videogames: the blog

making games is a thing to do

[pedrothedagger]

Hey there! I recently found you on twitter and I was curious about what kind of model your worker owned studio would look like if you decide to go through with that? Ever since that studio Motion Twin talked about how theirs worked I've been really interested in more non-hierarchical studios being created. Also, if you ever end up working on a game about resisting colonization I'd be extremely keen on it as a afro-latinx person! Anyway have a nice day!

I’ve thought about structure a lot - but at the end of the day, I think I am more concerned about transparency and democratic decisionmaking in terms of structure vs. the outcome of the structure itself.

For example: should everyone in the studio be paid the same amount? I can see arguments for and against: for example, it might make it more difficult to bring more junior folks on if there was a hard and fast rule that all employees must be paid the same. On the other hand, I’m a strong believer that, at the very minimum, there be a clearly established ratio between minimum and maximum pay, and I’ve also thought it could be interesting to peg pay to multiples of the minimum company pay. So if the maximum ratio was 3:1, then the only way to give the most well paid employees a raise is to raise the minimum company pay.

Anyways, again, the specifics of this I do have opinions on but I think a crucial part of worker ownership is worker collaboration on resolving these issues. So I’d want all of the worker-owners to talk this issues like this over and come to consensus in a transparent (and, imo, horizontal) way. I am less invested in the specific resolution than I am in the process - I feel like as long as I am working with a group of people that I trust I could accept the results of that process.

It’s funny, because a lot of these kinds of questions also pop up in leftist and union organizations (e.g. horizontalism vs. centralizing decisionmaking power) and my personal tendency is always towards consensus building and horizontalism because I feel like people work best when they feel empowered. I think basically my instinct is to be as horizontal as will be functional.

Also thanks for the question and encouragement! Exploring themes that aren’t touched by most games is something I feel pretty passionate about so it’s always good to hear people get excited about them!

[pedrothedagger]

Hey man, long time no talk, hope you're doing well. Saw your tweet a little while back about leaving Blizzard, was curious where you're off adventuring to now? I'd love to see some of your work somewhere new and fresh.

I’m working on some general life stuff for now (for instance, going through the huge amount of art I inherited from my family when my mom passed away and storing it in a more sensible way).

In terms of longer term plans, I want to work with anyone who is interested in organizing the game industry, and I *really* want to work with other likeminded devs to start a worker owned cooperative game development studio. Finding the right devs and figuring out funding are the next steps there.

Oh and maybe even a little R&R. I’ve been making games for 14 years straight and I haven’t taken a break longer than 2 weeks in that period. So that might be nice :)

[pedrothedagger]

Can you now reveal which bosses you worked on? Are there any that you consider a "masterpiece"?

I can’t! Because that is covered under NDA! And I don’t want to get sued! If I knew for a fact that Blizzard was fine with me talking about it, I wouldn’t mind sharing, but I don’t so I won’t!However, it is public knowledge that I made Siegecrafter Blackfuse, which is the first real raid boss I made (I did quest content prior to that) and which I am super proud of.There’s a lot of other bosses I made that I’m both proud of and wish were better for various reasons, but I think that’s pretty common. I don’t think I have the mindset to be happy about something without also have huge doubts and self-criticism around it :)

[pedrothedagger]

One more! Portfolios tend to be the thing to have for job seekers, but it can be a bit difficult to "show off" your game design ability/thought process by just putting games on your portfolio, particularly when other teammates contributed to the design of the game. I've been advised in the past that having a blog to discuss game design is a good way of showing your thought process and have been keeping an active one. Did you have any additional thoughts or advice on game design portfolios?

This is a great question and I wish I had a good answer. I think having a game design blog can’t hurt in that it can sharpen your ability to talk about game design, but I have to be brutally honest that if I saw someone link their blog in their interview packet the chance that I actually click is... not great.When I’ve been involved in recruiting new designers, I’d usually try to answer a few questions:

1) Can this person finish work? Do they have the technical chops required?

2) Does this person have a well developed design sense?

3) Does the person seem like a good cultural fit for the team?

The third one you can’t really do much about, and the first you can use your portfolio or prior experience for. This is where the “build a mod”/”make a game” advice comes in.Unfortunately, and I say unfortunately because I hate interviewing and think there are great designers who interview poorly, I usually have to wait until the interview to get a handle on someone’s design sense. Design tests can be useful, but really I want to see someone’s ability to brainstorm and think on their feet to get a handle on whether they’ll be able to pivot and adapt well to changes. And the best way to get good at that kind of stuff is just... well... talking design with people, deeply examining your own reactions to game design and trying to understand why things you do or don’t like were designed that way, etc.It sucks, I know, because I really wish I had a better answer to “how do I become a raid designer” - all I know is my personal experience which has been cultivating my design sense by thinking about games and then jumping on any opportunity I can find at companies whose games I respect.

[pedrothedagger]

Hey, i'm big fan of reading your insight into raid design and difficulty. I was wondering what your opinion/analysis of the ultimate raid series in FFXIV? Context: Ultimate is a single fight raid on off raid patches that is a high mechanic/dps density fight for top players. Can't link a video unfortunately.

I think the Ultimate encounters are really cool from the point of view of a designer. I think they are smart in that the answer a need in the community for ultra hard content without racking up huge expenses in terms of assets. I think it does reveal that the more “flavorful” elements of the encounter like new art, story, etc. are less critical for that audience, because the community generally seems to respond positively to the Ultimate encounters.

[pedrothedagger]

Persona 5, untranslatable jokes, and tokin on 4/20

To preface this: Persona 5 is the best JRPG in years. Please buy the game. Please do not use this or any bitching about the localization you see as a reason not to get it, because it isn’t one. It’s great. Play it. I will probably be making a post soon about some of the brilliant game design things in it!

So I was irritated about one of the questions in Persona 5 and made a random tweet about it after looking it up in english sources and trying to figure out a factual basis for it.  All the english sources on tokin (the name of a promoted pawn in Shogi) did not mention the history of how kin became to, and, more importantly, I could not find a single example of a cursive kin anywhere that looked anything like a to. So what the game was saying seemed pretty darn suspect.

Now to be fair, I don’t consider myself an authority on Japanese language and wouldn’t expect to be cited as such, but shortly thereafter Chris Kohler at Kotaku linked to the tweets and made an article based on them: http://kotaku.com/this-might-be-persona-5s-biggest-translation-fail-1794223069

Now I want to specify that I was not contacted ahead of time about this. I didn’t plan or want this to become an article at a major game site. I was just kinda bitching. I did not expect this to extend beyond the people who follow me, many of whom give no shits about Persona, localization accuracy, or the minutae of Kanji. If I had been asked, I would have preferred not to be cited for two reasons:

It’s really a minor issue and I don’t think it’s representative of my overall feelings on the game.

The level of research I put into it the tweet was appropriate for a tweet, not for an article in a major game news site.

But, at the same time, I don’t think Chris had any bad intentions with the article - it was just an interesting point of the language and an odd thing to show up in an English localized game. Chris is a good dude.

Anyways, as soon as I saw it had been made into an article, I panicked because if I wanted to be more sure I was accurate, I should have looked at Japanese sources. So I did. And, thankfully, japanese google provided this article which was massively helpful:

http://www.tonan.jp/moji/10tokin/

So, this is a long article. But what it boils down to, is arguing that it is not, in fact, a hiragana と at all - but, it also argues that it is quite uncertain as to what it actually is.

