The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process for Creating Half-Life (1999)

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131815/the_cabal_valves_design_process_.php

by thisismyswamp • 6 years ago

188 84 6 years ago

I think the Cabal concept is especially interesting in the wider context of Valve's "self organising" culture. It doesn't seem that this structure was designed, but was emergent.

PicassoCTs• 6 years ago

This structure is definitely not emergent, if left alone, human groups form little fiefdoms around local "lords", the hierarchy and bureaucracy of a feudal system emerges. To have working anarcho-syndicalism is a constant fight against this mechanism.

Who decides how much anyone gets paid, and how many virtual crystal gold smileys someone gets for doing what he currently does?

How many golden-smileys do you have to have on your shoulder to influence that decision?

marcinzm• 6 years ago

I remember reading that Valve's internal structure nowadays is lords of fiefdoms even if they communicate externally that it's not. The only difference from other companies is that there's no org chart saying who the lords are, you have to discover that yourself.

walrus01• 6 years ago

In the context of Cabal and video games, I was expecting something about Destiny 1/2

Netcob• 6 years ago

That's a refreshingly good example of "design by ...cabal..." actually working out pretty well. I think the key element is how the members actually had to implement their designs. If you just come up with a lazy compromise, it'll start haunting you immediately, and not just after the worker bees did their thing.

I think the "cabal" responsible for USB 3.1.1.1.gen2-420gig-whatever should have done the same, with each meeting ending in every member having to explain to their grandma why she can't connect her monitor to her laptop even though the cable fits perfectly, and that it's somehow _both_ the wrong cable and the wrong laptop port.

danbolt2• 6 years ago

I've noticed that happening a lot in my time in the games industry as well. The person making top-down design role isn't exposed to the friction that their decisions are making down the hierarchy. I think the worst part is that they're not even necessarily as invested in the product as someone else, so they're kind of structurally going along with the inefficient situation they're in.

wgjordan• 6 years ago

(1999)

Blikkentrekker7• 6 years ago

If they walk into a room with other characters, those characters should acknowledge them by at least looking at them, if not calling out their name.

If only Gordon returned this courtesy.

Silent protagonists are such an awful thing.

nitrogen• 6 years ago

You are Gordon. Did you acknowledge the NPCs by looking at them?

Blikkentrekker7• 6 years ago

I realize why they do it, but it can never work because the n.p.c.'s do not react to me in return. I can talk to them, say things to them, but they will never respond to anything I say.

Thus, the end result is that Gordon Freeman is a man whom many speak to, yet who never speaks back, and no one considers this to odd to say the least. — the conversations thus appear ridiculous.

It worked better with Chell, because others do not that Chell does not speak back, and Chell actually canonically refuses to speak out of stubbornness, so it's amusing to see Wheatley being obviously uncomfortable from the fact that Chell does not speak back and is simply blabbering to fill the awkward silence.

dx87• 6 years ago

I'd much rather the protagonist be silent in an FPS. It ruins the immersion for me, unless there are dialogue choices so I still have some agency. I quit playing Dishonored 2 after a couple of hours because the protagonist keeps talking as a way to narrate things for the player, but it's just silly being a stealth assassin constantly talking to yourself.

Blikkentrekker7• 6 years ago

Obviously in a stealth game it makes no sense for the protagonist to talk.

But it does not make sense either that a protagonist not answer when he be spoken to.

It was quite ridiculous in StarCraft where there was a player character who had a rank and was an actual character, his allies discuss strategic plans with him and talk to him, but he never speaks back, and is only addressed by title, for he lacks a name.

In StarCraft II, the game withdrew from the notion of a “player character” and the player simply took control of various different actual characters with dialog and a face.

danbolt2• 6 years ago

I think games will have their protagonist be some cocktail of “this character is me” and “this character is not me but controlled by me”. I think a competent game will usually to try pick a mix that’s in best-service of the experience. Gordon Freeman, Mario, or Cloud Strife all do this in different amounts.

tomc19852• 6 years ago

I beg to differ, and in any case HL was explicitly designed this way.

It can be really discordant when the protagonists speaks for you but isn't really in-line with the character you're roleplaying. Making them silent is a neat way of not breaking that immersion

Blikkentrekker7• 6 years ago

More discordant than the fact that he has completely implausible conversations with everyone but either everyone talks to him and he never talks back or provides input or as much as acknowledgement that he hears them, or conversely, if the player simply talk back to them in his head, the fact that no one says anything back to what he is saying?

Role playing a video game character does not work until artificial intelligence matures to the point that a computer might have a meaningful conversation with a man.

