The problem of difficulty in games has been debated to great depths for a long time. Various alternatives to the traditional approach with different difficulty modes at the beginning of a particular game have been proposed, analyzed and implemented. And yet, as much as they patch up the errors of the traditional approach, within them arise numerous inherent problems and difficulties. As such, I would like to propose another alternative–not so much a mechanical solution that requires implementation, but rather a different approach to difficulty design.
One thing I’d like to stress is that, this has been applied in various games quite successfully before, and I’ll mention them later on, but not to the extent to which it can deservedly become a central design philosophy, in my opinion. This I presume is due to a lack of a rather clear and deliberate approach to difficulty design.
But first, let me attempt to briefly summarize a few popular criticisms of the traditional difficulty modes approach and its alternative.
Problems with Difficulty Modes
Picture yourself coming into a brand new game, only to be asked to choose a difficulty mode that’s suitable for yourself, and presented with a number of different menu options. And frankly, they don’t do that good of a job at giving you sufficient information to make such an important decision. This is how many games in our history have done difficulty, and it continues to be fairly prevalent among modern games.
Here are its common criticisms:
Asking the player to make such a decision right at the beginning is not exactly a good idea. To select a difficulty mode before the game even starts is to make a major commitment based on very little information available (e.g. a short description). Once the player has selected a difficulty, they are probably going to live with it for the entire playthrough.
Even if the game allows the player to change the difficulty mode later on, it is, in itself, still not a very good idea. For one, explicitly selecting a difficulty mode in a menu-based manner is certainly not an interesting choice that games strive to offer their players. They do not have to weigh anything against anything. They do not have to analyze the risks and rewards coming as a result of each option. And generally speaking, players are not going to be good at weighting short-term convenience against long-term enjoyment. They just do not know the game enough.
Such approach would defeat the entire point of progression through unlocking higher and better tools to enhance and assist with gameplay. It would go against the intended gameplay experience from the game designer. And most importantly, it would make the player feel judged for not choosing a higher difficulty.
There have been several solutions to negate these issues, of which Mark Brown has gone into depths in one of his videos. However, not one of them was able to solve them all and still maintain immersion.
Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment
The idea of Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (or DDA) hinges on the theory of the player’s Flow State, in which the player is completely immersed, and the game’s difficulty feels just right. Any more difficulty will cause frustration and break immersion. Any less difficulty and the player will quickly find boredom, and you guessed it, lose immersion. Therefore, as designer Andrew Glassner put it in his book Interactive Storytelling, games “should not ask players to select a difficulty level. Games should adapt themselves during gameplay to offer the player a consistent degree of challenge based on his changing abilities at different tasks.” Or in other words, games should be implemented with a performance evaluation system as well as a dynamic difficulty adjustment system in order to adjust itself to accommodate the infinitely different and ever-changing characteristics of players. More on the technical details of DDA can be found in Robin Hunicke’s 2005 paper The Case for Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in Games.
However, while the Flow State theory admittedly has its merits, the DDA approach doesn’t go without its numerous downsides:
Some players, when they find out about DDA, hate it. Especially when DDA cannot be turned off, the player ends up feeling patronized, and not respected by the game as an adult, capable of taking on challenges and improving him/herself.
Players can, and will, learn to exploit DDA by pretending to be worse at playing than they actually are. And oftentimes, a DDA system will require some sort of break time in order to avoid revealing itself to the player, thus not able to quickly adapt itself to the player’s ostensible skill level.
DDA inhibits the player’s ability to learn and improve. As soon as the player improves, the difficulty ramps up to match their skill level, thus eliminating the possibility of positive results. If the player cannot see some sort of feedback from the game regarding their performance, they cannot know whether any changes in their approach to gameplay were effective.
DDA may create absurdities. One of the popular example of DDA going awry is the rubber-band effect in racing games, where opponents speed up and slow down seemingly for no reason in order to adapt to the player’s performance.
DDA is incompatible with some forms of challenge. If the challenge in question is numerically-based, then DDA can work easily. However, when the challenge is symbolical, with pre-designed elements that are nakedly visible to the player, often having only one or a few intended solutions, then DDA cannot work.
There are many interesting and nuanced approaches to DDA that I won’t mention since that’s beyond the scope of this segment. While I imagine there are going to be a lot of way to make DDA functional and sufficiently inscrutable through clever algorithms and implementation, I am rather discussing the fundamentals.
