The Front Door

My screenwriting professor talked about the “front door” when writing. When you start a scene with a character entering through the front door, it’s a choice. Your brain defaults to that choice because it’s what it knows - and you’re probably concerning yourself with bigger elements in the scene. But what more would it say about the character and the scene if they’re going through the side window, or simply take a wide step over the entryway when they enter? Basically - recognize when you’ve chosen a predictable direction and try to evaluate if you’re missing an opportunity. 

In game design it’s the same. We have to make hundreds of decisions in a week, and inevitably - for many of them - we’ll choose to walk through the front door. This is sometimes necessary to simply get the bigger ideas in the game. Other times we want to give the player something familiar - especially if we’re innovating in other areas. But it’s good to go back and revisit our “front door” decisions and ensure they’re intentional.

Originally, in Duskers you used a mouse interface to pilot drones around derelict spaceships. This was an example of an almost unconscious “front door” decision - seeing as it’s a standard to use the mouse when playing a game. A friend played an early version of it and tossed out the idea of controlling the drones with a command line interface (typing commands with a keyboard). This suggestion seemed ridiculous at first, but the more I thought about it - the more I liked the idea, and just had to try it.

I was really frightened to go though that side window because who plays a game with a command line interface? But after I did, I was suddenly seeing lots of side windows we could go through. I revisited something as simple as having a soundtrack in the game, and chose to go through the side window of not having one - because a soundtrack felt non-diegetic and would hurt the immersion of listening to a lone drone steer down an abandoned corridor. These side windows all contributed to create a unique experience - and that’s what resonated with our players and garnered the game so many awards (ironically including Best Interface of the year from Rock Paper Shotgun).

Keep in mind this applies to every aspect of your game: audio, art, UI, etc. In each decision try to recognize if you’ve defaulted to the “front door” and if that’s what’s best. Even small details can make a game feel unique and more cohesive. Your uniqueness as a developer is what will make your game resonate with players, so just be aware of when you’re going through the front door, and occasionally slide down the chimney.

Chess The Gathering: Design Part 2

Continuing from Part 1, Holly and I go over how we designed "Chess the Gathering", a board game mash up of Magic, Chess, and other geeky concepts. In this installment we go over spells that modify creatures with new abilities, and murdering twins.

This series is in response to questions about our "paper prototype" video

Chess The Gathering: Design Part 1

So after our paper prototype video on "Chess the Gathering" we got a lot of people asking us how the game plays. Then someone suggested we talk about the design process and how the game evolved. I'm not one to pass up on stealing a good idea, so here's part one of me yammering on about how the game came about. Holly on camera.... I should really put the prettier face in front of the camera, I'm new at this.

Chess the Gathering? (A Paper Prototype)

I love me some board games and as such I created a simple paper prototype of one that mixed elements from Chess and Magic the Gathering. However, as we played it more it became clear we needed to improve the paper prototype. Take a look at Holly and I making using what we could to make the game play smoother: Zombies, glue, Legos, and paint of course :)

It takes a village to destroy a city

I wrote and article (LINK) on Co-optimus.com about adding co-op to A Virus Named TOM. I debated re-posting it here but it seems silly. Ultimately, adding co-op was a lot of added work, with an even greater amount of reward from watching people play the game together. It's a long-ish read, but lemme know what you think if you do read it.

The difficulty I want

I got on a treadmill at the gym all ready to workout when it asked me a question I didn't know the answer to: "Difficulty Level?". I stared at the screen, which gave me no range, and to boot I had never run on a treadmill with an incline before. So I guessed 10. Turns out I think it was out of 10. Fortunately I didn't need to be Carl Lewis, when I realized things were getting way too hard, I just adjusted the difficulty down to 8 (ok 3). The point is, sometimes you don't know how difficult you want it to be until you've tried it.

So why don't we do this more in games? Many games ask you to choose a difficulty level up front, but don't allow you to adjust it later on when you realize you were wrong. Giving players access to Level of Difficulty settings throughout the game can not only help prevent them from being frustrated and putting the controller down, but also allow them to change the way in which they perceive and play the game.

I was playing "God of War" last week, a game I had always meant to play, but had avoided because it seemed like a hack and slash platformer, which is a genre that I've never been incredibly fond of (In case you're wondering, it turned out to be a hack and slash plat former). While playing it, I found myself enjoying the game quite a bit, though there were definitely moments of annoyance when I was punished for not being able to repeatedly push a button fast enough. At any rate I entered a room where I needed to beat everyone in it before the floor gave way. After several attempts I began to get frustrated, when suddenly on one of the restart screens I was asked if I'd like to switch to an easier difficulty.

Now normally I laugh at myself as the game took pity on me, and then defiantly answer "no" as if my wife had suggested we stop at a gas station for directions. But then I realized something. The elements of the game I was actually enjoying were things like story and atmosphere. And while I enjoyed some of the fighting, the thousands of baddies I had brutally murdered so far had somewhat soothed my blood lust. I realized that playing on easy would actually make the game more enjoyable for me, after all I still have God of War 2 left to play! So here's an example where not only I was reminded that I didn't need to play through the game frustrated, but was also able to play the game the way I'd actually prefer to play it at that point. What a clever God that War is!

