Gameology

Show Notes

Mathew and Attila discuss the ideal length of a gaming session. Games discussed in the show:

The World Ends with You

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Robo's World: The Zarnok Fortress

New Super Mario Bros.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Cliff

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

The Last of Us

Extended ThoughtsPlay Session Basics

Session length refers to the amount of time which a player spends in a game from the moment they turn it on to the moment they turn it off. From lengthy MMO raids to a few seconds spent playing a mobile game between stops in public transit, you must divide your game into session lengths that best accommodate the intended audience. Sessions can be thought of like chapters in a book; natural divisions of a game experience between which the user can end their game session or continue as they see fit.

One simple way this division is achieved is to break your game up into levels, but this isn't always possible given the nature of the game. Otherwise, a save / load system of some sort must be implemented which can allow players to dictate their own session lengths. Of course, with the ability to save and load anywhere comes the potential for abusing such a system to artificially deflate game difficulty. However, not every type of challenge is prone to abuse from "save-scuming" and the issue can be circumvented by only offering a "Save and Quit" option to the player. This way, the creation of the save file allows players to jump out of the game whenever they need to, but doesn't allow players to save and keep playing, reloading the file whenever they fail. Another approach is to limit saving / loading to preset save / load points; physical places in the game where the player must interact with a game entity to save their progress. This still allows you to dictate what transpires within a play session, although it is not as accommodating of length. Perhaps the ideal solution would be a combination of Save Points and the ability to Save and Quit from anywhere, as this can allow players to drop-in and out of a game at will while preserving the intended challenge of the game based on the location and scarcity of save / load points.

Getting into the Game

If it takes 5 minutes to get past the opening logos, loading the title screen, and then loading the save file, players probably won't feel like even opening the game unless they know for certain that they can commit to a longer play session. When I designed the main menu for Zarnok Fortress, I made it so that the main menu appears instantly without any splash-screens to get in the way of the game beginning. I also ditched the idea of the "title screen" which does nothing but display the name of the game and a message that says "Press Start to begin". The "main menu" is the first thing the player sees with the cursor positioned over the one-click-Continue button that instantly loads the last-played file. This means from when the user launches the game, they can start playing instantly. If you're intent on having splash-screens display before the game begins, I would suggest only having them appear the very first time, or at most the first few times the game begins. Beyond that, the logos can be featured on the Main Menu screen if you're really intent on reminding the user who it was that made the game they are playing. In the case of Zarnok Fortress, I further gave players the option of selecting how the game would load the levels. By default, the game loads levels one at a time since this has the least amount of up-front time cost. If a player is in for a longer play session though, they can elect to have every level pre-loaded into memory to speed up the time between levels, although this makes them sit through a long load before they can get into the game. I know just enough about asset loading in games to understand that offering this kind of choice isn't always possible, and may be severely limited by the amount of memory available from the game hardware, but when you can offer players this choice, they are sure to appreciate it.

Getting BACK into the Game

It can be tempting to enforce control over the length of a play session by not letting players quit out of the experience in the middle of something important, like a puzzle to which they might forget the details. If you've ever stopped playing a game for any length of time only to return to it utterly bewildered about what you should be doing or even what the controls are, it can kill the experience and make a player drop the game for good. 

In defense of Fi from The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (you'll never hear anyone else say that) she could at least remind you of your current objective, as well as give hints on how to get there. This is useful not only for players who are stuck in the game, but also for anyone resuming a play-through from an extended absence. Another, more elaborate solution from Pokemon FireRed / LeafGreen was a Journal that kept a log of everything the player had done recently, playing it back to them at the start of their next play session. While this system didn't give you a hint as to what to do next, it did contextualize everything you'd done up to where you left off in the game, which might have been enough to jog your memory into remembering what you meant to do before concluding your previous session.

One thing I haven't seen done very often (but something I believe would be incredibly useful) would be the ability for a player to access a quick primer on the game's controls to remind them of what does what. This is more important for games with a large number of different inputs, or games like First Person Shooters which can have small differences in controls from game to game. It would certainly be useful to a player coming fresh off of a session in a different game where "Right Bumper" performs the reload action, where now they need to press "X" instead.

Session Length by Platform

The length of individual play sessions must be influenced by the platform the game is being played on. Platforms can be broken down into a few distinct categories (in truth it's more of a sliding scale based on device capability and usage): Mobile, Handheld, and Console / PC. Of course, the platform a game is played on is not the only factor in session length, as more powerful devices can play host to games with session length structures of less powerful devices, and modern smartphone devices are capable of rendering experiences akin to full Desktop experiences of just a few years ago, so the following is mostly just a helpful generalization.

Mobile

Mobile refers to games played on a Smartphone (typically with only one hand, as the other is likely occupied holding onto the safety bars of whatever transit system the player is riding). These games should have the absolute shortest possible session length, as little as the amount of time it takes to get between stops on a subway (under one minute). These are the kinds of games where Iteration Time becomes incredibly important; how quickly can a player retry a challenge which they have failed at? When I designed the parody game Cliff, I made it so that the user doesn't even need to touch the screen when they die, they immediately restart the game and continue from where they left off. This can shave down precious seconds which are actually large fractions of time when dealing with sessions this short.

Handheld

While the handheld market is being carried almost solely by Nintendo's 3DS, and may not be much longer for this world in its current form, it serves as an important middle-ground in the sliding scale of session length. Anyone who packs a handheld game system in addition to the smartphone they probably have is likely in for a long trip, or is a dedicated gamer. Handheld games must play host to a wide range of expected session length that bridges the spectrum from Mobile to Console / PC. As such, it's difficult to put numbers to the exact session length because it depends so much on the kind of game being played, but lets say it occupies the range above 1 minute up to around 15.

Console / PC

These are the heavy hitters; the games which some players actively schedule around so that they can continue to enjoy them even as the amount of free time in their lives dwindles. These are games which can convey stories of massive scope (made by Indie and AAA alike) or multiplayer matches which have a minimum session length of 15 minutes (bear in mind that the time limit on causing eye-strain is 20 minutes of up-close focus). While games of this scale can tempt a player to play from beginning to end, it is the responsibility of the designer to build in break points at the upper limit of 40 minutes. At this point, give players the chance to come up for air, even if they decide to simply dive back down into the game. If you structure your play sessions to be much longer than this, players may not be able to finish your game because they cannot invest the necessary time into a single play session.

