Noticing Something is Not a Fun Challenge

One of my criticisms of Silent Hill: Downpour's puzzle design is the way the challenge would often lie in simply identifying all the necessary components.

In one particular 'Otherworld' section very late in the game you enter a room which is mirrored vertically; the floor is reflective and you can see a copy of the room below you although it has two monsters in it and two large cages raised off the ground, which don't exist in your version of the room. You can turn a valve to rotate the room and switch between versions. The idea is to get the monsters to stand in the right spot by scaring them with bright floodlights, then hit a couple of buttons to drop the cages down and trap them. The problem was that I didn't actually notice the buttons, because they had a dull colour in a dull room and were way off at the edges away from all the other important stuff.

I thought I had to use the valve to rotate the room and make the cages fall when it turned the right way up, which I think is a fairly logical assumption (despite being in a very illogical, nightmarish setting). When I eventually noticed the buttons I nearly kicked myself, and the resulting realisation was not a satisfying or rewarding conclusion to the challenge because the solution was simple and obvious. The term 'puzzle' is applied very loosely here. It's like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with several pieces missing, but having no clue that those pieces should even exist in the first place. When you finally find them, well of course they go there.

It occurred to me that a puzzle is best when the player is fully aware of all its working parts, they're just not sure how they fit together (or perhaps whether they do even fit together, but red herrings are another story). Downpour failed in this respect, several times, and the resulting effect was plain frustration that these key objects were not signposted well enough.

Level With Me by Robert Yang

[An old post I wrote in immediate response to Level With Me, but didn't get round to posting at the time.]

Robert Yang has posted his conclusion to Level With Me: a series of discussions with seven sideline game designers culminating in the collaborative development of a Portal 2 mod. The regular drip-feed of articles has now come to an end and we can experience the resulting piece first-hand and first-person.

1. Read the entire discussion series on Rock, Paper, Shotgun here.
2. Play the Portal 2 mod here.
3. Read the concluding words here.

Yang's interpretation of the whole exercise holds a mirror up to a deep-seated approach to game design and interpretation. It reminds us how much power we wield, yet how much we still have to learn about our craft.

Yang draws the conclusion that we place too much importance on the cold, mechanical structuralism of game design. That we reduce our creativity to systems and formulas when there is so much more to be derived. I think that this is true of many designers, although your average journalists and consumers also seem to be a further step behind (through willing restraint or otherwise) and generally lack the vocabulary and critical eye required to deconstruct games on even this mechanical level. This is to be expected and by no means frowned upon; a layman will always use layman's terms after all.

But Yang urges us onwards and upwards to a higher level of game reading, one in which mechanics, art, sound and structure combine to produce meaning. It is this meaning that the games industry seems painfully unaware of (or worse: indifferent towards). Those involved in development owe it to themselves, the medium and the consumers to read games more closely, to never take conventions for granted, and to examine the underlying messages these texts communicate. Words on a page are worth more than mere ink and paper.

Nuggets of Wisdom: the Joy of Discovery

Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid and The Witness, recently spoke about what he thinks modern Japanese games tend to do badly.

They don't just give you a simple situation and let you work it out. They explicitly tell you what to do and then say "It's not hard, don't be worried, go ahead, you try now". You know? And then you try and you do it and half-way, when you're in the middle of doing it, it stops you and it says "Now remember: during the next part rotate the block to the right!".

Once you've done that it eliminates the joy of discovery which, as I've said, is something I really value. I really value that click that happens in your head between you see something and you don't quite understand it and then suddenly you do understand it. And that is a fundamental part of human existence in the world, is that kind of mental growth, that kind of expanding my sphere of understanding the world around me. And when you build an entire game that's "I tell you what to do then you do it", OK you're not going to lose the player, but you've prevented that player from having any of joy of discovery at all, and I don't want to play games that are like that.

Of course, this flaw is not exclusive among Japanese games. Many Western games fall into the same pitfalls in their relentless quest to ensure games are seen 'the way they're meant to be seen' and the player is reduced to little more than a kind of 'God of the gaps' role. Japanese games do tend to be a little more heavy-handed in their approach, though (Ghost Trick springs to mind as a recent example).

I strongly recommend you listen to the full interview with Jonathan Blow.

Nuggets of Wisdom: Zelda's Storysense

All right, I'll come clean: I've never finished a Zelda game. The early ones passed me by. I didn't own an N64 so I never played much of Ocarina of Time, the game everyone loves to remind me is the 'greatest game ever' (it's not, it's Half-Life 2). The ones I have played failed to hold my interest for more than a few hours.

But thanks to the plethora of articles available I've been able to learn a great deal about the design of the Zelda games and, because I have no personal attachment to any of them, I think I've actually managed to retain a somewhat objective view of the series. The latest essay I read was an opinion piece by Tevis Thompson about where the games went wrong over the years, notably how their stubborn commitment to convention hampers the very essence of exploration: a voyage into the unknown.