It looks like he ends up feeling like the most likely explanation is that it originated from  今, which is an ateji (phonetic replacement or spelling of a kanji that is read a certain way with no regard to its meaning) for 金.

http://tonan.seesaa.net/article/31091021.html

Anyways, either way, my explanation was wrong, which I then brought up to Chris, who was nice enough to update the article. Now, while admitting that I was inaccurate in my factual reasoning as to why it was factually wrong, the fact remains that the statement in the english version of the game - that と金 is the cursive form of a specific kanji - is wrong. Now, it appears that there’s argument as to whether the Japanese was even correct - but it’s certainly different, and less wrong than the English. Let me explain why. Here’s the original Japanese:

In text:

この字はある漢字の崩し字なんだ、 なにか分かる？

So, let’s break this down. First, I’ll translate the easy nouns.  字 (ji) is character (it can mean other stuff but that’s most likely in this context).  漢字 (kanji) is… kanji.  

The other noun is 崩し字 (kuzushiji) , which can sort of theoretically be translated to “cursive” or “simplified” character - but it doesn’t mean cursive in really the same sense that western cursive is used. There’s a ton of possible ways to write a character in  崩し字 - really, anything that is written using a brush and omits or simplifies strokes is technically 崩し字. Which is why, in the articles above, he dislikes the argument that tokin originates from a  崩し字 of  金, because while it could be a theoretically VERY cavalier 崩し字, it really drastically simplifies the kanji (far moreso than the other shoji pieces simplify the same kanji). But I’ll give that that’s a lot of detail the game can’t provide so I’ll let it get away with cursive form :)

Okay, so we have:

この character はある kanji の cursive form なんだ、なにか分かる？

Next, the other easy stuff.  この is this.  なんだ is “what is”.  なにか means something. So we get:

This character  はある kanji の cursive form what is、something 分かる?

Last we’ll do verbs and particles. I won’t explain particles because they’re a whole section of Japanese grammar that’s not really pertinent and is somewhat complex but suffice it to say they are short “grammatical helpers” that mark the grammatical function of words in sentences, sort of like helping verbs and articles in English. Anyways, the verbs here are ある (aru), which means to be/exist (specially referring to inanimate objects), and  分かる (wakaru) which means a lot of different things in english, but usually it means do you understand or know. The only other things are  は, which is a particle marking a new topic of conversation in a sentence, and has no real translatable direct equivalent in english, and の, which indicates that a noun possesses or modifies another noun. So, without any word rearrangement, you end up with: “This character is cursive form of kanji what is, something understand?”

Which is a little intentionally obtuse but some simple rearrangement gets you something closer to english:

“This character is cursive form of what kanji, something understand?”

This is all you can really infer from transliteration. To turn this into actual English we need to start making value judgments and doing actual translation. So to get English out of this, the first and easiest thing to do is to realize that  なにか分かる is just ellipsing the subject, which is probably the student who the teacher is asking the question to. Also, you need your helping verbs and pronouns, and the nanika wakaru is more of an expression, so it’s probably closer to “do you know?”. All of that is interpretation and at the translator’s discretion, but it’s necessary to end up with something that’s vaguely English.

For the first part of the sentence, you are almost actually at a readable fragment, you just need an article, and here’s where I think the translation goes wrong. It uses “the”, when it clearly should use “a”. 

Why? “the” implies singularity and absoluteness. “the” implies that there is a single, or at the very least primary answer to the question “what is the cursive form of this kanji”, and that that single answer is the one they are looking for. But any Japanese person will tell you that 1) there are many cursive forms of Kanji and 2) that the “primary” cursive form of the 金, if it existed, would not be what is seen on the shogi piece. In fact, the very next slide conflicts with the usage of “the”, because it shows three different purported cursive forms of  金- and again, whether tokin factually is a cursive form of 金 is debatable, but that is at least asserted in the Japanese text, too!

So, I think a closer translation (and closer to the original Japanese structure) would be something like: “This character is a cursive form of a kanji - do you know which?” If you wanted to make it flow better, you could go from there. Something like “Can you tell me which cursive kanji this character originated from?”

Now, you might argue a simple swapping of “a” for “the” isn’t a big deal. And you would be right to some extent. But I certainly would argue that it undermines the coolest part of these little quiz games, which is that they actually teach you things! You could imagine someone playing this game, then later picking up Japanese, seeing a hiragana “to”, and telling their teacher “oh I learned that’s a cursive “kin!”” to be greeted by a frowning head-nod no. One of the coolest parts of the persona games is the opportunity to learn about Japanese, and it’s a bummer that it gives you misinformation by way of a relatively simple error.

But -  I actually think the bigger translation issues, and the reason why I think a bigger change should have been made to this question, is in the answers. So, this is actually even a tricky question in japanese! While searching for japanese sources, I actually found this blog:

http://karigezima.com/archives/25714

which says:

将棋経験者ならすぐに分かる問題です。

将棋してない人からしたら難しい…かな？(´･ω･`;)

Or - “Shogi players will instantly know the answer. But people who don’t play shogi probably screamed about how hard it is, huh?”

So yeah - this is a tricky question in Japanese. But, in typical multiple choice test fashion, it actually has something to help you out:

So here’s the answer options in Japanese. Let’s compare them with the english options:

So, to start things off, the question is asking about the cursive form of kanji - which you need to be able to see the kanji to determine, but the english version doesn’t let you see the freaking kanji! And, a single English word might correspond to multiple kanji. For instance, divination as a kanji could just as easily be 占 as  卜. And, while it’s more of a technicality because  金 is certainly the most obvious kanji that means “gold”, gold could also mean  鋆,  釛 ,  鉚,  鎏 ,  鏐 . Those might not be things that a sane person would think of when given the option “gold”, the fact remains that the game is supposed to be translated into English and you shouldn’t need to know Kanji to understand and answer questions correctly in it!

But I think the bigger deal here is that you actually miss out on the “dummy” option. See, because while “Divination” is technically what 卜 means, it is not an option in the Japanese version because of that - it’s there because it’s looks almost exactly like ト, which is the same sound, “to”, in the other major japanese character system, Katakana.

So for a Japanese speaker, you instantly see that dumb middle option and rule it out because it’s clearly a trick answer for dummies. It’s even maybe a little chuckle-worthy. You just miss out on all of that in english.

Because it’s so untranslatable to someone who doesn’t understand Japanese, and because really the relevant point here narratively and symbolically is that the lowest shogi piece can promote into the Gold General, and how that ties into the idea of neauvau riche, I think it would have been nice to just ask something like “This piece indicates when a pawn is promoted to what rank”? It’s a bit further from the Japanese, but again, if you can’t convey the meaning in Japanese without explaining what kanji are, how they are simplified, and make the answers make sense visually to players, maybe just get at the heart of the issue and the bigger narrative point.

Anyways, long story short - I still think this could have been better, but I’m glad it existed in a way because it was very much a learning opportunity for me!

[megadestroybastard]

Hey, Nate. MDB again. Thought I could lend my expertise, since it’s always better to have two experts tackling a problem like this. Here are some notes:

なんだ (nanda) does not mean “what is.” It’s the short/informal form of the phrase なのです (nano desu), which is simply a way to end a clause that ends in a noun while also inserting your personal feelings into the phrase. In effect, it’s a verbal punctuation mark. If that sounds terribly confusing, that’s because it’s Japanese, one of the most complicated languages on Earth.