Show Notes

Mathew and Attila discuss the length of games, both AAA and Indie. Games discussed in the show:

Anatomy by Kitty Horrorshow

Firewatch

Journey

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The Elder Scrolls

South Park: The Stick of Truth

Contra

Mass Effect Trilogy

The Order: 1886

Extended Thoughts

For those of us who have been fortunate enough to grow up with games, I'm sure many have fond memories of immersing themselves in 30-50 hour long experiences. Whether that meant playing a game to completion or sinking hours into the multiplayer, sometimes the experience could last even longer. However, as time went on and we grew up, we find that adulthood responsibilities demand more of our time and we can no longer (responsibly) afford to dedicate as much time to gaming. This either means favoring shorter experience so we can play a number of different games in less time, or being extra selective in which 30+ hour experience we choose to partake in.

When looking at what longer games have to offer, there are very few which actually justify their full play-time. Many longer games resort to padding out the experience in some form or fashion, but it is important to understand that this is not an issue exclusive to large AAA games. There are some games that are padded at 1 hour in length, just as there are games which are padded at 50 hours. Perhaps out of fondness for longer game experiences of days past, certain vocal gamers demand that games adhere to a "dollar per hour" ratio. As children, we are far less likely to notice when a game is padded out or has some segments which are repetitive. At the camp I work at, I see kids listening to 10 hour long versions of songs all the time. But this cannot form the basis of our demands for new games that are being made; it will result in worse games overall! In the end, a game's length should be determined by its story and the number of unique mechanical combinations it can present. However enticing a story may be, there are few mysteries that can be drawn out over 50 hours. However fun a combat system is, you can only introduce so many unique enemies for the player to fight. There is a point at which an experience begins to stagnate, and it is up to developers to trim the dead ends and deliver a satisfying conclusion to their game well before that happens. The ideal length of a game can almost be determined by the mathematics of combinatorics; if your game has a certain number of mechanics that can be combined in a certain number of ways, the length should be determined by the number of unique combinations that can be generated. Obviously some combinations will be so fun that they are worth repeating at least once, and some combinations are not worth having at all, so it ultimately comes down to the individual mechanics of the game. Essentially, there is a sweet spot for every game to find; not too short that it doesn't get to explore the intricacies of different mechanics intertwining, and not so long that those parts of the experience feel as though they are being drawn out like butter over too much bread.

Show Notes:

Attila tears into Paper Mario: Sticker Star.

Paper Mario: Sticker Star

Extended Thoughts

As much as I loved the first two Paper Mario games (the original and The Thousand Year Door) I feel as though I was at odds with the very principle of Paper Mario: Sticker Star. I believe however, that this was beyond a matter of personal preference, that there are some fundamentally broken (even paradoxical) mechanics in this game. I believe that it might be helpful to analyze exactly what went wrong, seeing how the various mechanics involved in the game's combat system operate in opposition to one another, instead of coalescing. Throughout the game, you collect 3D items that you can flatten into Stickers and then use as special items in Combat. Even your basic jump and hammer attacks appear in the environment as ready-to-use Stickers. And here's the crux of the issue; all your basic and special attacks are competing for space in the limited number of pages that make up your Sticker Book. Let's walk through the specifics:

1. You can't use the powerful 3D items you find until make your way back to a specific place in Toad Town where you perform the Sticker conversion (get ready for a lot of back-tracking).
2. Converted Stickers are tailor made to deal crazy amounts of damage to specific boss enemies, and it would be a complete waste to use them against anything less. They also require no input from the player to use them, no execution challenge or "Action Command" as the game calls it.
3. Converted Stickers take up a huge amount of space in your inventory so there's no way you can convert them all and still have enough space to take on regular enemies.
4. The specific items you need in boss encounters only become obvious when the fight starts.

So there's the critical flaw. You basically have to resign yourself to death the first time you encounter a boss, then go all the way back to Toad Town, then all the way back through the Boss's level, and then use the one item without which you are in for an unfairly difficult fight.

I'm not entirely sure if there's much to be done in making the inventory-based combat as it is presented in the game any better. There are a number of overlapping systems which make the game so fundamentally flawed that I would rather start from scratch if I wanted to make a combat system that was as engaging and fun as the traditional action-RPG battle system the series adhered to in its first two iterations. The most simple surface-level solution would simply be to give the player no limit on their inventory space, but at best this just cuts the difficulty of the game as every instant-win item is just somewhere in that list and all you need to do is pick it. I came up with a few other fixes, but as I said, none of these really make the game great, perhaps just a little better:

1. Make it so that no single item is a must-have, instant-kill for any boss. Perhaps late-game items can instant-kill early-to-mid-game enemies at best.
2. Have a number of different items which have varying degrees of effectiveness against your enemy, but exactly how much the item lives up to its potential damage is determined by an execution challenge, like your basic attacks in Paper Mario. The more damage a potential item is going to deal, the more difficult it is to pull off.
3. Couple this with an ability like Tattle from previous Paper Mario games to highlight what an enemy is weak against, and make the player responsible for retaining that information. Maybe this ability itself is an item, one which the player can naturally carry less of as they memorize the weaknesses of enemies.

As if this weren't bad enough, I even discovered a "First-Order-Optimal Strategy" which I used to blaze through the majority of the game. Simply put, a "F.O.O. Strategy" is one which requires a minimal amount of input with a high return for the player. In practical terms, I found a sticker which I could use to win every fight in the game with on my first turn, bypassing all combat; the Koopa Shell (and later the Red Koopa Shell). By using the Shell on the first turn, I could pretty well instant-kill every enemy in a given encounter. Between the Coin Bonus I received from winning the battle in one turn and the coins dropped by the defeated enemy, I was earning more than enough coins to buy all the Koopa Shells I needed to coast through every encounter. I'll admit that using this exploit would detract from any fun the game might have had to offer, but I already wasn't having fun, so rather than give up on the game entirely, I used this F.O.O. strategy to get to the end at least once.

Show Notes:

Mathew talks all about the Shadowrun series and specifically his favorite entry in the series; Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis.

Shadowrun (Genesis)

Extended Thoughts (written by Mathew Falvai)

What a joy to talk about my all-time favorite video game on the GAMEOLOGY podcast.

