Design Principles

Writing on principles of design that generally inform game design

Multiple Enemy Fights are Fair

Celia Wagar11 Comments

The claim that Souls combat is best suited to one on one seems quite popular, and even Yahtzee barfed it in his let it die video. ( http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/116981-Let-It-Die-Review ) What is the basis for this claim and how would you counter it?

Basis: When you lock onto an enemy, the camera points at them. You cannot lock onto multiple enemies at once.

Counterpoint: This is true in Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising as well, Nier Automata too, and nobody would say this horseshit about those games, even though MGR shits the bed in multiple enemy encounters by having the camera slowly push you into the wall. Continue reading →

Designing Secrets that Stay Hidden

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Hey again (I asked about Gunvolt, super happy you enjoyed it as much as you did), I saw your blog entry about secrets and wanted to ask if in this age of the internet and datamining, do you think it’s possible to hide secrets as well as older games have done? Any special methods you can think of?

The easiest thing you can do is encrypt or keep resources off the hard drive. Don’t describe whatever it is in plaintext, because that’ll get dumped then ctrl F’d. Don’t store whatever you’re hiding in plaintext anywhere. Don’t name the files after it, don’t name the folders after it, don’t have any references to it in any image or sound file, unless you encrypt those files, and hide the encrypted result inside another file that is of a type people would overlook.

The key for hiding things from modern day datamining is Steganography paired with cryptography. Cryptography means nobody can hit ctrl F and find it. Steganography means nobody thinks to look for it. Continue reading →

Awkward Control Styles

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What’s wrong with “it’s scarier if you walk like you’re drunk” if the game’s built around it? It reminds me of when people call Castlevania’s jump unfair. Power IS agency, right? To be challenged, the player must have weakness. What defines “bad” control limits for a game to impose?

I think agency is the wrong word to use with regards to a video game, because unlike real life, there’s no relative scale between games as to how much “agency” they have. In real life, agency is your control over your environment. It’s very easy to compare types and measures of agency between homeless people, stock brokers, weight lifters, and programmers, but in a virtual environment none of that means anything. Do you have a high level of agency in a life simulator where you can buy a home? Do you have more agency in a city builder than a life simulator, assuming they’re of similar complexity? Do you have more Agency in Fallout New Vegas where you get all these narrative choices to do crazy things like disband factions, manipulate people, and shake up the balance of power or whatever, or do you have more agency in Devil May Cry, where you have this overwhelming fine-grain control over what the character can do? Do you have more agency in Chess or Go? What about Tetris? Continue reading →

A Random Encounter Approaches!

Celia Wagar3 Comments

What do you think of random encounters? Do you think they warrant as much hate as they get? What would you do to make them more interesting?

There’s some really easy solutions to random encounters. They’re irritating because if you’re trying to grind intentionally, they drain a ton of your time just walking around. They’re irritating because if you’re trying to get some place, they pop up and drain your time with a fight you don’t want to participate in at that moment. Continue reading →

Playing with Space

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Kay, so Position is something that can be in a lot of possible states. You have X, Y, and Z coordinates. Any object can potentially occupy any combination of these coordinates. Each of these possible coordinates is a state.

In a game oriented around combat, you have your character’s position, then each enemy’s position. So if you had an absolute possibility space lookup, the maximum number of states is every combination of X and Y coordinate between you and the enemy. That number of possible positions is really big. It gets even bigger in 3d games which use floating point math to determine object positions.

So here’s the trouble, redundancy. Realistically, you’re not using all that space. Realistically, any set of coordinates where the difference in position between you and the enemy is the same is the same state for all practical purposes. Realistically, if you and the enemy are too far apart to fight each other, then all the states are redundant until you’re close enough for there to be significant positional play. And the Z coordinate tends to be a bit constrained by gravity, so most 3d games only really play out on an X/Y plane with a bit of Z-Action within that limited height the character can jump, or have the high ground relative to an enemy. Continue reading →

May You Have An Interesting Death

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What are some interesting mechanics in videogames you can think of that involve the player dying? (Like losing your curency in the Souls series when you die too many times)

Okay, so what’s death really? Death is resetting the state of the game to a prior state. How can you change this mechanic? By changing what is persistent through the reset, or what persistent effects are created after the reset, or having something happen between the point you technically die, and the point where the reset actually happens. The other obvious thing is changing the point that is reset to. Continue reading →

For Honor and Souls-style Multiplayer

Celia WagarLeave a comment

I’ve seen a lot of people compare For Honor with fighting games recently, do you have any thoughts on the game?

It’s meh. It’s better than most AAA trash, but it’s kinda simple. Basically, hold LT to lock on and block. You’re always blocking as long as you’re locked on in one of 3 directions, controlled by the right stick. You also attack in the same zone that you’re blocking in. You have light and heavy attacks, heavy attacks are useless unless you’re punishing something with particularly long recovery. You also have a guard break, so you can block, guard break, and light attack. Attacks are slow enough that you can always react and block in the correct zone. Guard breaks are fast but you need to be close. So between these you get the standard rock paper scissors loop: Attack, Guardbreak (throw), Block. Oh, there’s a dodge too, but the dodge sucks. It’s only really useful for dodging out of range if you’re right on the edge of their attack range. Continue reading →

What Makes a Dynamic Platformer?

Celia Wagar1 Comment

You’ve criticized the shallowness of super meatboy for basically being an execution challenge, but where would you say a pure platformer can get depth from, If there isn’t a dynamic element that responds to player input, such as enemies? multiple paths don’t really add dynamism necessary for a game.

Okay, so a lot of this depends on your definition of “pure platformer”. Is Mario a pure platformer? Is Mirror’s Edge a pure platformer? Castlevania and Megaman probably are not. Is Ori and the Blind Forest? It kind of straddles the middle, but also not really.

Mario has dynamic elements that respond to player input. Mirror’s Edge does not in most parts of the game. Super Meat Boy has a few (like the homing worms, and disappearing blocks, which you’ll notice aren’t duplicated in replays).

Multiple routes don’t have much dynamism, true. The idea is more routes on top of routes, on top of routes. Rather than totally distinct and separate routes, you make every little part have overlapping means of execution that have different results/tradeoffs. Continue reading →

Boss Design & Doing a Lot with a Little

Celia WagarLeave a comment

I remember you showed a writeup on how to design enemies from a Platinum games dev who said enemies with patterns would get too boring. Would Lil Horn from Super Meat Boy and Gelaldy from Ys Origin be good examples of that? Each attack pattern for them is exactly the same for each phase.

I feel compelled to say there’s probably exceptions to that rule. Like imagine a boss with patterns that speed up steadily over the fight, or one with patterns that are reactive to the player’s position and therefore are a bit different every time you play. Ninja Gaiden NES even had a perfectly serviceable boss who just walked left and right. Hell, a lot of old NES games had serviceable pattern bosses.

I think Lil Horn is absolutely a terrible boss fight though. Essentially you just repeat it until you memorize where to stand. Most of the boss’s attacks are designed to be unreactable, so you really just need to know in advance what will happen and the same thing will happen every time. There are some randomly spawning obstacles, but these are trivial. Continue reading →

Movie-Fueled Game Design

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Where would you draw the line with developers using movies to influence game design?

I don’t think there’s a line to be drawn so much as there needs to be a methodology.

Creating games is about creating systems, and movies and other stories ostensibly chronicle the interactions of fictional systems, or the interactions of real life systems. So you can look at a movie and say, “whoa, there’s a big focus on kung-fu here, how much of that can I adapt into a game?” Continue reading →