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Insider (February 2018)
🕑 Added 2018-02-28 09:23:54 +0000 UTC Hello! I’m Mark, and this is what I’ve been doing in February.I had been thinking about this video for quite some time. I’ve spoken about systemic design before, in the immersive sim and the AI episodes, but wanted to provide something a bit more substantial that would define the term and explore all the major elements of this kind of game.
The core of the video was always going to be about why systemic games are cool, things that make games more systemic, and problems that systemic games fall into. But the other parts of the video changed a bunch.
At one point, it was going to be much more about how the immersive sim was dead - but that’s okay because lots of games have systemic design now. But it felt like I was burying good, general purpose info in a video about shifts in the industry. So I shunted that stuff to the end.
(Above: some stuff that got scrapped from the final episode)
It was also going to go into more depth about the inputs / outputs stuff. But I came to realise that it was getting too technical for a general purpose audience - but also way too straightforward for a developer audience. So I scaled it down to the stuff about the Far Cry tiger.
I was also going to make the Zelda stuff even more prominent, but I’ve done a lot of Breath of the Wild coverage now!
Overall I’m pleased with the video and it got a great reception. It’s received almost 250,000 views, and I got lovely comments and tweets from people at Arkane, Ubisoft, and other places.
(Dan is Senior Tech Animator at Motive Studios)
The thing that weirds me out is that the video is so short. I feel like it’s packed with detail and covers a lot of ground, and was fully expecting it to be one of my longest videos. But it came out at just under 13 minutes. Oh well, I don’t think I’ll ever be a long form video creator.
Another video topic that has been on my mind. I had essentially felt unsatisfied with where I left that Dark Souls difficulty video, because I never fully resolved the conflict in my brain.
That being: a belief that game designers carefully craft experiences that we should embrace - but also, that all players are different and should be able to change the game however they want.
I had been thinking about the power of communication for a while, but Celeste’s assist mode gave me the push to turn it into a proper video. Plus, I had been reading about SOMA’s safe mode. And then someone on my Discord suggested Heat Signature’s permadeath stuff and I think that really tied the video together. So, thanks!
This was another well received video. Not just the views, but the huge ratio of likes and comments. This one really resonated with a bunch of people, who wanted to show their appreciation or give their own opinion on the topic.
Most comments were positive. Some were not. Among those, there were some totally reasonable rebuttals. But also plenty of people just have really toxic viewpoints when it comes to accessibility and who gets to finish games.
The comment that really baffles me is one that's like "I don't feel any satisfaction from finishing a game if I know others did so on easy mode". Like, wow. That's a revealing comment.
This stuff really bums me out. One of my least favourite things about games is that there is a skill disparity, and a competitive element. That's wonderful for multiplayer games! But when it affects two people having fun in their own way, it gets nasty.
Anyway. I’ll keep fighting for this stuff. Everyone should get to enjoy this hobby, if you ask me.
Other stuff
So, February’s been a really whirlwind crazy month for me in real life. I won’t go into it right now, just because it’s early days, but that’s all been very distracting. In a good way!
That means I haven’t played much stuff outside of games for videos. Plus, it doesn’t help that I’m still slogging my way through Yakuza 5 which is more than double the length of any previous Yakuza game.
I’m pretty disappointed with this one. So games 1-3 were all focused on one character, Kazuma Kiryu. But Yakuza 4 split the game into four chapters with you playing as Kazuma and three other protagonists. And it kinda worked because the stories were very interlinked and it all took place in the same city.
Yakuza 5 has five protagonists (!), I don’t even know how many cities, and a bunch of different stories that are only vaguely linked. That leads to things like... 40 hours into the game, when it feels like things should be wrapping up, you start a whole new story with a whole new character in a whole new city. Yeesh.
I’ve found it hard to get invested in anything - a city, a character, a story, a move set, a bunch of side quests - because everything keeps changing. The game’s also really bloated with strange side missions and new gameplay like taxi driving and dancing.
From what I’ve seen, Yakuza 6 just goes back to Kazuma kicking arse in Tokyo. So, that sounds promising.
Okay, outside of playing games. GMTK got a shoutout in an advert for Toki Tori 2’s Switch port. That’s cool. A lot of people got turned on to that wonderful game through my video so it’s nice to see the devs acknowledging my work.
