    http://tuxaqfh.sf.net
            http://tuxkart.sf.net http://prettypoly.sf.net
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