Like many people who love video games, I have a conundrum: I own more games than I will ever realistically have time to play. It’s a problem that has accumulated slowly over many years, compounded by Steam sales, charity bundles, and subscription services. It’s of course a wonderful predicament to be in, as it reflects the richness of a vast creative form¹. But the fact that I would seemingly never catch up weighed on me, and it invited reflection when I was setting goals for 2025 in January.

Three years ago, I experimented with a structured weekly sketching practice and managed to maintain it for the full 52 weeks. Each sketch took about an hour, which proved to be doable even with a busy schedule. What if I applied that same method to sampling the games from my backlog?

To make this work, the first thing I had to let go of was any hope of actually completing these games. This is a sharp contrast to the way I usually like playing video games: one at a time, engaging deeply with systems and stories, playing until the credits roll or I decide to move on. Many of these games had been “on my playlist” for years. Sadly, I had to accept that I would either sample them for a few hours as part of this experiment, or I would probably never play them.

As a professional game designer, I also feel it’s beneficial for me to “play widely”². The games in my backlog ranged from Kei to AAA, and were from studios all over the world. I pulled old consoles out of storage to play games on PS3, Vita, and 3DS. I have found it enormously helpful in my creative practice to draw inspiration from games of all kinds, to build on what has been done before and to point towards what hasn’t.

Catching up to December, I have just completed my 52^nd weekly backlog play. Every Friday this year I chose a game from my backlog (helpfully tracked on Backloggd) and played it for at least an hour. Some games I decided to continue playing, others I moved on from. In the end I completed 22 of them, though most of those were very short (1-2 hours). I also gave myself the flexibility to add to my backlog as I went, which allowed me to play nine new releases from 2025. The oldest game was Mega Man Legends from 1997; I played it on a PS TV that I impulse bought off eBay.

Here are some mini-review highlights³ of some games that particularly resonated with me:

• Folklore (PS3, 2007): I bought this game because of its reputation as a hidden JRPG gem from the otherwise fallow PS3 era. Folklore is an occult detective story set on a remote seaside town in Ireland and prominently features Celtic mythology. Each realm is a little puzzle where you absorb new abilities from enemies, then figure out how to use them against other enemies or hazards. The collectible picture book illustrations you find are secretly strategy guides, hinting at what counters what. Levels culminate in a boss fight that requires cleverly combining several of the abilities absorbed in that area.

• The Exit 8 (PC, 2023): The conceit for this game is brilliant. You’re stuck in a surreal loop in the repeating liminal corridors of a Japanese metro station; inspect the passageway for “anomalies” and retreat backwards if you find one. Sometimes the anomalies are obvious and scary; the best ones are the tiny odd details that require focus to spot, and act as jump scares in plain sight when you finally clock them.

• Vanquish (PS4 remaster, 2020): I was really glad to finally give this game its due, it’s an incredible action shooter that’s still like nothing else out there. Vanquish takes the core controls of a conventional third-person cover shooter, and adds rocket leg boosters for nearly unlimited mobility (!) and on-demand slow-mo (!!). You’ll need both to handle waves of enemies, massive robot bosses , and bullet hell barrages. I adore how its systems incentivize the player to push forward and take risks in battle.

• Many Nights a Whisper (PC, 2025): Another beautiful short game that blew me away with its premise. Ten years ago, you were chosen to perform a ritual. By day, under your mentor’s guidance, you practice sacred archery; by night, the people of the town come to offer you their wishes through a hole in the wall. Some are selfish, others are heartbreaking, and you must choose whether or not to accept them. The day of the ceremony comes, and you get one chance to land an impossible shot and light the holy brazier across the bay (but you’ve practiced, right?) Light the torch, and all the chosen wishes will be granted. No pressure.

• Jeanne d’Arc (PS5 port, 2024): Level-5 is a studio with a very distinctive charming style, and I’ve had my eye on this PSP SRPG for years. I was surprised and delighted when it received a port on modern consoles last year. I was also grateful for the QoL features the emulation provided (i.e. rewind and save states), since the game is tuned on the rather unforgiving side. This charming anime adaptation of French history, including full magical girl transformation sequences of Jeanne turning into a valkyrie-like armoured saint, really won me over.

• Metal Garden (PC, 2025): A short indie FPS with incredible atmosphere and vibes. The level design is superb, minimalist but flavourful, and pulls elements from both arena shooters and immersive sims. This small focused game by a solo dev punches far above its weight.

• Parasite Eve (PS1, 1998): I’ve always been curious about this game, Square in their golden age taking on survival horror mixed with RPG. The art direction grabbed me immediately, New York City in wintertime rendered in a gritty style with chunky polygons and prerendered backgrounds that feel somewhere between FF7 and FF8. The story is anchored as a supernatural police procedural, but takes some wild unpredictable swerves that make it feel like anything could happen. I only got about halfway into my playthrough but would love to get back to it.

• Bernband (PC, 2014): Wander through an alien city at night; there is no objective and no ending. Bernband is an influential walking sim by Tom van den Boogaart, a future member of Sokpop Collective. I really admired the excellent art direction and audio design. In its low-fi simplicity, it evokes an uncanny and mundane sense of a place. Tom is currently working on a remake!

• Like a Dragon: Ishin! (PS4 remake, 2023): This is my second attempt at getting into this series, after spending a few fun hours with Yakuza 0 that didn’t stick. This is not a game that is typically recommended for newcomers to the series, since its whole shtick is portraying recognizable Yakuza characters as historical figures. But I’m a history nerd, and I found the Bakumatsu setting really intriguing, and enjoyed walking around 19th century Kyoto. I was having a great time with this game, but regretfully decided to move on due to time constraints. The length of these massive open world games is the yet other barrier to me getting into the series.

• Arctic Eggs (PC, 2024): I had misunderstood this game to be a narrative-focused walking sim; it was much more difficult and skillful than I anticipated! This game really makes a meal of its one central pan-flipping mechanic. It demands that you develop a “flick of the wrist” muscle memory and keen intuition around the shape and weight of different items. The excellent pacing of new ingredients (and combinations of ingredients) keeps things feeling fresh.

Looking back now at the end of the year, I consider this weekly backlog play experiment to have been a success. The ten highlights above represent only a fraction of the games I enjoyed sampling this year, and I learned a lot from the games that didn’t resonate with me too. A structured practice like this has proven to be a successful method to overcome my mental blocks and just do something. It’s much better to have finally played these games, even for just a few hours, rather than gazing at them longingly in my backlog and wishing I had the time.

Now I’m left to debate whether I carry this practice into 2026, at the opportunity cost of some other new weekly goal⁴. I’m tempted to tinker with the formula a bit. For instance, I’ve found that longer RPGs aren’t a great fit for this method, since they often take several hours to really find their footing. Would a longer time commitment unlock that? I also noticed I had a natural tendency for selecting shorter games, since they at least had some possibility of completion. Perhaps I should make my selection randomly, and take the choice out of my biased hands…

As I figure things out, I’m wishing you and your loved ones a happy new year, and all the best in 2026 🎆

<sup>1. I’m grateful for the material well-being that also makes this possible. ↩
2. And read / watch / listen / be in nature widely too! ↩
3. This format consciously imitating Dan Bruno‘s great monthly media posts. ↩
4. A structured writing practice for this blog, for instance. ↩</sup>

The Last of Us Part II Remastered is out now on PC, and includes a small update for the roguelike survival mode No Return. We’ve added four new maps to the rotation, and two new playable characters from Part I: the gruff loveable smuggler Bill and the Firefly leader Marlene. I’m really thrilled with how these new characters fit into the mode, and wanted to unpack a little bit of their design process.

Every character in No Return has a unique loadout of starting gear and abilities. Our first priority when designing this kit is connecting to character traits from the story. For some this is straightforward: Abby as a brawler, Tommy as a sniper, Lev as a stealth archer. Others require more creativity: Dina mentions that Eugene “taught me about rewiring electronics and stuff”, which translated into her crafting-focused identity.

In terms of thematic connection, Bill was definitely in the former category. We wanted to give him his iconic pump shotgun and trap mines from his appearance in Part I. We also wanted to play off his identity as a smuggler, which connected nicely to the dead drop mechanic in No Return. Bill can optionally deliver crafting items to clandestine dropboxes on the map, and will receive a double reward for doing so (both a new random weapon and a new random recipe). No other character has a trait connected to completing dead drops, so it was a nice unique hook for him.

Getting extra rewards from dead drops helped us solve another design problem: shotguns are extremely powerful in No Return. We found through internal playtesting that starting with a shotgun was difficult to balance; enemies frequently run towards you in this mode, and ammo scarcity is less of a constraint. Therefore we opted to instead make Bill’s fully-upgraded custom pump shotgun a dead drop reward. Players would have to invest a little more effort to get it, but doubling the random reward made it appear reliably.

To balance his built-in advantages, we made Bill unable to dodge but have reduced hit reactions from melee (like Joel and Tommy in No Return). The trap mines and pump shotgun give players effective tools to overcome this vulnerability.

Marlene was a little more challenging to express thematically. She’s narratively connected to the Fireflies, but what could that hook into mechanically? Our first idea was to give her the Assault Rifle, a full-auto weapon unique to the Fireflies in Part I (and not previously available in Part II). We also gave her the option to “switch lanes” once per run, as if she were tapping into her underground Firefly connections and intel. Both were interesting, but didn’t quite establish a strong gameplay identity.

We finally landed on the idea of connecting her to gambits, which are dynamic optional challenges that randomly appear during a run. In The Last of Us, Marlene is a brave but desperate leader willing to risk her entire organization on a long shot with Ellie. What if No Return players were placed in a similar “all or nothing” position, required to complete every gambit or risk losing their encounter reward. We thought this was a really unique playstyle and helped balance out her powerful starting weapon.

No Return remains close to my heart, and I’m looking forward to seeing the incredible runs that players have with Bill and Marlene. A big thanks to everyone on the team who worked on the new update and on bringing The Last of Us Part II Remastered to PC!

Last Thursday night, I got to attend The Game Awards privately knowing that we had a surprise announcement up our sleeves. As the “one more thing” before the show wrapped up, we dropped our first trailer for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, a new sci-fi adventure from Naughty Dog. The live reaction in the theatre was incredible, and I’m thrilled that I could be there for it.

I’m excited to share my role as co-game director on Intergalactic. My counterpart is Kurt Margenau, a veteran designer at Naughty Dog who I’ve worked closely with for over a decade (since Uncharted 4). We’ve got a terrific team working on this game, and I’m honoured to be creating this incredible new world with them.

While we’re letting the trailer speak for itself for now, director Neil Druckmann revealed a few more details on the Naughty Dog blog:

“Intergalactic stars our newest protagonist, Jordan A. Mun, a dangerous bounty hunter who ends up stranded on Sempiria – a distant planet whose communication with the outside universe went dark hundreds of years ago. In fact, anyone who’s flown to it hoping to unravel its mysterious past was never heard from again. Jordan will have to use all her skills and wits if she hopes to be the first person in over 600 years to leave its orbit.”

In an interview with the NY Times, Neil revealed that “it takes inspiration […] from classic anime like the 1988 movie Akira and the 1990s series Cowboy Bebop”. The game is also scored by legendary composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Seeing the reactions from fans online has been a real treat, and I’m grateful for all the excitement and support for our team. Until we have more to share… see you on the other side.

Like many other game designers with a systems bent, I have spent copious enjoyable hours this year with the breakout indie hit Balatro. It’s usually described as a “poker roguelike”, which is a perfect logline for onboarding curious new players. Framed this way, it makes sense that it often invites comparison to Slay The Spire, another hugely popular deckbuilding roguelike.

It’s therefore ironic that the developer’s primary inspiration was not poker, but rather a Cantonese card game called Big Two. Furthermore, LocalThunk has stated that he drew initial inspiration from the score-chasing roulette game Luck Be A Landlord, but otherwise intentionally avoided playing other roguelikes during development. This often makes Balatro feel mechanically distinct from other roguelikes, since it does not always converge on the consensus “best practices” in the genre.

Seeing the game this way led me to an offbeat hypothesis. In returning to first principles on a deckbuilding roguelike, I believe Balatro’s design had a sort of convergent evolution towards a different game genre. A genre where players also seek synergies while drafting an evolving build, banking funds is rewarded with interest, risk mitigation is a fundamental skill, and the winner must survive multiple structured rounds with escalating stakes.

That genre is “auto chess”, which exploded in 2019 with the release of the popular mod Dota Auto Chess¹. While there are many thriving games in the genre today, the one I’m most familiar with is Teamfight Tactics (TFT), which uses the game engine and characters from League of Legends. Riot’s president of esports claims it is “the number one strategy game in the world” in terms of popularity. For the sake of this comparison I will use it as representative of the wider auto chess genre.

Structurally, both Teamfight Tactics and Balatro always progress through an ordered structure of stages (antes) and rounds (blinds). The games are divided between the core phase (champions autobattling or playing poker hands) and the deckbuilding phase (drafting champions or buying jokers). The player’s performance in the core phase generates the currency for the deckbuilding phase. Both games also feature special rounds scheduled at the end of each stage (a carousel draft or a boss blind).

Note that, unlike Balatro, modern roguelikes do not usually follow this kind of regular sequence. Most have instead structurally converged on Slay The Spire’s randomly generated branching adventure map. Furthermore, it’s uncommon for deckbuilders to use currency for drafting; most favor the simpler “choose one from three options” mechanic.

More conspicuously, Balatro shares interest as a mechanic with auto chess: players receive additional currency at the end of each round for each $5 they’re sitting on, like interest in a bank account. This is an exceedingly rare mechanic in video games more broadly, even in the strategy genre. It suggests to me that the designers of both games had a similar need to incentivize conservative purchasing decisions. Otherwise, the player’s existential drive to win each round would discourage them from sitting on unproductive money. The interest mechanic rewards players who just barely win each round, leaving the remainder of their unspent resources to grow.

In terms of drafting, champions in auto chess and jokers in Balatro provide specific roles within a build. TFT gives buffs for stacking several champions of the same class and origin, and generally rewards balancing combat roles (tank, damage, healer). Balatro players can seek to maximize their score engine by assembling +Chips, +Mult, and ×Mult rewards across multiple jokers, ideally with significant overlap in their trigger conditions.

A tactical element of both games is the power curve of certain champions and jokers. To survive the early rounds, a player needs to draft for things that provide immediate value and tempo. Cheap $1 and $2 champions carry the early rounds in TFT. Similarly, jokers like Ice Cream and Popcorn provide immediate value, but decrease in potency after each round. As the game progresses to later stages, players need to pivot their build towards scaling power². Managing this transition is a major skill element in both games.

Another shared strategic element is the ability of players to viably target “high” or “low” builds. For instance, an obvious strategy in Balatro is to build around high-value hands such as Flush and Straight. However, there are also competitive strategies for building around the lowest hand possible: High Card. Similarly, there are team compositions in TFT that seek to level up stacks of $2 champions, and others that count on turning out a $5 hypercarry.

Having a broad range of meta builds gives skillful players the opportunity to adjust their strategy on the fly based on the luck of the draft. Additionally, both games have mechanics that disincentivize relying on the same build every run regardless of circumstance. In TFT, all players are drafting from the same pool of champions. If another player is attempting the same team composition, those champions will get snatched up and become harder to find. Skillful TFT players can use this information to their advantage, pivoting their build towards undervalued champions.

In Balatro, the boss blinds create a similar dynamic. For instance, in the first week of the game’s release, the most popular strategy was to build a single-suit Flush deck. However, savvy players noticed that this choice was risky; there are four different boss blinds that each debuff a particular suit, which hard counters this build³. The philosophy that “a burnt hand is the best teacher” coaxes players to mitigate risk and integrate a secondary strategy into their drafting.

I have read and listened to several developer interviews about Balatro, and LocalThunk has been very open about his process and design values. I firmly believe that the similarities to auto chess that I’ve established here cannot be attributed to direct inspiration. Rather, I believe there are certain game design patterns that emerge organically when seeking to craft a particular kind of experience. Perhaps we’re all following these ley lines of game design, unwittingly tracing some underlying truth of mathematics and systems.

<sup>1. Another connection: Dota Auto Chess was also inspired by a Chinese board game: Mahjong. ↩
2. Balatro even plays with this as a difficulty element: adding “Eternal” stickers to jokers so they cannot be sold is a significant challenge. ↩
3. LocalThunk discusses this design choice in detail in an interview on the podcast “Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games” around the 20 minute mark. ↩</sup>

My daughter (age 6) is aware that her daddy makes video games, though with somewhat abstract notions of what that actually entails. She has often asked if we could make a game together, which led me to research various child-friendly gamedev tools. On a whim I picked up Game Builder Garage, a game-making toolkit released for the Switch in 2021. I hadn’t heard much about it since its release, but generally trusted Nintendo’s ability to appeal to young children.

I had every expectation that this experiment would fail. My kid enjoys playing games, but making games can be slow and tedious. Nintendo’s website says the game is designed for children “as young as first year elementary students”, which is slightly beyond her. She is still in the early stages of learning to read, so we always played together; she held the controller and I narrated the lessons.

Game Builder Garage uses a visual programming language based on placing and connecting “nodons”. There are various types of nodons for inputs, calculations, outputs, and object spawners. Each nodon is also given a little personality, with a unique cartoon avatar, audio FX, and quirky dialogue in the interactive tutorials. This is a great help in making abstract gamedev concepts more memorable.

The tutorials are well designed, slowly easing the player into new concepts and frequently switching back to “game view” to let the player test out their iterative changes. They’re tightly constrained experiences: the player can only do the “right thing” in every step and the lesson doesn’t advance until they do. The exception is the final step, where the player is given a limited opportunity for customization (selecting colours, adjusting music, etc.)

This format worked perfectly for my daughter. Each step was simple for her to follow and it was impossible to get the lesson into a bad state. If any part required math concepts that were beyond her (multiplication, negative numbers, cartesian coordinates), she could still advance the lesson by heedlessly following the simple instructions for nodon placement. It gave her confidence and pride to create full games with minimal parental assistance.

The seven interactive lessons covered multiple game genres in increasing complexity: a simple 2D platformer, a top-down ball roller, a side-scrolling shooter, a 3D puzzle room, a racing game, and culminating in a complex 3D platformer. It all felt like a vastly improved version of my own serendipitous childhood discovery of game making, attempting crude versions of every genre in the StarCraft campaign editor or on a TI-83+ graphing calculator.

This last weekend my daughter proudly finished the final interactive lesson, and I was curious if the appeal of Game Builder Garage would hold up when presented with a blank canvas. I was delighted to watch her confidently assemble new games from scratch, though so far mostly platformers and hewing closely to the concepts and structures taught in the lessons. Her biggest difficulty has been debugging when things aren’t right, but thankfully I’m able to assist with that.

It’s been fun to see gamedev concepts influence her thinking in small ways. Watching me play a PC game, she asked: is this game also made with nodons? She was very impressed when I told her that, basically, it was! She also, unprompted, made the following comparison (quoting a text message):

In the car [daughter] was asking about the airbags in the car. She asked how the car knows to pop them out. I said the force of the crash. She goes “oh so it’s like a touch nodon is in the front of the car that sends a signal to the airbag pop nodon”.

I’ve been evangelizing Game Builder Garage to all the other parents I know. It’s truly a terrific way to introduce programming and gamedev concepts to young children. My kid had a blast with it, and I’m grateful to get to share game making with her as a creative medium and hobby.

Wanted to share a bit of news about what I’ve been up to since shipping The Last of Us Part I remake in 2022. I’ve had the privilege to continue in the role of game director on The Last of Us Part II Remastered. I helped oversee porting the game to the PlayStation 5, including various technical enhancements and DualSense controller integration. We also added a whole slate of new features: lost levels with developer commentary, a guitar free play mode, new bonus skins, audio descriptions for cinematics, and much more.