Organic Difficulty in Games
There seems to be a number of different terms to address this approach, but just for this article I’m going to use the term “Organic Difficulty.” This is something that has been tossed around in the last decade or so.
The basic idea of Organic Difficulty is that the game does not ask the players to select or adjust their preferred difficulty via GUI-based commands, nor does it automatically adapt itself to match with the player’s performance and progress. But rather, the game allows the player to interact with it in certain ways to make it easier, or harder, for themselves. These take the form of tools, approaches, strategies, input sequences or methods, etc. which should often come with some sort of trade-off.
This is something that has been implemented in a number of games including From Software’s Dark Souls, which Extra Credits has dedicated an entire episode to, and which everyone should take a look.
In Metal Gear Solid V, for every mission the player has completed, there’s a score rating system which provides a rough overview of the player’s performance based on a number of factors such as stealth, lethality, accuracy, completion speed, whether the player has completed any mission tasks, and what tools they used. While the player does get minus points for mistakes such as getting detected, raising enemy alert, taking hits, etc. some other factors are not as clear-cut as to how they constitute minus points aside from narrative reasons. The player can always go on a lethal rampage, tossing grenades at everybody in sight, or calling a support helicopter to airstrike the entire enemy base. The player is provided the tools to do exactly all of those, and they’re always just a few buttons away, and the worst they get is a C rank, provided they completed the mission, and a slight dip in their earnings.
Another example of this can be found XCOM: Enemy Within. There’s a “cheesy” tactic in the game that can almost ensure victory, which is to have a unit with the Mimetic Skin ability to safely spot the enemies, thus enabling a squadsight-sniper from across the entire map to pick them off one-by-one safely without any real repercussion. This strategy is extremely effective in virtually every mechanical aspect of combat, with the only risk being that the spotter must not be flanked for they would instantly lose invisibility. The actual problem with this strategy is that it’s incredibly boring: your snipers just simply shoot every turn, and you can only take a few shots every turn, not to mention reloading. This strategy is best suited for beginners and people who have made mistakes and want to get out of the downward spiral. While on the other end of the spectrum, there are players who understand how the game and the AI of every alien unit in the game work, so they are more confident about moving up close and personal with enemies with minimal armor. Because for them, it’s not about defending against the enemies, but about manipulating, “nudging” the enemies into behaving the way these players want them to (e.g. nobody needs armor when enemies are only going to attack the tank; nobody needs to take good cover when enemies are too scared to move to flank in front of an Opportunist-overwatch unit; etc.)
The above examples seem to imply a few important points regarding difficulty:
Difficulty should not only be designed around the mechanics of a game. It should also take into account the aesthetics or elegance of those very mechanics.
Punishment does not always have to be tangible or significant, as long as it is enough to indicate to players that they are straying off the intended experience. A good analogy would be physical pain. The pain itself is not what’s causing harm to your body. The physical wound is. Pain is merely a bodily signal to let you know that what’s happening right now is pretty bad and you probably shouldn’t let what just happened happen again. But remember, the choice is ultimately yours!
It may not be a good idea to put people on the linear graph of “gaming skill” where some people are simply “softcore, not-so-good at video games” and some other are “hardcore and always challenge-seeking.” The idea alone is absurd, because players on such a graph would move up and down constantly, even during a single playthrough. Some people pick things up faster than a game can predict with its tutorials’ pacing. Some people due to real life reasons have to abandon the game for some time, and they lose a bit of their touch when they come back to it.
Instead of judging the player’s skill and trying to accommodate every possibility, games should be judging player interactions instead, using a spectrum between Effectiveness and Aesthetics of Play (or what I shall humbly name Ludoaesthetics).
The Effectiveness-Ludoaesthetics Spectrum (ELS)
On the Effectiveness-Ludoaesthetics Spectrum (ELS), difficulty exists only at the lowest technical level. Each end of the ELS represents what each player wants at a certain point in the game with certain conditions. On this spectrum, games are designed with the player’s interactions, approaches and strategies in mind, each with its own degree of effectiveness and ludoaesthetics. These are not solely defined by mechanics or the player’s skill level, but rather the way in which they are experienced and perceived by the player.