For the uninitiated, the Shadowrun universe is a wonderful mashup of Fantasy and CyberPunk. Set in a dystopian future of Mega Corporations, the Awakening returned Magic to the world and many humans mutated into elves, dwarves, orcs, and trolls. You play the role of a Shadowrunner: skilled mercenary for hire. Oh yeah, there are also Dragons. Powerful and intelligent beings that operate behind the scenes.

The Sega Genesis version of Shadowrun is a masterpiece in combining systems, attention to detail, and player choice.

The combat is a great place to start. Everything happens in realtime from the same perspective you see for the entire game. All of the dice-rolling and stat-tracking is done behind the scenes as guns, melee, and magic combine in fast and furious battles. A great detail is the ability to purchase guns from both legal and illegal shops. Illegal guns are the best but can be confiscated by police through random events (we’ll get to those later). You can either purchase armor that conceals the weapons (but provides less protection) or purchase a weapons permit from a specific contact. This mechanic breathes life into the world and adds weight to your choices. I love how these elements bounce off each other.

Speaking of breathing life into the world, random events are another wonderful element of the game. While navigating the world, the view will switch to the conversation screen and play out one of several scenarios. This could be the police wanting to speak with you, an injured man asking for help, or a shadowy figure offering illegal grenades. You always have multiple options to proceed and the outcome will mostly randomly generated. Helping the injured man might result in a cash reward or it could be a supernatural being luring you into a trap. The grenade salesman might be offering a sweet deal or could be an undercover cop. These moments offer engaging diversions that help flesh out a world limited by 16-bit hardware.

Another system I love is the ability to get a criminal record. Being arrested for infiltrating a corporation or carrying illegal weapons results in the record. This restricts your ability to purchase a visa that would allow you to reach the second wilderness hub. However there are multiple ways around this. You can either pay a phone contact to delete this record or pay a different contact to fly you into the second wilderness area undetected. These contacts are only represented by a beautifully drawn image on a vid-phone and plenty of text, but it further expands the universe.

Many of these details and mechanics are completely optional. For example, three separate gang factions exist. The player can gain access to each gang boss by either paying cash or having their reputation at the right level. These gangs offer contacts to their affiliates (Yakuza, Mafia, Seattle City Officials) and/or protection from random gang attacks. Another element that could be completely skipped over but deepens the universe.

The atmosphere is very dark and mature. The story begins by showing the player’s brother’s murder. The main quest is to avenge his death by following clues from one narrative set-piece to the next. Many NPCs are openly hostile to you and the world is painted as a corrupt/dangerous place to be. This is accomplished through a ton of text. Although text can be off-putting to some, it has the advantage of providing the depth of narrative detail found in books. The limited graphics and lack of voice-acting mean everything must be described in words. This not only invokes the imagination to further immersion but has the added benefit of infinite randomly-generated mission. 

Within this detailed world exists a Matrix, which is Shadowrun’s internet. The Matrix is represented with a completely different interface. The character’s virtual avatar uses programs that act much like spells with cooldowns. Defense programs guard access to the rest of the system and the highest level ‘Black-Ice’ programs can even cause physical damage to the player outside of the Matrix. A character can jack in through any cyber terminal and steal data to complete missions or sell off to a particular NPC. It’s also useful during infiltration missions to access the Matrix from inside a corporation to shut down security systems, cameras, alarms, and unlock doors. 

I could go on forever about this game but my biggest takeaway is how well it translated the Shadowrun universe into a video game using detailed, inter-connected systems. It was great then and still holds up during my semi-annual playthroughs.

Thanks for reading.

Show Notes

Attila heaps praise on one of his favorite games; The World Ends With You while Mathew listens patiently. A discussion on how the game handles Difficulty and an example of Mechanics as Metaphor.

The World Ends With You

Extended ThoughtsMechanics as Metaphor: sending Messages through SystemsWhether you intend for it or not, your game mechanics carry messages to your players. Use this to your advantage and turn your code into poetry in motion.

In the cult hit game, The World Ends with You, there is an overarching theme of the importance of individuality. It's woven into the narrative, and even directly into some of the game's mechanics. One shining example of using mechanics to metaphorically express the game's core theme relates to the combat effectiveness of your equip items. Every equip item in the game is an article of clothing associated with one of thirteen fictional clothing brands in the game world. Each of those brands is ranked in popularity, with different clothing brands being more popular in some zones of the game than others. If you wear items of a popular brand, you get a stat bonus, while if you wear unpopular clothing brands you get a stat penalty. However, the most important component of this mechanic is that the more a player wears a specific brand of clothing in battle, the more popular it becomes, eventually rising through the charts and granting the player the associated stat bonus. If the designers of TWEWY had stopped halfway and only made popular clothes give stat bonuses, that would have been a terrible message. Instead, they managed to turn that around completely and make it a fantastic example of expressing individuality; allowing players to wear what they want in the face of hardship and eventually rewarding them for it.

I would argue that most mechanics in games are devoid of a metaphorical meaning, and that's just as well. Having everything in your game be an elaborate metaphor would be incredibly difficult to construct and interpret, and in most cases it simply isn't necessary. That being said, it is incredibly important to keep this in the back of your mind while you are designing every mechanic in your game. By accident or coincidence, you could end up designing a mechanic that has some very negative undertones. It's all about understanding that nothing happens in a vacuum; your game exists as part of a large and complicated social web that is our world, and there are many things in our world that are fine in some cultures but terribly offensive in others. So take a moment to evaluate the messages in your game and ask yourself these questions: are they the messages you intended? Are there messages you didn't expect? Every once in a while you'll be presented with a fantastic opportunity to embed a meaningful message directly into the mechanics of your game, the code itself becoming poetry in motion.