The one that is closest to my heart is the new roguelike mode: No Return. I was the lead systems designer on the original The Last of Us Part II (PS4), so I was well-versed in our extremely robust enemy AI, terrific combat spaces, and a deep roster of weapon, melee, crafting, stealth and upgrade systems. In pitching this mode, I knew that we could remix these elements (and some fun new ones, more on that later) into thousands of dynamic combinations.

Why make a roguelike? We certainly took broad inspiration from the amazing games that have revitalized the genre in the modern era; some of my personal favourites include Spelunky, Hades, Dead Cells, Vampires Survivors, FTL, Cult of the Lamb, Prey: Mooncrash, The Path of Champions, and Inscryption. The sheer variety of these games proves that the fundamental roguelike concepts can be flexibly adapted to serve many genres, and to resonate with different design goals.

The particular design goals of No Return have been on my mind for a long time as a combat designer; in fact, I’ve written about them before on this very blog. In “Thwarting Boring Tactics”, I shared how Deathloop stymied my bad immersive sim habits by removing my ability to save scum. The permadeath aspect of a roguelike forces players to push through and improvise when plans go awry, emerging from the situation with either a memorable defeat or a hard fought comeback. The escalating stakes as you move deeper into a run create a thrilling tension.

Another major design goal was improvisational play (see “Intentionality & Improvisation”), which is a type of gameplay loop that asks the player to constantly make new plans on the fly. A roguelike structure supports this playstyle through randomized items and encounters.

Each character in No Return begins with a unique loadout, but the guns, recipes, and upgrades you acquire during a run are randomized. Because of this, players can’t always rely on their favourite standby items and tactics, and may instead be forced to equip a gun or crafting item that they neglected in the main story. The weapon may be unfamiliar or unwieldy at first, and lead to some spectacular failures; with luck, it eventually expands the player’s toolkit with a new option.

A similar dynamic is found on the randomized encounter side. The player may know one of the WLF combat encounters by heart, but the strategies become totally different with infected enemies in that space. They know how to fight the Rat King with Abby’s arsenal, but what about Ellie’s kit? We also have some small variations in certain layouts; the player may have to scramble when they find their go-to escape route closed off.

This philosophy also led to the addition of “mods”, which are random rule variants found on certain encounters. Because No Return is not canon, we had the freedom to experiment while eschewing the series’s usual groundedness. Some mods were designed to shake up the player’s playstyle, either reinforcing certain tactics (e.g. melee sets enemies on fire) or limiting them (e.g. long guns locked). Other mods create exciting new situations for the player to figure out: foes dropping pipe bombs on death, infected pustule clouds raining from the sky, or even (my favourite) invisible enemies.

As you can probably already tell, No Return was a real passion project for me, and I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to marry the excitement of a roguelike structure with the incredible combat mechanics of The Last of Us. I’m looking forward to seeing the reaction to the many new features in The Last of Us Part II Remastered when the game releases worldwide on January 19th, 2024.

Back in 2011, a friend gently guided me through the steep learning curve of League of Legends, and I’ve been playing it on and off ever since. For about as long, I’ve been casually following the competitive LoL esports scene, especially enjoying the Worlds championship tournament that caps off each year. Worlds 2023 has been particularly great thanks to a big change: Riot Games replaced the traditional “groups” stage with a “Swiss” format stage instead. Examining this change through a game design lens helps reveal why it has been so successful and impactful.

For years, the essential structure of the Worlds tournament has been the same. In the “groups” stage, teams are randomly drawn into smaller groups (usually four groups of four), and the top two teams from each group advance to the “knockout” stage quarterfinals. In 2014, the concept of “pools” was added so that teams would be seeded for groups based on their regional standings. This structure has worked reasonably well and created some terrific memorable tournaments, but one persistent awkward issue has been the randomness of the initial groups drawing.

For game designers, randomness is a tool and not necessarily a bad thing. It’s also not a unitary property; there are many different flavours of randomness, as I explored in a previous article about card design in Hearthstone. For designing a tournament, there are many upsides to randomness: it has the potential to create exciting matchups and surprising upsets, and a random draw is “fair” to all competitors.

However, a tournament has two primary objectives: to crown the best team based on skill, and to showcase exciting matches for the spectators. The fact that the initial random drawing for groups has an outsize impact on the overall outcome is inimical to both of these goals.

Because of the large skill discrepancies between teams and regions, the chance placement into groups can effectively predetermine who will advance. In mathematics this is called “sensitive dependence on initial conditions”. For instance, sometimes four strong teams are drawn into the same group. This creates a fiercely competitive “group of death” with a hard road for any of them to advance to quarterfinals. The opposite is an unbalanced “group of life” with two strong teams and two weak teams. This produces boring one-sided matchups and a practically foregone outcome. Even worse, it can set up pointless matches for teams that have already been mathematically eliminated.

From a game design perspective then, what is the fundamental flaw here? To quote Mark Rosewater: “randomness cannot be the destination; it has to be the journey.” Randomness is fun when players have a chance to respond to it. An ideal tournament format would not sharply delimit the range of possible outcomes with the initial random draw, but instead empower teams to change their destinies through their hard fought victories and defeats. From the spectator’s point of view, it should also produce close matchups and provide high stakes.

For comparison, let’s examine the “Swiss” stage which replaced the “groups” stage at Worlds 2023. The structure of this format was developed in the 1890’s for chess tournaments. In the first round, teams are randomly paired (against a region other than their own). In each subsequent round, teams are randomly paired against teams with the same win-loss record. This continues for five rounds until each team advances (with 3 wins) or is eliminated (with 3 losses); elimination and advancement matches are best-of-3.

For example, in round 3, there will necessarily be four teams with 2 wins, eight teams with 1 win / 1 loss, and four teams with 2 losses. A random draw will pair each team against another team with an identical win-loss record. A 2-0 team that wins advances to the next stage; a 0-2 team that loses is eliminated. All other teams continue into round 4 with either a 2-1 or a 1-2 record, and those records determine the next random pairing.

This structure provides a beautiful mix of positive and negative feedback that any game designer would recognize approvingly. Teams that win get closer to advancement, but also place themselves into the more competitive “group” of other winners (negative feedback). When winning teams qualify for the next stage, they no longer stick around to act as spoilers for the remaining matches (negative feedback). On the other hand, weaker teams eliminated early no longer provide “easy wins” (positive feedback).

Note that both formats rely heavily on random drawings for determining matchups. The critical difference is that the “groups” format fully resolves all randomization before the first match is played. In the “Swiss” format, something teams can control (their win-loss record) is fed back into the randomization. Teams are no longer trapped in groups of life or death, but chart a course through “fair” matchups driven by their skillful play.

Note that this format does not eliminate “luck” in draws; compare NRG’s easy path through the Swiss stage with KT Rolster’s slog. Recall, however, that a tournament has a second primary goal: to create excitement for the spectators. In this regard, the Swiss format has two significant benefits.

Firstly, the format optimizes for matchups between teams that are close in skill. The strongest and weakest teams quickly diverge into separate trajectories, reducing the odds of a one-sided stomp as the tournament advances. Secondly, it ensures that every match is meaningful to the outcome of the tournament. There are no lopsided groups or predetermined outcomes; every match is a fight to advance or a fight to survive.

Games that incorporate randomness need to do so with great care and intentionality, and it’s been fascinating to see a “metagame” of tournament design incorporate those same design considerations. Riot Games deserves credit for shaking up their longstanding competitive structure, and I’m excited to continue following Worlds 2023 through the knockout stage.

At the beginning of 2022, I embarked on a project of drawing once per week for the entire year. On Christmas day I completed my 52^nd and final sketch.

Among all the possible hobbies out there, why pursue sketching? I think on some level it’s an opportunity to revisit a beloved childhood hobby. Growing up in Quebec, I pored over my local library’s collection of Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées and Japanese manga imported from France (before it was widely available in English), then spent hours trying to recreate Akira Toriyama’s spiky-haired characters and incredible action shots. When this passtime suddenly became embarrassing in my self-conscious teenage years, I abandoned it entirely.

The more recent and direct inspiration for this project was visiting the Hayao Miyazaki exhibition at the Academy Museum last fall. I was familiar with the lavish storyboards he drew for his films, which only became more stunning in the final animation. However, what really struck me while touring this exhibition were Miyazaki’s preproduction sketches: the raw first drafts of characters and locations done in simple pencil and watercolours. While I could never aspire to be an artist on Miyazaki’s level, being able to share ideas visually in this simple manner seemed like an incredibly practical creative skill, and during that visit I developed the aspiration to cultivate it.

(I’ve also long noted sketching as a hobby among game developers I admire, including Brendon Chung, Adam Saltsman, and Derek Yu.)

I began my pursuit by reading “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards, which came highly recommended for people with an engineering background like myself. I appreciated the way she broke down the skill of drawing into components that gradually built on each other (edges, spaces, relationships, light & shadow, the gestalt), and I enjoyed completing the exercises provided with each chapter.

Edwards also provided another argument for learning to draw. Her perspective is that drawing is “basic to training visual perception”. To draw with correct proportion and perspective, you have to ignore the preconceived ideas of spatial relations from your “left brain” and rather see things as they actually are. Familiar objects acquire unintuitive properties when projected from three dimensions to two. Developing this way of seeing is a core building block skill for all “right brain” creative work¹, and is therefore inherently valuable.

“Drawing used to be a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness.” – Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Finally, in structuring this particular challenge for myself, I drew from books such as “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, “Ultralearning” by Scott H. Young, and the works of Cal Newport. All three authors explore best practices for self-directed learning, and suggest strategies for maintaining progress and motivation. As someone with a busy schedule and prone to being fickle about new hobbies, I sought to structure my practice in a way that I could stick with for an entire year.

Clear’s book in particular suggests that common wisdom about motivation is backwards. The standard assumption is that you show up regularly to practice because you are motivated to do so. However, motivation is capricious, and easy to lose when you’re rarely seeing visible progress. Rather, Clear suggests that the goal should be to regularly engage with the skill you want to learn. This act of showing up on schedule with or without motivation develops a habit. Habits become deeply rooted, to the point where they no longer require extrinsic motivation.

“So, yes, perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits

Based on this principle, I designed my personal challenge around simply showing up and drawing. I didn’t need to take on progressively more complex subjects, or regularly adopt new techniques. I didn’t have to spend a particular amount of time completing my work. The goal was simply to complete one sketch per week for the entire year. They didn’t even have to be completed on schedule, though I tried never to float more than two per weekend.

In terms of equipment, I started with a set of drawing pencils, an eraser, a ruler, a protractor², and a large 9″x12″ pad of paper. To truly capture the inspiration of my youth, I even managed to locate my childhood Dragon Ball pencil tin. Following directions from Betty Edwards and others, I began drawing faint practice lines with a 6H pencil until I got the shape I wanted, then went back and passed over with a darker HB at the end. At first this process was quite tedious: draw, erase, draw, erase, trial and error until the desired curve emerged. Gradually I developed some muscle memory that helped speed up the process.

One limitation of this setup was that it wasn’t very portable. Drawing this way basically required a tabletop setup, and sometimes I wanted to sketch while out in the world. In my search for inspiration, I chanced upon the book “Sketch Now, Think Later” by Mike Yoshiaki Daikubara. He demonstrated the amazing urban ink drawings he drew on location while travelling, optionally adding watercolours afterwards. Inspired by his work, I purchased a little 5½″x8½″ handheld notebook and a waterproof Pigma Micron 10 pen; I adore both. I love getting to draw when the mood strikes while travelling, and how pen drawing forces you to keep moving fluidly and creatively incorporate errors.

My final piece of sketching equipment was a digital pencil for my iPad Mini. I’ve used it to dabble in Procreate, though I haven’t started seriously learning its functionality yet. With layers, brushes, and unlimited undo, digital drawing certainly has the least friction of the three options. However, I find myself missing the fine-grain pressure control that physical drawing affords. The digital simulation isn’t quite as intuitive, or perhaps it requires some additional calibration.

“The easiest way to learn directly is to simply spend a lot of time doing the thing you want to become good at.” – Scott H. Young, Ultralearning

Between pencil, ink, and digital drawing, I completed my 52 weekly sketches. However, as I reflect back on this year-long project, I’m somewhat ambivalent about whether to consider it a success. Ostensibly, I achieved what I set out to do, and stuck with it despite a busy schedule and varying levels of motivation. It’s difficult to see any clear linear progression in drawing skill, but I certainly feel more comfortable and adept than I did at the start. I also generally had a nice time while sketching, it was a quiet relaxing contemplative hobby.

In a broader sense, however, my original inspiration for learning to sketch was being able to communicate ideas visually. I want to develop a practical skill for collaborating with others in the context of making a video game or other creative project. Contemplating this ultimate goal makes me question my learning strategy. Is copying from visual reference the best way to improve? Or should I structure my practice to more directly target creating original art? What is the next set of core skills I should seek to develop?

I’m still grappling with these questions, but I feel quite upbeat about this format of structured, regular practice, and I’m keen to see what other skills might be amenable to this sort of yearly project. Here’s to continuing to grow and learn in 2023.

<sup>1. I’m a bit skeptical of the left/right brain distinction, but I’ll accept it as a premise of the book. ↩
2. Surprisingly useful for learning two-point perspective! ↩</sup>

Back in 2020, I wrote about co-heading the accessibility effort on The Last of Us Part II and the incredible reaction to our expansive set of features. Later that year we were also honoured to receive the inaugural “Innovation in Accessibility” award at The Game Awards. In the years since, we’ve seen awareness and support grow for accessibility across the games industry, and many new games that have pushed the frontiers in novel and exciting ways.

More recently, I had the incredible opportunity to step into the role of game director on The Last of Us Part I remake for PS5. While our goal was to stay faithful to the original in terms of story and core mechanics, we had a chance to integrate a decade of technology and craft improvements to modernize the gameplay. This of course included accessibility.

In addition to porting over options from Part II, we developed a handful of new features for the remake. The most ambitious was providing descriptive audio for the cinematics. These were developed in partnership with Descriptive Video Works, who brought professional expertise from the world of film and television. We also developed a new DualSense controller feature that plays spoken dialogue as haptic vibrations, with the goal of conveying the cadence and emphasis of the actor’s performance without audio.

I was thrilled to be able to showcase the accessibility features in the game’s marketing. We released an accessibility feature highlight trailer, as well as Naughty Dog’s first audio-described story trailer. I also had the opportunity to discuss these features (and accessible design more generally) in interviews with Eurogamer, Fanbyte, and The Inverse. The Washington Post also featured a great story about players with disabilities who were excited to experience the original game without barriers that might have excluded them.

Finally, I had the unique opportunity to discuss accessibility with Den Fami Nico Gamer, one of the premier video game magazines in Japan. It was published alongside an interview with Hiromi Wakai about the accessibility features built into the PS5 OS.

Den Fami Nico Gamer – Will we be able to play games when we lose our eyesight or can’t move our hands?

For the benefit of non-Japanese speakers, I have provided my full original responses in English below, since automated web translation loses a lot of the details and jargon. (The translations of the questions were provided by Sony PR, and I have lightly edited them for clarity.)

Could you tell me reasons why you decided to support accessibility in your games? How do you decide which titles to support and which not to?

Accessibility welcomes players who wouldn’t otherwise get to play. While we specifically aim to support players with disabilities, the broader truth is that accessibility is good universal design for everyone. For example, subtitles are useful for deaf players, but I use subtitles if I’m playing games late at night while my daughter is sleeping. If I break my arm, I might temporarily need to use motor accessibility features while it’s in a cast.

Disability is extremely common (1 in 20 adults in Japan are considered to have some type of disability), and for all of us it is an inevitable part of our own mortality. Our vision, hearing, and motor coordination are all affected by aging. If the generation that grew up with video games wants to continue playing them into their old age, games will need to serve their changing needs.

We strive to support accessibility for all of our titles, and to continuously develop new technology that we can carry over to future games.

Before you start development, what did you start with and what did you research?

There are many excellent free resources that outline the most common issues and best practices for inclusive design. For example, the Access Design Patterns framework gives names to specific high-level design principles. “Second Channel” suggests that a visual cue in a game should be matched with an audio cue, and vice versa. “Clear Text” means providing options to improve legibility through colour, size, and contrast.

With these principles in mind, we begin designing and prototyping new features that we think would be useful. While most developers on the team are able-bodied, we can imagine playing the game without sound, without visuals, or only pressing one button at a time. However, we make sure to always invite players with disabilities to come playtest the game, provide feedback, and validate our feature ideas.

Development may cost higher and take more time to support accessibility. How did you persuade and secure the publisher with this in mind? Does the request come from the publisher side asking to support accessibility?

When we look at the big picture, the development cost of supporting these features is very small compared to the overall game production. The benefit is that it allows us to expand the audience for our games, bringing in new players who might have otherwise been excluded. Being able to modify settings to suit their needs allows all players to experience the gameplay more comfortably, without cumbersome barriers getting in the way.

In software and video games, features tend to be cheaper and easier to develop if you plan for them early in production. By being proactive about accessibility considerations, we ensure that they’re a natural and integrated part of the development plan, not something we’re having to scramble for at the end.

We are very thankful to have the full support of the studio leadership at Naughty Dog, and also from our publisher SIE. They recognize the importance of creating games that welcome players with many different needs and abilities.

I think it is very tough to decide how far to support [accessibility]. What did you do when you had to decide to limit some of the support? It would be great to ask about the thought process behind it.

When we started development for The Last of Us Part II, the team decided to pursue four big accessibility goals based on technical feasibility and player feedback from previous games. The first was to offer fully customizable controls through button remappings. The second was to make our user interface (UI) and HUD elements dynamically scalable to larger sizes. The third was to provide a high contrast render mode that highlighted important visual elements for players with low vision.

Our last big goal was the most challenging and ambitious: we wanted players who are totally blind to be able to complete the game. We had recently heard a talk by accessibility consultant and blind gamer Brandon Cole, and he amazed us by showing how he was able to play games like Killer Instinct and Resident Evil 6 entirely through sound. We wanted players like him to be able to play our game too.

Because we aligned on these goals early on, it provided boundaries that safeguarded us from continuously adding new features. If we had a new exciting accessibility idea that didn’t match these goals, we could put it aside for consideration on a future game. We’ll keep striving to reach further with each game that we create.

Generally speaking, I think one of the selling points of PlayStation is the beauty of graphics. I think it is one of the most expensive parts of game development. Supporting [blind or low vision] users would mean to cut back on that strongest selling point, were there any dilemmas or struggles on those decisions? Were there any points of innovations or difficulties when trading off the graphical beauty for accessibility?

We take great pride in our visual art, so developing a new high contrast render mode that flattened and simplified all those finely-crafted details wasn’t something we took on lightly. The team made great efforts to ensure that the final result, while primarily functional, was still aesthetically pleasing and up to Naughty Dog’s artistic standards.

There are also many aspects of our games that can be appreciated without sight. We have a world-class sound team, and The Last of Us Part II won several awards for its audio design and music. Players also enjoy the combat challenge; blind gamers have beaten the game on the hardest difficulties. Of course, most players come to our games for the storytelling, which is still a powerful and moving experience with the voice acting alone.

When developing games, I think it’s important to have [people with several types of disabilities] to actually try out the accessibility features. Can you describe the framework you set up for the process?

There is a saying in the disability community: “nothing about us without us”. Throughout development, we periodically invite accessibility consultants to playtest the game. They provide critical feedback on our features and prototypes, letting us know what is working well and what needs further refinement. They also identify barriers we may have missed, and help us brainstorm new ideas to address them.

Were there any skills or requirements for the [accessibility consultants]? [Do they require] special school / vocational training school in order for them to supervise accessibility features in games?