The word ある (aru) is, as you said, a verb meaning “to be/exist.” And it’s true that placing a verb before a noun makes it a relative clause. So you technically could say that the translation for ある漢字 is “the kanji that exists.” But that extremely inefficient and redundant. You’d get the exact same meaning from taking the “aru” out, so there’s no reason for it to be there.

Which is why! The word “aru” before a noun is used to indicate a particular one of those things. So ある日 means “someday,” ある人 means “somebody,” etc. So the proper translation for ある漢字 would be “some (particular) kanji.”

なにか (nanika) does indeed mean “something” or “anything,” but in the particle か (ka) indicates a request for specific information. When asking a question with a yes or no answer, you use かどうか (kadouka). Examples:

「いくらか分かる？」(Ikura ka wakaru?) “Do you know how much (it is)?”

「どこにあるか全く知らんねんで。」(Doko ni aru ka mattaku wakannen de.) “I ain’t got a clue where it is.”

なに (nani), as I’m sure you know, means “what,” so when the teacher asks, “Nani ka wakaru?” she’s not saying, “Something understand?” it’s more like, “Do you know what (it is)?”

Finally, in your post, you accidentally omitted part of the Japanese version. You wrote:

「 この字はある漢字の崩し字なんだ 、なにか分かる？」

But the text in the game actually says:

「 この字はある漢字の崩し字なんだけど、なにか分かる？」

It’s not super important, but it still holds a minor significance that has to be considered depending on how you want to convey the character. Personally, I like to translate けど (kedo) to “Even though”, but the word “but” works just as well. It’s much more complicated than that, so just role with it, for now. Get it? “Role”? ‘Cause it’s an RPG? Um…anyway.

When you put it all together, there are several ways you could translate the sentence, but it turns out the way it was localized was actually pretty faithful: “This character is the cursive form of a specific kanji. Do you know which one it is?” A little verbose compared to the original, but grammatically, very close!

Hope that helps!

[pedrothedagger]

Thanks! That’s helpful :D It’s good to talk about this stuff.

You’re right about  なんだ in this context, for sure. I can be a casual form of なんです, which is what had confused me.

The other points are totally valid, and I totally agree I missed a couple things. I still think the choice of “the” is wrong, though as I said I think it’s a pretty minor issue. I still wish they showed you the kanji options though!

[pedrothedagger]

Persona 5, untranslatable jokes, and tokin on 4/20

To preface this: Persona 5 is the best JRPG in years. Please buy the game. Please do not use this or any bitching about the localization you see as a reason not to get it, because it isn’t one. It’s great. Play it. I will probably be making a post soon about some of the brilliant game design things in it!

So I was irritated about one of the questions in Persona 5 and made a random tweet about it after looking it up in english sources and trying to figure out a factual basis for it.  All the english sources on tokin (the name of a promoted pawn in Shogi) did not mention the history of how kin became to, and, more importantly, I could not find a single example of a cursive kin anywhere that looked anything like a to. So what the game was saying seemed pretty darn suspect.

Now to be fair, I don’t consider myself an authority on Japanese language and wouldn’t expect to be cited as such, but shortly thereafter Chris Kohler at Kotaku linked to the tweets and made an article based on them: http://kotaku.com/this-might-be-persona-5s-biggest-translation-fail-1794223069

Now I want to specify that I was not contacted ahead of time about this. I didn’t plan or want this to become an article at a major game site. I was just kinda bitching. I did not expect this to extend beyond the people who follow me, many of whom give no shits about Persona, localization accuracy, or the minutae of Kanji. If I had been asked, I would have preferred not to be cited for two reasons:

It’s really a minor issue and I don’t think it’s representative of my overall feelings on the game.

The level of research I put into it the tweet was appropriate for a tweet, not for an article in a major game news site.

But, at the same time, I don’t think Chris had any bad intentions with the article - it was just an interesting point of the language and an odd thing to show up in an English localized game. Chris is a good dude.

Anyways, as soon as I saw it had been made into an article, I panicked because if I wanted to be more sure I was accurate, I should have looked at Japanese sources. So I did. And, thankfully, japanese google provided this article which was massively helpful:

http://www.tonan.jp/moji/10tokin/

So, this is a long article. But what it boils down to, is arguing that it is not, in fact, a hiragana と at all - but, it also argues that it is quite uncertain as to what it actually is.

It looks like he ends up feeling like the most likely explanation is that it originated from  今, which is an ateji (phonetic replacement or spelling of a kanji that is read a certain way with no regard to its meaning) for 金.

http://tonan.seesaa.net/article/31091021.html

Anyways, either way, my explanation was wrong, which I then brought up to Chris, who was nice enough to update the article. Now, while admitting that I was inaccurate in my factual reasoning as to why it was factually wrong, the fact remains that the statement in the english version of the game - that と金 is the cursive form of a specific kanji - is wrong. Now, it appears that there’s argument as to whether the Japanese was even correct - but it’s certainly different, and less wrong than the English. Let me explain why. Here’s the original Japanese:

In text:

この字はある漢字の崩し字なんだ、 なにか分かる？

So, let’s break this down. First, I’ll translate the easy nouns.  字 (ji) is character (it can mean other stuff but that’s most likely in this context).  漢字 (kanji) is… kanji.  

The other noun is 崩し字 (kuzushiji) , which can sort of theoretically be translated to “cursive” or “simplified” character - but it doesn’t mean cursive in really the same sense that western cursive is used. There’s a ton of possible ways to write a character in  崩し字 - really, anything that is written using a brush and omits or simplifies strokes is technically 崩し字. Which is why, in the articles above, he dislikes the argument that tokin originates from a  崩し字 of  金, because while it could be a theoretically VERY cavalier 崩し字, it really drastically simplifies the kanji (far moreso than the other shoji pieces simplify the same kanji). But I’ll give that that’s a lot of detail the game can’t provide so I’ll let it get away with cursive form :)

Okay, so we have:

この character はある kanji の cursive form なんだ、なにか分かる？

Next, the other easy stuff.  この is this.  なんだ is “what is”.  なにか means something. So we get:

This character  はある kanji の cursive form what is、something 分かる?

Last we’ll do verbs and particles. I won’t explain particles because they're a whole section of Japanese grammar that's not really pertinent and is somewhat complex but suffice it to say they are short “grammatical helpers” that mark the grammatical function of words in sentences, sort of like helping verbs and articles in English. Anyways, the verbs here are ある (aru), which means to be/exist (specially referring to inanimate objects), and  分かる (wakaru) which means a lot of different things in english, but usually it means do you understand or know. The only other things are  は, which is a particle marking a new topic of conversation in a sentence, and has no real translatable direct equivalent in english, and の, which indicates that a noun possesses or modifies another noun. So, without any word rearrangement, you end up with: “This character is cursive form of kanji what is, something understand?”

Which is a little intentionally obtuse but some simple rearrangement gets you something closer to english:

“This character is cursive form of what kanji, something understand?”

This is all you can really infer from transliteration. To turn this into actual English we need to start making value judgments and doing actual translation. So to get English out of this, the first and easiest thing to do is to realize that  なにか分かる is just ellipsing the subject, which is probably the student who the teacher is asking the question to. Also, you need your helping verbs and pronouns, and the nanika wakaru is more of an expression, so it’s probably closer to “do you know?”. All of that is interpretation and at the translator’s discretion, but it’s necessary to end up with something that’s vaguely English.

