Magic Sword

Surprising Heartbreaks - Gameplay Video

David Lynch on Videogames

- Games without Mystery

When you are spoon-fed a game story, more people instantly know what it is. I love things that leave room to dream and are open to various interpretations. It’s a beautiful thing. It doesn’t do any good for Barry to say, ‘This is what it means.’ Videogame is what it means. If Barry or anyone else could capture what the game is in words, then that’s poetry.”

- Playtesting

"Even with only ten people, you can feel a game differently than if you play it by yourself," he added. "By yourself, you're too relaxed, and you're not really forced to get that feeling of many people in the room which is a horrific feeling, sometimes, but it forces you to see a game through a group's eyes, and you can learn a lot of things from it. Up to that time, you've been working part by part and getting the individual parts working; but seeing it all at once, it could work great part by part, but as a whole, it doesn't."

- Game Stories and Meaning

“There is a key in the game as to its meaning,” said the director. “But keys are weird. There are surface keys, and there are deeper keys. Intellectual thinking leaves you high and dry sometimes. Intuitive thinking where you get a marriage of feelings and intellect lets you feel the answers, where you may not be able to articulate them. Those kinds of things are used in life a lot, but we don’t use them too much in videogames. There are games that stay more on the surface, and there’s no problem interpreting their meaning.”

But what is this?

I am giving a talk at Play & Tell in Copenhaguen, Denmark tomorrow. It's one of the best talks I'll ever give if everything goes well. It's a complicated subject and it is just a bit beyond my comprehension and ability to communicate, so it is actually exciting to talk about it!

It is related to how we create meaning in games and a magic thing that happens when you break it in certain ways.

This is the final slide:

Marriage

Free to Play is like Bad Television

Jonathan Blow talks about how "Free to Play" deeply distorts game design. Also ponders a few of the common retorts made in defense of F2P:

• "It does not affect good game design"
• "F2P is the future of games"
• "But people have fun playing Candy Crush!"

On other news, I gave a talk that required me to diagram this:

On other news, I give a talk in two days at Los Angeles, California, at GDC Next (which, noncoincidentally, has a ton of talks about Free to Play).

I edited a snippet of an interview about Storyteller:

PM: Has working on Storyteller changed the way you think of your own stories for future games?

DB: I realized while making Storyteller that western middle-class culture is highly trained in consuming stories in various forms, but the moment you have to create a narrative, that skill is almost useless. Making stories is still in the hands of storytellers -- we are just more sophisticated consumers.

Storyteller picked a small island of the possible stories that can be created and try to guide players through it smoothly. It tries to make a subset of story creation accessible and engaging. The surprising part is that even with simple elements, you can create pretty sophisticated situations.

Tim Schafer playtests Storyteller

The past week, an ambitious game development conference happened here in Argentina, where we invited a few developers from afar to give talks and mingle with the local creators.

I was in charge of picking the guests and convince them to fly all the way to my hometown, Buenos Aires. I chose based on how useful their insights would be to the local industry, which is mostly small independent studios, as well as bringing to Argentina a piece of the amazement and enlightening I felt when I attended San Francisco's GDC for the first time.

We had Zach Gage (Spell Tower, Ridiculous Fishing) talking about the mobile space and lifestyle choices, Ron Carmel (World of Goo) about what he believes is essential to the commercial success of an independent game, Robin Hunicke (Journey, now Funomena) gave a two day Game Design workshop, Nathan Vella (Swords & Sworcery, Super Time Force, Below) talked about independent game promotion, Gonzalo Frasca covered the link between learning and videogames, Andres Bordeu (Zeno Clash, Rock of Ages) presented the challenges of making a big 3D game in Chile with only 15 people and Lee Petty (Brutal Legend, Broken Age) exposed his process for art direction. There were several presentations from local developers as well!

Lee Petty is on the left. The one on the right is grinning creepily at something...

Love and Money with Ron Carmel.

Wait, are you sure this is a game?