Show Notes

Mathew and Attila discuss difficulty, fairness, and consistency and how this can be done well or done poorly in games. Games discussed in the show:

Dark Souls

Bastion

Dark Souls II

BioShock

Robo's World: The Zarnok Fortress

Final Fantasy XIII

Super Mario World: Feather Cape

Mega Man Boss Select

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Batman Arkham Knight

Extended Thoughts

People play games for a myriad of different reasons. Some people play games for the narrative, some for the challenge. Some people play games just to pass the idle seconds aboard morning transit. Something that affects the appeal of any game experience is the game's difficulty. I'll be discussing true difficulty in this write-up, not difficulty in controls (which falls under more of an accessibility issue). There are a number of different ways we perceive games as being difficult, some more overt than others. Typically, the more overt a game is about its difficulty, the more it tends towards being a frustrating experience for the simple reason that creating a truly "challenging but fair" experience is incredibly difficult. It's something that only experienced developers can properly pull off, and it is the product of a LOT of play testing and iteration. It's incredibly easy to make an experience which is arbitrarily difficult.

Any experience which relies on trial and error on the part of the player, (especially when the penalty for the "error" in question is death and loss of progress) that's the easy / frustrating kind of difficulty. This kind of difficulty stems from lack of communication to the player; throwing them into situations they are unequipped to deal with, confronting them with hazards that they have no way of encountering without getting hit by them at least once, invisible paths that you just have to know are there. Situations we are confronted with in real life where we are under-informed are incredibly frustrating and unless that is what you are trying to evoke in the player (why!?) they should be avoided.

Ways of Modifying Difficulty

Of course, there are plenty of situations where even if the majority of players understand the solution to a given problem, there will be a few who do not, a few for which a given part of your game is just too difficult. It's in these circumstances where having an adjustable difficulty is incredibly useful. It lets more players experience the parts of your game that lie beyond the one particular wall they've run up against. There are a number of different ways these difficulty modifiers can be built into an experience, and there are a number of ways in which this can be done well, or poorly which I'll classify as "multipliers", "modes", and "items". I'd like to preface that a game may draw on any combination of these methods depending on the nature of the experience (I believe it is a rare case where a game uses only one method).

Multipliers

Multipliers apply a mathematical increase or decrease to the given difficulty of an experience. They are perhaps the simplest way of modifying a game's difficulty. If on "Normal" difficulty given enemy attack deals X damage to the player, on "Easy" difficulty it deals X - 2 (or half of X) and on "Hard" difficulty it deals X + 2 (or two times X). My main issue with Multipliers as a means of modifying game difficulty is that it leads to a core inconsistency; if the player gets used to playing on a specific difficulty they will find it jarring when an attack that they are used to surviving suddenly leaves them KO'd.

Modes

Difficulty Modes represent core changes to the game experience. This could mean altering the number or type of enemies that spawn, removing hazards from the game environment, or adding in extra power-ups. Due to the nature of these changes, it often makes it difficult (if not impossible) to swap a difficulty Mode once a game session has begun. After all, if you have the Mode set to Normal, then toggle over to Easy where there should be fewer enemies, how is the game to decide which ones should de-spawn? What if the player is standing in a space where a Hazard would exist when they decide to bump up the difficulty? This is why choosing difficulty Modes is typically set in stone at the beginning of starting a new file, or in the game's main menu before starting a play session, it allows a fixed experience to load in and avoid all the issues just mentioned. By contrast, Multipliers are the easiest to turn up or down at a moment's notice since they aren't changing anything core to the game layout. Although creating alternate Difficulty Modes presents a significant design challenge, it also presents a number of different ways for a player to experience the game and solves the issue of maintaining consistency that Multipliers struggle with. Indeed, consistency is an especially great aspect of Modes because should a player choose to play through the game a second time on a harder difficulty Mode, all the experiences of the previous play-through will still be relevant.

Items

The last category of difficulty modification is the use of Items, especially consumable ones that the player can carry with them and trigger at specific instances. These are items which the player does not need to use to get through a specific challenge, but which make the challenge easier. Mega Man provides some great examples of how this is done. You can use the Emergency Energy Tanks to replenish health from the pause Menu, allowing you to bank up on Health where it is easy to find, and then expend it where you have need of it. You can also use "Rush Powers", granted by Mega Man's trusty robot dog. The powers they afford vary from game to game, but for instance, some give extra rising platforms which you can jump onto to make certain jumps easier, or platforms that travel forwards which you can use to cross large gaps. Even in the recent Mario games, your ability to store an item in a backup slot to be used when needed means you can get an item from an easy level, and then use it where necessary to get through a difficult level.

In my game, Robo's World: The Zarnok Fortress, I took the Mega Man approach and included Spare Parts which the player could collect throughout the game, and then redeem them not just to replenish Health, but also to get Shield Power-Ups and Grenades. Allowing players to redeem items to deflate difficulty at their whim is both a blessing and a curse. It certainly accomplishes the goal of allowing players to self-regulate the game's difficulty, but it can allow players to entirely circumvent moments in the game by simply walking through all the hazards you've placed in their way, "damage boosting" to get to the end. It can leave players with a definite sense of having completed a part of your game "incorrectly". Item usage gives players a very potent means of modifying the difficulty in your game and means you really need to think through the nature of the challenges in your game and how they can potentially be affected by item usage.

Difficulty Curves

As a player progresses through a game, it is reasonable to assume that will naturally get better at it. They will learn to master the controls and gain a more thorough understanding of the mechanics. As such, the difficulty of a game should naturally rise over time to provide a level of challenge to the player that feels "just right". As I see it, an ideal curve can be broken into three parts:

Smooth Start

The beginning of the curve should be the flattest as you take the time to introduce the player to your game, letting them get a feel for the controls before giving them any real challenge.

Upward Slope

As a curve begins to steepen, you must pay close attention to each interval of the slope, making sure that there are no "walls" where the difficulty rises too suddenly. Let the slope build, but keep it a smooth curve; don't let it build to an unpleasant spike.

Flattened Peak

When a player has attained a new threshold of competence, they should be allowed some time to enjoy that feeling of power before you increase the slope of the difficulty to provide them with a fresh level of challenge. This creates the moment of "release" that follows the intensity of a "tense" moment as the Slope reaches its steepest point. You may even consider having the difficulty dip down a little at this point.

A simple difficulty curve

Curves withing curves

As the difficulty curve's overall shape trends upward over time it should have smaller subsets of peaks and valleys. Towards the end of an experience, you can start to increase how steep the Slope of the curve is, scaling the challenge up at a faster pace than earlier in the game. 