Some accessibility consultants come from a background in user experience (UX) or human–computer interaction (HCI) design. They bring in knowledge of best practices from outside the games industry, such as subtitle guidelines from the BBC or the screen reader technology on the iPhone.

Consultants also bring in a wealth of communal knowledge from gamers with disabilities. If we’re discussing a particular feature, they can give us examples of good (and bad) implementations in other games, or share feedback they’ve heard within the community.

I hope to continue to see accessibility supported in games and hope to see more in the future. What were the positives / negatives that resulted from supporting accessibility?

We were incredibly excited by the positive reception from the breadth of accessibility features in The Last of Us Part II. We were surprised when the coverage even spread to major non-gaming publications, such as NPR and USA Today. We were also incredibly honoured to receive the inaugural award for “Innovation in Accessibility” at the Game Awards. We hope that this helps promote awareness across the games industry of the importance of accessibility.

More importantly, we received so many wonderful emails and letters from players. They said how excited they were to share the experience with loved ones. They recounted how they’d triumphed over boss battles without requiring able-bodied assistance. Nothing makes me prouder as a game developer than hearing these incredible stories.

As a longtime fan of the Halo series, I’ve enjoyed seeing its evolution over the years. Each game builds from the strong foundation of the “golden triangle” (guns, grenades, melee) and sandbox combat design (vehicles, enemy AI interactions, wide open levels, physics, etc.) From there, several games in the series have experimented with various new player abilities. For instance, Halo 2 and 3 dabbled with dual wielding, and later entries added sprinting and clambering.

I’m particularly fascinated by the various attempts to add a core fourth element to the “golden triangle”. Halo 3 introduced deployable equipment such as the bubble shield and gravity lift. Halo Reach and 4 reconceived these as armor abilities, granting new abilities like a jet pack, dash, or projectable hologram. Halo 5 subsequently rolled several of them back into the player’s default loadout.

While these are all strong mechanics that interact well with the other systems in Halo, I would argue that they failed to ascend to “core” abilities. As a tradeoff for their power, they have significant limitations. They have long cooldowns, restricted ammo, or are extremely situational in their use. They introduce little spikes of excitement and tension, but don’t fundamentally alter the dynamics of Halo combat.

Given this history, I was delighted to discover the grappleshot in Halo Infinite. This new piece of equipment fundamentally reshaped my combat experience while also perfectly supporting the “golden triangle” core identity.

The sheer numbers of interesting uses for the grappleshot (enumerated below) is impressive. A mechanic with so many possibilities affords ample opportunity for player choice and skill expression. What’s more, each of these ideas came from a delightful moment of sudden insight from my own playthrough. None of these situations are didactically tutorialized, but come about through playful experimentation and discovery.

1. Advancing

You can use the grappleshot to launch yourself towards the enemy’s general position. This is useful for quickly crossing open terrain with little cover, or when you have short-range weapons equipped and it’s advantageous to get in close. It’s also just an exciting opening move into any combat encounter when you’ve got full shields and you’re feeling confident.

2. Retreating

On the other hand, if your current position is getting too hot and your shields are getting low, you can use the grappleshot to quickly retreat to safety. You can slightly curve your approach while reeling in, allowing you to grapple around corners and finesse which side of cover you’ll land on. Flying out at the last moment is significantly more entertaining than the traditional passive Halo option of “hunker down in nearby cover until your shields recover”.

3. Flanking (Traditional)

Using the layout to flank around an entrenched enemy position is one of the core elements of shooter combat design. The mobility of the grappleshot makes it easier to take advantage of these routes, and even opens up new possibilities such as…

4. Flanking (Vertical)

In addition to the left and right flanks, vertical traversal opens up the option of flanking from above or below. The combat layouts in Halo Infinite support this mechanic with vertically stacked layouts, upper catwalks, and porous multi-story buildings.

5. Target Prioritization

Another core element of shooter combat is target prioritization; the player must identify which high-threat enemies must be dealt with first in any given situation. In Halo Infinite, this frequently means snipers or turrets in high overwatch positions. The grappleshot allows you to close the gap on these priority targets and focus them down first.

6. Taking the High Ground

As a corollary to singling out enemies in advantageous positions, you can also use the grappleshot to reach and exploit those positions yourself. Shoot from the enemy’s own sniper nest, fight from their fortifications, or commandeer their turret.

7. Fast Falling

By contrast, you may find yourself in a situation where you’re high up but it would be advantageous to take cover on the ground. Simply jumping and falling from gravity may expose you to enemy fire in midair, but grappling downwards gives you the option to “fast fall” (to steal a term from fighting games) to safety.

8. Dodging Shots

An underappreciated element of what makes Halo’s core combat so great are the big slow energy projectiles that many of the Covenant weapons fire. Strafing and dodging these shots is a joyful skill expression, reminiscent of old-school shooters like Doom. Weaving between these shots while flying around on the grappleshot adds another layer of enjoyment.

9. Grapple → Melee

Grappling an enemy works the same way as grappling any other surface. You fly directly towards them, and automatically melee them on arrival. Tougher enemies will assume a defensive stance while you’re midair and block the hit. Later in the game, you can unlock upgrades to stun the grappled target (if they’re unshielded) and deliver a shockwave blast on arrival.

10. Grapple → Shotgun

Alternatively to #9, if you have a shotgun, you can opt to shoot them point-blank on arrival instead. However, firing your gun will break the tether, which creates a delicious tension of trying to hold your shot until the very last moment.

11. Rear Weak Points

Hunters and Shield Jackals are enemies with strong defenses in the front, but are vulnerable to being shot from behind. You can use the grappleshot to quickly reposition behind them and exploit this weakness. In practice, however, this tactic is outclassed by other abilities. It’s easier to get behind Hunters with the thruster ability, and hitting a Jackal’s shield directly with the grappleshot makes them lower their guard anyways.

12. Hijacking

Options for dealing with vehicles while on-foot have traditionally been fairly limited in the Halo series. You can try to hijack them, but more often than not you’ll get run over in the attempt. The grappleshot evens the odds by allowing you to latch onto an enemy vehicle, fly towards it, and automatically hijack it. The skill expression comes from needing to get into grapple range, and the enemy AI tends to compensate by strategically keeping their distance.

13. Grabbing Weapons

Grappling a gun on the ground will pull it towards you and make it your current active weapon. While in theory this is an interesting option when you’re out of ammo, in practice I didn’t use this mechanic much. It’s far easier to reposition yourself than to precision target a tiny pickup on the ground.

14. Grabbing Fusion Coils

Halo Infinite has small throwable explosive barrels called fusion coils. You can walk over and pick them up manually, but grappling them into your hands mid-combat is far more interesting and dynamic. Of course, the risk tradeoff is that an enemy might shoot the fusion coil while it’s in hand or flying towards you.

15. Intercepting Fusion Coils

Brutes (and enemy players in MP) will pick up and throw fusion coils at you. If you’re quick on the draw, you can grapple them out of midair and throw them back. As a systems designer myself, I’m particularly impressed by this wonderful dynamic interaction of modular game mechanics.

16. Opening the Gates

A lot of the open world gameplay in Halo Infinite involves smashing through Banished outposts. These are typically fortified with high outer walls, which adds a complication when you roll up with a Warthog full of marines. The solution is to park your ride, grappleshot over the walls, and open up the gates from inside. Overcoming this kind of mid-combat obstacle helps the player feel like the hero of the battle.

17. Hidden Routes

If #16 is too direct for your playstyle, Banished bases usually have hidden entrances as well. Use the grappleshot to poke around hard-to-reach areas around the outside of the base, and you’ll frequently find an underground tunnel leading inside. This is another clever opportunity to make the player feel smart.

18. Overshooting

If you grapple onto the edge of a surface, then steer away from that surface in midair, you can overshoot your grapple point and launch yourself into the air. This is useful for many of the previously mentioned applications: to retreat even further out of combat (#2), to flank from midair (#4), to get into hijacking range of an enemy vehicle (#12).

19. Climbing

Halo Infinite’s open world features tall mountains and massive Forerunner structures. While most areas are connected by winding roads, it’s great fun to take the direct route and scale the sheer cliffs with the grappleshot. Carefully scanning for toeholds and planning your climbing route adds some quiet downtime to an otherwise frenetic game. Once you unlock the “quickshot” upgrade (reducing the cooldown by 40%), you can fly up any vertical surface by repeatedly overshooting and regrappling in midair.

20. Fast Traversal

Since the open world is built to vehicle scale, traversing long distances on foot can be fairly tedious. If you happen to find yourself between objectives without a ride, you still have the option of grappling forward horizontally across the terrain, essentially the non-combat version of advancing (#1). Traversing this way is reasonably fast, so foot traversal never feels like a drag.

21. Fall Recovery

One of the perils of flying through the air on the grappleshot is that you might accidentally fling yourself off a cliff. Thankfully, the problem is also the solution. Spinning around and just barely catching the edge before you fall into the void is an exciting and memorable experience. Failing to do so is also entertaining!

22. Aesthetic Beauty

Finally, the best reason to use the grappleshot is just for the beautiful aesthetic experience of it. C. Thi Nguyen notes how, in a broad sense, games (such as rock climbing) are optimized to create such experiences:

“In my normal life moving around the world, I get to feel graceful once a week, but rock climbing […] tunes you into the part of the activity that has that feeling. And when you rock climb… […] it’s built to constantly call out of you that incredible experience of delicate, graceful, perfect motion.”

The repeated sensation of beautiful movement kept me engaged and delighted with Halo Infinite all the way to the end. The combat and the traversal were so sublime that I was intrinsically motivated to clear out base after base, simply enjoying playing around in this sandbox for a while.

While I’ve enumerated these 22 uses to make the case that the grappleshot is a great game mechanic, one could reasonably use this as evidence to claim that the grappleshot is overpowered. It certainly outclasses all the other equipment (threat sensor, drop wall, thruster) that Halo Infinite tries to put in the same control slot. Perhaps an ability that is useful in almost every situation is simply unbalanced.

Paradoxically, “good design” heuristics like balance can get in the way of good design. Frank Lantz invites us to consider another “unbalanced” weapon:

“Look at the AWP, the signature 1-hit-kill weapon in Counter-Strike. It’s completely unbalanced. Any sensible game designer would have rejected it. Luckily for us, Counter-Strike wasn’t made by sensible designers, it was made by unreasonable people who kept this unbalanced ingredient and evolved the rest of the game around it.”

The grappleshot is “unbalanced” in the sense that it warps the design space around it. Rather than reject this uncomfortable distortion, Halo Infinite’s whole design rises to meet it. The final product is a rare accomplishment: a series reboot that feels both classic and revitalized.

Eurogamer recently invited developers from Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games to share their thoughts on accessible game design. I was thrilled to relate some anecdotes of working with our terrific accessibility consultants, and how novel features and mechanics emerged from our collaboration. I also got to express my viewpoint that accessibility is an exciting frontier in game design, and there are still so many foundational design and implementation questions waiting to be explored.

Eurogamer – How Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games think about accessibility

I have reproduced my own responses below, but please click through to the full article to read Brian Allgeier and Michele Zorrilla’s takes as well.

Possibly a hard question to answer to start with: what is the biggest thing about accessibility design in games that a lot of people don’t understand or aren’t aware of?

Matthew Gallant: Accessibility is orthogonal to difficulty. Providing a “very light” difficulty option may remove barriers for some players, but others want to play on “grounded” or with permadeath enabled. (Shout out to SightlessKombat!) Challenge and accessibility can coexist in harmony with the right design choices.

To give an anecdote from development on The Last of Us Part 2: to adapt stealth gameplay for blind players, we prototyped an “invisible while prone” option. In our first accessibility playtest, we asked consultant Brandon Cole to try it out and give us feedback. We cheered as we watched him get his first stealth kill while using it, and overall his impressions were positive. However, he had one feature request: unlimited invisibility felt too generous, could we add an optional time limit?

What is the cornerstone of accessibility in games at the moment? Is there a set of features that you always build out from, or does it change from game to game?

Matthew Gallant: Accessibility is fundamentally about good design. Games typically have their own unique needs and challenges in terms of accessibility features and implementation, but those choices are guided by universal design principles.

The Access Design Patterns framework breaks this down really well. A few that were particularly relevant for us were:

• “Second Channel”: any information provided through one channel (e.g. visual) should also be available through other channels (e.g. audio, haptics).
• “Same Controls But Different”: allow players to remap their control schemes, and provide alternatives for button holds, mashes, and chords.
• “Clear Text”: allow players to increase text size, colour, and contrast to improve legibility.

We’re fortunate at Naughty Dog in that we own and develop our own game engine. This means that any functionality we develop for one game is a permanent investment in our technology, and can be carried on to future projects.

How much do you work with the wider community of players with disabilities? What does this work look like? I am assuming there is overlap with the team as a matter of course!

Matthew Gallant: While we work with a range of accessibility consultants, we also get informal feedback from various sources. For instance, we have several developers with disabilities on our team who used and evaluated the features as they were being prototyped and implemented. This included our motion sickness options, mono audio mode, and our one-handed control scheme presets.

We also get letters and emails from fans with feedback and functionality requests. For example, in 2018 we received a letter from a fan requesting the “camera sway” and “camera shake” adjustments from God of War. They were excited for The Last of Us Part 2, but were concerned that it would be unplayable for them without these options. Serendipitously we already had these options in our debug menu, it had just never occurred to us to expose them to players.

One of the things that really leaps out at me about accessibility design is that it must be a really fascinating form of problem solving: you have these things you need to translate for a wide variety of players and you have to work out how to do them. Is that right or have I romanticised it hopelessly?

Matthew Gallant: Accessibility is indeed a tremendously exciting design space. A lot of great ideas emerge in conversation with our consultants during playtests. To give a few examples:

While discussing functionality that would be useful for players with low vision, our consultant James Rath pulled out his iPhone to show us the various features he uses on a daily basis. He was demonstrating using a gesture to zoom on the phone screen, when it occurred to us that the DualShock 4 also has a touchscreen built-in. This led to the creation of our “Screen Magnifier” feature. Watching Steve Saylor’s joyful reaction to the feature in a later playtest was a big development highlight!

We had another breakthrough while playtesting with fine motor accessibility consultant Paul Lane. He was having difficulty lining up a series of jumps through a tricky traversal sequence. Ironically, we had designed a feature to help players to align their jumps, but it was bundled with audio cues and intended as a vision accessibility feature. Paul loved the assistance, but rightly did not want the unnecessary accompanying audio. This taught us two valuable lessons. Firstly, don’t make assumptions about who will be using your accessibility features. Secondly, make accessibility options granular so players can tweak them to suit their needs.

Another design breakthrough happened in conversation with Brandon Cole. We had designed two features to help blind players navigate. “Navigation Assistance” points the player towards the critical progression path by pressing L3. “Enhanced Listen Mode” allows players to scan the environment for items and enemies, causing them to emit a spatial audio cue when pinged. Brandon had the brilliant idea of uniting these two features, allowing players to set their navigation goal to the item or enemy they had just scanned for. The combination of these two features greatly enhanced the gameplay experience for blind players.

What would you like to see happen in accessibility in the next ten years? What are the big challenges and the big opportunities?

Matthew Gallant: The big challenge for accessibility is that there is no silver bullet. Every game has unique accessibility design challenges, and must be evaluated and playtested individually. However, games that advance the cutting edge of accessibility benefit the entire industry. Future games can replicate proven functionality at much lower risk and cost.

The big opportunity for accessibility is that it’s a true frontier of game design. We had almost zero precedents to work from while designing complex action/shooter game features for blind players. However, this gave us a completely blank canvas to try anything we could imagine. In some ways it feels like the early days of 3D controls in the PS1 era, when designers were grappling with fundamental questions like “how do you move the camera”?

Over the next (hopefully less than) 10 years, I would like to see accessibility features become the norm for all video games, something that seems noteworthy and deficient when absent. I believe that this demand will emerge organically from players who become accustomed to the universal benefits of good accessible design.

I also had the opportunity to share some of my favourite letters from fans on the PlayStation Blog. While I’ve heard many heartwarming stories from players who love and cherish our games over the years, the ones that have touched me the most are the ones about accessibility.

PlayStation Blog – PlayStation Studios dev teams share their favorite fan interactions

“Nothing makes me prouder as a game developer than hearing from players who have used the accessibility settings to remove barriers from their gameplay experience. One player told us how the accessibility settings allowed his father to reconnect with gaming as a hobby after losing his vision due to a degenerative eye disease. Another described how he watched his wife (who is completely blind) play The Last of Us Part II, and how delighted they were to share the experience.

A player with cerebral palsy worried the Rat King fight might be impossible without asking his dad for assistance. He tweaked the accessibility settings, got the timing down, and (to quote him directly): “FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE I DEFEATED A BOSS!”

These stories remind me of our duty to consider the needs of all players with our design choices, and how accessible design invites everyone to play. We’ll strive to continue reaching further as we create games at Naughty Dog.”

I’ll reiterate a big thank you to everyone who has been part of the accessibility effort over the years: our development team at Naughty Dog, our partners at Sony, our wonderful consultants, and the many fans who have provided feedback and feature requests. Here’s to continuing to push the frontier of accessible game design in 2022 and beyond.

Arkane Studios are one of my favourite developers. Playing through Deathloop has made me realize that I’ve been playing their games the wrong way for years.

I’ll get into the nitty-gritty of this revelation, but first I want to frame it within a general game design principle. It’s not enough for designers to provide players with a myriad of interesting gameplay options (as Arkane games certainly do). Within those options, players may find a strategy that’s boring but reliable and effective. The existence of such a degenerate strategy may lead some players to repeatedly use it even if they ruin the game for themselves.

It is therefore essential that designers make boring tactics impossible or ineffective.

This is not the same problem as designing systems that encourage players to switch up their tactics. For instance, the classic RPG pattern of having some enemies that are weak to fire and others weak to ice. This is a “carrot” that encourages players to vary using fire and ice attacks. The problem archetype I’m referring to would be the player who dumped 100 points in their ice attack, and spends the rest of the game freezing enemies for massive damage regardless of elemental weaknesses. The game systems need a “stick” that disincentivizes this boring strategy.

I – CLEAN HANDS

I have a history of playing stealth games as puzzles that can be optimized. To quote myself from almost a decade ago:

My preferred approach is to play each scenario as flawlessly as I can. I like to ascertain a situation, determine a strategy, execute it, then figure out how I could have done better. Can I avoid alerting the guards? Use fewer resources? Turn the environment to my advantage? I treat it like a puzzle, playing it over and over to find the optimal path.

This is the attitude with which I took on the Dishonored series¹. I tried over and over until I had a near-perfect stealth run. Nothing in the game’s systems discouraged me from playing this way; in fact, there were multiple systems that encouraged it:

• Killing and going loud gives you the high chaos “bad ending”. Chaos performance stats are shown at the end of every mission.
• There are compelling and creative nonlethal assassination options, and they often become unavailable if you alert the target or make some other error.
• Being judicious about stealth and killing aligns with Corvo and Emily’s story goal of stabilizing and regaining control of the Empire.
• Perhaps most importantly, there is no limit or penalty for save scumming.

Unlocking the “Clean Hands” trophy was challenging and rewarding in its own way. However, I ended up completing the game without ever engaging with the dozens of combat systems and tools the game had to offer. If this means I played Dishonored “wrong”, then I would argue that it wasn’t entirely my fault. The systems encouraged me to play flawlessly (carrot) and nothing prevented me from doing save scumming (stick).