Effectiveness refers to how well the player can progress and achieve their goals in a game using the set of tools they’re given and the strategies they’re allowed to formulate. How easy those tools are to use, and how good they are at helping the player progress towards the game’s intended goals, primarily constitute Effectiveness. Players who aim towards and stay on this end primarily look for the most effective ways to achieve the intended goals of the game (which of course include playing the game the easy way).
Ludoaesthetics refers to the perceivable aesthetic appeals of the aforementioned set of tools and strategies given to the players. Players who aim towards this end do not necessarily look for the most effective ways to achieve the intended goals. But rather they tend to look for the added intrinsic benefits derived from unconventional play. These benefits include:
Superficial Attractiveness: Visual and auditory appeal of using the subject matter or the subject matter itself. It can be represented by any entity the player can recognize in the game such as a character with great visual design, a badass-looking weapon with satisfying visual and sound effects, etc.
Competitiveness: a.k.a. bragging rights. This is rather self-explanatory. There is always that portion of players who keep seeking greater and greater challenges to prove themselves to the world. They may even go as far as handicapping themselves with arbitrary limitations to heighten the challenge.
Greater sense of satisfaction derived from greater challenges that may go beyond the goals intended by the game. People who have been through heights of overwhelming odds know about, and may expect, the immense amount of satisfaction that comes with them.
Narrative Fantasy: Players may look for things that may not be effective or productive in terms of gameplay because they would align with the narrative better (in games that understandably contain some degree of ludonarrative dissonance), or they would add an extra layer of depth and intensity to the narrative and thereby enhancing it. Essentially, they’re sacrificing gameplay optimality to elevate their narrative fantasy.
Design for Ludoaesthetics
The point of designing for ludoaesthetics is NOT to create increasingly harder challenges in order to accommodate the player’s increasing skills (though that is not to say such approach has no merits whatsoever). But rather, it is actually to encourage players to strive for aesthetics in their gameplay and to lean more towards the right side of the spectrum.
Here are a few suggestions on how to go about it.
Creating more depth
Depth refers to the amount of space the player is allowed to make interesting choices using the set of tools they’re given by a game. For a more detailed explanation of what Depth is in comparison to Complexity, you can take a look at Extra Credits’ episode on Depth vs. Complexity.
Essentially, Complexity is the amount of constituent elements that make up a game, and Depth is the degree of interactivity between those elements. The very nature of ludoaesthetics has to do with the deviation from the default, intended approach (a.k.a. Playing “by-the-book.”) Therefore, the more those elements “talk” to one another, the better chance it is for ludoaesthetics to emerge, because then the player will be able to find more different ways to control or manipulate each element.
[Also read: Design for Theorycrafting]
Depth is pretty much the prerequisite for ludoaesthetics even as a concept to exist. Without a lot of depth, the window of opportunities for ludoaesthetics get significantly lower or completely non-existent.
Creating patterns suggesting the possibility of gameplay aesthetics
Adding more depth is not only about simply adding more stuff in a game and making them as obscure as they possibly can be. It is also about leaving breadcrumbs to suggest that there is more than meets the eye, therefore encouraging players to explore further possibilities. What kind of depth to even add? And how does one go about communicating it?
Below is a conceptual representation of a set of challenges typically found in video games.
Each challenge is represented by a window of failure and a window of success. These windows can be spatial, temporal, symbolic, strategic, or a combination of all. They are the spaces in which the player enters by behaving in a certain expected way. Secondly, the black line represents the player’s interactive maneuvers: where to get across and which direction to turn to next, in order to overcome the set of challenges without stumbling into the windows of failure.
For example, say we have a situation in a 3D platformer game where the player is facing a pit, and across the pit leaning towards the right side there is a narrow platform. In such a scenario, we can assume that the window of failure includes any and all sets of behaviors that lead the player plummeting down the pit, and the window of failure includes those that lead the player to landing on the platform across the pit safely.
Now consider the same representation of challenge above, but this time with a slight deliberate arrangement.
As you can see, the sizes of the windows of failure and the windows of success stay exactly the same, but the positions of the windows of success have been altered so that they align somewhat (but not exactly aligned to the point of being too obvious). You can see that nested within the windows of success is a narrower window where the amount of the player’s maneuvers stays extremely minimal. Stepping into this window offers the opportunity for a non-disrupted gameplay flow, where a deliberate and guided set of behaviors will let the player “breeze” through the challenges seemingly almost with ease. This window is where ludoaesthetics occur.