Also, even though that quote is very old I largely stand by it. TT2 is good as hell.
I’ve had this quote stuff happen a bunch of times though the old reviews I used to do, but I think this is the first time for a GMTK episode!
Oh, and I also won an award! Critical Distance named me the video essayist of the year, which is very awesome. Their write up is lovely (and surprisingly accurate!) and I received so many congratulations. I’m very honoured.
So, in general, 2018 is just going incredibly well. And, now I’ve said that, everything is gonna start to go wrong isn’t it? I wonder if life is more like Call of Duty or Mario Kart...
Upcoming videos
My plan this year is to start each month with a big, educational topic video (feedback loops, systemic design), and then follow up with something on a single game (Rayman Legends) or a conversation starter (assist modes).
So the topic vid for March will be puzzle design! Looking at games like Portal, Talos Principle, Inside, Stephen’s Sausage Roll, etc to see how their puzzles are made.
Now this is actually really tough. This is not something that just makes intuitive sense to me. And it’s hard to reverse engineer / analyse these puzzles. I mean, I’ve got some ideas. But it’s not the same as looking at a Mario level or a Bioshock stage.
So I’ve been doing some other stuff like making my own puzzles in Deus Ex GO to get into the mindset. And talking to some devs behind rad puzzle games, about their process. Turns out, it’s all quite vague and experimental on their end, too.
If you’re a dev reading this and you’ve made puzzles - shoot me a message. Would love to hear about your experiences.
Anyway. I’ve got lots of notes, footage, and ideas. But right now I’m just kinda throwing ideas around, reading about other types of puzzle, and generally thinking on stuff like a huge nerd.
My job is weird and dumb and you make it possible. Thank you.
Comments
Neil
It's very unlikely you haven't already, but you should definitely talk to Alan Hazelden (@draknek) re: puzzle designs! Lovely guy and wicked smart.
TheSandromatic
that is exactly how I think about mario + rabbids, but what is weird is that mario + rabbids is easily the most constrained tactics game I've ever seen.
Felipe Dal Molin
A piece of advice I use to give is on the possibility space of the puzzles. That is, the quantity of possible moves at any given time. It's also where most aspiring game designers fail when tackling puzzle design: they'll make five or six puzzles that lay down the rules, then quickly go on to make a level that uses all mechanics and starts so open-ended that it's tiring just to look at. That's a common shelf moment for the first half hour of a puzzle game. Puzzles are more enjoyable when you know the possibility space is small, discrete, and yet you can't bear to find the solutions. Ever got tired of starting a new Mario+Rabbids battle, with that camera sweep of the entire battlefield, enemies that are going to take 3 or 4 turns to reach, and several characters to choose from? I think Stephen Sausage Roll is one of the good examples, almost to the point of being too tight. Portal also takes advantage of that, with its closed rooms with only a couple of interest points, growing with time but never to the point of being overwhelming. The Witness does that too, leaving the big boards for completionists (say, the one in the ship, huge and with 3 different mechanics that you don't even know are in play). Into the Breach takes a similar route to Mario+Rabbids (tactic combat with displacement-based core mechanics), but constrains the board and fits it in one screen to embrace the puzzle aspect. I think there are exceptions. A level with a huge possibility space but less points of tension can be enjoyable (say, there's plenty of ways to beat it, or the turn/time limit is relaxed, or there are limitless undos and restarts...) Either that, or you put it in a "Side B" of sorts and let the willing players spend hours trying to finish it in under 120 moves. It's important not to mistake "small possibility space" for linear solution, or small number of solutions. The possibility space refers to the player's affordance and their understanding of the game space and available actions. Your research and commitment are awesome, keep up the good work!
Christopher Spong
Ditto this!
Paul Andrei
Hey Mark, congrats on the award, you really deserve it! Could you, maybe, share the data/interviews/ideas you gather for a essay but don't make it in the final cut? I understand that your videos must be accessible for a broader audience but some of us would like to see the more technical stuff :) Thank you very much for your awesome work!
Manuel Alcoba
Congrats on the totally deserved award! Regarding length, the duration of your videos is simply perfect. One of your virtues is that you are able to convey the exact amount of content in just the right time. I'm also glad that Toki Tori 2 gets a Switch version, hopefully Two Tribes get some income from it, it's kind of sad to see that this masterpiece was the reason of their demise. And +1 for anything Antichamber :)
Josh Foreman
Congrats on the well earned award! Your educational vids are my favorite, and why I support you at the level I do. You have a real gift. Your educational pieces rival even best lectures I've attended at GDC.