MaxBarraclough• 6 years ago

Interesting it's canon that Freeman is not simply mute, although I wish they hadn't closed the door on that interpretation.

https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Gordon_Freeman

Blikkentrekker7• 6 years ago

Even if he be, most other characters do not treat him as such, and do not remark upon the fact even after having just met him and have no way of knowing, that he never speaks back. It provides for a very surreal experience.

jimbob45• 6 years ago

“ Include an expert from every functional area (programming, art, and so on). Arguing over an issue that no one at the meeting actually understands is a sure way to waste everyone’s time.”

This always sounds good in theory but ends up with unnecessary individuals falling asleep during meetings. I prefer either a staggered approach to meetings where the likely unnecessary people are only invited to the end of the meeting OR are simply “on-hand” for the meeting in case they need to be pulled in.

I don’t care how critical the input is, if you pull someone into a three hour meeting and they only contribute five sentences, they’re not going to be happy with you.

kaba0• 6 years ago

It depends on the program domain, but I think it must have been quite fun designing a game as opposed to the client still doesn’t know what it wants and this API should instead do this.

danielscrubs• 6 years ago

They where the ones that where going to be responsible for it so how can they be unnecessary? He even said they started to say no more and more as the deadline started to loom over them.

Jare• 6 years ago

In most significant decisions in gamedev you want art, design and engineering (at least - QA, audio, animation and a number of others as well) to be involved. Some people from one discipline may be versed enough in another to cover the role, but the role must still be present, or there will be pain and work thrown away later on.

(incidentally, the ability to understand an issue from these multiple but interrelated angles is what makes experienced people so valuable in gamedev, and their constant loss to other less crazy industries so painful)

ArtWomb2• 6 years ago

Cabal. Design Bible. All grounded in the Single Source of Truth philosophy. With feedback from 200+ playtest sessions directly incorporated into the stream. And the result is the cohesive narrative vision in Half-Life.

Contrast this with "What Went Wrong with Cyberpunk 2077" exegesis from Bloomberg this morning and I'm still not sure anyone can point to a single reason beyond "we were too ambitious". I wish this breakdown were more technical in nature. Like a good GamaSutra postmortem. I suspect tooling plays an enormous role. UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development. But does it scale to teams of hundreds of designers?

Inside Cyberpunk 2077's Disastrous Rollout

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-16/cyberpunk...

ffhhj2• 6 years ago

It's interesting to me how the physics bugs such as characters and object getting stuck inside walls, flying cars, failed inverse kinematics and so on have been the usual bugs for so many years now, but there isn't yet a methodology to prevent gamedevs from falling in those old known pitholes. These are very difficult to detect by QA and the way to fix them is tweaking some parameters and geometry here and there. There should be a way to supervise the physics engine, find whether future calculations will cause an invalid state on some object and choose a transformation that won't produce such conflict.

vvanders2• 6 years ago

As with everything in gamedev it comes down to one thing: performance. Anything that can be faked, approximated our outright hacked in the name of perf or memory will be.

The canonical example for me(which was ironically is in Half-Life) is that the AI for the grunts is surprisingly simple. If you throw a grenade they were scripted to shout "grenade" and navigate to the nearest nav node.

Tons of people thought there was really complex AI behind that behavior but it was just a couple of really well telegraphed "if()" checks.

programzeta• 6 years ago

Some devs do focus on it - this blog post goes into detail about how someone worked through making sure you could walk everywhere in The Witness: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0005

smogcutter3• 6 years ago

There should be a way to supervise the physics engine, find whether future calculations will cause an invalid state on some object and choose a transformation that won't produce such conflict.

This is probably just me not really understanding the domain, but this sounds like a version of the halting problem?

Even if it’s not, isn’t that just an extra layer doing what the collision engine is meant to do in the first place? And if you can monitor a system to ensure correctness, couldn’t you use a similar mechanism to make the original system correct to begin with? And if you can’t do that, how can you expect to make the supervisory layer correct?

mhh__2• 6 years ago

Testing things like that is a little weird - they're inherently fuzzy, so even if you compare to a ground truth like a serious MBS package you're spending needless FLOPS on accuracy no-one will notice.

I guess if you are able to formulate the problem as a state machine, you could use something like bounded model checking to ensure it doesn't blow up, but the problems there are twofold: Firstly, that's way too complicated and brittle for a game codebase, and secondly your average game developer probably doesn't even know what it is to begin with.

klmadfejno4• 6 years ago

UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development. But does it scale to teams of hundreds of designers?

This comment seems to come out of nowhere. Cyberpunk isn't written in UE4 to the best of my knowledge. But rant time! I love ue4 blueprints. I think they're the bees knees because documentation of things is so hard, but blueprints make that so easy! The ability to grab a bunch of nodes and collapse them into one node means you can comfortably make your top level view of things just a series of collapsed nodes with long form descriptions in full sentences. So your high level stuff is basically pseudocode.