Of course, the downsides of it are aplenty: it can be extremely difficult to realize such a window exists in a real scenario. And in order to stay inside such a narrow window, the player has to be extremely precise and/or smart in their gameplay. You can think of this window of non-disrupted flow as an intended “weak point” of the challenge, where a single and concentrated attack will break the whole thing apart in one fell swoop. But the process of identifying such a weak point, and delivering the finishing blow with great accuracy may require a lot of trials and errors, and can be extremely tedious and/or difficult.
An Example from Master Spy
A common manifestation of ludoaesthetics comes in the form of speedrunning. Finishing with speed is, for the majority of games, not the primary intended goal. Games are rarely ever designed to be speedrun, and most players do not have to finish any games at high speed in order to not miss anything. So speedrunning has always been a sort of arbitrary self-imposed challenge by those who seek greater sense of enjoyment from their favorite games.
However, there are a few exceptions. And you can find the above mentioned window of non-disrupted flow in levels like this one from Master Spy by Kris Truitt.
In this game you play the role of the Master Spy, to infiltrate ridiculously well-guarded buildings, palaces and fortresses with a huge number of different enemies, hazards and contraptions standing in your way. And you are given no tools whatsoever but an invisibility cloak that can help you sneak past the eyesight of certain enemies while halving your movement speed.
In the example above, your goal is to retrieve the keycard on the other side of the wall slightly to the right of your starting point, and then to escape through the white door right above your starting point safely. And while your cloak can get you past the eyesight of the guards, it is of no use whatsoever against the dogs, who can smell you even when you’re cloaked and will sprint forwards to attack you at horrendous speed as soon as you’re on the same ground as them.
So what you have to do as a sequence of actions in this level is first to cloak yourself, then drop down from the first ledge past the the first guard, then quickly decloak to regain speed as the cloak is useless against the incoming dogs. Then before the first dog reaches you, move forward to the right, then quickly jump up. Keep jumping to retrieve the keycard while avoiding the second and third dog. Cloak up, then get on the ledge with the three moving guards. Finally, jump to the left to reach your destination.
However, as you can see from the footage above (courtesy of a speedrunner nicknamed Obidobi), as soon as the player reaches the ledge with the three moving guards on the right, the guards turn to the other side and begin moving away from where the player is, effectively freeing the player from having to cloak and having their movement speed halved. And then right before the player reaches for the white door, the guard on the far right is about to touch the wall and thereby turning back to the left. This is such a tiny window of success that should the player not have begun moving right after they start the level and stayed uncloaked at the end, they would have failed. The level is designed in such a way that it can be completely solved without wasting any moment and action.
Is it significantly more difficult to play this way? Yes. Was this arrangement absolutely necessary? Not really. But the designer made the level with the expectation that people are going to speedrun the game and will be looking to optimize their timing with each level. Thus, the levels in Master Spy are designed so that should the player start looking to speedrun the game, they will easily recognize that sweet, sweet window of non-disrupted flow. It is an immensely satisfying experience to discover it.
Ensure Usability
As usual, it is easy to get too extremely logical about design and forget all about the equilibrium, which is almost always what design is about.
In this case, it is important that designers must ensure that whatever tools they’re making for their players to achieve ludoaesthetics, MUST have at least some sort of usability, even if it’s incredibly niche or extremely difficult to pull off. Things that serve nothing and mean nothing are NOT aesthetic. Say you have an RPG, and one of your players goes out of their way in order to build an unconventional character because they see some sort of future potential from this build, only to find out later that when they’re finished with the build, the meta of the game has changed and the window of opportunity for such a build has long passed. This means that the entire amount of depth you added, and the ludoaesthetics you might have intended by allowing that player to go in such away, is utterly useless and entirely wasted. So always remember to ensure usability for everything you add in your game.
Conclusion
Organic Difficulty and the ELS are not only, and not necessarily, an alternative solution to the whole difficulty problem. But rather, they represent an entire paradigm shift away from the idea that games should find more and more complex ways to serve players with different skill levels, and towards a design philosophy where players are given integrated tools within the context of games to set their own difficulty at any point without breaking immersion and perhaps the extra baggage of shame. It is not enough to have your players stay at the same level of difficulty throughout the game, or dynamically adjust the difficulty on the fly to suit them. It is best, in my opinion, to let your players cook to their palate. Just make sure that the process of cooking and the game itself are one and the same.