Garrison Gondek
To me, I think the core question for whether an easy mode is a good or bad inclusion is whether the challenge is core to the feeling the game is trying to evoke or not. In many games, I'd argue it isn't--Uncharted, for example, is famously more fun on easy mode (before 4, at least) because it encourages you to take the sort of mobile, free-wheeling approach to combat encounters that feels like how Nathan Drake would approach things. (Uncharted 4's normal mode is perfect, though, because it encourages those mobile, improvisatory tactics by making them the most effective tactics.) Something like Dark Souls, though? I had a (controversial) comment on Mark's video to the effect of: I think most people who want an easy mode for Dark Souls would be disappointed by the game. Remove the challenge and I think you lose most of what makes people so enamored with that series--that feeling of growth and mastery, looking back at the difficult journey you've taken and how far you've come as player. The combat itself, honestly, is nothing special. Remove the threat from it and I'd argue you really lose something crucial to the game experience. The games would still be wonderfully atmospheric, of course, and have in some cases still quite satisfying to explore, so I might be off base on this. But that's my take on the "Dark Souls easy mode" discussion, at least.
Matt Glanville
I've worked on a few games which included puzzles in my career. The first game I worked on in a professional sense at EA was Create. It's a physics simulation puzzle game very much like The Incredible Machine, where you had to set up elaborate Rube Goldberg-esque chains of events to nudge physics objects into the right place. My approach to designing puzzles is to work backwards. Start with a clear, desirable end result. Then come up with a problem or a complication which prevents that being a simple, straightforward task. Then you can layer in more of these complications, still working backwards, to make puzzles bigger or longer. For example, in Create, I might need to get this ball to start rolling so knock over a tower, but the ball is really heavy so I need to knock it with a fast rocket, but rockets are pulled off course by that magnet so I need to compensate for that, etc. I also try to ensure that when the puzzle is solved, the end result is something satisfying which has a pleasing payoff like some eye candy or watching some big, spectacular thing kick off. One drawback I have found with the approach I described above is that you can end up with very linear puzzles which require the perfect sequence of events to be carried out in a pre-defined way. This can be very frustrating for players and can lead to them just trying to second guess how the designer thinks. In the game I'm working on now and we are definitely trying to move away from this approach to puzzles (if you can call them puzzles) and think of them more like mini sandboxes with one or several problems or obstacles to overcome, and a few different tools available with which you can do that. But the core idea of having a desirable outcome and a complication making it tricky remains a solid high level starting point.
Andy Latham
On the subject of easy modes and the like: I'm of a similar opinion that if a person gets enjoyment from a game using an easy mode, then great. However I wonder if there's some value in comparing with other media. Imagine having an intellectual film that takes a ton of concentration and a level of intelligence to understand, and then making an "easy" version of it, with extra exposition scenes explaining more about what's happening. That would have all sorts of connotations in terms of the film as a work or art (affected by the delivery of its message), as a piece of entertainment (affected by the pace of the scenes), and how it would be received by the public. Secondly the whole subject raises questions about education in the various media. If a game doesn't encourage less experienced/skilled players to try to improve, then does that make it harder for them to become as game-literate? I don't know the answers to these things, but I feel there is more to the conversation than people just giving militant views.
Emanuel
If you are going to shoot on First person puzzlers, you need to checkout Antichamber.
Gabriel Henrique Dalposso
Hey Mark, you talked about never making a long-form video, but I believe it could help a lot if you could make one to deeply look into some aspect of game design (I know it could be a lot of work, but I'd love to see something like that and I believe many would too). Regarding the Puzzle video, I think it's best to try getting into some designer's mind, to see what are their processes and inspirations (instead of trying to figuring them out yourself :D )
Andres de Pedro
I wish i could spend more time on reading/viewing books/tutorials/articles/design tips, but as i cant have 30hours per day, your videos really come handy, thanks for that! Also, praises for your well earned reward!, greetings from Spain ;-)
Congrats Mark for you reward, you really deserve it ! I find your work awesome and inspiring, love it and can’t wait to more. Mael, from the south of France.