Compare that with Deathloop, a game with similar action gameplay options but completely different high level incentives:

• You play the levels over and over. Early runs are typically messy and chaotic, but as you gain information (both in-game and as a player) the puzzle-box options slowly reveal themselves.
• Messed up your intricate plan? You haven’t permanently tarnished your save, just try again tomorrow.
• The presence of Julianna adds chaos, complicating any attempt at a “perfect” run.
• Killing eternalists doesn’t conflict with Colt’s morals or story goal. They’ll come back tomorrow anyway.
• You can only save between levels, and lose most of your day’s progress on death. However, to offset this, the game is quite forgiving in other ways (the Reprise slab, regenerating health sections, infinite power regen, etc.)

By actively disallowing my boring perfectionist strategy, Deathloop gave me permission to have fun. Rather than reloading when my plans went awry, I improvised. I engaged with all the combat and weapon systems I’d been neglecting all these years, and had a blast doing so. I got out of my own way and just enjoyed myself, knowing that the game systems allowed me to do so.

This shift in mentality could not have been accomplished with incentives alone. Even with the forgiving nature of the time loop, save scumming still would have been a temptation. Rather, the enforced permadeath and limited saves completely removed my ability to adopt a boring tactic.

II – WHY DO WE RUIN OUR OWN FUN

As designers, why is it necessary to solve the problem of players ruining their own fun? Shouldn’t players naturally avoid making themselves bored, and actively seek playstyles that are engaging? Why isn’t this a self-correcting problem?

The answer may lie in the concept of “double consciousness”, which in a general sense refers to the fact that “games are multilayered in terms of identity experience”. While studying D&D players in the 1970’s, sociologist Gary Allen Fine split the player’s identity into three. These ideas were later further developed by Harvey Smith (co-creative director of Dishonored) and Matthias Worch. The three parts are:

• Character: “the fictional character embodied by the player”
• Player: “the player acting within the framework and the rules of the game”
• Person: the person with life demands and self-perception outside of the game

Uniting these three frames is one of the challenges of game design. When they are not aligned on shared goals, they risk drifting apart and undermining the player’s investment in the game (i.e. ludonarrative dissonance).

Slide from Matthias Worch’s 2011 GDC talk “The Identity Bubble”

Playing Dishonored as a pacifist is compelling because it’s reinforced in all three parts of the player’s identity:

• Character: Corvo and Emily want to bring peace and stability to the Empire
• Player: Low chaos mission rating perceived as good performance
• Person: Identifying as a good person, therefore seeking the good ending

If there’s a countervailing incentive towards a more expansive and improvised playstyle, where is it seated within this identity framework? Trophies for creative kills provide an incentive within the game rules (i.e. “player”). If it’s a desire driven by emotions such as curiosity or boredom, this is also an aspect of the “player” identity (since we bring our emotions into the “magic circle” of a game). Within the “person” frame, it could be driven by self-perception as “someone who expresses their innovation and creativity within games”; Mark Rosewater calls this player archetype a “Johnny”.

Depending on one’s personality then, some players could have a completely different identity experience:

• Character: Corvo and Emily are badass supernatural assassins
• Player: I’m going to pull off cool assassin moves using all the tools in the toolbox.
• Person: “I would do cool stuff like this if I was Corvo”

The fact that both interpretations and playstyles are valid and supported within Dishonored is a testament to the range and versatility of the immersive sim genre. But it also suggests why the “boring tactics” problem isn’t self-correcting; players align a game’s narrative and mechanics with their own perspective, preferences, and values. Players aren’t really choosing their playstyle, it’s a manifestation of who they are.

It therefore behooves designers to thoughtfully craft their game story and rules to incentivize the ideal / desired / most fun way of playing. Assuming the developers at Arkane Lyon wanted to promote an improvisational playstyle, they skillfully reinforced it within the player’s identity frames:

• Character: Colt is brash, audacious, and willing to do anything to escape the loop.
• Player: The game’s structure rewards improvisation, not perfect play. No long term disadvantage to killing or going loud. Mistakes are impermanent, try again another day.
• Person: “If I was in Colt’s situation, I would do the same thing.”

III – NAUGHTY DOG COMBAT DESIGN

In my work as a systems designer at Naughty Dog, I’ve grappled with the same problem archetype in more low-level mechanics. We run frequent internal playtests when our games are in development; whenever I see a tester adopting a boring tactic to progress, I start thinking about how we could tweak our systems to push them to play more dynamically.

1. Staying put

For instance, consider the problem of the player choosing to stay put. They pick an attractive cover position and try to clear out the entire fight from that one spot. Playing this way is a very safe option, as enemies typically need to expose themselves to advance or flank. It’s also appealing to timid players who would rather stick to the section of the layout they know rather than move forward into the unknown.

However, this is a boring strategy. Playing this way won’t deliver on the fantasy of being a climbing / swinging / jumping treasure hunter (Uncharted) or a scrappy smuggler surviving on the ragged edge on their wits and grit (The Last of Us). It fails to engage with the complexity of the combat spaces or the knowledge model of the AI. If we condone players using this tactic, then it’s our fault if players come away from the experience with the impression that our games have lackluster combat.

We have several systems that are designed to make this tactic ineffective. The most direct method is grenades in the Uncharted series (and to a lesser degree molotovs in The Last of Us). The grenade manager detects when the player has remained within small radius x for more than y seconds, which is a heuristic for the player staying in place. When this condition is detected, it requests the AI coordinator to throw a grenade, flushing the player out of their position and forcing them to move.

A subtler system is baked into our enemy accuracy model. Like many things in video game AI, baseline enemy accuracy is calculated by multiplying together a set of tuning parameters, each expressed as a float in the [0,1] range. Some of these parameters are based on curves that ramp up over time. One of these parameters slowly ramps to 1.0 while the enemies know the player’s current position. Players who stay in place are penalized with enemies who gradually hone in their accuracy on a stationary target.

We also use enemy design to nullify this tactic. Brutes in Uncharted and Clickers in The Last of Us are tanky high-threat enemies that charge right at the player’s position. They function as “spiky balls”² that force the player to maintain their distance and continuously reposition. Other enemies provide area denial, creating dynamic obstacles that limit where the player can fight from.

2. Charging at enemies

However, one of the unintended consequences of disallowing staying put is that players might pivot to charging directly at enemies instead. This is also an undesirable tactic, and for the same reasons; it short circuits other systems and flattens out the combat experience. This tactic is a particular concern for The Last of Us, where charging straight into gunfire unscathed would severely compromise the game’s grounded tone.

To disallow this tactic, we go as far as overriding the baseline enemy accuracy. Every frame we detect the player’s movement vector towards each enemy. If that vector is within a ~70° cone directly at an enemy within ~15 meters, we consider the player “charging towards” that enemy. Enemies who are being charged towards have their accuracy parameters overridden to be nearly 100% accurate. We also guarantee that they get a “full body” hit reaction, which knocks the player backwards on hit. Furthermore, in some cases, we even give them a more aggressive firing pattern when charged. It’s effectively impossible to close the distance on an enemy except this way.

This tuning is heavy handed, but it’s critical for the integrity of our combat loop that this tactic is ineffective. It forces players to consider the combat layout, using occluders to regain stealth or to approach enemies without being shot.

3. Hoarding resources

Another boring tactic we actively try to subvert is hoarding resources. Ammo and supplies are scarce in the world of The Last of Us, and some players respond to this by adopting an ultraconservative playstyle. They squirrel away all their shotgun ammo and crafted items, hesitant to consume them lest their need be greater in a future encounter. However, as in the other cases, people who play this way rob themselves of the full breadth of the gameplay experience.

The most straightforward solution to this issue is to have a low maximum inventory. This means that hoarding players quickly find themselves in a situation where they’re walking past pickups unable to pick them up. There’s no benefit to hoarding once you’ve hit the cap, so players have permission to use their items less discriminately. Since weapons have individual ammo types, this has the added benefit of pushing players to cycle through every capped weapon in their inventory.

A more pernicious solution to this problem is to dynamically spawn fewer items based on current inventory. While this does penalize hoarding, the increased scarcity simply reinforces the player’s mental model; stingy item drops validate a conservative playstyle. We have some systems like this in The Last of Us series, but we keep it a light touch to avoid this issue.

Counterintuitively, on The Last of Us Part II we found it more effective to use starvation prevention logic to preempt players from developing this mindset entirely. This means loading the dice, favouring high-roll drops for players with low resources. However, we wanted to avoid rewarding players who were simply playing carelessly by resupplying them mid-fight. To that end, we ensured that the starvation logic only triggered in the exploration spaces between fights. This helped maintain the player’s long term supplies, and bolster their confidence that the game wouldn’t leave them stranded.

Another effective prevention measure is to limit the opportunities to spend their resources. In playtests, we often noticed players hoarding supplements (player upgrades) while reliably spending their parts (weapon upgrades). This is because player upgrades are available anytime from the backpack menu, whereas parts can only be spent at a workbench. Since there’s usually at least an hour of play time between workbenches, the same loss aversion that causes hoarding works in our favour. Might as well spend your parts now, as you may not have another chance for a while. (Deathloop also limits upgrade opportunities this way; you can only spend residuum between missions.)

IV – ADDITIONAL CASE STUDIES

Here are some additional examples of designers responding to boring tactics.

League of Legends – Lane Swapping (2v1)

Around 2015, a new strategy emerged in high level League of Legends play. Rather than following the traditional metagame of sending two players to the bottom lane, teams would send their duo to the top lane to face a lone opponent. Depending on the champion draft there can be various incentives to do this: dodging an unfavoured matchup, starving the enemy solo laner, and the gold and map advantage of taking an early tower.

On the surface this seems like a valid and interesting strategy, an alternative choice that players can situationally opt into. However, it has a number of deleterious consequences for League of Legends as a whole. Firstly, it drastically shrinks the number of viable top lane picks, placing an enormous premium on the small pool of champions that can cling to life in a 1v2 lane. Secondly, short circuiting the typical “lane phase” in this manner takes a lot of excitement out of the early game. Both teams are forced to play conservatively as they strategically concede their weak side of the map, and the action doesn’t pick up again until midgame. This staid opening is particularly problematic for League as a spectator esport.

Riot have pursued a number of approaches to limit the effectiveness of this tactic, with two in particular having stood the test of time. Firstly, they have made turrets more resilient in the early game, first as an emergency patch before the world championship and later more officially as a “turret plating” mechanic. Secondly, despite a stated desire to “find a more nuanced approach” that preserves map symmetry, they have made the bottom turrets a little weaker. Only the top and mid lane towers get a “fortification” buff for the first five minutes of the game.

Destiny – The Loot Cave

Less than a week after Destiny’s initial launch, a curious strategy emerged. Players found an effective strategy for farming engrams by massing together in communal spaces and mass firing into a narrow cave, instantly obliterating the continuously respawning enemies.

I wrote a lengthy post back in 2014 about how the runtime interaction of various mechanics created the Loot Cave dynamic. Needless to say, the developers at Bungie felt like this was a boring strategy in comparison to the intended pathway to progression: “shooting at a black hole for hours on end isn’t our dream for how Destiny is played.” They hotfixed this particular area and made their activities more rewarding.

Metal Gear Solid V – Enemy Preparedness

Once players find a playstyle that works, it can be very difficult to push them to try other approaches. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has a unique “enemy preparedness” system designed to do just that: dynamically reacting to the player’s tactics and deploying enemies with countermeasures.

Players have documented six categories of preparedness, though they are not specifically identified in-game. For instance, if players frequently approach bases under the cover of darkness, they’ll start deploying mortar-flares and night-vision goggles. If players assault bases aggressively, they’ll begin wearing body armour and carrying LMGs.

I think of this as a second-order design solution. It’s not that any of these individual playstyles is inherently boring. Rather, in a game with a wide array of available options, it’s boring to keep playing the same way. The preparedness system incentivizes pivoting to new strategies.

Call of Duty – Infinite Respawns

While the use of this technique has waned in modern titles, a mainstay of the classic Call of Duty games was that enemies infinitely respawned until you pushed forward and triggered the next phase of the fight.

While this type of encounter design can be frustrating, it’s designed to prevent playing passively. Without infinite respawns it would be very effective to hang back in cover, snipe the enemies from afar, then saunter forward when the coast is clear. However, this would fail to deliver on the fantasy of being on the frontlines of a war.

Modern shooter games tend to use different approaches to solve this same problem. For instance, creating combat layouts with shorter sightlines and more legible flank routes. Within the AI, developers can adjust how enemies peek and aim from cover to make them less susceptible to being whittled down at long range.

V – ACCESSIBILITY IS NOT BORING

How does accessibility fit within the designer’s responsibility to disallow boring tactics? The common argument is that overcoming difficulty is core to the experience of certain games, and that options that reduce difficulty would enable players to ruin the game for themselves. In this view, using options to remove challenge is a boring player choice, and thus is fair game for a designer to disallow.

As an accessibility advocate I do not agree with this position, but I don’t believe the core concern is completely without merit. Rather, I believe that it is also the designer’s responsibility to frame these options. Players need context and clarity to determine whether their experience would benefit from enabling certain options.

For instance, consider this message that Celeste presents as part of its menu flow³:

“Assist Mode allows you to modify the game’s rules to fit your specific needs. This includes options such as slowing the game speed, granting yourself invincibility or infinite stamina, and skipping chapters entirely. Celeste is intended to be a challenging and rewarding experience. If the default game proves inaccessible to you, we hope that you can still find that experience with Assist Mode.”

Based on focus test feedback, we added a similar information screen to our “combat accessibility” submenu in The Last of Us Part II. It says:

“These settings are designed to make combat accessible for all players. As such, they can significantly alter the gameplay experience.”

In both cases, the developers are framing the intended audience for accessibility features as players with “specific needs”. These are players for whom the “default game proves inaccessible”, rather than the intended “challenging and rewarding experience.” The designers do not condone tweaking these options haphazardly; they are intentionally designed to support a player base with a spectrum of diverse needs.

Those who choose to enable these options are doing so with the clear understanding that they are changing the rules of the game. The “magic circle” of the game is bounded by these rules, so modifying them must be done from the “real world” outside the circle. The designer has relinquished a small measure of control, and put the burden of tailoring (literally “to make fit”) the game experience on the player. With their cooperation, we remove the barriers and rejoin the intended experience within the magic circle.

VI – CONCLUSION

In the MDA framework, game designers define the rules of the game (mechanics). In motion, the rules interact with each other and with player input (dynamics), creating an emotional and intellectual experience in the player’s mind (aesthetics).

At its core, what I am arguing here is that designers are also responsible for the negative space of aesthetics. There should be intention and craft put towards the experience that the player is NOT having. This is a kind of shadow game design, where the goal is to surgically cut holes out of the possibility space where boring options used to be.

<sup>1. To prove I’m not alone in playing this way, check out this poster who has a similar revelation about perfect runs while playing Prey: Mooncrash. ↩
2. No clue where I picked up this name, it’s apparently not a term of art. ↩
3. I am quoting the modified version of this message, which was adjusted in a 2019 patch. ↩</sup>

A few years ago I started making Twitter bots as a weekend creative coding hobby, developing a dozen or so through 2015-2016. I’ve more recently developed a keen interest / anxiety around climate change, and have been reading various popular books on the subject. Last weekend, I combined those passions and created a new bot: @ClimateClockBot.

Recognizing the niche appeal of such an endeavour, I’d like to take a moment to expand on why I think bots are interesting and what I hoped to accomplish with this project.

Methodology

The model and data for this bot are provided by the Climate Clock project’s API.

Their countdown time is based on two pieces of data provided by the IPCC. As of 2018, the world has a remaining budget of 420 gigatonnes of CO₂ for a 66% probability of remaining under +1.5˚C global average temperature. This budget is being depleted by emissions at a rate of 42 ± 3 gigatonnes of CO₂ per year. Putting these two together, scientists predict that the world will overshoot this limit around the beginning of 2028.

The renewable energy percentage is based on the “Our World In Data” open source database. According to their model, renewable energy provided 11.41% of global energy consumption in 2019. The annual growth is assumed to be 5.655%, which is the average growth rate in renewable energy share from 2016-2019. This rate is continuously updated with new yearly data in the Climate Clock API.

I believe the Climate Clock is designed very intentionally in a way that overcomes certain roadblocks in engaging a general audience on the topic of climate change. I’d like to break down some of these design considerations, and how I have attempted to echo these aspects with my Twitter bot.

(Quoted sections below are from the excellent book “Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change” by George Marshall.)

Framing it in the present

“[…] the greatest salience belongs to threats that are concrete, immediate, and indisputable—for instance, a car out of control driving right at you. By contrast, climate change is […] abstract, distant, invisible, and disputed.”

Climate change is a worldwide, complex, systemic issue. So big and complicated, in fact, that it’s susceptible to being limited by framing. In the media, the most pernicious problem is framing climate change as a future problem. For instance, consider headlines about government targets for “net zero emission by 2050”, or popular science reporting with maps of which cities could be underwater by the end of the century. Neither of these are factually incorrect, but the time horizons are distant to the point of being emotionally irrelevant.

A related problem is “narrative fidelity”. Human cognition internalizes complex issues as narratives. The long delay between CO₂ emissions and the resulting temperature changes are disconnected from our intuitive notions about cause and effect. Yet climate science tells us with high confidence that if we overshoot certain thresholds of CO₂ (in the present), the average global temperature will eventually increase to +1.5˚C (in the future). The exact speed of that change and the specific weather patterns that will result are more difficult to forecast with precision, but we know that the full effects of today’s emissions will be felt long after they are created.

“We interpret climate change through frames, which focus our attention but limit our understanding—they allow us to exclude or ignore meanings that lie outside the frame.”

The Climate Clock project reframes the conversation and centers it on the near term: at our current emissions rate, we will overshoot the +1.5˚C threshold in 6.5 years. Our actions in the here and now (cause) are creating an existential threat for human civilization (effect). We have a narrow window to act. It’s an immediate problem. It’s a climate emergency.

Given that the Climate Clock already exists as a website that people can visit, what is the benefit in providing the same information from a Twitter bot?

Embedded in social media

“When we become aware of the issue [of climate change], we scan the people around us for social cues to guide our own response: looking for evidence of what they do, what they say, and, conversely, what they do not do and do not say. These cues can also be codified into rules that define the behaviors that are expected or are inappropriate—the social norm. If we see that other people are alarmed or taking action, we may follow them. If they are indifferent or inactive, we will follow that cue too.”

While our personal reaction to climate change is determined in some part by our individual understanding, it can be constrained by the context of the society we’re embedded within. Human cognition is heavily influenced by “peer pressure, trusted communicators, social norms, and in-group loyalty”.

It’s therefore critical that the conversation around climate change happens on social media, where we soak up what everyone else is talking about. Seeing your peers engaging with the topic (by sharing a tweet from @ClimateClockBot, for instance) helps position it within the “norms of attention”, which are “the social rules that define what is or not acceptable to recognize or talk about.”

Mounting physical Climate Clocks on the sides of big buildings leverages this social dynamic to bring the conversation about carbon budget and overshoot into public spaces. My hope is that a Twitter bot achieves the same thing in the digital public sphere.

Connecting local with global

“We are very well adapted to respond to immediate threats but slow to accommodate moving change. Climate change is a process, not an event, so it requires that we RECOGNIZE MOMENTS OF PROXIMITY that can demand attention.”

Regular updates about climate data can also create interesting juxtapositions with the other posts on your Twitter feed. This type of “context collapse” is usually considered a negative for social media, an anxiety-inducing superposition of small and large social circles. In this case, the goal is to highlight connections between local events (wildfires, floods, storms, and droughts) and long-term climate trends that increase their likelihood and damage. Moments of proximity can help focus our event-centered mind on nebulous slow processes.

Experiencing slow change over time

One of the interesting properties of Twitter bots is simply watching their behaviours play out over a long period of time. Noting when @everyword reaches a new letter of the alphabet, or when @NYT_first_said records some neologism’s ascent into the paper of record. If “the medium is the message”, then it’s worth considering what and how the slow background trickle of a Twitter bot is structurally communicating.