Considering this is the very first post on this development blog, I suppose I should take the chance to talk about the game just a little bit, right? That’s what we’re all about here at Fine Monkeys.
Growth Device is basically a narrative-driven, simulative, roleplaying, text and GUI only, idle game. The story will unfold gradually in many forms imaginable from the structure we’ve developed for the game, with a simulated chat system at the center of the narrative.
Meanwhile, between story points, you get to manage an entire organization, guiding the R&D department, assigning staff to various positions, and sending field agents to missions. What you do in the base management layer of the game will influence the story and the narrative. And what you choose to say (or not to say) will also affect the shape of your organization. It is just as essential to consider what you say, what secrets you reveal, what you demand from your people, as it is to manage daily operations at your organization.
This is the project I’m currently working on. If you’re interested, feel free to follow us over here! Can’t wait to share more about the game with you folks.
What do you mean "Dark Souls only needs one difficulty mode?" You yourself know and have made a video on the fluid difficulty of Dark Souls. In my book, that's how accessibility should be handled. Text and UI options are THE WORST when it comes to communicating game elements and mechanics for many reasons I'm sure you realize. They don't really show how much you care about diversity of players as much as they show that you're hesitant about letting players tinker with your design.
In short, good difficulty design is where, to the player, there are no difficulty modes at all. Instead, there are only the effective/efficient strategies (but more grindy, repetitive, boring) and the not-so-efficient strategies (but more challenging, varied, satisfying). The problem here is, you should NOT put players on a linear graph of 'play ability' where there are people who are simply "better at games" than others. Instead, you should put players on a spectrum between "people who prefer the outcome over the gameplay itself" and "people who prefer interesting gameplay over how effective/efficient their approach is." If you approach difficulty that way, nobody will find any approach to the game superior or inferior to any others.
I can give you some examples off the top of my head.
So I'm no Overwatch veteran, but I know in that game, Bastion is a VERY STRONG hero, and there's not a lot of mechanical downside to playing him. The real downside is, Bastion is incredibly boring to play. He has a typical self-repair ability, and his killer mode is a static turret form. Any Overwatch beginner will likely love him because he can help them even up the playing field with the more experienced players. But when players reach a certain level of experience, their need for variety of gameplay, to show how skilled they are and how well they know the in-and-outs of the game, will start to trump their need for effective gameplay.
Another shining example I can give you is from XCOM (I'm talking about XCOM2012 here). Even though I picked up this piece of design from the Long War mod, but just for the sake of understanding, I'm going to summarize the mechanics a little bit, and they may not seem the same with the vanilla game. So there's a "cheesy" tactic in that game that can almost ensure victory, that is to have a cloaking unit spot the enemies for a sniper from across the entire map to pick them off one-by-one safely without any real repercussion. This strategy is perfect in virtually every mechanical aspect of combat. The only problem with it is that it is INCREDIBLY BORING: your snipers just simply shoot every turn, and you can only take a few shots every turn, not to mention reloading. This strategy is best suited for (1) beginners and (2) people who have made mistakes and want to get out of the downward spiral. On the other end of the spectrum, there are players who understand how the game and the AI of every alien unit in the game work, so they are more confident about moving up close and personal with the aliens with minimal armor. Because for them, it's not about defending against the aliens, but about manipulating, "nudging" the aliens into behaving the way these players want them to (nobody needs armor when aliens are only gonna shoot at the tank; nobody needs to take good cover when aliens are too scared to move to flank in front of your Opportunist unit; etc.)
All of the above is to say two things:
Difficulty should not only be designed around the mechanics of a game. It very much should also take into account the AESTHETICS or ELEGANCE of those very mechanics.
You should not put people on the linear graph of "playing ability" where some people are simply "softcore, not-so-good at video games" and some other are "hardcore and challenge-seeking." The idea alone is absurd, because people on such a graph would move up and down constantly, even during a single playthrough. Some people pick things up faster than a game can predict with its tutorials' pacing. Some people due to real life reasons have to abandon the game for some time, and they lose a bit of their touch when they come back to it. People should be put on a spectrum between "effectiveness" and "aesthetics of play", and games should be designed so that they can accommodate almost anyone on that spectrum.