More complex; curves within curves

Curves within curves within curves

But why stop there? As important as it is to have an overall curve of your game in mind, you can plot out the difficulty curve of your game down to the moment (The execution of a complex attack can have its own curve mapped to it!). It seems like an awful lot of planning and tuning, but if you can map out a satisfying curve for your game, it will ensure that the order of things shakes out nicely and your game will feel better as a result.

Difficulty curves can be nested as a fractal

The Problem of Open World Games:

This is where we arrive at "The Problem of Open World" games. When you give a player the choice of which part of the game they wish to tackle first, (letting them pick a Dungeon or Robot Master) it means that each of those zones must be equally difficult to begin with and follow the same difficulty curve within each stage. Depending on how the difficulty is balanced, this can have one of two results. If every stage is balanced towards being a viable entry point in the game for the player, then it will therefore not present enough of a challenge as the player tackles the last few stages, especially if the player is picking up a stat-boosting item somewhere in each stage that further reduces the difficulty of the levels. Alternately, the difficulty is balanced towards late-game play and it presents a difficulty spike which turns early-game players away, which I would argue is the worse alternative. In this case, if the player gets a stat-boosting item in each stage, it effectively creates a backwards difficulty curve as each item the player gets makes the game easier. Even if the balance falls somewhere in the middle, that would just mean you are alienating both early and late-game play experiences. The way I chose to tackle maintaining a balanced difficulty experience within an open world in Robo's World: The Zarnok Fortress was with a mechanic in the game where the enemy's intelligence level goes up. This way, at the outset of the game, the enemy intelligence would be low, making for an easier play experience. As time went on, the AI level would go up, matching the player's advancement and providing a consistent level of challenge. On top of that, I allowed players a means of countering this intelligence increase with another mechanic within the Digital Environment. In addition to being a means of quickly traversing the Fortress, it also gave players the opportunity to play a Pac-Man style Minigame where they ate up bits of data that represented the enemy intelligence.

Crafting a difficulty curve that makes your game not too difficult and not too easy for all different kinds of players can be a challenging design problem. Sometimes it's not enough to give players the tools they need to modify the difficulty of the game through use of Multipliers, Modes, or Items if they don't understand how to make use of them. You may need to build things into the game that automatically notice if the player is running up against a wall and offering them non-intrusive suggestions as to how to tackle that particular challenge. You may even consider implementing a system which actively modifies the game's difficulty in response to the player's success or failure within the game. This is how I approached difficulty management in the Tower-Defense / Real-Time-Strategy game Orbit. The game would actively spawn more or fewer aliens for the player to contend with depending on how prepared the player was to deal with a given threat.

There are a myriad of ways you can build in variable difficulty into your game. Whatever the narrative, genre, or mechanics of your game, there's bound to be some method that you can make use of to make your game enjoyable and accessible to a broader audience.

Show Notes

Mathew interviews Attila about his recent participation in a Game Jam and Attila shares his thoughts and experiences with Jams past. Games discussed in the show:

Robo's World: The Zarnok Fortress (The Digital Environment)

Stardew Valley

HeliChopper (Made in 17 Hours)

When we were Young

Gentlemen Drop Dead

Cat Daemon (Throw Away Games' Jam Game)

 

Extended Thoughts

I've only been lucky enough to participate in 4 Game Jams; 3 in-person and one online. To give a brief overview, the goal of a Game Jam is to create a game, either as an individual or with a group, within a short time limit. At an in-person Jam attendees meet up in a specific location to be in the same space as other jammers, whereas in the case of an online Jam, participants coordinate the event over the Internet through use of a website or forum. An online Jam does not preclude the possibility of teams, but it is certainly less likely that team members will end up seeing one another. Due to reasons such as the cost associated with renting the space for an in-person Jam, they don't tend to run for more than a few days. Online Jams face no such constraints and may therefore run as long as the event coordinators see fit, up to a month in some cases.

The Jams I participated in are Toronto's own TO Jam (3 years in a row) and once in the online Game Maker Community Jam. If you are considering participating in a game Jam and have the opportunity to participate in an in-person Jam, I highly recommend it. That isn't to slight online Jams, but attending one in-person has a couple added benefits. For one, they are a fantastic way of meeting new people with a common interest in game development in your local area; you might make some new friends! Working side by side with team members can really help you to coordinate your efforts and get the most out of a jam experience. Plus, there's nothing quite like the creative energy of the other teams around you, catching snippets of conversation and insights into other people's workflow can serve as a source of inspiration on your own project.

 If you are a prospective employer, Jams are a fantastic way to see what people are capable of in a limited span of time. I personally met the Artist who I hired for work on Robo's World: The Zarnok Fortress at a Jam! I've also seen some people who've done nothing but play games and / or watch YouTube videos all three days of the Jam, making them people I wouldn't consider working with. By contrast, when you're dealing with an online game jam, it's more difficult to evaluate the work habits of other participants, although some people do take it upon themselves to live-blog or even live-stream their development. When participating in an Online Jam, you are also participating from the comfort of your own home. Some attendees of in-person Jams elect to stay at the location overnight, packing sleeping bags to ensure that they can remain at the event as long as possible. I've always personally chosen to return home overnight to sleep in the comfort of my own bed and have a daily shower, which is a given when participating in an online Jam. That being said, if typically a Jam participant doesn't have a lot of spare time to dedicate to making games, I can completely understand why they are motivated to squeeze every last second out of the in-person event. I will advise however, that first time attendees don't try staying overnight, it would be better to get a feel for what a game jam is like before going for total immersion.

Many game Jams incorporate a Theme of some kind; an over-arching concept which serves as the inspiration for the game you are making. Some Jams take the theme very seriously and only post the theme when the Jam starts, others are more lax and may post it up to a week before the event begins. For my part, I find the Jams that heavily enforce the use of their theme to be less fun. For some people, the Theme is a great starting-off point which inspires the game they are about to work on. I come up with new ideas for games all the time, and therefore find it limiting to have to constrain my ideas to fit a jam's theme.