Another interesting case for level of detail is "Oblivion" (ok, ok, Elder scrolls IV: Oblivion... nerds). This game had something I'd never seen before: a difficulty slider. Accessible at almost any time during the game. Moooore difficult.... Lessssss difficult. Sliders are so fun! So I'm playing the game and I get to a point where I want to silently assassinate someone (always a fun thing to do). I sneak into the house across the street, jump over to their balcony, slip in and stand over their sleeping body with a giant sword in my hand and glint in my eye. I rain my strongest attack down on their head and... they get up and call the guard? Now I was still able to kill them (I know you were worried), but I was very unsatisfied with the result. In my mind this game was fairly life-like on the tone scale (other than the magic, and maybe the vampires). This was not a giant Ogre wearing sword repellent, so in my mind, when one attempts to lop another's head off with a sword while they're sleeping, one generally succeeds. So what did I do? I snuck in, lowered the difficutly, lopped his head off, and then raised the difficulty back up. AMAZING. It was as if I had an argument with the designer, and won! As if he listened to my plight, installed a fix and I was able to continue playing the game I wanted to play. What would have been a frustrating complaint turned into a paragraph about a cool feature.

Now some might say that in doing this, you allow players to play the game in unintended ways, and this is a valid point. Someone may crank the difficulty down, and then forget to raise it up as they get better. This could cause them to miss out on some of the "tension" of exploring caves because they know they can't get hurt. I feel this is somewhat acceptable. The player knows how they want to play, and if my wife hadn't been able to crank down the difficulty I'm guessing she would've given up on the game (she also enjoyed exploring more than fighting anyway). However, there may be a way to have your cake and eat it too. What if you combined this with what "God of War" did? What if you remind players that they can raise the difficulty level if they haven't even come close to having a formidable battle? Many times a player would take such suggestions, they simply forget about these options and sometimes end up putting the controller down instead, because they don't know why they're not enjoying the game anymore.

Interweaving gameplay mechanics (Design)

When I first envisioned the circuit game I started with the simple notion of energizing a circuit by turning its parts, or "tiles" to allow energy to flow (paradox 3000 is the most recent example I can think of). I then thought that perhaps once the circuit was energized, the grid formed by the edges of the circuit's tiles could glow to become prominent in the foreground, and then you could navigate a character along that grid, avoiding enemies, and making your way to the next circuit. Thus you're solution of one problem would lead to the starting point of another.

Now many games interweave various gameplay mechanics to various degrees of success. In some cases the gameplay mechanics complement one another and are both a major component of the game, such as the dungeons in Zelda where a mix of puzzle solving and action just feels right, culminating in a boss battle that exemplifies this balance by making you have to figure out a strategy for how to defeat the boss (puzzle), and then execute on that strategy (action).
In other cases the second gameplay mechanic might be very different, but limited to a small portion of the game. Usually this is a task, such as unlocking a door. These are usually dubbed as "mini-games" since they're almost like separate little games inside of the main game. The "hacking" that you do in bio-shock is a good example of this, where the main game is first person shooter and the mini-game is a type of connection puzzle. I feel that usually work well because they can serve as an opportunity to break up gameplay, preventing monotony without the risk of annoying the player that dislikes the mini-game, because either you’re not forced to do it (in bio-shock you don't HAVE to hack bots), or if you are you don't have to deal with it too often.

Things seem to get murkier when the gameplay is both different AND a major part of the game. People can be divided on this and while sometimes it's the fault of bad implementation and balance, sometimes it may just come down the player’s tastes. I thoroughly enjoyed ActRaiser (c’mon people let’s take a walk back to super Nintendo). In this game you play as a God (a familiar setting to me) where you go down to earth to clear some demons from a land (side scrolling action). Then when you clear that land you build it up with followers sim-city style (god game). Throughout the game you go back and forth between these modes. I feel they did a good job implementing these mechanics since they made the switching between them predictable and instigated by the player. It wasn't that I was constantly being thrown back and forth between modes, when I felt I was ready to take on a new land, I knew I'd be playing an action game, so if I didn't feel like that at the moment, I could continue to build a previous area.
However, had I hated either side scrolling action or top down god games, I might not have liked the game. I recall reading a review for Call of Juarez, a game in which you alternate between playing a pistol packing preacher (guns blazing) and a bow and arrow yielding drifter (stealth). In it the reviewer complained that he (bias or not) enjoyed one experience much more than the other, and as such felt as though he had to trudge through half of the game that he didn't like to play the half he did.

So I guess, like many things, there are pluses and minuses to how greatly and how often you vary gameplay mechanics. As for me I decided not to go with interweaving the gameplay. I integrated the two mechanics into one gameplay style, and when I came up with another I added it as a separate gameplay mode. I felt that in my case it worked better that way and it made it so I didn't constantly have to worry about balancing the two against each other. But someday I'd love to give something that does mix it up between two gameplay mechanics a try.