For the first part of the sentence, you are almost actually at a readable fragment, you just need an article, and here’s where I think the translation goes wrong. It uses “the”, when it clearly should use “a”. 

Why? “the” implies singularity and absoluteness. “the” implies that there is a single, or at the very least primary answer to the question “what is the cursive form of this kanji”, and that that single answer is the one they are looking for. But any Japanese person will tell you that 1) there are many cursive forms of Kanji and 2) that the “primary” cursive form of the 金, if it existed, would not be what is seen on the shogi piece. In fact, the very next slide conflicts with the usage of “the”, because it shows three different purported cursive forms of  金- and again, whether tokin factually is a cursive form of 金 is debatable, but that is at least asserted in the Japanese text, too!

So, I think a closer translation (and closer to the original Japanese structure) would be something like: “This character is a cursive form of a kanji - do you know which?” If you wanted to make it flow better, you could go from there. Something like “Can you tell me which cursive kanji this character originated from?”

Now, you might argue a simple swapping of “a” for “the” isn’t a big deal. And you would be right to some extent. But I certainly would argue that it undermines the coolest part of these little quiz games, which is that they actually teach you things! You could imagine someone playing this game, then later picking up Japanese, seeing a hiragana “to”, and telling their teacher “oh I learned that’s a cursive “kin!”” to be greeted by a frowning head-nod no. One of the coolest parts of the persona games is the opportunity to learn about Japanese, and it’s a bummer that it gives you misinformation by way of a relatively simple error.

But -  I actually think the bigger translation issues, and the reason why I think a bigger change should have been made to this question, is in the answers. So, this is actually even a tricky question in japanese! While searching for japanese sources, I actually found this blog:

http://karigezima.com/archives/25714

which says:

将棋経験者ならすぐに分かる問題です。

将棋してない人からしたら難しい…かな？(´･ω･`;)

Or - “Shogi players will instantly know the answer. But people who don’t play shogi probably screamed about how hard it is, huh?”

So yeah - this is a tricky question in Japanese. But, in typical multiple choice test fashion, it actually has something to help you out:

So here’s the answer options in Japanese. Let’s compare them with the english options:

So, to start things off, the question is asking about the cursive form of kanji - which you need to be able to see the kanji to determine, but the english version doesn’t let you see the freaking kanji! And, a single English word might correspond to multiple kanji. For instance, divination as a kanji could just as easily be 占 as  卜. And, while it’s more of a technicality because  金 is certainly the most obvious kanji that means “gold”, gold could also mean  鋆,  釛 ,  鉚,  鎏 ,  鏐 . Those might not be things that a sane person would think of when given the option “gold”, the fact remains that the game is supposed to be translated into English and you shouldn’t need to know Kanji to understand and answer questions correctly in it!

But I think the bigger deal here is that you actually miss out on the “dummy” option. See, because while “Divination” is technically what 卜 means, it is not an option in the Japanese version because of that - it’s there because it’s looks almost exactly like ト, which is the same sound, “to”, in the other major japanese character system, Katakana.

So for a Japanese speaker, you instantly see that dumb middle option and rule it out because it’s clearly a trick answer for dummies. It’s even maybe a little chuckle-worthy. You just miss out on all of that in english.

Because it’s so untranslatable to someone who doesn’t understand Japanese, and because really the relevant point here narratively and symbolically is that the lowest shogi piece can promote into the Gold General, and how that ties into the idea of neauvau riche, I think it would have been nice to just ask something like “This piece indicates when a pawn is promoted to what rank”? It’s a bit further from the Japanese, but again, if you can’t convey the meaning in Japanese without explaining what kanji are, how they are simplified, and make the answers make sense visually to players, maybe just get at the heart of the issue and the bigger narrative point.

Anyways, long story short - I still think this could have been better, but I’m glad it existed in a way because it was very much a learning opportunity for me!

[pedrothedagger]

How much influence does the encounter design team have on the direction to take a raid (or for that matter, what raid to even develop)? Are you essentially just given a bunch of rooms and said "MAEK BAWSSES" or is there a lot of collaboration involved with elements such as the artistic elements, level design, or story?

We have a ton of influence on all of it, and the other teams involved (level design, character art, lore/writing, etc.) also influence our stuff. Random example: A fight like Blackfuse - one that’s heavily based on the environment, is going to have very specific needs for the encounter space that we’ll have to ensure the artists include. And then just as often, artists will have a cool idea that will shift what abilities we plan to give the boss. I think all Blizzard games are like this, probably, but it’s all very collaborative because everyone wants to feel good about what they are making!

[pedrothedagger]

Is "encounter designer" a kind of branch from "Game designer" jobs? Or rather, what experiences, skills, or projects helped you to get to where you are now? One of my main "dream jobs" has been to design and tune raid bosses/encounters (I LOVE making paper kits for encounters often), but I've never seen postings for anything like that and have been trying to find out the right "path" toward that goal.

Encounter Designer, in terms of what we do on WoW, is a little bit of a specialized role, because it only really exists on MMOs, and even then on a small subset of them. But, to your main point - Encounter Design is really at the nexus of System Design (people who design the rules that the game works by) and Content Design (people who make the stuff you play through). I can’t recommend a path because, honestly, those of us on the encounter team on WoW have all had pretty weird, seemingly random paths through the industry. The most consistent advice I suppose I could give would be to work in Blizzard QA, because the largest percentage of encounter designers have come through that route than any other single route (though the majority on the team now did design work before they came to Blizzard at various different studios, the largest common path of folks on the team atm was through Blizzard QA).

Anyways, I would just say that the same advice applies as applies to any other design job, except as applied to WoW encounters. Be able to clearly articular what makes an encounter work, what makes one not work, and why. Be able to understand what you should do as an encounter designer, and probably more importantly, what you shouldn’t do (based on the context). Try to understand the standards that exist in the game you’re applying for (or the genre you’re applying for if it’s not an already available game), and why they exist. Have some ideas on ways you would make encounters better, but be able to present them humbly enough in an interview that you don’t come off as a jerk :) That’s all just very general “becoming a designer” advice, though.

[pedrothedagger]

Outside of QA, Art, Sound, etc - about how many people collaborate together for designing a raid boss? Are you able to shed some light as to what thought processes and strategies go into creating immersive encounters?

There’s probably room for a whole Blizzcon panel on the design process of encounters :) But, suffice to say that the entire encounter design team takes part in the planning and high level concept for each boss encounter, and while individuals become the “point person” for an individual boss, that’s after a series of team-wide brainstorms. Ultimately, the entire design process is highly collaborative and discussion oriented, and we frequently help each other out in implementation and in thinking through design problems.

This is one reason why it’s not always super helpful to think of person X designing boss Y - while they may have been the point person on it, in most cases the boss comes out of a process that involves the whole team contributing to the high-level design, and contributing feedback as the fight is implemented and tested.

[pedrothedagger]

From a design perspective, I believe that the Mythic20 system is great. 20 is a good number for diverse and plentiful mechanics since the responsibility can be split much more "fairly" among the raiders. However, I find the WoD transition into the system after roughly 8 years of 10/25 was too late. What are your thoughts on the current Mythic raiding paradigm, and what (if anything) might you have done differently? Was the change worth the initial costs? (Just your opinion, of course :) )

I don’t necissarily agree that the transition was too late. Remember that the first mixed difficulty 10/25 raid was Naxx in WotLK (Late 2008), and that Heroic raids didn’t exist until Icecrown, over a year later. That system persisted through Cata and MoP (with the addition of LFR in Cata’s last patch and Flex in MoP’s), but I think the frequent design shifts have indicated that we were never super happy with the raid structures as they existed beforehand, and the WoD change was the product of a long series of changes over time, not a sudden shift after relative stability.