One of the best things about a Game Jam is the fact that it presents the opportunity for game designers to practice the most fundamental mantra of their craft; "Fail Faster". While you may not completely bring to life your game idea within the time-frame of a jam, you should at least be able to create a minimum viable product, something shows off the heart of the experience you want to create. The Jam build can serve as your test-bed, with other jammers as your audience to see if your idea has merit, or where it needs improvement. If you manage to hook an audience with just your Jam build, if you hear those magic words; "I'd love to see more of this!" You'll know that you're starting off strong. And don't worry if your Jam game isn't showered with adoration, perhaps it just needs some tweaking before it really shines, even the best designers need to iterate on an idea several times before they get it right. You can't get too invested in an idea, if trying to bring it to life reveals some fundamental flaws with an idea, just be glad of the time you've saved yourself, lest you'd continued working on the game in isolation and the flaws hadn't become noticeable until the end of a long development cycle.

Another great benefit of participating in a game Jam of any kind is that it helps you refine your sense of Scope. As a developer, it's incredibly important to see how far you can push your skills, and what you accomplish within a given period of time. After all, when you work on a larger scale project you'll likely be breaking up larger tasks into smaller ones as you build out your project time-line. Accurate estimation is critical to ensuring that your project hits the expected ship date. Poor time estimation can result in your project running late, which can strain a project's budget among other unpleasant side-effects.

Show Notes

Mathew and Attila discuss how games can get off on the right foot; what makes a good tutorial? Games discussed in the show:

Robo's World: The Zarnok Fortress

Pokemon

XCOM: Enemy Within

Rayman Legends

Batman: Arkham Knight

Legend of Zelda, Fi

Mario Galaxy 2: Cosmic Spirit

Super Mario Bros. 1-1

The Witness

Final Fantasy VII

Extended Thoughts

A well constructed tutorial can make or break a game. When constructing a tutorial for an interactive medium, developers should aim to create a similarly interactive tutorial. The more interactive a tutorial is, the more it resembles actual gameplay, the better a player will learn its lessons. Occasionally, this can be accomplished by actually tricking the player into a desired outcome. A great (and comedic) example of this is in the opening moments of Portal 2 where the character is asked to "speak" and given a prompt on-screen that says "Press A to speak". Actually pressing the button causes the player-character to jump, and the humor of the dialog in this moment helps the player remember the button associated with this action. Of course, you might be asking yourself, doesn't the "A" button perform the Jump action in most games? Why would the developers feel that it is necessary to teach something so basic? Quite simply, it's because it's best not to make any assumptions about what the player may or may not know, even in regards to actions that seem like common knowledge. While the "A" button is typically the jump button, depending on the kind of game you are creating, it might not even occur to players that they have the ability to jump.

A good tutorial makes no assumptions, but you can allow the player to indicate if they have played the game before, and don't need to start from scratch

The less text a tutorial features, the better, as players tend to ignore it. If possible, text instructions should be paired-down single-word overlays accompanied by a button prompt. If you need to display a lot of text, you can convey it through dialog to make it more compelling. Players are far more willing to give their attention to dialog, especially if they are presented with a face, as it helps sell the feeling of an interactive conversation.

Text walls are a mortal sin in the eyes of some gamers.

If you can't directly involve the player in the element they are being taught, you can demonstrate how that element works by having other characters interact with it. This can be accomplished either through a video playing in the game showing the player character performing a given skill correctly, or by demonstrating a mechanic in the environment of your game. As an example of the second case, players begin the original Portal game without its iconic armament and learn the simple mechanics of movement and traveling through portals and moving boxes onto buttons. By the time you finally encounter the portal gun, it's sitting on a pedestal and rotating, firing portals automatically. This gives you a great sense of anticipation, but it also illustrates how the thing you are about to pick up works. When you have an external element like this which the player is not in control of, it can hammer home the idea of how it will function once the player has control of it in a sort of "do as I do" presentation.

While constructing a tutorial, you need to be sure not to introduce too much to the player at once. The pace at which you introduce new elements is highly dependent on the kind of game you are making. You might decide to have a number of super-short levels that each encapsulate a single tutorial element, or to have a longer tutorial level that introduces multiple elements to the player. In the second case, you should still take care to only introduce one new thing to the player at a time. If players encounter two things they've never dealt with before at the same time they don't get the chance to see how the elements act individually. Again, going back to Portal as an example, once you finally pick up the Portal gun off of its pedestal, it can only fire one of the two possible portals. The player makes their way through the next few puzzles where the developers teach them about the intricacies of portals, breaking common player misconceptions such as "the blue portal is the 'in' portal and the orange portal is the 'out' portal".

I'd recommend playing through Portal as a Case Study in how to do a tutorial correctly. Plus, it's a lot of fun and not very long.

Of course, if the game you are creating the tutorial for has mechanical synergies the player should be aware of, these synergies should be showcased in a tutorial format, if not necessarily within the first level. You'll have a great opportunity to reintroduce players to situations they are already familiar with (which is important, as the repetition helps reinforce learning) while introducing a new element to keep the tutorial fresh.

It can be very difficult to keep a tutorial compelling, but that's also incredibly important. If it feels too much like an instructional course and doesn't do a good job of representing the game that is to come, players will want to skip past it and miss all the valuable lessons you needed to bestow for them to properly enjoy the game. One big reason it can be so difficult to construct compelling tutorials is because of how tightly controlled they need to be. Some parts of your tutorial might demand that the player master a skill before being allowed to move on, and there is a big difference between "doing something once" and "mastery". You must ensure that players are learning the right lessons about the game mechanics they are presented with. Ideally, your game mechanics will be reasonably intuitive, but if not, it's your job to present them in a light that makes them intuitive. If an ability doesn't feel intuitive to a player, it could go ignored in favor of an easier to perform ability which works for most, but not all scenarios, and then players will encounter great frustration when they hit a wall where the easy-to-perform ability no longer suffices. 

Making something intuitive isn't exactly easy, it involves illustrating clear scenarios when a particular skill is necessary so that players can connect the dots.

Player feedback is vital for far more than just seeing if a mechanic is intuitive. Even if you've poured lots of thought and effort into the creation of your tutorial, if it doesn't make sense to players, you need to change it. You cannot let your ego get the better of you and insist that no change is required, citing the lack of skill play-testers have at the game as evidence that "they are just stupid, but any intelligent person would be able to figure this out". I would hope that developers are aware of how important it is not to look down on play-testers if they stumble through your tutorial. As the developer of a game, you get to see it built from the ground up, getting plenty familiar with the controls and mechanics. It should be expected that players aren't going to be playing on anywhere near the same level of proficiency as the creators of the game. Of course, as you iterate and make changes, getting an appropriate sample size of testers to evaluate every segment of your tutorial can be incredibly difficult, especially for small teams. You should strive to get as many fresh perspectives on your game as possible to ensure that you are getting unbiased feedback (that they aren't simply completing some component of your tutorial because they already know how to play).