Everything went extraordinarily well and it was a pleasure working with so many professional people that ensured that all the details were taking care of all the time. Our guests gave amazing and insightful talks and got the chance to meet part of our warm and colorful local community of game makers.

Now because of a mix of time and place, old school graphical adventure games are very close to the heart of argentines, and even non-gamers played games like Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango. So we decided to invite Tim Schafer, one of the heroes of the genre, and he graciously accepted to talk about his creative process during his whole career.

Seizing the opportunity, I got him to playtest the latest version of Storyteller. I think he was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the idea behind the game works, and he got the hang of it immediately.

Tim Schafer is playing Storyteller in BEER mode.

It's highly likely this event will happen again next year, even bigger than this one. I really hope it does because it made an impression on everybody.

Also, this post's title is blatant.

Designing for the Schizophrenic Player

Most puzzle games are designed to be played in a linear progression of levels. As designers, our job is to imagine what will happen to players at every point in the game and make choices that fulfill, augment or defy their expectations. But when we have a linear progression of levels we only picture one "player model": each one of his steps is predetermined, we expect him to be progressing in his understanding at the same rate as the game ramps up, and we are shoehorning every single person into this ideal.

The problem with this approach is that people are very different. Some people understand certain things much faster, others have short patience or temper, others are delighted by some puzzles and frustrated and annoyed at others, no matter how well designed. This multiplicity is something I rarely see embraced in game design.

Now we can't design a game for everybody. By every design choice we make in the game, some hypothetical player is left out and others lured in. But even those players that could enjoy our game have different expectations. I want Storyteller to have something for different kinds of people. The nature of levels in Storyteller is eclectic and heterogeneous, so there is no reason to put one after the other.

Of course, a consequence of this is a loss of control on the level pacing, difficulty and dramatic tension (a subject worthy of an article). But this is actually how we go about the world, how we think, how we create meaning and how we define our experiences.

Storyteller needs an initial sequence of levels that introduces the essential ideas of Storyteller: how stories are laid out, how each character and prop affect plot and how levels are solved. This is particularly important because the game is so different from most other games.

But also, references to classical stories of literature and movies: Some solutions to some levels in Storyteller feel like a "reduction" of well known stories like Romeo and Juliet. Those who are familiar with the references are pleased when the game acknowledges them. Those that don't recognize the references will be delighted when if they get to see them at some point in their life! (hey! I played a game that mentioned this movie!).

But also intricate soap-opera levels that challenges your understanding of the game and ability to project situations in your head.

But also, easy stories that snaps an idea at you like a short poem.

But more than cleverness, or challenges, or stories, what I enjoy putting into my work the most are surprises. Players who get into Storyteller find plenty: what happens if I put a character in the story after he died?, What happens if I put a mentor with a villain? Can I make Maria fall in love with her uncle?

This raises design questions: how do I structure levels to convey what they are about so a specific player finds what he wants to play? how do I reveal the interesting parts of the game to new players? are thumbnails enough to express what might be inside the level? Does it matter?

Storyteller selected for GDC Next 10!

Storyteller was selected as one of 10 games that will be showcased at GDC Next 10 at Los Angeles, California, between the 5th and 7th of November. The selection includes well known games like Capy's Super Time Force and Double Fine's Broken Age, so I am happy!

I will be giving a talk about turning stories into gameplay instead of putting gameplay in stories (or putting stories in gameplay).

And next week a mini game developers conference is happening here in Argentina with top-notch international guests like Tim Schafer, Ron Carmel, Nathan Vella, Robin Hunicke, Lee Petty and Zach Gage. It's free! More info here.

All these things happening mean that I will have much less time to sit down and work on the game, though. Storyteller's development is made of alternating "stretches": there are periods of experimentation where I break everything fearlessly to try new stuff, and stretches of getting the game to be stable enough to be played by actual people. I was on an experimentation phase but now I have to stop to get the current version stable for the trip.