As for things we could have done differently, I don’t know that 20 is inherently the perfect size, but it was IMO the best choice given the history of WoW and what WoW raiding has looked like over time. We could have picked a different number. I think we’re overall pretty happy with how 20 has played out, though.

As for costs, I think the current system is much less costly than separate, parallel 10/25 man raids, and as a result the raids are on average higher quality and better tuned than they were beforehand. So I think that’s not really a cost, more of a savings, and I think the benefit is worth it. The real cost of the changeover is borne by the community - specifically by the mythic raiding community (obviously 10 and 25 guilds can continue to raid just fine in n/h in the current system).

I think, given the general outlook of the mythic raider as an accomplishment and challenge driven player, that the value of having a single “canon” encounter tuning and benchmark is worth a lot more than the flexibility of the parallel 10/25 difficulties. There was always the perception, sometimes correct, by people running one raid size that the other side had it easier. People’s successes as mythic raiders meant different things based on their raid group size, and that’s something that I don’t think most mythic raiders liked (even if they liked only running with 10 people).

As designers, there were also mechanics that we either couldn’t do if they didn’t work in both 10/25, or we’d have to bend over backwards to try to make the tuning match even if we did do the mechanics - and it was very difficult to be successful. More often than not you’d just leave the mechanic on the table and not do it rather than risk a gross imbalance across difficulties.

My biggest regret with any of the raid changes are that some players had to find new people to play with, and that can be really hard and painful. It’s an insanely difficult problem to solve, because it’s about finding a group of people with similar schedules, with personalities that mesh with yours, etc. and that’s just extremely difficult for us to fix, and it’s hard to know if any tool we introduce to help it will even be adopted by the community (see - the in-game guild finder). But that’s the biggest problem I see, personally.

[pedrothedagger]

Ulduar style hard-modes are often fondly remembered, seemingly even by WoW's developers, though have yet to be repeated (let's be honest, one kill-the-council-in-a-certain-order is hardly true to the fantasy). There have been a number of reasons presented against them, but I have a hard time buying into any of them besides breaking the established difficulty/reward formula. What do you believe are the primary obstacles against such design?

First, a disclaimer: these are my personal opinions. I can’t speak for anyone else on the team and this shouldn’t be taken as any kind of official policy :) Different people might have different answers.

But I think there are a few things at play here that make this an issue for me as a designer.

First, I think we should clarify that we’re really talking about the method of unlocking hardmodes, not the hardmode encounters themselves. There’s nothing we did inside the Ulduar hardmode encounters that we couldn’t or wouldn’t do today in a Mythic encounter. Even something like Hardmode Hodir can be elegantly handled with a tighter zerk timer in Mythic - arguably more elegantly than the actual Hodir hardmode.

Anyways, as far as the unlocks, first I’d question how much of the fond memories of the methods of unlocking Ulduar hardmodes are the product of rose-colored glasses. A couple of them had icky side effects (”accidentally” triggering hard mode on XT as you geared up, needing to just intentionally wipe if you missed Hodir’s, or getting locked after missing it by a second), and many of them weren’t particularly interesting in and of themselves - Flame Leviathan and Freya’s unlocks were basically “don’t pull some trash”, Hodir was just “do the fight but fast!”, Mimiron was literally pushing a button. Which worked thematically and comedically for Mimiron but was hardly thrilling gameplay :) 

I think the ones that worked better were Iron Council (which we repeated on Protectors in MoP) and Yogg. Between the hard-mode unlocks that had icky side-effects, and the unlock methods that weren’t very interesting, I’d argue that the batting average for the unlock methods in Ulduar was not very good.

Again - this is not to say that the hardmode encounters themselves were not good! Ulduar’s hardmode encounters were quite good for the most part, and we’ve done plenty of encounters that are similar mechanically to the actual in-encounter mechanics of Ulduar hardmodes. Just making sure to clarify the difference between the unlock method on hard modes and the hard modes themselves.

Ultimately, the biggest reason in my view not to repeat the Ulduar style of hardmodes is actually the seed of a bigger lesson about game development: time is always finite and every decision to spend time somewhere is a decision to not spend time somewhere else.

Given finite time, spending that time brainstorming, implementing and tuning 8-14 unique methods of unlocking hardmode encounters seems like a poor use of developer time vs. spending that time on the actual hard mode encounters themselves. 

We already handle a much more complex raiding landscape than existed in ulduar (LFR + two scaling difficulties + Mythic), and scaling raids are the kind of player-friendly feature that I think *is* very positive for the game, but also has development costs. But I think that’s one example of a feature that is a better cost/benefit ratio than Ulduar style unlocks. and I would argue that the kinds of things you’ve seen in Heroic difficulty raids pre-WoD and Mythic raids in WoD/Legion are far more ambitious (e.g., entire extra phases, new environments, etc.) than anything in Ulduar. The additional complexity of creating unlocks for each boss would have to cut into those in some way.

Additionally, even if it were worth the time tradeoff, it would create additional design constraints on us that would limit our ability to do cool things. I think players would be dissatisfied with cop-out big red buttons in encounters that aren’t Mimiron, but what if there’s not really a good hook for another kind of Ulduar unlock in an encounter? Does that mean we don’t do a hardmode for that encounter? Do we shoe-horn the hardmode in, maybe hurting the design elegance of the encounter?

Those kinds of constraints can be a good thing, when what they buy you is worth the constraint - for example, scaling Normal and Heroic difficulty. But, at least in my opinion, it’s hard to argue that the benefits of carrying the Ulduar unlock method forward is worth the cost.

In summary: it’s a thing I’m glad we tried. I wouldn’t hate it if we decided to try it as a one-off thing again. I don’t think it’s the solution as a catch-all for all raids.

[flaskataur]

Thanks for the response again! I’m definitely not trying to bait out responses on behalf of the team or attempt to weasel answers to things you aren’t supposed to talk about. My questions are definitely just for your opinion/experience and I’m trying to make sure to word them to be clear there. :)

I definitely do not believe the Ulduar style hard-modes are the way to go for every raid by any means. One thought that came to my mind was to save such an experience for the final raid of an expansion. Things already generally tend to go wild after the first month or two of hardcore progression settles, as that’s when the set bonuses, trinkets/weapons, or Legendary effects come into common play. Historically, the end-tier seems to be where all semblance of balance and order fall apart (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the reset button is around the corner), it would be the perfect time to shake things up with dynamic difficulties. This would also help address the possible problems of trying to create a gimmick for every single boss you ever imagine. Saving the brainstorming for one raid out of every, let’s say, four, gives you more opportunities to reuse old styles without blatantly ripping off the “red button” 10 times an expansion to the point where it becomes cliche.

The boss fights over the years have become way more sophisticated and elaborate than they ever were in the past, and I’m definitely not nostalgia-ing over these “super cool bosses we’ve never seen anything like again”. Unlocking them through interacting with the raid or the boss itself, I believe, is just way more rewarding than merely flipping a switch in the interface. If I was going to flip a switch, it would be more satisfying for it to be a Mimiron button, for instance. Even Obsidian Sanctum drakes provided a more satisfying experience.