Recently, Danny O’Dwyer and the team over at Noclip have done a documentary series, interviewing prominent independent developers (Derek Yu of Spelunky, Jim Crawford of Frog Fractions, and Jonathan Blow of The Witness), talking about the games that inspired them as children, discussing their own takes on the significance of mystery in games, and explaining how they weaved elements of it into their design fabrics. The documentary series is fittingly titled “Rediscovering Mystery,” and a solid must-watch.
It takes courage for a developer like From Software to even attempt to include such a vast, and totally missable areas such as the Painted World of Ariamis or Ash Lake in the original Dark Souls. And there’s no doubt, that the effort from Jonathan Blow and his team, to build an island full of mystery and surprising treats, elegantly placed on the fine line between obscurity and conspicuity is absolutely commendable. However, aside from being a big help when you need it, the Internet is also a land riddled with spoilers. People are always discussing, debating, and engaging in joint-efforts to unearth even the most obscure secrets of all in games. And often as a result, the easy and most logical answer from developers on how to retain the player’s interests in games is to keep expanding their worlds, and to include even more obscure secrets for them to find out.
I do believe that this approach is, not only costly for sure, but also fairly limited in its efficiency. Not to undermine developers’ effort and control over the experience, but there’s one thing that many designers I know will probably agree on: the most profound, interesting, valuable and effective drive of all stems from within people’s heads. And the most common manifestation of such drive that one can see, comes in the form of theorycrafting.
A spoiler-resistant design paradigm
According to Christopher A. Paul (2011), the word theorycraft originated from World of Warcraft, which describes “the search for the optimal set of strategies with which to play, by using statistical analysis and mathematical modeling.” In the broader context, theorycrafting refers to the practice of analyzing theoretical scenarios, speculating possibilities, performing statistical reports, planning strategies for unexpected events, or simply “connecting the dots.” All of these are done mostly off-game, or at least not within the context set up by the games they’re playing.
Take a look at almost any game, you’ll find a universal advice suggesting that starters do a “blind” playthrough first, then come back a second time with a strategy guide to “one-hundred-percent” the game. While there’s nothing wrong with avoiding spoilers before you can enjoy a good book or a good movie, I do think that the old method of adding depths and maintaining player’s interests no longer holds itself well. What if instead of discouraging players from communicating with others on discussion boards, or encouraging blind playthroughs, we can design games around the reality of gaming today?
Minimal handholding
While this is a popular mantra adopted by many modern designers and may seem ostensibly obvious, I’d still like to stress its importance. Instruction on basic controls and maneuvers is fine, but make it so that players will have to do their own homework in order to overcome bigger challenges (say, higher difficulties). They can take notes, read up, discuss with other people, or even come up with their own ideas and strategies. You may be told how to move around and perform various attacks in Dark Souls, but nowhere in the game will you find an explanation on how Poise works, or how sometimes having low-to-no Poise is actually beneficial. The user interface and functionality of Darkest Dungeon may imply that you should treat your units as precious and cure them of devastating mental afflictions, but you’ll have to learn for yourself that it’s really costly to maintain a sane army, and the path to victory involves treating your units as expendables.
I myself have spent about 1,500 hours on the Long War mod for XCOM 2012 by Firaxis, and tried to pinpoint exactly what about it that reeled me and thousands of others in, even during its development period, and how it had us all absolutely enthralled. XCOM 2012 was fine, but it certainly, most would agree, did not have much to keep people playing for hundreds of hours. And that’s where the mod steps in. In direct opposition to Sid Meier’s idea at GDC 2010, which is basically to occasionally “cheat” in favor of players so that they themselves won’t ironically feel cheated, Long War relieved XCOM of every last bit of its shackles. As a result, the game was significantly harder, but a majority of XCOM players found the honesty and transparency worth a lot more in the long run than the ocassional helping hand.
Ensure High Interactivity between Game Elements
The first thing that comes to mind when people start thinking about strategies is how different elements within a game will interact with one another. And good news is, you don’t have to make such complex network of interactions obvious. Human beings are good at noticing and distinguishing patterns, and we love playing the game of connecting dots. What would happen if I combine Element A with Element B, and then sacrifice Element C, which on its own is very beneficial, to go for Element D? Would I then have to change my playstyle now that this setup is in place? And how? These are amongst the questions players are going to ask themselves when they theorycraft. Try to think ahead of them, and leave footprints on the ground behind so that players will follow them.
Extra Credits’ episode on Depth vs. Complexity explores this particular topic further.