Most people don't do this of course. But then most people don't write good code, and lots of people writing blueprints one sees in the wild don't even know how to code to begin with.

Blueprints are, imo, what people really want when they think they want jupyter notebooks for data science.

boogies• 6 years ago

Cyberpunk isn't written in UE4 to the best of my knowledge.

It’s in (their in-house) REDengine 4 according to Wikipedia (citing https://archive.today/20180405084214/https://www.gamezone.co...). But perhaps that has Blueprint-inspired visual development tools?

markjgx• 6 years ago

Talking about Unreal Blueprints, did you know creating a new blueprint node is as simple as writing a C++ function and adding a reflection macro on top of it, that's it. It's freaking awesome.

MikeLumos• 6 years ago

Speaking of blueprints for data science: https://www.luna-lang.org/

mhh__2• 6 years ago

UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development.

My guess is that it probably doesn't scale all that well. I think the issue it's so much the technology but the people who use it - when you see UE4 projects labelled "Blueprint only!" what that usually means in my experience is unmaintainable, unsearchable, no version control etc.

They're great for animations, but for anything vaguely structured they're just slow and RSI inducing.

Guthur2• 6 years ago

HL to Cyberpunk 2077 is very much apples to oranges, on many levels.

* The team size required for a modern day AAA title is significantly higher than that of HL days.

* The games design choices are vastly different. HL was very on the rails, though hides it it really well by giving you the illusion of a large world, this a really great design trick and HL is rightly lauded for it. In contrast CP2077 aims to be closer to a true open world that tries to provide a linear storyline inside a large world with more open level design with many auxilary story lines and interactive world building.

* HL had a single platform focus (PC) for the initial development whereas CP2077 try to straddle two very different hardware generations and a multitude of platforms. If CP2077 had, in a hypothetical world, only focused on PC and maybe current gen consoles (PS5 and XBox S) it would not have nearly the same level of negative press.

EliRivers• 6 years ago

The team size required for a modern day AAA title is significantly higher than that of HL days.

I'm often left unconvinced by statements like this. Is it that the team size for a modern AAA title is required to be so large, or is it just that they are so large? The diminishing returning from making teams ever bigger makes me wonder if having such large teams are just a sign of low-level, dragging general incompetence somewhere in the chain of people running the whole thing.

I don't have any hard evidence either way, but every so often when I see a small, well-run team of competent people turn out something really good, I wonder.

doppp• 6 years ago

Yes, it scales well. Also, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't use UE4.

H8crilA3• 6 years ago

I truly don't understand the Cyberpunk2077 complainers. Has any of you/them actually played the game? I've played it on Google Stadia and loved it, the main story and major side stories were exciting (Konpeki Plaza really had me on edge), combat is complex, characters are well written, graphics are amazing. As far as bugs are concerned I had to reload an earlier save maybe 3-5 times over the span of 40 hours of gameplay, which is not good but honestly I didn't care. It does look like the console versions were worse off, though, but I didn't play these myself.

vermilingua• 6 years ago

No, many complainers haven’t played the game, because it crashes or runs terribly on their on-spec device.

If your answer to that is “buy a new device”, you need to get outside more.

ad404b8a372f2b9• 6 years ago

I don't understand this response, I have seen it repeated many times over many threads about cyberpunk. You've no doubt seen the thousands of reports of game breaking bugs across all platforms, PC included. Do you believe all these people are lying just because you had a different experience on Stadia? I don't get the logic. Feels like St Thomas.

Personally I had to get a refund after a few hours because of dozens of crashes, and an unreasonable amount of bugs, and I really wanted to play that game. I even installed Windows to be sure it wasn't Proton related. My PC is high-end.

hutattedonmyarm• 6 years ago

I’ve played it on PC. I enjoyed the gameplay, main and bigger side missions a lot. But I had so many minor, mostly visual, glitches, it really threw me off. Floating everything’s (cigarettes for Johnny, traffic lights, guns), my character T-posing while driving, other characters T-posing, my car randomly exploding when I call it, my motorbike getting stuck in another vehicle when calling it, and so on. In addition a few gamebreaking bugs requiring me to load an earlier save, one even required me to load a save before a specific event. So my attempts to just grab the latest save and try that was not working

giobox• 6 years ago

The Stadia version is one of the best performing ports of the game in benchmarks, and far outperforms the PS4/xbone console version most will buy.

Stadia gives an experience similar to good PC, it’s the base console version where the vast majority will play where dynamic resolution scaling and inability to stream game assets in time destroy the game, not to mention the launch bug where save files corrupted if they went over 8mb...

It’s the only game ever Sony and Microsoft have had to remove from sale from digital store fronts due to quality issues, unheard of and shocking for a game with this budget etc. People will be dissecting what went wrong with this for years.