I wish I didn't have to bring up the ego issue, but it's something I've witnessed and work to make changes in spite of.

A good tutorial is not one which front-loads everything there is in your game, but one which is well paced out. If a player isn't going to need a particular skill or have to worry about a particular mechanic, leave it until the level in which it will be encountered. In the extreme case, you certainly wouldn't want to teach the player how to do something at the beginning of your game only to have it go unused until the very end of the game. It would be unreasonable for the player to remember that unused skill throughout the whole game. Instead, every time you introduce something new to your game, keep good tutorial practices in mind. Even if player is encountering a new game element in the last level of your game, you should be relying on the same good teaching practices as you've used up to that point. Don't make the assumption that just because they've made it this far that they don't need new mechanics explained to them. Always keep in mind that your ultimate goal is to teach players how to play your game so they have the best possible experience in it.

Don't try to compress everything into the beginning of your game, implement good tutorial practices whenever a player is taught a new mechanic in the game.

Show Notes

Mathew and Attila discuss what makes a boss encounter memorable, looking at Mini-Bosses, Temple Bosses, and End Bosses. Games discussed in the show:

Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Robo's World: The Blulite Rocks

Halo: Combat Evolved (Warthog Run)

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (Shadow Queen)

Final Fantasy XIII

Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess (Ganondorf)

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (Bonetail)

Extended Thoughts

As much as we might hate tests in school, gamers relish the chance to rise to the challenge and tackle a well crafted boss. Although there are innumerable approaches to Boss design in games, there are some practices that have stood the test of time. Since different classes of Boss have differing best practices, I'll be dividing them into the following categories: Mini-Bosses, Temple Bosses, End Bosses, Experiential Bosses, and Secret Bosses.

Mini-Bosses

Mini-Bosses are encountered by the player at mid-points in their experience. They might be guarding a special item, a door, or any other sort of objective. During the rising action of a given zone, they serve as a small climax, to help flesh out your ideal interest curve. Mini-Bosses can be anything from tougher versions of enemies the player has already encountered, to larger foes that fight in a unique arena that serves as part of their combat experience. Defeating a Mini-Boss in most Zelda games rewards the player with a new Item which they will learn to use before going up against the Temple Boss. Mini-Bosses can be constructed like other enemy characters in your game, and in fact they may be reused as enemies further down the game's timeline.

Boss Rushes

Other types of bosses usually should not recur in such fashion due to the nature of the challenges they present. The only place where it would make sense for these other kinds of bosses to re-appear might be in a "Boss Rush" experience, where the player must fight every single boss in the game one after another. Building a Boss Rush into a game's core experience can come across as padding out its length. Since bosses are usually unique enemies, it rarely makes canonical sense for the player to have to fight them again. Still, it can serve as a great gauntlet challenge for players to test their skill, so while I would advise against making a Boss Rush mandatory for progression, I would highly encourage their inclusion as a way for the player to earn some sort of rare item, or even as an unlockable bonus play mode that the player can access from the main menu of the game.

Temple Bosses

Temple Bosses serve as the big guardians of a given area in the game and perhaps a test of the player's mastery of a particular skill,  usage of an item, or simply a "level gate" (evaluating that the player has reached an appropriate "level" before being able to proceed). By defeating this boss, the player is proving that they are ready for a new type or tier of challenge in the game. It is usually this tier of boss that is subject to the "3 hits" rule; not necessarily that the Boss dies in three strikes, but that the player successfully exploits the boss's moment of weakness on three separate occasions. Of course, this is specific to a game with a boss structure like Mario's; it wouldn't do to have a Dark Souls boss keel over in 3 hits. That being said, it is worth exploring why this is done, as many well-crafted bosses have been made with this sort of structure to them. To land the first hit, the player must familiarize themselves with the boss's attack pattern and moment of vulnerability. The second hit, on a smaller scale, is usually a smaller proof of mastery in itself, proving that the first hit wasn't a fluke. After the second hit, or once the player has brought the boss under 50% of its total health, it will enter an "Enraged" state. Once Enraged, the boss will often exhibit some extra challenging characteristics such as moving more quickly, attacking more aggressively, or changing up its attack pattern. Landing a final hit on an Enraged Boss ought to prove that the player has completely mastered the challenge the Boss present, and if the boss were to require further hits without continuing to change up its tactics, the fight could start to feel tedious. Since a Temple Boss fight is meant to serve as the climax of a particular zone, the last thing you want is for the encounter to feel like anything but an exciting challenge.

End Bosses

The concept of an "enraged" state goes beyond just Temple Bosses as well; End Bosses can have multiple stages to their encounters too. In the case of these multi-stage bosses, each sub-phase of the boss can (but doesn't necessarily have to) obey the rule of 3 Hits. If the battle is broken into stages like this, it can be a great opportunity to revaluate the player's mastery of all the skills they have learned throughout the game, with each phase of the fight testing a different skill. I personally believe these kinds of encounters are far more interesting than having a single large health bar which you must whittle down over time (an experience that is essentially static throughout the battle).

Experiential Bosses

It's important to keep other types of "final challenges" in mind too. In place of a Temple Boss or even an End Boss, you can include a particularly challenging experience. A great example of this is the "warthog run" in the final levels of Halo 1 and Halo 3. While you aren't fighting any single large enemy, you are doing your best to survive a ship going into a nuclear meltdown and the collapsing superstructure of a Halo respectively. They provide a unique and memorable experience to close out the game and leave a (hopefully) positive impression on the player of the adrenaline fueled final moments.

Secret Bosses

All the bosses I've discussed so far are ones which fall somewhere along the planned path for the player. They should be designed to be within the skill range of the player at the moment they are encountered in the game, with perhaps the End Boss being a notable jump. Beyond that lie "Secret Bosses"; challenges that are far above the expected skill of the average player. Secret Bosses are typically found in RPGs, or any game where the player has free roam of the world. Even getting to these bosses is usually a gauntlet challenge in itself, like the Pit of 100 Trials in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. The boss itself is typically more powerful than the End Boss of the game, and may require the player to have the most powerful weapons, armor, or abilities that can be unlocked in the game in order to succeed. If the End Boss tests a player's mastery of the "story" component of the game, the Secret Boss exists to test a complete mastery of the entire game, a true capstone challenge.