“So climate change is a future problem. But it is also a past problem and a present problem. It is better thought of as a developing process of long-term deterioration, called, by some psychologists, a “creeping problem.””

As a communication medium, the slow drip of a Twitter bot mirrors the gradual accumulation of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere. Both are experienced as background information in slow real-time, but milestones focus our attention.

When we notice that the remaining carbon budget has fallen below 200 gigatonnes for the first time, we can reflect on that experience. How long ago was it above 280 gigatonnes? What did that passage of time feel like? How many of those periods remain until overshoot? Are we moving fast enough to fix this?

“In real life, it seems that the most influential climate narrative of all may be the non-narrative of collective silence.”

Creating this bot was part of a larger goal that I would like to integrate into my personal creative practice. The problem of fighting climate change begins with the problem of getting people to learn and care about climate change. We need game designers to help people play and engage with complex systems. We need storytellers to translate slow processes into digestible and resonant narratives. We need artists of all types (bot makers included) to engage with climate change in their art.

Earlier this year we wrapped up four years of development and shipped The Last of Us Part II. While most of my work was on systems, combat, and AI, I also co-headed our effort to push the boundaries of accessibility.

We established our goals early in preproduction. We wanted to build on the motor accessibility features from Uncharted 4, offering more options for players to customize controls and simplify inputs. We wanted to have scale, colour, and contrast options for our HUD and subtitles. Most ambitiously, we wanted to create a suite of features that would allow a blind player to complete the game without sighted assistance. By the time the game shipped, we had developed over 60 accessibility features.

To hear a full breakdown of our development process, check the talk that Emilia Schatz and I recently presented at GAConf. We discuss how we planned our production, worked with terrific consultants, iterated on our features, and integrated accessibility into our regular playtesting. Many thanks to Ian Hamilton and Tara Voelker for inviting us to speak.

Accessibility in The Last of Us Part II:
A 3-Year Development Journey

After years of development, it’s been so exciting to see the reactions from fans about how these features have benefited them. Some have called The Last of Us Part II “the most accessible game ever”. The story also got picked up outside of the video game press, with coverage from CNN, BBC, CBC, and USA Today; Emilia and I even had a radio interview with NPR Morning Edition.

Our dearest hope is that our push for accessibility helps advance the state of the art in the games industry and inspires other developers to make it a priority. Many thanks to our accessibility consultants and testers, our collaborators at SIE Worldwide Studios, and everyone at Naughty Dog who helped make these features possible.

^{Photo credit: Misty Rayburn}

Back in 2017, I gave my first talk at GDC about combat design and AI in Uncharted 4. A recording of this talk is now free and publicly available in the GDC Vault.

Authored vs. Systemic:
Finding a Balance for Combat AI in Uncharted 4

The title of the talk comes from the biggest quandary we faced through development: how to decide what to handle systemically (using generic combat AI systems) and what to author (hand-placed markup and scripting). Previous games in the Uncharted series were highly authored, but we had some new design goals for Uncharted 4. As we pursued much larger wide-linear spaces and deeper stealth gameplay, we knew our familiar scripted approach would struggle to account for all the ways the player could engage in combat.

This led us to explore a more systemic approach to combat design. For instance, we developed the concept of “vantage” in an attempt to programmatically analyze combat spaces and find the strong positions to hold. We tried a similar technique for getting enemies to search, generating “heat” at the player’s last known location that would realistically disseminate through the layout. Unfortunately, both of these approaches failed to generate consistent results. We had oversteered away from authored combat design, and needed to find a balance.

We eventually developed the concept of “hard points”, which allow level designers to mark up strong positions and important places to defend. However, the choice of whether to use these hard points and which NPCs to assign to them is left entirely up to the systemic combat logic. This hybrid approach let us leverage the designer’s holistic knowledge of a space without requiring bespoke scripting to account for every possible scenario. We felt like this was the middle ground between “authored” and “systemic” approaches, and that it gave us the best of both extremes.

The full talk goes into much greater detail on the development process and implementation details, so check it out if you’re interested. As a bonus, you’ll also discover what Uncharted has in common with Pac-Man.

Last year, my friend and coworker Michael Barclay boldly declared that “level blockouts are art”. He started the hashtag #Blocktober to celebrate the art form and encourage other developers to share screenshots of their blockmesh levels. The response was enthusiastic, as hundreds of developers gave us a sample of their early-production work. It provided some well-deserved exposure to a vital facet of game development that players normally never get to see.

Since Michael is starting up #Blocktober again this year, I thought I would dig through my own work files to find something to share. While I’m not actually a level designer, in my systems design work I often develop playable prototypes to pitch a certain gameplay idea or feature.

The video above is an early prototype of the train combat sequence that was later developed for chapter 9 of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. While we were still in early preproduction, I wanted to pitch an action setpiece that combined ideas and mechanics from two of my favourite levels: the train from Uncharted 2 and the convoy chase from Uncharted 4. This would also enable us to leverage some of the physics and animation tech that had already been developed in our engine.

A few credits: the rocky terrain that the train meanders through is borrowed from Mark Davies’s blockmesh of the islands from chapter 12 of Uncharted 4. I reused many of the vehicle-to-vehicle combat systems previously developed by Kurt Margenau. I also wasn’t involved with the real train level that actually shipped with The Lost Legacy; that was developed from scratch by Nicholas Lance, Asher Einhorn, Michael Barclay, Vinit Agarwal and many more.

There is a certain class of books (Understanding Comics, The Design of Everyday Things) that aren’t ostensibly about video games, but have still found their way into the informal game design canon. Having recently read Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows, I believe it also deserves a spot on that list. The book covers a wide range of tools and methods for systems thinking, but I’d like to focus on one technique in particular and how it could apply to game design.

Stock-and-flow diagrams are used to model the interconnections between elements of a system. As the name suggests, they define systems in terms of stocks and flows. Stocks are “the elements of a system that you can see, feel, count, or measure at any given time”; they are shown as boxes.

Flows are what cause stocks to change over time. Inflows and outflows are depicted as thick grey arrows (going to or coming from a stock, respectively). The rate of a flow is represented by a faucet, because it can be adjusted higher or lower.

If the rate of a flow changes based on the level of a stock, then this creates a feedback loop. There are two types of feedback loops. Balancing loops seek to maintain equilibrium and resist change within a system (in game design this is often called negative feedback). Reinforcing loops are the opposite; they enhance any direction of change imposed on the system (positive feedback). In stock-and-flow diagrams, feedback loops are represented by thin curved lines.

Clouds represent the boundary of the system. The boundary is an intentional choice of what is considered inside and outside the system for the purpose of analysis and conversation. In reality, “there are no separate systems. The world is a continuum.” The boundary only exists in our mental model, and thus it must occasionally be reevaluated to suit the problem at hand.

Here’s a simple real-world example as given in the book.

In this example, the temperature in a room is a stock. Heat flows into the room from the furnace, and the rate of inflow is determined by the thermostat. It turns the flow on/off based on the difference between the temperature in the room and the goal temperature setting. Heat also flows out to the air outside. The rate of outflow is determined by the discrepancy between the indoor and outdoor temperatures. The rates of inflow and outflow are both affected by the current level of the temperature stock, which indicates that we have two feedback loops (both balancing).

Like the real world, video games are also built out of many complex systems. We can use stock-and-flow diagrams as a tool to better understand the structure of these systems.

Of course, gameplay systems are not always visible from the player’s point of view. Jennifer Scheurle explored this topic in her 2018 GDC talk entitled “Good Game Design is like a Magic Trick”. Mechanics are sometimes intentionally obfuscated to create a specific aesthetic effect for the player. For instance, consider the health system in Assassin’s Creed Origins as discussed in her talk.

From the player’s perspective the system is fairly straightforward. Their health is divided into three equal segments. Unless they have recently taken damage, it will regenerate over time up to the maximum of the current segment. This dynamic encourages the player to fight tactically, dancing in and out of combat.

However, game director Ashraf Ismail revealed that the player’s health is also affected by hidden “safety belt mechanics”.

There are two hidden systems that modulate the amount of damage taken. If the player’s health is above 66% (two full segments), then they cannot be taken below 7% health in one blow. This is true even if the attack would have outright killed them. The purpose of this mechanic is to provide a buffer against the negative emotion of perceived “cheap shots”. Given the chaos of battle, it feels subjectively unfair to be taken down suddenly from high health. A similar system exists for enemies with firearms. The first shot from offscreen is forced to miss, which gives the player a “fair” warning and an opportunity to react.

We know that the player’s health regenerates in combat after not taking damage for a few seconds. However, the rate of regeneration is secretly increased when recovering the final segment of health. Furthermore, the last sliver of health shown in the UI represents more actual health points than its appearance would proportionately suggest.

Ashraf (as quoted in the GDC talk) explains that these mechanics exist “to make every fight tense & interesting. We want to nudge the system to have players lose health more quickly at the start of the combat segment, and employ safety mechanics further down the track to generate an experience to make players feel like they are escaping this combat situation by the skin of their teeth.”

Another example of a hidden feedback system is the inventory balance system in Bioshock.

Paul Hellquist explains that “Bioshock tries to make players […] constantly be hungry for key resources such as ammo and health.” However, this is difficult to achieve given the wide range of player skill levels. Without perfect balance, one player might overflow with supplies while another can hardly keep their gun loaded. Neither player would be having the intended aesthetic experience of operating on the “ragged edge”.

To achieve the desired inventory balance, Bioshock modulates the item drop rate based on the player’s current inventory. For example, novice players are less accurate with their weapons and take more damage from enemies, thus consuming ammo and health kits at a greater rate. This outflow of consumed items reduces the level of the inventory stock. The system reacts with balancing feedback, increasing the item drop rate to replenish the stock.

We developed a similar balancing feedback system for the dynamic difficulty in Uncharted 4. When a player dies repeatedly in combat, the system starts making small adjustments to the combat tuning variables. Enemies get a bit more inaccurate and drop more ammo. Buddies provide more assistance, and mid-combat checkpoints happen more frequently. As the player gets unblocked and makes progress, the system slowly moves the tuning back to its original values.

Jennifer Scheurle highlights another feedback example from Uncharted 4, as related by lead designer Kurt Margenau.

In a scripted climbing sequence, the player lands on a rock that begins slowly coming loose. They must scramble to the top of the rock and jump off before it collapses down the cliff face. The goal is to have Nathan Drake barely make the jump, regardless of the player’s skill level. To achieve this, the designer uses perfect climbing input as a baseline (tracking progression along a spline vs time). If the player falls behind that baseline, then the animation speed of the falling rock is dynamically slowed. Less skilled players will have a more forgiving climb while maintaining that “skin of your teeth” feeling.

While the previous examples show how feedback loops in action-adventure games are often hidden from the player, what about games that make systemic complexity the star of the show?

Banished is city-building strategy game, which means that it’s fundamentally a game about managing the complex interactions between dozens of stocks and flows. The town’s population affects both the birth rate (reinforcing loop) and the death rate (balancing loop). Having more farmers increases the food supply (reinforcing loop), but also the food consumption (balancing loop). Food demonstrates how stocks can act as “shock absorbers” in a system; the village doesn’t immediately starve when the inflow of food is severely reduced in the wintertime.

Figure 7 shows the particular interactions between population and food stocks, but Banished features dozens of stocks (clothing, tools, housing, etc.) that follow similar dynamics. The goal of the game is to keep all of these interactions in balance. Otherwise, a cascading failure could destroy the integrity of the entire system (i.e. everyone dies).

Connecting this back to the real world, I wonder: what do we learn when we play video games? Eric Zimmerman notes that:

“Playing games requires a kind of systems literacy that no other medium demands – to understand rules and patterns, and to learn them on the fly. After all, unlike other forms of games, video games do not display their entire ruleset (if indeed any of it) up front; instead, the player has to play with the world and infer the system behind it.”

Games require us to grapple with multiple complex systems (even when they’re hidden). Playing a game involves observing the behaviour of systems, making a mental model of them, and predicting how they will react to new input. They embody what Donella Meadows calls the “central insight of systems theory”: systems behave according to their structure and reveal their structure through their behaviour.

Systems thinking in turn makes us better equipped to understand the world around us. It can help us to make more informed decisions about ecology, finance, politics, etc. “You can’t navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take your eyes off short-term events and look for long term behaviour and structure.” Systems thinking is an antidote to a world that fixates on individual events, rather than “seeing in their history clues to the structures from which behaviour and events flow.”

To give a quick concrete example of this, consider the argument that Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis makes against government austerity. He points out that some politicians compare a national budget with a household budget. If an individual is deeply in debt, the financially responsible course of action is to decrease spending to reduce that debt. The same should therefore apply to indebted nations; reduce government spending to pay off the national debt.

However, Yanis points out that, as individuals, our income is independent of our spending. This is not the case in a national budget, where government spending is a component of the national income. If a decrease in private spending (recession) causes a decrease public spending at the same time (austerity), then the national income will decrease. Since the government’s inflow of tax revenue is a percentage of the national income, this causes a runaway reinforcing feedback loop (depression).

Yanis makes the case that belt-tightening is effective on an individual level, but not a national level. The diagram above illustrates that they are structurally different systems, and systems thinking teaches us that systems behave according to their structure. Austerity advocates therefore cannot reasonably argue that both systems will react to change in the same way.

Regardless of whether or not Yanis’s argument is economically correct, systems thinking gives us tools to better understand the arguments being made in economics and politics. If video games as a medium have a unique benefit to offer the world, it might be systems literacy.

Stock-and-flow diagrams are a useful tool for modelling game systems for discussion and analysis. Of course, this is just one small topic in Thinking in Systems. The rest of the book uses this notation to explore further topics, such as a taxonomy of common systemic problems and where to apply change in order to have the biggest effect on a system. It’s all extremely relevant and practical for game design, and I highly recommend picking up a copy.

While I was playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild over the holidays, I kept thinking about Far Cry 2. Of course that’s not uncommon; I cut my teeth writing about games in ~2008, so I tend to see Far Cry 2 everywhere (game design pareidolia). However, rather than a vague impression, Breath of the Wild evoked specific ideas that director Clint Hocking explored in a 2009 GDC talk entitled “Fault Tolerance: From Intentionality to Improvisation”. I’d like to use that talk as a framework to compare the two games and discuss some common mechanics that are used to similar effect.

Clint begins his talk by discussing intentionality in games, which is “the ability of the player to devise his own meaningful goals through his understanding of the game dynamics and to formulate meaningful plans to achieve them.” Games that support high-level intentional play (e.g. immersive sims, stealth games) tend to have “robustly interconnected systems”. The player must develop a deep understanding of both how these systems work in isolation and how they interact with each other.

The flow of play can be divided into two phases: a composition phase (deciding and figuring out what to do) and an execution phase (doing it). Games that favour execution are more “ride-like” (Call of Duty), whereas favouring composition is more “puzzle-like”. Intentional play emerges when the two phases are kept in a “game-like” balance.

Clint notes that messy systems (generalized physics, crowds, fire) tend to collapse the player’s intentionality. However, he also felt that the “simulation of broader more chaotic and unpredictable systems” was the future of game design. Thus, with Far Cry 2, Clint’s initial goal was to explore how highly intentional play could be preserved in a “highly dynamic and free-form” environment.

At one point later in development, Clint and his team decided that some of the high-level faction systems they’d been developing needed to be cut. However, he was concerned that this would discourage the player from making complex plans. Shortening the composition phase might make the game more “ride-like”, which would subvert intentional play.

However, he observed that systems that inflict “small unpredictable losses” (malaria, wounding, gun jams, grenade rolling down a hill) kick the player out of the execution phase and force them to improvise. The player therefore “switches back and forth between composition and execution several times in a given battle”. A short composition phase is balanced by a short execution phase, and intentionality is preserved.

Improvisational play is therefore “intentionality compressed”, and randomness is “the pressure cooker that pushes the already intentional player to react and improvise a new plan on the fly.”

In this vein, Breath of the Wild has two systems that inflict small semi-unpredictable losses on the player. The first is the weapon degradation system. Weapons are fragile, which makes them unreliable. When their weapon breaks, players are forced to adapt. They can pull an alternate (perhaps less familiar) weapon from their inventory, or try to make use of whatever environmental tools are currently on hand. One streamer observed that weapon degradation naturally pushed him to explore the game’s other mechanics, such as stealth and fire.

The weather system can also work against the player. Snow and sandstorms are blinding. Thunderstorms unleash lightning strikes against metal equipment. Most commonly and annoyingly, rain makes climbing just about impossible. Unlike previous games in the series, the player also has no tools (e.g. Song of Storms) to control the weather. When inconvenient weather rolls in, their only real options are to pass the time or adapt their plans.

These chaotic systems therefore serve the same purpose in Breath of the Wild as they do in Far Cry 2: inflicting random small losses on the player to force them back into the composition phase. Unexpected setbacks compel the player to slow down, to observe, and to think; it may even push them to engage with systems that they may otherwise have ignored. Even in her annoyance with Zelda’s weather system, Patricia Hernandez pointed out that: “without these rain mechanics, I wouldn’t have all these ridiculous stories, huh?”

Video by Alex Wiltshire

Another aspect of improvisational play is how the player handles having their plans upset (i.e. being kicked out of the execution phase). As Clint points out, in a “ride-like” game, this usually means just dying and restarting from the last checkpoint. In a more intentional stealth game, the player may be able to recover from a loss, but the cost of failure is so high that they’re just as likely to just quickload the last save.

To encourage improvisation, the player must be willing to fall back into that composition phase (rather than simply reloading). This means that any random unpredictable losses have to be quite small. As Clint points out: “you rarely die from these events – unjamming a weapon takes no more time or effort than reloading does.” Furthermore, the game generally needs to be forgiving of the player’s mistakes.

In Far Cry 2, this is achieved with the buddy system. When the player is downed while on a mission, they will occasionally be pulled away to safety at the last minute by a buddy, who will then fight by their side (and is at risk of being killed). In a blog post, Clint noted that the point of this system was “to design an ‘out of frying pan, into the fire’ system where the player would be baited further and further down a losing path until he ultimately would occasionally be required to make a choice between giving up a limited though not overly rare ‘resource’ (a buddy) in exchange for not having to reload and redo a lengthy section of the game.”

Breath of the Wild’s equivalent systems are the four powers granted by the Champions. Mipha’s Grace is the most similar to Far Cry 2’s buddies; it restores the player’s health to full (+ bonus hearts) on death, but then goes on a real-time 24 minute cooldown. Daruk’s Protection blocks three hits when the player has their shield up (18 minute cooldown). Urbosa’s Fury helps the player deal with crowds of enemies, and Revali’s Gale makes traversal more forgiving. These powers help the player to smooth over their mistakes without restarting the game, but their long cooldown means the player can’t become overly reliant on them.

Outside of the scope of Clint’s GDC talk, there’s another notable similarity between the two games: respawning enemies. One of the biggest complaints about Far Cry 2 was that guard posts would quickly respawn after the player cleared them. While he confessed to “getting raked over the coals” by the press for this decision, Clint’s rationale was that “it was better to have them repopulate rather than have the player be able to empty the world of gameplay too easily”. While there may be better theoretical solutions to this problem, he maintained that respawning was the best available option given the realities of production.

Subsequent entries in the Far Cry series have pivoted significantly on this idea, and have integrated permanently clearing out bases and claiming enemy territory into the core loop of the game. While taking over the game world is great fun, many game critics noted that Far Cry 2’s “incessantly hostile” world was far more unique and evocative. As Brendan Keogh described:

“It was frustrating and certainly unfair, but each of these elements thematically resounded with the game’s broader cynicism. Unlike Far Cry 3’s world, which became safe and friendly (and uninteresting) after enough checkpoints were destroyed, the one in Far Cry 2 stubbornly resists the player’s colonial attempts. The game will let you eke out a living, but it will never let you take over its entire world. Just like the broader conflict into which the player has stepped in this fictional country, the player’s attempts at colonialization are pointless, dashed at every turn.”