You also mentioned the XT heart - honestly, I find that to be a good side-effect of the system. Avoiding the whole 10 seconds of doing nothing because the heart is already in execute range thing would be nice through some means, but I feel it gives more intrinsic depth to an encounter that would otherwise become mindnumbing once the content is on farm, a sense of danger that did not exist earlier, but did not manifest through arbitrary difficulty scaling.

I can definitely understand that the time constraints are a major concern. I (probably wrongly) assumed that temporarily abandoning the many multi-difficulty tier approach in favor of hard-modes for a specific raid would grant additional time and resources necessary to elegantly answer the recurring question of “what to do on this boss?”

In today’s game, I could not possibly imagine hardmodes working. Between LFR, Normal, Heroic, all with some degree of dynamic scaling, in addition to set 20 man Mythic, that’s an enormous amount of time already spent supporting so many versions of near-identical bosses, I’m honestly surprised that one of those levels hasn’t been trimmed for the sake of efficiency (and for the sake of player burnout) yet. Should that ever happen though and we return to days where raids have 1, maybe 2 difficulty settings, I believe it might be worth consideration!

Sorry for the wall of text, figured you wouldn’t mind a little discussion.

[pedrothedagger]

I think the desire for more “in-world” representations of harder difficulty is cool, but it’s hard to understate how much cleaner and preferable for tuning the current system is.

There is some value in wrapping difficulties in some lore, though. Something I think is really clever in FFXIV is that, after you clear the normal difficulty of a raid, you actually unlock a quest that has you visiting a wandering minstrel who “embellishes” your story and makes it more epic and crazy than it actually was: which unlocks the Savage version. It’s obviously not a super deep context for harder difficulties, but it is a fun, in world explanation :)

[pedrothedagger]

Ulduar style hard-modes are often fondly remembered, seemingly even by WoW's developers, though have yet to be repeated (let's be honest, one kill-the-council-in-a-certain-order is hardly true to the fantasy). There have been a number of reasons presented against them, but I have a hard time buying into any of them besides breaking the established difficulty/reward formula. What do you believe are the primary obstacles against such design?

First, a disclaimer: these are my personal opinions. I can’t speak for anyone else on the team and this shouldn’t be taken as any kind of official policy :) Different people might have different answers.

But I think there are a few things at play here that make this an issue for me as a designer.

First, I think we should clarify that we’re really talking about the method of unlocking hardmodes, not the hardmode encounters themselves. There’s nothing we did inside the Ulduar hardmode encounters that we couldn’t or wouldn’t do today in a Mythic encounter. Even something like Hardmode Hodir can be elegantly handled with a tighter zerk timer in Mythic - arguably more elegantly than the actual Hodir hardmode.

Anyways, as far as the unlocks, first I’d question how much of the fond memories of the methods of unlocking Ulduar hardmodes are the product of rose-colored glasses. A couple of them had icky side effects (”accidentally” triggering hard mode on XT as you geared up, needing to just intentionally wipe if you missed Hodir’s, or getting locked after missing it by a second), and many of them weren’t particularly interesting in and of themselves - Flame Leviathan and Freya’s unlocks were basically “don’t pull some trash”, Hodir was just “do the fight but fast!”, Mimiron was literally pushing a button. Which worked thematically and comedically for Mimiron but was hardly thrilling gameplay :) 

I think the ones that worked better were Iron Council (which we repeated on Protectors in MoP) and Yogg. Between the hard-mode unlocks that had icky side-effects, and the unlock methods that weren’t very interesting, I’d argue that the batting average for the unlock methods in Ulduar was not very good.

Again - this is not to say that the hardmode encounters themselves were not good! Ulduar’s hardmode encounters were quite good for the most part, and we’ve done plenty of encounters that are similar mechanically to the actual in-encounter mechanics of Ulduar hardmodes. Just making sure to clarify the difference between the unlock method on hard modes and the hard modes themselves.

Ultimately, the biggest reason in my view not to repeat the Ulduar style of hardmodes is actually the seed of a bigger lesson about game development: time is always finite and every decision to spend time somewhere is a decision to not spend time somewhere else.

Given finite time, spending that time brainstorming, implementing and tuning 8-14 unique methods of unlocking hardmode encounters seems like a poor use of developer time vs. spending that time on the actual hard mode encounters themselves. 

We already handle a much more complex raiding landscape than existed in ulduar (LFR + two scaling difficulties + Mythic), and scaling raids are the kind of player-friendly feature that I think *is* very positive for the game, but also has development costs. But I think that’s one example of a feature that is a better cost/benefit ratio than Ulduar style unlocks. and I would argue that the kinds of things you’ve seen in Heroic difficulty raids pre-WoD and Mythic raids in WoD/Legion are far more ambitious (e.g., entire extra phases, new environments, etc.) than anything in Ulduar. The additional complexity of creating unlocks for each boss would have to cut into those in some way.

Additionally, even if it were worth the time tradeoff, it would create additional design constraints on us that would limit our ability to do cool things. I think players would be dissatisfied with cop-out big red buttons in encounters that aren’t Mimiron, but what if there’s not really a good hook for another kind of Ulduar unlock in an encounter? Does that mean we don’t do a hardmode for that encounter? Do we shoe-horn the hardmode in, maybe hurting the design elegance of the encounter?

Those kinds of constraints can be a good thing, when what they buy you is worth the constraint - for example, scaling Normal and Heroic difficulty. But, at least in my opinion, it’s hard to argue that the benefits of carrying the Ulduar unlock method forward is worth the cost.

In summary: it’s a thing I’m glad we tried. I wouldn’t hate it if we decided to try it as a one-off thing again. I don’t think it’s the solution as a catch-all for all raids.

[pedrothedagger]

What are your thoughts on encounters that separate raid-teams for a considerable amount of time? Each group deals with their own select mechanics without directly affecting the opposite group's success, however they are all contributing to the same end-goal? Gothik in Naxx and Halion in RS are two small examples, but what if that concept was amplified to a much larger scale? What challenges are faced in designing something like that? Do you believe it could make for a compelling and fun boss?

Having done a couple fights with temporarily separate raid teams, I think there are really good and really bad aspects. I think as added spice to a raid tier, in a one-off encounter, it can be really cool.

Thorim from Ulduar and Spoils of Pandaria from SoO are probably the most fully realized version of this, and I thought it was a great encounter. I also loved that if one group finished early they could help the other group clean up, which was essential to making that kind of encounter feel good.

The biggest challenge is that half the raid never sees half the encounter, and that means that a lot of work may go unseen by a lot of players, and that you have to carefully balance the amount of fun the two groups are having. For instance, I’ve only ever done the Arena on Thorim - I’ve never seen what’s inside the tunnel. That can be cool, and it worked fine on Thorim, but if the Arena were a substantially less fun job than the tunnel I’d be really bummed out to miss out on it.

[pedrothedagger]

Dark Souls & Easy Modes: A Counter-Argument

I recently read a very good article arguing for the existence of an “easy mode” for Souls games.

While reading, I noticed that I agreed with the contour of his arguments and understood the motivation. And yet, I disagreed with a fundamental part of his premise - it is both presumptuous and abandons the responsibilities of both the author and the audience.

I’ll go into this in more detail, but the combat mechanics serve to reinforce a central underpinning of Dark Souls, which is an emotional arc that is reinforced through story, mechanics, art and lore.

First - where I agree with his arguments. The arguments against an easy mode that he is refuting are, actually, bad arguments against an easy mode. The first is ludicrous - I do not need to die repeatedly to appreciate an area in Dark Souls. In fact, the effect of the difficulty in Dark Souls is exactly why can appreciate combat areas without dying!