In many ways this statement (and indeed the whole essay) could apply to games as a whole when we examine how they have changed over the years. There is an ever-growing tendency fill in all the gaps, to tighten the designer's grip on the experience, to ensure that every secret gets discovered at just the right time and no one gets too far ahead of themselves lest they feel lost or confused. My goodness, what a terrible experience that might be in a game about exploration! There are certain kinds of games in which 'hand-holding' is appropriate, but there are other kinds in which it utterly undermines the central idea the game attempts to convey.

Anyway, this whole post was made to highlight one particular part of the essay which has little to do with any of the stuff I just said. But it is about story, which I find interesting. Enjoy.

The game mechanics of early Zeldas provided plot enough, the kind that is boring to tell (then this, then this) but thrilling to play. They required no narrative scaffolding to be justified; they justified themselves. And strangely, the iconic simplicity of early Hyrules fired the imagination the way a good map does, opening up story possibilities rather than narrowing them down to just one. Story flowed from world instead of world from story.

Source: Tevis Thompson: Saving Zelda

UPDATE! I'm now playing Ocarina of Time on the 3DS. Check me out.

Episode One's Place in the Grand Scheme of Things

I was off work sick today and decided to use to the time to revisit Half-Life 2: Episode One, generally considered to be the weakest link in the series and indeed earned the lowest Metascore of all the Half-Life games. I had a blast with it today, as I did when I first played it in 2006, and it got me wondering why it has earned a somewhat sour reputation among hardcore fans.

Friendly warning: this post is full of spoilers and intended for those who have finished Half-Life 2, Episode One and Episode Two.

Episode One occupies this strange transitory space between Half-Life 2's broad narrative strokes and Episode Two's relatively heavy-handed exposition. There is a great deal of foreshadowing of events to come: the transmission from Judith, the emphasis on Eli and Alyx's strong father-daughter relationship, establishing the Vortigaunts and the G-Man as key players in the greater conflict, and of course bringing the dreaded Advisors creeping into the limelight. Yet much of this foreshadowing can go unnoticed on your first play-through as we know very little about the importance of these elements until Episode Two, so your attention remains focused on the pressing urgency of stabilising the Citadel core and escaping City 17.

Given that Episode One largely takes place in environments familiar to players of Half-Life 2 it comes as no surprise that many felt it was too derivative of its predecessor. We return to the Citadel interior and fight through war-torn city streets much as we did in Half-Life 2, albeit with a far greater emphasis on indirect combat through use of the Gravity Gun, various inventive gadgets/weapons, and your trusty sidekick. Indeed, the vast majority of its art and sound assets are recycled and it features only two new enemies, one of which was present but posed no threat in Half-Life 2 (the Stalker) and the other being an amalgamation of two other enemies (the Zombine).

But one point that Episode One really nails is the sense of a world in motion (the storysense as Tadhg Kelly would put it). From the very beginning, we bear witness to world-changing events that affect the lives of every individual in the vicinity, be they fleeing citizens or desperate Overwatch soldiers. This is an area in which Half-Life games have always excelled in my opinion, ever since the series opened with the Resonance Cascade which still hangs heavy on Eli's conscience. In this particular episode we witness the changes brought about by our own actions as the Citadel reels from a heavy blow, eventually leading into a cataclysmic eruption that opens the gateway to vast legions of alien invaders.

At the end of the day Episode One functions as a great segue from the monolithic release of Half-Life 2 into the bite-size episodic format. It has some obligations to tie up certain loose ends (the fate of Gordon, Alyx and the people of City 17) which flow into subsequent events (the opening of the Combine superportal and the hidden transmission of the Borealis data packet) but it places such a firm focus on the immediate goals that I for one was swept up in the adventure before stopping to consider how it all fit into the bigger picture. I believe it is for this reason that replaying this - or any Half-Life game - remains such a joy even more than 5 years later.

Badcat Wants Salty Bacon update 2

MAJOR UPDATE: THE GAME NOW HAS GRAPHICS

Play it in the same place as before: here.

Coming next: stuff to do with scores and front end stuff

Badcat Wants Salty Bacon

I've often wanted to participate in a 48-hour game jam but have always been to sleep-deprived or busy to actually do it. Yesterday, a friend at work challenged me to make a game in 10 minutes. This is a far more reasonable amount of time to allocate to game development so I accepted the challenge and set myself the following guidelines:

1. The game must be a game in a vague sense; it must have a clear goal which can be attained. This was one area where my previous game jam fell down.
2. The game must be feature-complete; all the gameplay elements I plan to include must be included in the first pass.
3. Graphics and sound are low priority and can be added later. They just need to be at a functional level so you can tell what's going on.

As it turns out, 10 minutes is an unreasonable amount of time in which to make a full game so it spilled over to the 30 minute mark. Still, I met my goals, and the game is winnable with a vague sense that you could have done better if you tried a bit harder next time.

The first pass of Badcat Wants Salty Bacon is playable in your browser here (I accept no responsibility for any keyboard damage incurred).

Coming next: GRAPHICS.