Far Cry 2’s unnamed African state is a bleak, oppressive, war-torn country. It nihilistically evokes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. “It goes to such efforts here, to be ugly, to make you feel ugly” notes Alec Meer. You’re not the hero; you’re a bad person in a bad place. Respawning guard posts therefore serve to maintain coherence “between what [Far Cry 2] is about as a game, and what it is about as a story”.

The same is basically true in Breath of the Wild. Every moonrise has a random chance of being a “blood moon” that will bring every enemy in the world back to life. As with Far Cry 2’s guard posts, this serves the practical purpose of preventing the player from completely depleting the game world.

This system is also strongly resonant with the game’s narrative. The bad guys won a century ago, and post-apocalyptic Hyrule is a corrupted shadow of its former glory. Unlike Far Cry 3 or 4, Link can never restore the fallen world by gradually clearing out each individual area. Breath of the Wild’s systems and story both dictate the the world can never recover until Calamity Gannon is defeated.

There’s one more connection I’d like to draw between Clint’s writing on intentionality and Breath of the Wild. In his “Designing to Promote Intentional Play” talk from GDC 2006, Clint mentions the problem of messy systems (like physics) subverting intentionality. He describes how Half-Life 2 unravels this problem by relying on affordance.

Affordant objects have obvious indicators of their own properties. For instance, a minecart is made out of thick metal and its physical dimensions are larger than the player. The player can therefore infer that it is bulletproof, can be used as cover, and is attracted by magnets. It has wheels, so it will roll down a slope. It has a large mass, so it can be used to weigh down switches. Players don’t have to remember how minecarts function, but can easily discern these properties on the fly as needed.

As Clint explains, this is significant because:

“Essentially, the world presents itself to the player as a collection of potential solutions to physical problems. The concept of affordance through properties allows the player to quickly and accurately parse the world for objects that provide potential solutions to what he perceives as the current problem, thereby allowing him to build chains of intent through a messy system and solve his problems in creative ways.”

While this quote is describing Half-Life 2, I believe it’s equally applicable to Breath of the Wild. In a 2017 talk, technical director Takuhiro Dohta explained how the game’s “chemistry engine” simulates interactions between elements (fire, water, electricity, wind) and materials (wood, rock, metal). In their engine, elements can interact with materials (fire burning wood), and elements can interact with elements (water putting out fire), but materials do not influence other materials. These reactions can further interact with the physics simulation (fire creating an updraft).

This system creates a convenient abstraction in how objects interact. The interaction isn’t “fire arrows burn wooden crates”, but simply a universal “fire burns wood”. A metal weapon can be substituted to close an electrical circuit because metal always conducts electricity. Objects interact through their properties and affordances, which are “designed to have an overall consistency and to feel instinctive”. This desire for affordance even pushed the game to adopt a more realistic art style. As art director Satoru Takizawa noted: “one of our goals was to have the art intuitively suggest possible physics and chemistry gameplay based on the player’s own experiences in the real world.”

I have no evidence to suggest, nor do I mean to imply, that the Nintendo EPD team took any sort of direct inspiration from Far Cry 2. Rather, I think it’s a sign that the systemic design principles that Clint Hocking has been articulating for over a decade are still fresh and relevant today. There’s still so much unexplored design space here, so let’s hope we see more games that push the limits of intentionality and improvisation.

A few weeks ago game director Bruce Straley announced that, after 18 years, he was going to be leaving Naughty Dog. He will be dearly missed.

In the last few years before his departure, I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with Bruce on The Last of Us and Uncharted 4. Working under his creative direction made me grow tremendously as a game developer. His way of thinking and his design values are visible across the entire team, to the point where it’s impossible to distinguish Bruce’s process from Naughty Dog’s process as a studio. He wasn’t just a director; he was a true leader.

I’d like to share four important lessons that I learned from working with Bruce Straley.

Get Someone Else to Play It

It’s common wisdom that tools play an outsized role in game development. Developers who are comfortable with their technology can prototype their ideas faster, throwing away what doesn’t work and iterating on what does. With any luck, you won’t need to make compromises around a bad decision later in development.

However, there’s a corollary to this that’s seldom discussed. When developing a new feature, it’s very tempting to iterate on it in isolation. You develop a sense of ownership about what you make, so you balk at the idea of presenting it to others too early. You can see the obvious flaws in your unfinished feature, and you think you’ll get better feedback if you fix those first.

To counteract this impulse, Bruce always encouraged us to call over a random coworker and put a controller in their hands as early and as often as possible. Getting someone else to playtest your work will immediately reveal the most crucial problems with it. It’ll allow you to pivot much faster, and avoid wasting time polishing a prototype that requires a fundamental revision.

Furthermore, they may have ideas that you hadn’t even considered, which segues nicely into…

Everyone’s Feedback is Valuable

Game development is specialized work, and it’s very easy for the various disciplines to become siloed. This can also make it difficult to give feedback across departments. An audio technician might feel reluctant to tell an environment artist that they can’t spot the enemy NPCs in their lush environments. One fears a territorial reaction; “you don’t understand my work and are unqualified to judge it.” Better to keep it to yourself rather than step on someone else’s toes.

As a director, Bruce maintained a holistic view of making games, and encouraged everyone on the team to reach out with their feedback regardless of department. Everyone working at a game studio has a love for games and a great deal of experience playing them. If they have an issue with how a particular feature works, then there are likely hundreds of players who will share the same concern after launch.

Don’t let your studio foster a parochial attitude; encourage every department to share their concerns across disciplines. Identifying problems is often more valuable than finding solutions.

Own The Game You’re Making

Disciplinary parochialism has another side effect: developers often cultivate a blindness for issues that they aren’t responsible for. An animator who is focused on fixing a bad animation blend may observe that a level’s lighting is broken, but mentally file that away as “someone else’s problem.” Nobody feels like they own the game as a whole, only the small aspect that they’re directly working on.

In my early days at Naughty Dog, I recall demoing some prototype feature to Bruce. I didn’t get much feedback on my work, because he immediately noticed that a variety of other issues were popping up. I had of course noticed those issues during my work, but the “not my problem” filter had caused me to completely disregard them. He tasked me to track down those issues before my work could be properly evaluated.

Bruce taught me to not be blind to brokenness. I should feel a sense of ownership for the entire game, even the parts that I’m not directly contributing to. Even if an issue is neither my fault nor my responsibility, I can make the development process better by tracking it down.

Talk Face to Face

The modern workplace features a cornucopia of digital collaboration tools. On many teams, the vast majority of communication takes place in emails, IMs, or some proprietary all-in-one project tracking software. These tools are indispensable, but also fundamentally flawed. Like all written communication, they lack the nuances of speech: posture, tone of voice, hand gestures. Emails also suffer from low-bandwidth and a low signal-to-noise ratio; often a two minute conversation will convey more information than a fifteen email thread.

As a director, Bruce believed that any substantial communication should happen face to face. In my first few months at Naughty Dog, I recall being (gently) reprimanded for sending a hundred word email response to someone on an issue I felt strongly about. That issue was “too big for email”; Bruce instructed me to get out of my chair, walk over to their desk and figure it out together.

Scheduled meetings are a rarity at Naughty Dog, but these sorts of informal desk-chats happen all the time. If a thorny multi-disciplinary issue needs resolving, it’s not uncommon to see a cabal with a representative from every department hovering around a single monitor.

As an introvert and a newcomer to an established studio, this way of working took me a long time to get used to. Fortunately, it helped push me out of my comfort zone and familiarize myself with the other departments. I now firmly believe that talking face-to-face is one of the “secret sauce” ingredients responsible for Naughty Dog’s tremendous success.

Bruce, I told you this in person but I’ll say it again here: thank you for everything you taught me about making games. It’s up to the whole team now to keep the lessons you imparted alive at Naughty Dog. I hope we’ll make you proud with what we’re making next.

“Originally, Deadly Premonition was supposed to take place in Canada. However, when I brought the idea to game producers, they told me the story should take place in America, as it is the country that generates the most sales.” – Hidetaka Suehiro (aka SWERY)

Today marks 150 years since several British colonies in North America united to form a new dominion under the British Crown. Confederation may be fascinating¹ to Canadian history nerds like myself, but it’s not exactly summertime blockbuster material. Our separation from the mother country was a lot like Canada itself: peaceful and amiable, but perhaps lacking panache.

Four years ago, Canada’s video game industry surpassed the UK to became the third largest in the world. Some of the best-selling and most acclaimed games are made out of studios in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Edmonton. However, this fact would be easy to miss; video games are rarely permitted to be distinctly Canadian. Canada is where media is made, but hardly ever where it’s set (see “Vancouver Never Plays Itself”).

To that end, I thought I’d take this sesquicentennial opportunity to celebrate the handful of games that are proudly and unambiguously set in Canada. This list is definitely cursory and incomplete², so if you spot any conspicuous omissions let me know in the comments below.

Bare Minimum

Wikipedia’s list of “video games set in Canada” is dominated by sports games. For instance, there are apparently twenty-seven Formula One games that feature the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal. NHL, NBA, MLB, PGA, and FIFA games painstakingly render Canadian players, teams, and arenas.

With no disrespect to sports games, I subjectively consider these titles a bare minimum in terms of portraying Canada; that’s just where the teams happen to be. If the sport moved elsewhere, so would the game franchise.

Honourable Mentions

These games are mostly set outside of Canada, but merit an honourable mention for having some level or segment that is distinctly Canadian.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution splits its focus between Detroit and Shanghai, but the developers at Eidos Montreal snuck in one brief section in their home city. The mission features a great skyline flyover with an oversized Olympic Stadium.

Similarly, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is principally set in the 18th century Caribbean, but the present-day metafiction takes place at the headquarters of “Abstergo Entertainment” in Montreal (inspired by Ubisoft’s own office!)

Mass Effect 3 doesn’t spend much time on Earth, but it opens with an escape from Vancouver as the Reapers begin their invasion. Art director Derek Watts notes that they specifically chose a Canadian city (over Hong Kong or Rio) to acknowledge Bioware’s Canadian roots.

Sly 2: Band of Thieves has a heist set in Canada. Players take part in the Lumberjack Games run by Jean Bison (literally a bison), and seek to collect energy from the Northern Lights.

Like the show, South Park: The Stick of Truth portrays Canada in its idiosyncratic flappy-headed style. The game has the Prince of Canada send players on a cross-country quest to meet the Earl of Winnipeg, the Minister of Montreal, and the Bishop of Banff.

Finally, while it takes place entirely in Europe, Valiant Hearts: The Great War depicts a significant event in Canadian history. The Battle of Vimy Ridge (1917) marks the first time that all four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force participated in a combined offensive.

Set in Canada

This category highlights games that are nominally set in Canada, but otherwise aren’t particularly Canadian. For instance, the Dreamcast survival horror game D2 takes place in “the Canadian wilderness”, but that mostly serves the purpose of being an archetypal winter environment. In fact, the setting was allegedly inspired by director Kenji Eno’s visit to snowy New Zealand.

Vancouver hosted the Olympic Winter Games in 2010, which resulted in two officially licensed games by Sega: Vancouver 2010 and Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games. I imagine they have a lot in common with the licensed Olympic games set in other countries.

While rather divergent in terms of theme, the games Until Dawn and Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek are both set in winter lodges in the mountains of Alberta. The former also features the wendigo, which is a monster from Algonquian folklore.

Distinctly Canadian

The Yukon Trail is a 1994 educational game set during the Klondike Gold Rush. While it’s told from an American perspective (the player starts out in Seattle), the game portrays an important era in northern Canada’s history. On their journey, the player will even encounter Sam Steele, the legendary officer of the North-West Mounted Police.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game is a beat ’em up based on the bestselling comic series by Bryan Lee O’Malley. Like the comic, the game is distinctively set in Toronto, with levels featuring landmarks such as the CN Tower, Casa Loma, and TTC Streetcars.

Set in a rural 19th century village, the action-strategy game Sang-Froid – Tales of Werewolves features monsters from French-Canadian mythology. Studio founder Yan Pepin wanted to “create a game inspired by the old Quebec folktales he had grown up with”.

Fort McMoney is a NFB documentary and strategy game about the Athabasca oil sands. The episodic web game allows players to virtually tour Fort McMurray, interview real residents, and make decisions about how their virtual city should develop.

Assassin’s Creed Rogue’s protagonist fights with the British Americans (i.e. the Templars) against New France (i.e. the Assassins) during the Seven Years’ War³. Players can sail the open world of the North Atlantic, visiting settlements in Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland.

The Long Dark is a survival game set in the Canadian wilderness. Players are confronted with the real-life dangers of hunger and exposure, and must explore and scavenge to survive. Creative director Raphael van Lierop says that he was inspired by the natural surroundings of his home on Vancouver Island, and that he seeks “to make games that have a Canadian angle to them”.

Kona is an interactive murder-mystery set in northern Canada in the 1970’s. It’s an unapologetically Québécois game; while the audio and subtitles are localized, the in-game text textures are all in French. It also features an original soundtrack by Quebec folk band CuréLabel.

Happy birthday to my former home and native land. My sincere wish is that, for your bicentennial, the number of games set in Canada will be so large that it will impossible to list them all in a single short essay. 🇨🇦

<sup>1. While not directly about Confederation, I recommend Pierre Berton’s “The National Dream”. ↩
2. The lack of games by and for indigenous peoples is a particularly glaring omission on my part. ↩
3. Americans call it the “French and Indian War” but that’s a silly name. ↩</sup>

^{Header image of the Owl’s Nest bar in Osaka excerpted from toco toco ep.24}

Clash Royale has been my go-to phone game lately. I didn’t pay it much attention when it launched early last year; I just assumed it was Supercell’s latest entry in the “shouting man icon” mobile game genre. But it kept popping it when I was searching for new deckbuilding games to play, so I decided to give it a shot.

Belying its wacky cartoonish aesthetic, Clash Royale is actually a very elegantly designed real-time strategy game (with a tolerable free-to-play metagame). Players select 8 cards (troops, spells & buildings) for their deck, then spend “elixir” to deploy them on their side of a two-lane arena. Their units will push towards the opponent’s side of the map, with the aim of toppling their three towers. The entire battlefield fits on a vertical phone screen, and matches only last 3-4 minutes.

Players select where to summon their units, but they fight autonomously once deployed¹. This simple touchscreen interface is approachable for mobile players, but there is deep skill and strategy in the timing and placement of deployment. In essence, Clash Royale refines mechanics from the notoriously complex RTS, MOBA and deckbuilding genres into a very elegant and accessible hybrid game.

While there’s a lot to praise about Clash Royale’s design, I’d like to expand on a small detail that caught my eye. It’s an ingenious design decision that allows the developers to efficiently reuse their existing content. It also opens up strategic options for the player without sacrificing simplicity.

Skeletons are the weakest units in Clash Royale. They die in one hit and their melee attacks deal negligible damage. The base version of the card spawns 4 skeletons and is one of the only 1-elixir cards in the game. It’s mostly used as a quick distraction, tanking damage from a stronger unit while your towers whittle it down. Its low cost also makes it good for an emergency defense. Because it’s a common card that fits well into beginner decks, players will very quickly get a sense of a skeleton’s relative strength and strategic uses.

A different card, Skeleton Army, deploys 14 skeletons for the cost of 3 elixir. This has an obvious benefit in elixir efficiency (2 extra skeletons for the cost), but it also provides a distinct strategic utility. A horde of weak units can easily overwhelm stronger units that have high hitpoints and move slowly. Skeleton Army is a hard counter to Giants & Hog Riders, two of the strongest pushing units in the game. However, a concentrated swarm is more susceptible to AOE spells, giving the opponent to the option to trade effectively using Zap or Arrows.

Concocting two cards from a single unit is pretty good, but Clash Royale goes even further. The Witch is a slow-moving AOE-damage unit that summons 3 skeletons in front of her every few seconds. The Tombstone is a low-cost defensive building that periodically spawns a skeleton, and spawns 4 additional skeletons on death. Finally, The Graveyard is a legendary spell that gradually summons a swarm of skeletons in a large radius. It can be deployed anywhere in the arena, even directly on top of your opponent’s towers. Each of these five cards gets to reuse the skeleton code and assets while serving distinctly different strategic purposes.

A similar design pattern is used for goblins, which are a slightly-stronger base unit. They come in two basic flavours: Goblins (melee) and Spear Goblins (ranged) both cost 2 elixir for 3 units, while the Goblin Gang summons 6 goblins (3 of each) for 3 elixir. Goblin Hut is a building that periodically spawns spear goblins, and Goblin Barrel delivers 3 melee goblins anywhere on the map.

From a production point of view, there are many benefits to this type of content reuse. Supercell have stated that they keep their game downloads under 100 MB, which is the maximum size that iOS will allow to be downloaded without wifi. Having multiple cards use the same unit models, textures, and sounds is a huge benefit to Clash Royale‘s memory footprint. I suspect that the minor unit variations (such as the melee and ranged goblins) likely have some shared assets. This decision undoubtedly helps with development scheduling as well, as they can create more content in the same amount of time.

Furthermore, this approach also has benefits for game design. Once players understand a unit’s strengths and weaknesses, they won’t be confused if that unit pops up in a different context. For instance, I remember the first match where my opponent played The Witch. I had to take some time to observe and understand her behaviour, but the skeletons she summoned were a known quantity. I felt confident about reacting to them.

Having fewer individual unit types simplifies game balance and tuning. If The Graveyard spell were to hypothetically summon it’s own bespoke unit called the zombie, then the design team would have to reconsider the zombie’s strength relative to the skeleton every time either unit was adjusted. Keeping the units consistent allows Supercell to focus instead on what makes each card unique. For instance, they’ve nerfed Skeleton Army twice this year by simply reducing its skeleton count by one.

Designers often fret about reusing assets, fearing that players might burn out on repetition. Clash Royale’s economical design demonstrates how clever tweaks to existing content can afford distinct strategies for the player. NPCs are more than their base stats; variations in quantity, economy, and deployment are cost-effective ways of reinterpreting existing units.

¹ Purely incidentally, the game actually has a lot in common with Pax Britannica.

On November 15^th, I’ll be speaking about combat design and AI in Uncharted 4 at the Montreal International Game Summit. My talk explores how we navigated the extremes of combat design philosophy (tightly authored vs fully systems-driven) throughout Uncharted 4‘s development, and how we found our best results with a hybrid approach.

Ahead of my talk, I did a short interview with Brendan Sinclair at GamesIndustry. We discussed a number of topics related to AI design, including why our early attempt at a simple point-to-point search behaviour failed:

“In another instance, they used some pathfinding AI from The Last of Us to get enemies from point A to point B. Gallant said it was soon clear that the AI worked especially well in The Last of Us because the game’s tight, complex environments ensured that the enemies would traverse environments in mostly human ways, using aisles and doorways, walking around desks and other obstacles in the layout. But in Uncharted 4‘s larger, more open layouts, moving from point A to point B usually meant travelling in a perfectly straight line, which wasn’t terribly interesting.”

“The solution was to run paths throughout the layout that AI would move along, trails that would have them reasonably making their way throughout the level, perhaps clearing out corners or other places the player could be hiding on the way to their destination.”

Attending MIGS this year is also a nice homecoming for me. Not only was I born and raised in Montreal, I was actually a student volunteer at MIGS way back in 2009. It’s a real honour to be able to come back as a speaker seven years later.

You can catch my talk at 3:45 PM in room 519A on Tuesday November 15^th. If you’re attending MIGS, I hope you’ll swing by to say hello!