I am now at the point where I am getting a glimpse of the release date of the game. There are branches of experimentation that will not be explored and features that are falling off, as I try to shape how the final version of the game will feel like. This required me to think about the game at a higher level, and everyday development has been affected by it: The current version feels *qualitatively* better than the last one. I expect the game to improve in leaps the next months (after I stop traveling around!).

Gratuitous Screenshot

Where Difficulty is Meaningless

Storyteller's (current) last level.

This week I visited Cochabamba, Bolivia, to talk about independent game development. We spent several hours doing Q&A, that always invariably helps me clear my thoughts on many subjects. At some point, I got asked:

How do you ramp up difficulty in Storyteller?

Spending so much time under a rock making my game, the question took me by surprise because when I design Storyteller, there is no concept of difficulty in my head.

There are some games for which the word "difficulty" has a clear meaning, like a knob that can be turned up to force players to work more to make progress. In Tetris, increasing the speed at which pieces fall happens to produce that we have to train more to keep up. Spelunky demands an increasing amount of real time training as you get further, thus getting "more difficult" [1].

A key concept for this kind of games is repetition: performing accurate physical tasks like jumping+shooting+aiming+mid-air-movement requires repetition to train your motor skills. We could visualize this training as a curve that goes up where the game can set the minimum bar in a continuous fashion: enemies get faster, jumping needs to be more accurate, require efficient resource management, etc.

But what does "difficulty" mean for a game like Storyteller, that does not require any kind of motor prowess, there is no punishment for making mistakes and you have all the time in the world to make your next move? When we figure out a riddle, being faced again with a very similar riddle is boring: we are not learning anything new!

Storyteller is not a series of obstacles I devised to put players to the test until they "beat it" (horrible word, btw). That mindset is an inheritance from old days where arcades tried to make you lose your money. When a designer is antagonistic the game feels antagonistic and as a player I find it puerile and automatically assume it is not for me.

I want puzzle games to feel like a garden of interesting ideas with multiple paths that sometimes guide gently and sometimes lead me to wilderness that require effort and familiarity.

People smarter than me found out that each game defines a universe with its own rules that create a "meaning of existence". Each game states "Find the meaning of your life, on my terms". When we become competent at a game, many of the ideas and discoveries we made can't even be put into words: we just understand the ideas and perceive the beauty.

Storyteller allows the creation of a large amount of interesting stories, and challenges players to figure out how far they can be taken. The concept of "difficulty" is not part of this aesthetic, it has no place in this universe. Thus a "difficulty progression" make no sense. Each level is a new idea that stems from the mechanics, not a knob that I turned up [2]. Every time I try to decide which level come after which other level, or whether I need an intermediate level between other two, I ask myself:

• Can I expect players to understand all the pieces necessary to make this puzzle interesting and not confusing?
• Is this level making the game repeat itself or is it adding something new?
• What would players be expecting here? Do I want to break that expectation?
• or ultimately "does it feel right to play level B after level A?"

As a consequence, players might find a later level easier than previous ones, and sometimes they will get stuck and frustrated because a certain level is unusually tricky. I am fine with this. As a bonus, this policy also tells me when to stop making levels: when I am not adding new ideas to discover.

And to take this further, with the recent overhaul of the level selector I am opening levels in somewhat unorthodox way:

Instead of a general difficulty progression, there are several "pages"[3] that start with a short linear progression to make sure players understand a few key concepts and then sets them loose to pick whatever level they want. This blurs the notion of difficulty even further! The way I see progression in Storyteller is like a ring of understanding that gets larger as you play the game, allowing more and more freedom to discover how the game defines its meaning of life.

I suspect a vast amount of puzzle games out there are in the same situation, but were forcibly structured linearly by increasing difficulty, discouraging many players from finding its treasures.




[1] I am oversimplifying. Spelunky's difficulty progression way more interesting than a linear curve, but a proper analysis would need its own article.
[2] It can be argued that if you take the last level in the level selector, it is clearly *way* more difficult to solve than the first one, but the difficulty difference lies just on how used you are to see the world through the eyes of Storyteller.
[3] Each page explores a different "branch" of Storyteller's aesthetic.