I played on a high end PC and still saw a lot of bugs, none game breaking thankfully though.

asiachick2• 6 years ago

And the result is the cohesive narrative vision in Half-Life.

Half Life has no cohesive narrative. It is just a bunch of interesting random scenes thrown together and people make up their own narrative about it. It works but it's not a "cohesive narrative"

jgilias• 6 years ago

If the players are in the mood for more action, all they need to do is move forward and within a few seconds something will happen.

This! I remember being scared to move around when playing Half-Life the first time. Flickering lights still make an instant association with crowbars to me. Great to read a bit more in detail how they managed to make something so great!

jokethrowaway• 6 years ago

The Cabal sounds great and I'm looking forward to try it.

I'll pick the projects carefully though, as it's impossible to ship more than two products with this methodology.

PeterisP• 6 years ago

"The meetings were only six hours a day" ... ahhh ... (for five months straight)

solidist• 6 years ago

from the mod makers pov, circa after they launched in 1999:

https://medium.com/super-jump/building-a-popular-half-life-m...

Mod making was a digital cabal concept, with local leads forming fiefdoms. They were opinionated to a design/delivery. Sometimes straying to other mods, but mostly focusing on one concept at a time.

vvanders2• 6 years ago

Valve also hired really heavily from the mod community. I spent a good portion of my youth in that scene and the people that they hired they really went far for(relocation, visas, etc).

I think most of the leads for the more popular mods(outside of CS obviously) ended up there in one form or another if they were interested in it.

pugworthy• 6 years ago

Nice writeup. I was part of a mod team that got by Valve long time ago, and indeed it was a giddy fun time. We had no idea what we were doing, but we just created a game that we wanted to play - and it seemed to have worked.

TazeTSchnitzel• 6 years ago

(1999)

(if the title gets edited, please delete my comment for me)

nmfisher2• 6 years ago

Fascinating article.

One question remains unanswered though - how did Valve afford all of this? Given Half Life was their first game, where was the money coming from to not only produce an entire game, but to then scrap it and redesign/rewrite from scratch?

Danieru• 6 years ago

Valve was started by two Microsoft Millionaires. Money wasn't an issue.

nmfisher2• 6 years ago

Even still, the initial Cabal was three engineers, a writer, an animator and a designer, so you can assume that the broader team was at least that much again. That's 12 people full-time working for 2-3 years (and the actual credits go up to 30, so it's probably even more). At $75k per FTE (in 1996 salaries), that's at least $3 million, which is quite a lot, even for two people wealthy from MSFT stock options.

kevlar1818• 6 years ago

TLDR: Small, cross-functional teams build better products.

anthk• 6 years ago

On game scripts (literature, not programming), a lot of ideas were shaped before in text adventures/interactive fiction. ZMachine-Inform/Tads have several games based on sci-fi and weird tech environments, such as Babel, or Spider and Web. And the reverse happens, too. H.P. Lovecraft->Alone In the Dark->Anchorhead.

peter_d_sherman• 6 years ago

"The first theory we came up with was the theory of "experiential density" — the amount of "things" that happen to and are done by the player per unit of time and area of a map. Our goal was that, once active, the player never had to wait too long before the next stimulus, be it monster, special effect, plot point, action sequence, and so on. Since we couldn’t really bring all these experiences to the player (a relentless series of them would just get tedious), all content is distance based, not time based, and no activities are started outside the player’s control.

If the players are in the mood for more action, all they need to do is move forward and within a few seconds something will happen.

The second theory we came up with is the theory of player acknowledgment.

This means that the game world must acknowledge players every time they perform an action.

For example, if they shoot their gun, the world needs to acknowledge it with something more permanent than just a sound — there should be some visual evidence that they’ve just fired their gun. We would have liked to put a hole through the wall, but for technical and game flow reasons we really couldn’t do it. Instead we decided on "decals" — bullet nicks and explosion marks on all the surfaces, which serve as permanent records of the action. This also means that if the player pushes on something that should be pushable, the object shouldn’t ignore them, it should move. If they whack on something with their crowbar that looks like it should break, it had better break. If they walk into a room with other characters, those characters should acknowledge them by at least looking at them, if not calling out their name. Our basic theory was that if the world ignores the player, the player won’t care about the world.

A final theory was that the players should always blame themselves for failure.

If the game kills them off with no warning, then players blame the game and start to dislike it. But if the game hints that danger is imminent, show players a way out and they die anyway, then they’ll consider it a failure on their part; they’ve let the game down and they need to try a little harder. When they succeed, and the game rewards them with a little treat — scripted sequence, special effect, and so on — they’ll feel good about themselves and about the game."

The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process for Creating Half-Life (1999)

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