Disclosure: As a speaker, MIGS is covering my flight & accommodation during the conference.

“RNG gets your emotions really high and really low. It makes you really feel. Sometimes when I play a game I’m just going through the motions and I’m not getting those highs and lows, but in Hearthstone I get them all the time. It makes me want to come back and play more.”

– Mike Donais, Hearthstone senior designer

Randomness is a perpetual topic of conversation among Hearthstone players. It’s generally accepted that a game with random elements can be highly skillful and competitive. However, each new expansion revives fears that Blizzard may have tipped the balance too strongly towards luck at the expense of high-level play. The evolution of the game has been particularly visible this year, as Blizzard phased out two of Hearthstone’s older expansions to create a new standard set for competitive play.

RNG is often treated as a monolithic quality, but Hearthstone actually employs many distinct types of randomness in its mechanics. Some cards allow players to influence their odds by modifying the board state. Other cards use randomness as a strength, providing situational versatility. Some cards become more reliable with careful deck construction, and others vary based on the opponent.

Fundamentally, randomness is created by picking randomly from a set. For example, a coin flip picks from the set of {heads, tails}. While each card interacts with randomness in a unique way, they can be broadly categorized by the set that they randomly pick from. In other words, the set of possible outcomes defines a type of randomness. We can use these categories to chart the evolution of randomness in Hearthstone through the years.

To begin, I need to limit the scope of my inquiry. Because Hearthstone is played with a shuffled deck, there is an inherent randomness in drawing a card. It could therefore be argued that Blackwing Corruptor (“if you’re holding a Dragon, deal 3 damage”) has an element of luck to it. For the sake of brevity, I will only be considering cards where a player with knowledge of the visible board state could not predict a card’s outcome in every situation.

Bluffing and hidden information are also outside the scope of this discussion. All of the “secret” cards in Hearthstone are triggered off of deterministic conditions, and are therefore not inherently chance-based. However, some secrets do have some randomness in their triggered effect.

COIN FLIP

A 50/50 coin flip is the most fundamental random game mechanic. Hearthstone employs it only sparingly, mostly as thematic flavour for clumsy ogres. Interestingly, pre-nerf Nat Pagle triggered at the end of turn, guaranteeing at least once chance for a card draw. This reliability made him a popular inclusion during the public beta, until he was adjusted.

RANDOM TARGET

Randomly choosing from the set of characters on the board is the most common type of randomness in Hearthstone. These cards should theoretically be more random than a coin flip, since “a random enemy” selects from an upper bound of 8 targets. In practice, these cards reward skillful play because players can modify the board state to favour their desired result; they’re more unreliable than they are truly random.

Deadly Shot destroys a random enemy minion, which in the worst case has a 1 in 7 chance of hitting the desired target. However, if the other minions can be cleared from the board, then the spell will have a single deterministic target. Cards that restrict their target selection by some characteristic (“Murloc” type or “with 2 or less attack”) further reduce the set of targets, providing players with even more control over the outcome.

Players also control the timing of when to play their “random target” card, weighing the current expected value against possible future board states. For example, Arcane Missiles has an 50% chance of killing a lone 2-health enemy minion. A player can choose to play the card immediately and accept these odds, or save it for a better opportunity.

SMALL SET

Some cards randomly draw from a small fixed set of non-collectible cards, seen most emblematically in the Shaman hero power Totemic Call. These sets come in various sizes: there are 3 animal companions, 4 basic totems, 7 spare parts, etc. The cards in the set are similar in terms of cost and effectiveness, and the preferred outcome usually varies based on the current board state.

Small sets are less random than they appear because they have two components: a known baseline and a random bonus. While Animal Companion has a ⅓ chance of summoning a particular card, it will always provide a beast with at least 2 attack and 2 health. The player can confidently factor this baseline into their decision making; for instance, they know that they’ll always produce a beast-type target for their Houndmaster.

Cards that produce a random result within a given numeric range (e.g. “2-3 damage”) are categorically similar to small set cards. Lightning Storm guarantees at least 2 damage to all enemy minions, making it reliable board clear regardless of the random outcome.

CATALOGUE

Embracing the possibilities that are only available to a digital card game, some cards select randomly from the entire Hearthstone catalogue. While this mechanic had some presence in the base game, Blizzard fully embraced it with the Goblins vs. Gnomes expansion. The nature of the game fundamentally changed when Piloted Shredder overtook the vanilla Chillwind Yeti as the standard 4-mana minion.

These cards typically restrict the type of random card they can pull based on some combination of cost, category (minion, spell or weapon), class, and creature type. For example, at the time of the GvG expansion’s release there were 531 collectible cards in Hearthstone, but a Piloted Shredder’s “random 2-cost minion” only selected from 65 of them.

This form of randomness provides less control for players, particularly when random cards are summoned directly to the board and not draw into hand. Cards of the same cost tend to provide roughly equivalent stat value, and their small differences follow a normal distribution above and below the power curve. At the extremes of this distribution are notoriously volatile outliers, such as the board-clearing Doomsayer. While these extreme outcomes can swing games, skilled players should have a greater ability to adapt to these unpredictable situations.

Ben Brode, lead designer of Hearthstone, explained the pivot towards this style of randomness: “I think the reason cards like that work for Hearthstone is that they make every game a little bit different, and it gives opportunities to really good players to show off their skills when they’re presented with novel situations that they have to adapt to.”

DISCOVER

The discover mechanic was introduced in the League of Explorers expansion. Like catalogue randomness, this type also draws from the entire library of Hearthstone cards. However, discover cards present the player with 3 random options; the player draws one and discards the other two. This is powerful because the player can choose the card that best fits their situation.

For example, Dark Peddler offers a wide range of 1-cost cards: Corruption removes big enemy minions, Reliquary Seeker complements a full board, and Power Overwhelming can enable a lethal finisher. When the draw restriction is something other than cost (e.g. cards with deathrattle), then the player has the flexibility to choose cheap cards in the early game and expensive ones in the late game.

The discover mechanic is extremely popular among Hearthstone players. Because it interacts with the entire Hearthstone catalogue but does not tend to dramatically swing games, some could argue that it’s an entirely superior version of catalogue randomness. However, I would argue that its predictability fails to create the “highs and lows” and “novel situations” that the Blizzard design team are looking for. Discover is well-designed chance mechanic, but it shouldn’t necessarily push out other types.

DECK CONTENTS

I mentioned at the outset that Hearthstone has some inherent randomness from shuffled decks. However, there is a broad category of cards that further interact with this randomness and are thus worthy of consideration.

The simplest version of this mechanic involves interacting with the top card on the player’s deck. This card varies in predictability based on the number of cards remaining to be drawn; it becomes more predictable in the late game. Other cards draw instead from the set of minions that have died in a game. This becomes less predictable as the game goes on, but provides more value when an expensive minion is revived.

This type of randomness can also interact with the player’s deck by shuffling additional cards into it. This is particularly beneficial for slower control-style decks, as they are more likely to draw through their entire deck through the course of a game. However, it comes at the pernicious cost of making the deck less efficient, because the other cards are less likely to be drawn.

Some cards of this type behave similarly to catalogue randomness, but limit themselves to cards from the player’s deck. Mark Rosewater notes that this mechanic is popular in Magic: The Gathering because “it allows players to have control of what they’ll find through deck construction.” Players may want to target a specific ideal minion with Barnes, creating an interesting constraint when deckbuilding.

DISCARD

This is arguably a subtype of deck randomness, but it’s used frequently enough to warrant its own section. This type of randomness interacts with the player’s hand, and is only found in Warlock cards. Players have some room to play around this random mechanic, since discarding from an empty hand has no penalty.

It’s interesting that this mechanic doesn’t actually need to be random, but Hearthstone never allows the player to choose which cards are discarded. An interface for this would theoretically be trivial to add. My assumption is that the designer team did not think that this additional mechanical complexity would yield any interesting results.

OPPONENT’S DECK

These cards use the contents and/or ordering of your opponent’s deck as a source of randomness. They interact by shuffling cards into their deck, or by copying cards out of it.

There is a conspicuous absence of cards that force the opponent to lose or discard cards. Lead designer Eric Dodds explained that, during development, the card Thoughtsteal actually took the cards out of the opponent’s deck. This created “a lot of emotional negativity” during playtesting, a good example of the “fun fails to exceed anti-fun” anti-pattern in game design. This mechanic was subsequently entirely removed from Hearthstone.

It’s also worth noting that interacting with the opponent’s deck is used most frequently in the Priest class. Some Rogue cards have a similar mechanic, but they draw from random cards in the opponent’s class (a type of catalogue randomness).

JOUST

The jousting mechanic fits thematically with The Grand Tournament, and is only found in that expansion. In theory, because this mechanic randomly pits the player’s deck against their opponent’s, it should give the edge to players who run bigger minions in their deck. In practice, good players usually include both small and large creatures to have an efficient mana curve, and the benefit of winning a joust is not worth the cost of building inefficiently. The joust mechanic is effectively thematic window dressing for worse odds than a coin flip.

With this taxonomy of randomness defined, we can now statistically analyze how these types are used across expansions, hero classes, and mana costs. You can find the raw data for these charts on Google Sheets.

We can follow the evolution of Hearthstone by charting how frequently each type of randomness appears in each expansion. For instance, we can see that random targeting has been the most common type, but that its use is rapidly declining.

Catalogue randomness has had a stable presence in the game since Goblins vs. Gnomes, except for League of Explorers which displaced it with the discover mechanic. The use of small set randomness has dropped off significantly, but Whispers of the Old Gods introduced a set of five Toxin cards that may see further use.

We can also see an interesting shift between major expansions (with ~130 cards) and adventure expansions (with ~40 cards). The proportion of random cards has decreased in major expansions, but greatly increased in the adventures. Perhaps the larger expansions have to accommodate more “bread & butter” cards, while the adventures have more leeway for flavour.

This chart shows that Blizzard uses the types of randomness to differentiate their hero classes. Warlocks have discard, Shamans have damage quantity, and Priests interact with the opponent’s deck. Mages have the most catalogue randomness, which fits thematically with conjuring things out of thin air. Druids have significantly fewer random cards than the other classes, perhaps because they tend to have “choose one” mechanics instead.

Is randomness more appropriate early in a game or late in a game? There’s an interesting tension at work here. Mark Rosewater argues that early game randomness is more fun because it gives both players a chance to respond. It also makes the outcome of the game less likely to hinge on one final random occurrence (e.g. Yogg-Saron).

However, the pro player Reynad believes that this is not the case in Hearthstone. Because the assignment of defenders is decided by the attacker, early control of the board is a significant tempo advantage. Because of that, he argues that “RNG that affects the board early has a big influence on the outcome of the game.”

I hoped to provide some insight on this tension through statistical analysis, but this chart mostly proves the null hypothesis. The different types of randomness are found at every mana cost, and the overall distribution of random card costs is similar to the distribution of non-random cards. The only noteworthy trend is that catalogue randomness peaks at 5 mana, later in the curve than average.

What if we explore the effect of the randomness, rather than the source?

This graph is similar to the previous one, but it charts what happens after the random choice has been resolved. It reveals how certain effects are valued relative to cost.

This chart shows some support for Reynad’s argument. For instance, we can see that the random effects of 1-mana cards tend to either draw cards or modify an existing minion; neither of these effects has a large effect on the board. To his chagrin, however, random effects that deal damage are most common in the 2-3 mana range.

Summoning a random minion has the largest effect on the board, and is thus one of the most expensive random effects. It appears most frequently on 4 mana cards, and the majority of cards in the 7-10 price range provide random summoning as an effect.

RNG in game design is often discussed as a quantitative property; “how much” randomness does this game have? Playing Hearthstone has taught me to appreciate the qualitative properties of randomness. You can give players the tools to load the dice in their favour. You can make uncertainty feel like adaptability. You can turn an unlikely event into an amazing player story. Randomness is not a single tool, it’s an entire toolbox.

Austin’s independent games collective Juegos Rancheros hosted another game jam this summer, and this year the theme was “mystic western”.

I hadn’t initially planned on participating, since I was already rather busy preparing for some summertime travelling. However, I was struck with a fun game idea that really fit the theme and scope. I wanted to make a game based on a specific scene from a 1997 episode of The Simpsons, where Homer hallucinates a mysterious voyage through a desert landscape under the influence of extremely spicy chili peppers.

For the gameplay, I took inspiration from the indie platformer Knytt Stories by Nifflas. It has a very clean, blocky, simple aesthetic that seemed feasible to imitate, even with my limited art skills. I also wanted to emulate its low-key pacing and its focus on exploration over combat. Having enemies to fight wouldn’t fit the vibe of the source material, where the mystic desert was mysterious but not threatening. Ultimately, I managed to translate almost every beat of the five minute hallucination sequence into some sort of playable experience (with the notable exception of the snake, which sadly was cut for scope.)

Developing a platformer was also a good excuse to apply some of the lessons I learned from Steve Swink’s “Game Feel”. The book breaks down and analyzes the ways in which designers manipulate game physics in unrealistic ways to make platformers feel good. For instance, it taught me to increase gravity when the player is descending to avoid feeling floaty. I also implemented variable jump height, input buffering, and late jumping based on the lessons from this book.

You can download El Viaje Misterioso for Windows and OSX here:

Download from itch.io

Download (Windows)

Download (Mac OSX)

Source Code (GitHub)

At the end of the game jam, I was very proud to find out that my entry was one of the 25 games selected for the Mysteric Western Arcade at the Marfa Film Festival. I sadly couldn’t make it out for the event, but I hope people got a chance to play it there!

Reeks of moon therefore beware of darkness.

— Yharnam Notes (@YharnamNotes) April 18, 2015

Yharnam Notes is a small tribute to Bloodborne, one of my favourite games of 2015. The game’s asynchronous multiplayer features include the ability to leave notes for other players using templates of words and phrases. These permutations can often be inadvertently lyrical, as Natalie Zed explored in her Bloodborne poetry. Inspired by this, I made a bot that constructs random messages using the vocabulary of the game’s note system.

For the want of an umbrage, the anger was lost For the want of an anger, the deadly sin was lost

— Hypernym Bot (@HypernymBot) November 10, 2015

Hypernym Bot was inspired by the folk proverb “For Want of a Nail”. I wanted to find a way to generate the same structure of text programmatically. Fortunately, Wordnik maintains a list of hypernyms (words that are more generic or abstract) for each word in their database. This made it simple to start with a random word, then iterate up the chain of abstraction of few times.

abidings 💀 pic.twitter.com/Etfnslbvi2

— Every Metal Word (@EveryMetalWord) December 27, 2015

This is one of the silliest ideas that I’ve actually followed through on. Somehow my errant thoughts on @EveryWord and heavy metal clichés intersected, and led me to render every word in the English language in a heavy metal font. Tweeting a new word every four hours, @EveryMetalWord will complete its task by 2065.

You can find the complete list of my Twitter bots here. Wishing you all a happy new year, may your 2016 be programmatic and random!

For the last few months I’ve enjoyed following along with Liz England’s Game Design Book Club. Though I’ve only been participating intermittently, it’s been really valuable as motivation to read books that are often cited and highly praised in game development circles. It has also pushed me to explore certain topics that I may not have chosen on my own.

September’s book club selection was Challenges for Game Designers by Brenda Romero and Ian Schreiber. It covers some common ground with other “game design 101” books aimed at a classroom environment, but it has two unique twists. Firstly, it has an emphasis on non-digital games. This affords a greater focus on “pure” mechanical considerations: chance, skill, strategy, social dynamics, etc. Secondly, as the title suggests, the reader is encouraged to explore the topic of each chapter by completing assorted design exercises; it’s equal parts textbook and workbook.

I was very impressed by the variety of exercises presented in the book. The ones that particularly interested me (and, admittedly, took the least time to complete) involved taking an existing game and modifying it to emphasize a different type of skill.

For instance, one of the exercises in chapter 5 was to “modify [Tic-Tac-Toe] by adding one or more chance-based mechanics”; the game should also be “good for adult players”. I thought this challenge was quite interesting, so I took some time to develop a small game called Catalina Tiles for it. The game is played on a nested 3×3 grid, and players use four 4-sided dice to determine which tiles they can claim on their turn.

Rules for Catalina Tiles [PDF]

Another exercise in chapter 8 involved choosing a “non-digital game with no elements of chance at all” to modify by adding fog of war: “your opponent’s pieces are hidden from you (and vice versa) except under certain conditions.” After researching existing chess variants (there are so many), I developed two unique hidden-information chess games. Luft Chess is standard chess played with invisible kings, and Reverse Schrödinger’s Chess has each player secretly deploying their opponent’s back row pieces.

Rules for “Fog of War” chess variants [PDF]

I had a lot of fun completing these exercises (also learning how to use LaTeX to make fancy rulebooks). Even as someone who works on games every day, it’s been valuable to stretch my creative muscles and make games under unfamiliar constraints.

The Game Design Book Club is online and open to everyone, so feel free to follow along if it interests you. The November selection is Shooter, “an anthology of critical essays about first-person shooters” that Clint Hocking has spoken highly of.

The podcast Radio Diaries recently featured an insightful interview with Bill Siemering, one of the founders of National Public Radio. In it, they discuss the original NPR mission statement written in 1969; the document outlined their vision for non-commercial radio that would bring context, culture and humanity to the news.

Mr. Siemering read a short excerpt from the mission statement on the podcast, and I was moved by how sincere and optimistic it was. I have always enjoyed NPR, and knowing the lofty ideals behind its founding only deepens my appreciation. As a media creator, their statement articulates the kind of values that I aspire to express in my own work. In fact, I was so impressed and inspired that I wanted to share some brief quotes from it here (courtesy of the transcription by Transom.org).

National Public Radio will serve the individual, it will promote personal growth, it will regard the individual differences with respect and joy, rather than derision and hate. It will celebrate the human experience as infinitely varied, rather than vacuous and banal. It will encourage a sense of active, constructive participation, rather than apathetic helplessness.

[…]

The total service should be trustworthy, enhance intellectual development, expand knowledge, deepen aural aesthetic enjoyment, increase the pleasure of living in a pluralistic society, and result in a service to listeners which makes them more responsive, informed human beings and intelligent, responsible citizens of their communities and the world.

[…]

It would speak with many voices and many dialects. The editorial attitude would be that of inquiry, curiosity, concern for the quality of life, critical problem solving, and life loving. The listener should come to rely upon it as a source of information of consequence, of having listened as having made a difference in his attitude toward his environment and himself.

[…]

National Public Radio will not regard its audience as a market, or in terms of its disposable income, but as curious, complex individuals who are looking for some understanding, meaning, and joy in the human experience.

I’ve highlighted a few sections that I thought were particularly eloquent. You can read NPR’s entire original mission statement here.

To relate this to my own work, I wonder how a video game could “celebrate the human experience as infinitely varied”. How can we engage our players as “curious, complex individuals” with “a sense of active, constructive participation”? I don’t have any clear answers, but I’ll aspire to keep such objectives at the heart of my creative work.

I was recently interviewed by Jason Johnson at Kill Screen about the intersection of two of my favourite topics: video games and Twitter bots. Specifically, he wanted to explore the possibilities of using Twitter as a platform for games, and I was happy to oblige! You can read the interview over on their site:

Kill Screen – Is Twitter the Next Playground for Gamers?

In preparation for our discussion, I took some time to catalogue all the game & game-like bots I could find. For instance, image bots (such as Lowpolybot, a_quilt_bot & pixelsorter) are interactive, but are they games? Others explore content from games (MinecraftSigns, Book of the Dead) without being games per se.

Some bots (AnagramBot, ThesaurusGame, and my own TinyCrossword) function like public game shows; anyone on Twitter can reply but only the first correct answer will win. More egalitarian bots (wordassocbot, mazebotgame & fmkvote) let everyone play, and choose their inputs randomly or in aggregate¹. There’s a category of bots that don’t take player input at all, but instead play games against themselves (ChessBotWhite & reverseocr). You could even interpret artassignbot as a game, if you approached its assignments sincerely!