I also think that players should be able to consume games as they like. I don’t believe that there is something morally wrong about changing a piece of art. Where I disagree is about who that rests upon.

To underpin my objection to his argument, I’d like to talk about the role I think difficulty plays in Dark Souls. Many critics assume that the difficulty in Dark Souls primarily exists to force you to reckon with and master its mechanics. I think this is partly true, but mostly false. The reality is, no matter how well you have mastered the mechanics of the game, you can make progress in Dark Souls. The entire RPG conceit of levelling up and coming back to beat a boss later goes against the core concept that mastery must be used to beat bosses. Additionally, the social mechanics, and the summoned AI companions all provide workarounds for mechanical mastery. You could play through a Souls game, blissfully ignoring all mechanics, sheltered by players online. So the argument that demanding mastery of mechanics is the primary reason for Souls’ difficulty seems to be countered by the game itself, which provides many opportunities to circumvent mastery and still make progress.

Additionally, if pure mastery were the goal in a Souls game, I would argue that the games are extremely poorly paced - the RPG progression insures that the first areas in the game are often the most difficult, packed with the most frequent and seemingly unfair deaths. A game that was truly about mastery would layer increasing challenge against an undeveloping character - something like Titan Souls. Or Devil May Cry, though that does offer a soft progression system.

Instead, I see Dark Souls’ difficulty as a narrative paintbrush - it exists to reinforce the hostility of the world and elicit an emotional response on the part of the player. Everything in the game is designed to elicit a sense of anxiety, loneliness, and fear at being a stranger in a strange land. You are unwelcome. You should not be here. As you learn to navigate an area, you become more familiar with it - what once caused anxiety is now commonplace. You have made a foreign place your home.

That emotional arc proceeds on at least three levels - in individual encounters, in whole areas, and in the game as a whole. Your first encounter with a new creature often ends in death. The emotional journey is reinforced by every mechanical and artistic choice made in the game - the unsettling enemy designs that frighten at first, the spare music and echoing sound effects, the sense of extreme loneliness in a game with very few talking characters (and most of whom seem... not entirely there), and even the lack of any in-game map.  And, yes, the progression systems that ultimately make the end of the game easier than the beginning.

So, when people say that the difficulty itself is integral to Dark Souls, I think they are mistaken. The game’s difficulty is a tool to elicit an emotional response on the part of the player, not an end in itself.

Which leads me to why I disagree with what seems like a central supposition of his article - that the game should provide an easy mode.

I don’t, actually, think there’s anything wrong with wanting to play an easy version of Dark Souls. I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with publishing editions of books that remove “difficult” content. However, asking (or demanding) that the creator of the original work provide a compromised version of their vision to suit individual tastes presumes a responsibility on the artist that their art must appeal to the masses. It is demanding that the author not only share their vision, but also write the Cliff’s Notes. Either it fails to understand the artistic value of the mechanical aspects of the games, or it presumes that game creators’ role is to cater to the whims of their audience rather than express what they want to express. I can’t get behind this.

However! I said I agree that players should be able to enjoy games as the wish! And I do believe that.

What I think many of the arguments for an easy mode fail to recognize is the role and responsibility of the audience. There, in fact, does exist an easy mode, along with hundreds of other user customizations - you can go download them on the Dark Souls Nexus: https://www.nexusmods.com/darksouls/mods/top/?. Some of these can be used to lower the difficulty of the game, make monsters stand still, etc. There are maps available online that ease the sense of anxiety exploring new areas. These are all things that the audience has done, creative works of interpretation that a community has done in response to the creator’s original vision.

So - in short - there’s nothing wrong with wanting to play an easy mode in Dark Souls. There is something wrong with asking the creator to compromise their vision in order to deliver it into your hands. The artists responsibility is to communicate their vision, not necessarily to make sure that we all see it.

[pedrothedagger]

Numerical Tuning Lessons

At some point, if you’re doing system design, or anything that butts up against system design, you’re going to end up looking at formulas in an excel spreadsheet. I’ve spent plenty of time over the past 10 years looking at these and tweaking games and figured some lessons I’ve learned would help other people.

Lesson 1: Get Exposed

This is a fairly simple one, but important - if you’re working on a big team, and you aren’t an engineer, make sure the engineers expose as many tuning variables and formulas to you as possible. It is your responsibility, and should be your goal, to understand fully how the game’s systems work. Additionally, the ability to A/B test different values is massively helpful when trying to grok how numerical changes effect the feel of gameplay. If those values or formulas are hidden in code that you don’t have access to, you can’t really fully understand how things really work.

This has worked different ways on different games I’ve worked on - on Dungeon Siege III, for instance, I owned the .cpp files that defined the RPG systems and the numerical rules for them. On other games, these have been exposed in data tables or through script. And, in the worst cases, they’ve been hidden in code that I didn’t have access to and had to look over an engineers shoulder as they made changes for me.

The cases where these worked best were where I could fully see and understand all the details of how the system worked and could freely tweak and iterate on my own. You can’t tune a system you can’t edit, and you can’t truly understand a system that you can’t see. Get those values and formulas exposed! 

Lesson 2: Minimize Floating Variables (or: Only Tune What You Want)

Games, especially RPGs, typically have lots of numbers that interact in complex ways. There are the obvious numbers - HP, damage, statistics, and then there are “out-of-game” values, like expected time to kill a monster, power growth per level, monster kills required per level, time per level, etc, that players never directly see but that influence the relationships between those values.

You should understand the mathematical relationships between the in-game values and the tuned values, and ideally set up formulas in something like an excel sheet, so that you can isolate exactly the variable you want to tune and not affect other things - or else you risk ending up with a “man in the shower” problem, where you tune one number, which causes an overshoot in a second system, when forces you to retune that system, which causes an effect on the first number, etc.

The biggest mistake I have found is that people often want to tune the values that players see, but these are often the least important values in the game! Oftentimes, it’s the “feel” values, things like “how many hits does it take to kill a monster at equal level? At one level above?” are the real questions, and people try to tune values like HP to realize those goals. Instead, I would recommend never tuning values like HP directly and instead setting your equations to allow you to directly change the “feel” values - to make those the knobs that you have to turn - and then letting your formulas spit out the in-game values for things like health and damage. Note that these references can get a little bit circular, and so you may need to arbitrarily set some value - for instance, health is often based on a player’s ability to deal damage * expected kill time, but a player’s ability to deal damage at a given level could just as well be definied from a monster’s expected HP. You may end up just deciding “A level 1 player will do 100 damage per second” or “A level 1 standard enemy will have 100 HP” and that will scale all of the numbers in your system. But from that point forward, you should only tune the individual “feel” values you want to hit directly, rather than tuning the player-visible values in a way that will have knock-on effects in other systems.

Lesson 3: Make Big Changes

This is a pretty common lesson shared by lots of system designers, but figured I’d share it here too - especially when you are doing early tuning, double or halve numbers. Don’t nudge values by 5-10%, because it’s too hard to see the changes and it takes you much longer to understand the effect your change is having. Additionally, it can save a ton of time. If you double a number and it doesn’t seem crazy, you just saved yourself a lot of time slowly nudging up to the doubled number. If it does seem crazy, you can try the halfway point between the doubled and the original value.