General Design Practices

When encountering a boss, especially a Temple Boss or the End Boss, you should consider the feasibility of introducing it with a cut-scene. This may not be necessary if the boss is a character which has already been introduced at an earlier point in the narrative, but even if that is the case, a brief cinematic will set the stage and heighten the player's anticipation for the battle ahead. You could use this cinematic as an illustration of the boss's power, or even make it functional by safely demonstrating the boss using one of its attacks while the player is invulnerable and giving some insight as to how the attack might be avoided. It also lets you show off the intricacies of the boss's design which the player might not notice if they are engaged in battle. Whatever the purpose of the cinematic, you should either keep it very short, or simply only play it the very first time the player encounters the boss, as it can be infuriating to sit through a cinematic multiple times if the player dies to the boss.

When looking to create a boss in a game of your own, it can be difficult to find the balance between something challenging enough that it will feel satisfying when defeated, and something which asks too much of the player. As with all aspects of game design, feedback and Play-testing are crucial to ensuring that players are understanding the challenge they are presented with. A boss is not the time to introduce new mechanics to the player, not when they could be within range of a one-hit-kill enemy and too distracted trying to survive in order to follow any new instructions. You must make sure the player can identify the boss's attack patterns and weaknesses (physical "weak points" or "moments" of vulnerability between attacks). However, when you go to implement that feedback, consider that instead of changing the boss, you also have the option of modifying the level leading up to it, helping the player to better understand the mechanic they are being tested on. You should want players to be able to defeat your bosses, as any good teacher wants their students to pass their tests.

Show Notes

Games discussed in the show:

Call of Duty of Infinite Warfare

The Legend of Zelda Wind Waker HD

Starcraft II

Mario Kart: Double Dash

Mario 64

Final Fantasy VII

Sega 32X

Extended Thoughts

All art is created in, and for its own time. Society advances, cultural touchstones come and go, new phrases enter language, and stories age until they can entice only scholars of history. No work of art is immortal, but it certainly seems like video games age like few other forms of art, so quickly that it has become common practice to remaster, or even completely remake games that were new only a few years ago. The reasons for these recreations vary on a case by case basis, but chief among them should be making the original experiences accessible to new players.

Games seem to age quickly compared to other forms of art, and so are subject to far more remakes and remasters

One such barrier that developers should tackle is that of the game's controls. Control paradigms shift over time and across game genres; what was the standard method of controlling a particular game years ago will likely feel awkward to a gamer of today. An awkward control scheme will pervade the entire experience, and might serve as a barrier to entry for new players. Giving players the option to remap their controls does a lot to prolong a game's lifespan, but it does not make it immortal. Games released on the Wii U's Virtual Console allow players to fully remap the Gamepad buttons, but in the case of N64 games, this doesn't compensate for the fact that where the N64 controller had four C-Buttons, the Gamepad has a second Analog Stick. In the case of Ocarina of Time where the player assigns items to these buttons, the Analog Stick is an awkward substitute. As game consoles adopt ever more varied controllers, each with their own features (some might call them gimmicks) it will make it difficult to recreate those control schemes in future. This is why, even if a developer has built in a relatively robust control mapping system, it does not guarantee immortality. After all, can you really create a control customization system that accommodates the potential lack of analog sticks where your game normally relies on them? The more complex your game's control scheme is and the more tied into controller specific functionality it is, the more likely it will need to be (at the very least) retouched to keep it accessible to players.

Giving players control over their controls is incredibly helpful in prolonging a game's lifespan, but cannot guarantee immortality

Further to updating a game's controls, developers would do well in retouching the game's entire interface and menu systems. There is an adage when it comes to planning concrete paths across a campus; simply plant grass the first year, then wait and see where the grass has worn down before constructing the permanent paths, as this will be a perfect indicator of the paths people take as they move from building to building. If a game has been out for years, developers can look at which actions players want the fastest access to, and build in these quick-access options directly into the new menu system.

Giving players quick-access to the options they use the most will go far in making the remaster more accessible

While the most significant way to improve a game's accessibility is through improvements to its interface, most remakes usually take the opportunity to improve the original game's artwork, and for good reason. While some games have a stylized art style that can stand the test of time, there are many games which tried to have a "realistic" art style in their time, few of which have aged gracefully. Specifically, improving the artwork of the "photo-realistic" games of the N64, PlayStation 1, and Original Xbox era would, in many cases, constitute an accessibility improvement. Given how important artwork is in directing the player's attention and aiding them in traversal of game environments, when a game's artwork can improved through the availability of newer and more powerful hardware to run on, this can improve the entire gameplay experience. And, let's be honest, many gamers (especially young ones) are much more likely to try a game if it's graphical fidelity can match the standards of modern AAA games, so even in this way, improving the artwork of a game can help in making it more accessible to a new audience.

Improved graphics can improve the accessibility of a game just like improving its controls or menus, but only if that artwork isn't so flashy as to detract from the environment's readability

Even with a new coat of paint and an updated control scheme, sometimes there are significant things like a game's combat mechanics that (despite how good they were at the time) now feel dated, even to fans of the original game. This is usually due to hardware limitations or mechanics constructed around a limited range of inputs that leaves a game feeling "old", no matter how good it felt in its prime. This is where we enter the world of remakes; the chance to take inspiration from a game's original plot, characters, and setting, but ultimately create a new experience from the ground up. This is where developers truly need to decide whether it is worth creating a spiritual successor or numbered sequel instead. If the original game was particularly popular, the decision will probably land on a remake since this can help ensure a return on investment for all the resources that are going to be invested in what is essentially a brand new game. These are the kinds of games where the experience might be very different from the original game; entire sections added, altered, or even removed to keep things in line with modern pacing expectations. The most important thing a developer should seek to do in creating a remake is building upon the essential experience of the original game. So long as they can preserve (and hopefully build upon) the original reason players fell in love with the original game, those same players and more will love the remake.

Above all, remakes must preserve the essential experience of the original game, for that is why players liked the game in the first place