Encourage micro-and-meta strategies
To reiterate a point previously made: the higher the difficulty level (by which I mean the amount of depth the game can and may provide to the player) the more the game should require the player to think outside of the immediate in-context scenario being laid out in front of them and plan ahead for future possibilities. The player should have to not only care about major factors and decisions, but also minor details that at first may seem trivial, but will make a difference in specific scenarios. For example, a 5% hit chance boost may seem negligible—not a lot of difference between an 80% hit and an 85% hit. But in the specific scenario where the player’s hit chance is penaltied down to 0%, and the 5% boost will be applied after the penalties, then it becomes the difference between chance and no chance.
To do that, a game needs to require players to acquire more knowledge than it can offer explicitly inside itself (unless they decide to constantly break the 4th wall and rain down paragraphs after paragraphs on the player, which is a bad idea by the way.) Obviously, this requires the game to contain a lot more depth. People won’t have a lot to read up on or talk about if the game they’re playing is Flappy Bird!
Micromanagement in gaming is often referred to as tedious. However, I do think it can be interesting and sometimes deeply profound if the player can see that:
It matters. It’s not going to matter if your SPD stat gets a 25% boost if you’re already the fastest moving unit in a turn-based combat and others have no way to catch up, which is what a lot of old RPGs were guilty of.
Everybody else is doing it.
The game is designed around the fact that everybody is doing it.
I found immense joy in discussing strategies with other players in the XCOM Long War community, and to play around with various ideas and theoretical scenarios in my head whenever I was on break at work. That made me feel like I was improving even when I was away from the game, and the game also helped me learn to think and to plan things carefully, and deliberately.
Reduced Linearity
Just like minimal handholding, even though reduced linearity isn’t anything new to experienced designers, it is amongst the key qualities of games designed for theorycrafting. Naturally, if every scenario in a game is scripted, every puzzle has but one single solution, and nothing that the player can do will make any significant impact to its outcome, then that game’s resistance to spoilers is clearly low. Someone nonchalantly tells a player that maybe they can turn left at this juncture, and they can’t unlearn that! You want to make sure that problems almost always have more than one answer, and there is a moderate space in which the player’s theorized solution may go off-track.
Maintain control over gameplay
With that said, in certain games, even if they’re non-linear and designed to encourage theorycrafting, there is still the risk of the player figuring out the optimal play and sticking to it rigorously, ultimately ruining their own experience. Soren Johnson, one of the Civilization designers, wrote “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.” (2011)
The current most efficient ways to tackle this problem that we know of, is to introduce random elements, or in some context, procedural generation. The idea is to allow the computer to systematically and algorithmically generate environments or outcomes based on the player’s input and a dice roll. Randomness is not necessarily “lazy design,” but rather meant to serve as insurance against optimal play always producing the same results, making sure that no strategy is without its flaws. Allow people the freedom to metagaming and micromanagement, but at the same time try to mitigate certain-win strategies as much as possible. Work closely with testers and even the community.
Final Words
Designing a game that is challenging, complex, with a lot of depth, and which encourages strategizing, planning for possible scenarios, coming up with creative ways to solve problems, might seem to be an overwhelmingly difficult task. But I do think it is a good ideal to push towards. If people are going to read up on games before diving in and perhaps spoil it for themselves, let them do it as much as they want. Make it so that the challenges in your game can take that fact on the chin and still give them a hard time. And a good time.
Lastly, I’d like to leave you with a few words from Professor Brian Moriarty’s lecture back in GDC 2002, The Secret of Psalm 46.
“If super power is what people really want, why not just give it to them? Is our imagination so impoverished that we have to resort to marketing gimmicks to keep players interested in our games? Awesome things don’t hold anything back. Awesome things are rich and generous.
The treasure is right there.”
References
Christopher A. Paul (2011) Optimizing Play: How Theorycraft Changes Gameplay and Design. Retrieved from http://gamestudies.org/1102/articles/paul
Sid Meier (2010) The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know is Wrong). Available at https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012186/The-Psychology-of-Game-Design
TangledAxile (2016) Yes, XCOM2’s RNG cheats - in your favor. Here’s how. Message posted on Reddit. Available at https://www.reddit.com/r/XCOM2/comments/45u81x/yes_xcom_2s_rng_cheats_in_your_favor_heres_how/
Soren Johnson (2011), GD Column 17: Water Finds a Crack. Retrieved from https://www.designer-notes.com/?p=369
Brian Moriarty (2002) The Secret of Psalm 46. Available at http://ludix.com/moriarty/psalm46.html
Extra Credits (2013) Depth vs. Complexity - Why More Features Don’t Make a Better Game. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVL4st0blGU
11 colors, including alpha channel. It’s been what, almost a year and half now since I last did anything pixel art. I can definitely feel the rust flowing in my veins.