Lesson 4: Start with Math, End with Feel

Math, spreadsheets, etc. all make a great starting point for tuning, but never trust that math will produce a game that feels good. For one, your math may be wrong. There are probably variables you aren’t accounting for, especially in a game with any action-ey elements. Player skill is a thing. Math is super useful for establishing a baseline, but never, ever trust that your math is correct when playing the game is telling you something different. Additionally, math isn’t going to make your boss feel good, and late in the day, don’t be afraid to change things outside of your formulas to get the feel changes you want - but DO save those changes for late in the process, when you’re sure that your core feel variables (like your time to kill) aren’t likely to change. Otherwise, those big changes can completely overwrite or blow away your fine tuning changes.

[pedrothedagger]

Thoughts: Hyper Light Drifter

I just finished Hyper Light Drifter! I want to start actually putting down thoughts when I finish games and they are fresh in my memory, so here goes.

Warning: there will be minor spoilers. But there’s not a ton of story to spoil so I wouldn’t be too worried.

Overall

I really enjoyed the game. If your game’s premise is “Top Down Metroidvania + Intense Action Combat + Beautiful 2D Art” and you deliver at all (and HLD does), I will like your game. HLD delivers. I liked it a lot and would strongly recommend it to anyone who likes tough action games and exploration/Metroidvania games.

Highlights

Level Design - The level design was just fantastic. Navigating the levels was easy, there were quite a few gorgeous, well placed vistas, the levels were designed to make your navigation abilities (dashing, chain dashing, etc.) super fun. Secrets were abundant and well telegraphed, and about halfway through I began to realize the language that the game uses for secrets (there is a little symbol the game uses in most places! Keep an eye open!). Additionally, it’s really impressive how the game made such thorough use of relatively few tools in enough varied ways to keep them interesting! There were very few one-off gimmicks in levels and the game never really broke its rules. The game also made great use of the Metroidvania trick of showing you things that you can’t get to yet, to pique your curiosity and help you understand the flow of the level without making it overly linear. Particularly, the doors that only open when you’ve collected 3/4 pieces of the triforce for a given area (it’s a triforce okay) provide a great leading tool for the player without overly constraining them. Honestly this game is a master class in 2D top down level design.

Art - I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what drove most people to the game. It’s what drove me to it! But the art is just gorgeous, the palette tasteful (and more important varied - each of the main areas has a very strong aesthetic that is very different from the others), the animation is punchy and expressive. Just a gorgeous game. I believe super strongly that  “art style > hi-tech graphics” and this is a stellar example of that.

Music and Sound - The music is sparse and ambient for most of the game, which is why when it DOES kick in, it’s very intense and matches the emotion the game is trying to build quite well. When you hit an impressive vista, or a tough fight, and the music swells, it does exactly what great game music needs to do - works in harmony to make you feel what the game’s trying to express. The sounds is great on it’s own, as well, but also provides great gameplay feedback, which is something I felt other aspects of the game could have done better - but the sound nailed this.

Standard Enemy Design - The bestiary in each of the areas felt extremely different, worked really well together, AND had a ton of personality! Their gameplay and art worked together fantastically as well - the swoopy bird guys mechanics instantly sold why I couldn’t slash them when they were flying, and led me to try to shoot them out of the air - when it worked, I was thrilled! The frog ninjas instantly read “frog ninja” which, besides being awesome, led me to think “i bet that frog’s gonna throw a shuriken” before he did, and that felt awesome! It’s pretty rare that you can spawn a bunch of enemies in a room, let their AI drive them, and get decent gameplay. These enemies are so well designed that it works.

Atmosphere, Character and Mystery - I’ve felt like designers, especially narrative designers, can overemphasize the importance of the player understanding what is happening in the game world. Instead, I think it’s actually much more important that the player understands the big themes, the “flavor” of the world, and the details are actually often unimportant and boring - in fact, not knowing them, leaving them mysterious, are much more engaging than spelling them out. This is part of the magic of Dark Souls, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, and Hyper Light Drifter really succeeds. Additionally, the decision to make the friendly NPCs animal people, and to have them tell little visual stories, was brilliant. It made me care about the world far, far more effectively than dialog would have.

Critiques

The Bosses - The difficulty level of the boss fights felt pretty all over the place. The bird boss was a super easy one-shot, and the west boss was pretty darn difficult. That’s normally fine, but it didn’t mesh well with the overall area difficulty to produce a “standard path” - I found the west area’s standard enemies to be easier than the bird area’s, for instance. Also, I felt the bosses tended to highlight some of the control and feedback issues I’ll raise below.

Controls - For the most part, the game controlled beautifully, felt fluid, smooth and precise. But a few issues really marred that:

Dashing - The game has either a hidden cooldown, input lag, or just a bug with dashing. It felt like there was a cooldown potentially after 3 dashes in a row (talking about standard dashes here - not chain dashes) but it was very unclear what in particular triggered the cooldown, how long you needed to wait in between dashes to clear the cooldown, or really just why sometimes you’d press the dash button and nothing would happen.

Hit Reacts - Hit reacts on players are fine. Long hit reacts are cool. But, it felt like you regained movement control of your character after a hit react before you regained the ability to dash - I’d need to really dig in to figure out what felt wrong here - but in general, I find that it’s clearer when there’s a very firm hierarchy of actions - e.g. you can always do action A if you can do action B. If I can dash while moving, and cancel attacks with dashes, I’m going to assume that any time I can move I should be able to dash. It didn’t feel that way - but I could have been wrong.

Non-audio Feedback - While there were strong indicators when e.g. you got hit (including massive hit stop), some indicators felt missing - for example, after firing the shotgun, you have to cock it to fire again (your character automatically cocks it after a time, but other actions, like dashing, can delay your ability to cock it). How do you know if it’s cocked? Well, there’s a sound. That’s it, as far as I can tell. No animation, no UI indicator, nothing. For something as critical as when your buttons will work vs. do nothing, that’s not good.

Perspective & Depth Perception - Overall the game did a great job with this, but because it uses an orthogonal projection (there’s no foreshortening) and because some enemies and objects are quite tall, trying to tell what I could and couldn’t walk “behind” was often kinda frustrating. There’s not a great solve for this IMO, but it’s one of the drawbacks of their otherwise super super cool art style.

Visual Noise & Getting Lost - It was way too easy to lose yourself onscreen in chaotic firefights. Additionally, the visual they used for Dashes didn’t do enough to help situate the player onscreen AFTER the dash - I really needed to know where I ended up, and the visual did a better job of showing where I WAS then where I ended up. This problem was especially pronounced in the bird area, where some of the bird-man attacks used the same color palate as the drifter’s dash visuals.

Minigames - The Soccer and Dash minigames were awful. Don’t ask or encourage players to engage in a repetitive stress inducing “repeat this thing 800 times” activity. Especially don’t reward it. Please. These things would have worked as cute little side activities (the 100 dash challenge was OK, the soccer game should have just been an easy little goof).

RPG Progression - Overall I thought this worked well, but I did feel that the “big upgrades” (the sword and dash upgrades) shouldn’t have been priced the same as the “little upgrades” (the gun and health pack upgrades). The sword upgrades and dash upgrades were way more “fun” - it felt like the gun, bomb and health pack upgrades were the wrong choice - even if maybe they were pretty good gameplay-wise.

Balance - The shotgun, IMO, was stupid overpowered on bosses and the “dodging through projectile” upgrade on the dash shouldn’t have refilled your ammo - the game should have done more to force you to use the sword on bosses more often.