Apparently I was a backer of this game. Props to them for actually finishing a project. That’s a big deal.
Apparently I also liked the character art. That’s why I backed the game. I still like it, but I’m a little bit disappointed how the environment and UI art did not evolve after the Kickstarter campaign. The game is pretty, but it’s pretty in a very uninspiring and perhaps Thomas Kinkadey way. Turns me off quite a bit, since I’m (still) an artist.
I was able to try it for 10 minutes or so. In this game, you can skip a cutscene and the game will display a summary in text of the previous cutscene for you. That makes me nervous. Really, if your cutscenes can all be summarized in text, then either they’re really (I mean, really) crappy, or you’re missing the whole point of cutscenes. Cutscenes are (at least) about nuances and subtleties—things that cannot or are not easily expressed through other means. Maybe you want to put a foreshadow here. Maybe you want this character to very slightly change their attitude through the character sprite or whatever. That’s why cutscenes exist. They are not just about characters taking turns to speak.
A new talk from game designer of Braid and The Witness, Jonathan Blow, where he’s announcing and introducing his WIP programming language currently named JAI, and revealing a very brief glimpse of what might turn out to be what he’s called “Game 3″ in the past. A fairly educational and inspiring talk.
I was writing this as a comment, but apparently there’s a character limit. So I’ll reblog this.
This is not meant to be an encouragement or an urge to you. I just want to say that when making games, especially when you're new and just starting out, it is okay to not finish something. Don't get me wrong, finishing something is harder than the word implies, and when you do it is already an extraordinary accomplishment. However, making games also takes a long time. Most of the time it takes years. When you're starting out and learning new things as you go along, you learn at an exponentially faster rate than an experienced person making a game. So what often happens is by the time you get to the second half of the project, you’ve become a lot better at doing things, and you look back at the things you made for it 2 years ago and and it’s really terrible, sometimes even cringe-worthy. And you end up going back and redoing a lot of things and it’ll take forever. And this has happened for me so many times. The worst scenario is even after you’ve redone a lot of things, you still don’t feel right because the thing you started 2 years ago isn’t even that good structurally—which I hope doesn’t happen for anyone, really. But in reality it does, a lot.
All I’m saying is, especially at this point, be very honest with yourself and don’t let your (supposedly) pride or sense of responsibility to your audience make you suffer through a hard time making something you’re no longer happy with. New people improve A LOT when starting out. You can make an even better game.
Today was a long one. I had some time to make more progress, albeit not much. Some improvements for fundamental code for the character include:
Display sprinting sprite frames
Stop sprite animation at the correct frame when idle, even if the Sprint button is still being held
Optimized the way GMS2 takes the spritesheets
Also I managed to get GMS2 to properly upscale the game screen to 2x without breaking pixels, which is frankly quite a big deal for me and those using retina or other high resolution displays.
So I guess I’m reviving this project. Yes, again. Testing the water with GMS2 at the moment to see what happens, since they’re promising a Mac version soon-ish.Â
So far what I’ve got from it is, GMS2 doesn’t fully support Unicode (and neither did GMS1.4), which is a real shame. You can sort of still, but it involves a heavy amount of cross-referencing to make sure you get the ID of the Unicode character you want right. Not optimal at all if you want a game with heavy use of text in any Unicode languages. Which mine is, sadly. I do wanna try localizing the game into my own primary language at some point.
Another thing is I’m not exactly happy with the performance so far. Maybe it’s still early in the game. Maybe it’s because of my collision detection algorithm. I’ll play around some more to be sure.
What I’m quite happy about though, is that you can get a basic top-down pixel movement and collision system done really fast with a very easy to understand piece of code.
So this is what I’m currently involved with. I’m not allowed to say much other than that I’m super excited to be a part of this team and this project.
jacobvanloon
tangentwithtanner
pixelskylines
andulkaphoto