Bots can also explore game-like procedural generation and world building. ARealRiver, tiny_star_field and dungeon_bot assemble unicode symbols into microcosms, cleverly working within the constraints of Twitter. Similarly, fantasy_florist and youarecarrying evoke imaginary worlds using only brief descriptions.

Ultimately, I believe we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to playing on Twitter and interacting with bots. There are many interesting creative opportunities in both, so I encourage my fellow bot enthusiasts to continue creating and experimenting!

¹ The popular streaming bot Twitch Plays Pokémon uses a similar approach.

Last year I made a little game for Space Cowboy Jam with my good friend Matthew Breit. Inspired by one particular scene from Cowboy Bebop, we decided to make a silly cooking simulator. He modeled some vegetables, I coded some menus, we wrote some goofy dialogue, and slapped together Stir Fry Blues in a couple of weeks.

Sadly, the version we made within the time constraints of the game jam was pretty lousy (we placed 45^th out of 60 overall.) It had no audio, the menus were ugly, and the NPC dialogue was repetitive. Most egregiously, we still had a placeholder screen for the cooking animations. After the jam, we simply left the project in unfinished limbo for months.

Over the Christmas holidays, I took a pass at improving Stir Fry Blues to the point that I would no longer be ashamed of it. I cleaned up the UI, added some creative-commons audio, and wrote logic for the NPCs to recognize over 30 recipes. To make the cooking animations, I took what we already had (3D modeled food) and simply added physics. Watching a loaf of bread boiling in a pot adds immensely to the game’s humour.

You can play Stir Fry Blues in your browser with the Unity Web Player, or download it:

Play Stir Fry Blues (itch.io)

Download (Windows)

Download (Mac OSX)

Though I’m quite proud of the final product, making a game that’s entirely menu-driven and has lots of custom content isn’t actually much fun. Writing the data structures for the ingredients (their prices, taste values, expiration, etc.) felt like I was developing CMS software. At least I learned a lot about C# and Unity while doing so! For my next side project, I’d definitely prefer to tackle a more mechanics-driven game.

↰113: Be3#
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♛□♚♙□□♙□
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□♗♙□♗□□□
□□□□□□□□
♖♘□♔□□□□
— Random Chess (@RandomChessBot) November 2, 2014

@RandomChessBot plays random chess moves until it finds a checkmate, then tweets the final board state. This bot was particularly easy to code thanks to Jeff Hlywa’s excellent chess.js library, which provides a list of legal moves and exports the board state in ASCII. It’s worth noting that the majority of random chess games do not end in checkmate, but rather in an “insufficient material” draw state (the bot disregards these results.)

SEE 🔭 partridge, madness, liner
HEAR ♫ Aspect Ratio – La Stazione. La Zona Industriale
PARTY 🎉 http://t.co/dJyJ4cmj7G

— See Hear Party Bot (@SeeHearPartyBot) October 13, 2014

My friend Peter Javidpour made an amazing website called See Hear Party, which plays GIFs in time with the beat of a song (using Giphy & SoundCloud). As soon as he demoed it, I immediately wanted to help promote it with a Twitter bot. @SeeHearPartyBot pairs three random GIF search terms with a random electronic song from SoundCloud, occasionally creating an affecting juxtaposition or serendipitous harmony. This was also the first bot I implemented in Python instead of JavaScript.

000005 pic.twitter.com/FE1UrAKoRz

— Game of Life Bot (@GameOfLifeBot) October 20, 2014

@GameOfLifeBot tweets GIFs of Conway’s Game of Life simulated for 100 generations from a random initial seed. I used Tristan Hearn’s game of life library; since his implementation uses matplotlib, it was easy to export each generation as an image using various colour maps. I then used images2gif to assemble the individual frames into an animated image. This bot has inexplicably been my most popular bot since @HoroscopeBot; maybe people just like GIFs?

In November 2014 I will land on comet 67P as part of ESA_Rosetta. I am operated by DLR_en's Microgravity User Support Centre MUSC in Colo…

— Verified Bio Bot (@VerifiedBioBot) October 31, 2014

I noticed that Twitter has an official account that follows every verified user (a.k.a. “key individuals and brands”). This gave me a silly idea for a bot that tweets the out-of-context descriptions from the bios of random verified accounts. Fortunately this concept only took a few hours of coding to get up and running, and @VerifiedBioBot was born.

1: an American punk rock band 2: a country in Africa 3: a dramatic television series pic.twitter.com/ywb3Bcbk3O

— Tiny Crossword (@TinyCrossword) November 1, 2014

My most recent Twitter bot is @TinyCrossword, and it’s a personal favourite. It generates tweet-sized crossword puzzles, drawing clues from Simple English Wikipedia. For a tweet with an image (117 characters remaining), each clue can be no more than 36 characters long. It creates a new puzzle every day at noon PST, then tweets the solution a few hours later. This bot also scans the replies it receives, and will credit the first person who solves the puzzle correctly (sadly, nobody has yet to do so). I’m glad that I finally came up with a bot idea that was interactive!

These five new bots bring my total to eight. Sadly these will also be my last, at least for now. I’ve been using these short development cycles to procrastinate one some of my larger side projects. Making bots has been extremely entertaining and valuable, but I’m ready to get back to some meatier long term endeavours.

Also, if you’re interested in bots, be sure to check out the livestream of Darius Kazemi’s Bot Summit 2014 this weekend.

“The social experience of a cave farming run is amazing: the herding to get a team of Guardians all behind the line and firing in the right direction, the rush to grab the loot, the scramble when the panic wave starts, the beckoning glow from inside the cave. The speed at which the community organized around this activity was inspiring and humbling to us.”

– Destiny Dev Notes

Destiny’s loot cave is a fascinating phenomenon that has captured the interest of many journalists, critics and players. From a design perspective, it’s a potent example of emergent gameplay: the often unpredictable consequences that arise from complex interactions between individual game mechanics. I’d like to examine the details of how the loot cave works, speculate why it was difficult for Bungie to anticipate, and examine several options for fixing it.

The infamous cave is found in the Skywatch area of Destiny’s Old Russia level. The site would be unremarkable except for the gangs of high level players who (used to) hang out nearby. However, its unique geometry and the NPCs’ interactions with it are the key to what affords this particular exploit. The cave is a spawn point for low level Acolytes and Thralls, and its deep concave structure seems designed to obscure their reappearance from the player’s view. Once spawned, these creatures charge directly towards their intended combat zone on top of a nearby hill, disregarding incoming fire while in transit.

In Destiny, enemy NPCs are blocked from respawning if a player is nearby. However, the rolling hills that face this area allow players to see into the cave from a great distance. This means that player can stand outside of the range that would prevent respawning, while still firing into the cave with long-range rifles. Appearing under the player’s scope within a confined space and immediately charging towards the cave mouth, the enemies can be mown down over and over with ease.

This exploitative cycle is somewhat fragile, as it depends on the players’ ability to contain the flood of respawning NPCs within the bottleneck at the mouth of the cave. If an inopportune reload or lapse in concentration allows an enemy to escape the cave, the NPC can run free towards its destination and out of view of the ridge of snipers. Each enemy that escapes reduces the number that are spawning within the cave, diminishing the drop rate. A single player would therefore have great difficulty sustaining the loot cave; it requires two or more high level players diligently concentrating their fire. Given its reliance on the unspoken cooperation of strangers, it’s not surprising that Bungie was unable to anticipate this unusual tactic.

Why would high level players opt to use this repetitive tactic, rather than participate in advanced missions as the developers intended? Firstly, there’s the unusual decision by Bungie that any NPC is eligible to drop legendary weapons and armour, even enemies that are significantly lower level than the player. Secondly is the fact that Destiny’s loot system is notoriously stingy. In the recent developer notes, Bungie had acknowledged the fact that their high level encounters and daily missions lack fanfare when loot is obtained. Furthermore, many of their systems offer faction reputation as a reward, an abstraction from the loot itself that may be difficult for players to grasp. It’s therefore understandable why some would prefer the tangible rewards and strong shiny feedback of the loot cave.

We can further examine the loot cave through the MDA framework, where mechanics describe the formal rules of the game, dynamics describe the rules acting in concert and responding to player input, and aesthetics describe the player’s experience of the game. Through this lens, the loot cave interaction looks like this:

• Mechanic: NPC respawn points are blocked by proximity, but not line of sight.
• Mechanic: Individual NPCs in Skywatch respawn 6 seconds after dying.
• Mechanic: Any NPC can drop legendary items regardless of level.
• Mechanic: Advancement beyond level 20 is only possible through gear.
• Mechanic: Ambient multiplayer allows players to meet up randomly.
• Dynamic: The Loot Cave
• Aesthetic: Periodic excitement from loot drops, boredom from repetition.

Last Thursday, roughly a week after being widely discovered, Bungie published a small hotfix to greatly decrease the efficiency of farming the loot cave. This was accomplished by “normalizing” the NPC respawn timers in Skywatch to 40 seconds, stymying the endless flood of monsters and effectively ending this particular instance of the loot cave phenomenon. However, the community has quickly identified new locations with a similar farming dynamic.

Bungie could continue to hotfix respawn timers, but in aggregate that might have the unintended effect of emptying out low-level patrol areas. They could prevent weak monsters from dropping legendary gear, but that might make much of their world obsolete to players past level 20. Ultimately, I think Bungie is already planning systemic changes in the right direction: making their existing end-game content more rewarding. If the strike & raid missions find an appropriate balance of difficulty, reward and fanfare, then players might stop hunting for a cave to shoot into.

Since I released @HoroscopeBot earlier this summer, I haven’t stopped thinking about Twitter bots as a creative medium. Corny “I could make a bot for that” ideas kept popping into my thoughts. After reading this appreciation of museum bots, I decided to try my hand at making something similar for a different catalogue.

This led to the creation of @EveryBookBot. Every hour, it takes a random word from Wordnik and tweets a book on that subject from the Google Books API. The goal is to mimic the serendipity of browsing a library or a friend’s bookshelves. Books cover such a delightfully broad range of topics, everything from crackle glass and Spanish fashion to concise philosophy and thumb wrestling. The more obscure subjects fascinate me; who loved this thing enough to write a book about it, and who was their audience?

Its sibling @EveryGameBot isn’t quite as diverse, but perhaps that’s to be expected from a younger medium. This bot tweets a random video game or board game every hour, drawing data from the Giant Bomb and Board Game Geek APIs. Highlights so far include a political game from 1894 and an obscure fighting game best remembered for its FF7 tie-in. Exploring old esoteric games feels particularly worthwhile in a culture that’s too often fixated on the new and popular.

On the technical side, both bots resize and tile the book/game covers using a JS ImageMagick library. The cover tiling is done to reach the 440×220 image size that Twitter prefers, though I rather like the aesthetic effect as well. I’m also using a simple PostgreSQL database (which Heroku conveniently provides) to ensure the same item doesn’t get tweeted twice. The source code for both bots is available on Github.

Last weekend, as a side project, I decided to create an oracle. Like most oracles he spouts nonsense, occasionally happening upon a cogent statement by random chance and serendipity. His name is @HoroscopeBot, and he takes the auspices of Twitter to post a semi-coherent prophecy every twenty minutes.

What inspired this unusual creation? Through another act of internet happenstance, I became acquainted with two prolific bot-makers: Darius Kazemi and Rob Dubbin. As I followed their various projects, I slowly became convinced that bots were more than a mere novelty. Their playfulness with language and meaning was strangely revealing. They were subversive in a world that is increasingly run by algorithms. They could also embrace the inherently unpredictable nature of automation and make it charming.

While ruminating on these bots, I conceived of a simple bot idea of my own. I decided that I needed to make it right away, and devoted an idle weekend to develop the minimum functionality. The idea was to to find tweets of the form “you will ______”. If I prepended two such statements with a zodiac sign, it would create a disjointed horoscope. For instance:

GEMINI ♊: You will come out on the banks of the Rio Grande, but you will have to build a jail.

LIBRA ♎: You will be my queen, but you will NEVER MAKE A FREE THROW IN YOUR LIFE.

SCORPIO ♏: You will understand it, but you will need tissues.

On the technical side, this involved communicating with the Twitter API using OAuth, parsing text with regular expressions, and finding a host that could re-run the logic at set time intervals automatically. Following an online tutorial, I began developing my bot in Google Apps Script.

I initially thought that grabbing tweets would be the most difficult technical hurdle, but the API was actually quite straightforward. The rub was that my application required manual reauthentication every few hours, which is a major annoyance for a program that’s defined by its ability to run 24/7. Twitter has a workaround for this; they will provide you with a single access token that will never expire. However, Google’s OAuth library would not allow me to simply provide it with a token; it wanted to do authentication the “right” way.

To make the bot fully independent, I had to port the logic to Node.js and deploy it on Heroku. This was not a smooth process (mostly due to the limitations of my git knowledge), but the twit library finally enabled me to connect to Twitter indefinitely with my access token. As of Sunday morning, @HoroscopeBot should regularly tweet new prognostications with no further intervention; you can check out the source code on GitHub.

In an interview with the Boston Globe, Darius says he was inspired by Ian Bogost’s idea that, in lieu of writing, objects can embody philosophy. In that context, I’ve thought about what sort of viewpoint my bot is advancing. Maybe it demonstrates the incompleteness of written language. Sentence fragments are fungible, and simple juxtaposition can create unintended meaning; context is always important. Alternately, perhaps it celebrates second-person aspirations. Somebody is saying “you will”, will you?

You can play it directly in your browser by clicking the title below:

Solo Queue is inspired by Dan Bruno’s Time for some Fire Emblem and Alex Austin’s Bioshoot Infinite + 1. I was intrigued by the notion of abstracting a game’s core mechanics into Twine as a form of critique. I wanted to apply the same approach to the lords management game (a.k.a. MOBA) I play most regularly: League of Legends.

While I was fiddling with Twine, I was also working (and eventually had some success) at climbing the season 3 ranked ladder in solo queue. There is a certain inherent insanity in attempting teamwork with four complete strangers. To quote Reservoir Dogs:

Mr. Pink: Why can’t we pick our own colours?

Joe: No way, no way. Tried it once, doesn’t work. You got four guys all fighting over who’s gonna be Mr. Black, but they don’t know each other, so nobody wants to back down. No way. I pick. You’re Mr. Pink.

Succeeding in solo queue requires diplomacy, flexibility and ego management. Ultimately, it’s a lesson in serenity; you must accept that you are going to lose many games regardless of your personal performance or skill.

As I’ve indicated previously, I had some troubles working with Twine. In fact, halfway through development I moved the passages to a plain text file and began compiling them directly with twee. I also wanted to avoid mixing JavaScript code with story content, so I stored the macros in separate files and wrote a few quick Perl scripts to append them together at build time. The workflow worked quite well once I’d set all that up; I especially enjoyed being able to easily import Leon Arnott’s excellent Twine macros.

It felt great to work on a hobby game again, though I’d like to attempt something with more systemic mechanics for my next side project. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy my preposterous little game, and to all the League players: best of luck in season 4!

The interactive fiction platform Twine has been around for many years, but recently it’s been at the centre of the DIY game creating movement. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters heralds it as an accessible development tool for those without programming experience. New voices are joining the game-making world, and the variety of Twine games is truly remarkable: personal games, satirical games, Kafkaesque games, sexual games, and many more.

Inspired by the creativity of this new wave of game makers, I decided to work on a small Twine game as a side project. I read a few tutorials, downloaded the application, and began assembling a story. Unfortunately, I started encountering minor hindrances much sooner than expected. I was digging through forums and documentation to implement functionality that I thought would be trivial. Disheartened, I frequently had to resort to kludgy workarounds.

Here are my four biggest frustrations with Twine:

No Nested Logic

Twine has built-in syntax for linking passages, displaying text conditionally and getting/setting variables. However, the syntax does not allow any of these to be nested. You can’t display a variable inside a link or a conditional statement. You also can’t embed any html inside a link, which makes image links difficult.

// Can’t print a variable in a link
[[Hello there <<print $name>>|Say Hello]]

// Can’t conditionally print a variable
<<if $name eq "Bob">>Is <<print $husband>> feeling better?<<endif>>

// Can’t embed an image in a link
[[<html><img src=”foo.jpg” /></html>|Link]]

The workaround is to write your own html in these cases, instead of using the built-in Twine syntax. You can access the Twine variables and link to passages using JavaScript, though that has its own headaches (explained in detail below.)

Verbose Macros

Twine allows you to write custom JavaScript macros, which is great! The process for doing so, however, is a tad obfuscated and verbose. To make a macro: create a new passage, add the tag “script”, then write your logic in a function with the following template:

macros['randomnumber'] = {
    handler: function(place, macroName, params, parser) {
	insertText(place, Math.random());
    },
  };

That’s the bare minimum script for inserting a random number. Here’s a fancy version with all the bells and whistles:

try {
  version.extensions['randomnumber'] = { major:1, minor:0, revision:0 };
  macros['randomnumber'] = {
    handler: function(place, macroName, params, parser) {
	if (params[0] === undefined) params[0] = 0;
	if (params[1] === undefined) params[1] = 1;
	var n = Math.round(Math.random()*params[1] + params[0]);
	insertText(place, n);
    },
  };
} catch(e) {
  throwError(place,"randomnumber error: "+e.message); 
}

None of it is egregiously verbose, but boilerplate phrases like “handler function place macroName params parser” are daunting. Twine is a great tool for first-time game makers, it would be nice if writing macros was equally approachable.

I also wish it were possible to import script functions from external files. That would allow authors to share and reuse modular components. A library of common functions would be a boon to those without the technical knowledge to write their own JavaScript. Dan Cox has a clever macro for loading external JavaScript libraries, which I’d love to see integrated natively.

File Format

Twine is a graphical interface wrapper for a simple plaintext format (called twee). However, the application saves stories in a .tws file, which is just a Python pickle serialization. Since this format is not human readable, it discourages the use of source control. Why bother tracking your changes when you can’t understand the incremental differences?

Thankfully, there’s an easy built-in way to get around this. In the Twine menu, call File > Export Source Code to export your story to a plaintext twee file. You can even modify that file in a text editor and reimport it back into Twine (though you’ll lose some of your previous passage arrangement).

Weak Documentation

There is some documentation for both Twine and twee. The former covers the basics and the latter alphabetically lists available functions (assuming robust JavaScript knowledge); neither is terribly useful for learning to write macros. I found the answers to my questions scattered across the TweeCode google group, Porpentine’s resource compilation and Dan Cox’s macro tutorials. Here are a few useful tricks I had to figure out the hard way:

Firstly, if you want to link to a passage (named “foo”) from embedded html (e.g. for an image map) use <html><a href="#" onclick="javascript:state.display('foo', this); return false;"> foo </a></html>. (If you neglect to return false, it’ll work on Chrome but not Firefox.)

Secondly, if you set a variable in Twine syntax using <<set $foo = true>>, you can access it from within JavaScript macros with state.history[0].variables["foo"]. You can use this to get around some of the nested logic issues I mentioned earlier.

Finally, a minor idiosyncrasy: Twine does not allow links back to the “Start” passage. Many authors get around this limitation by making a new first passage and displaying it in “Start” with <<display ActualStart>>.

Despite my criticisms, I still think Twine is a valuable and important platform. Fixing certain small issues would simply improve what the tool already does well: provide a accessible way for everyone to make personally meaningful games. Twine is free and open source with a passionate community, so I’m certain it’ll continue to improve and grow.

I’ve been feeling rather stealthy lately, playing through Dishonored and Mark of the Ninja over the last few weeks. Playing them back-to-back has contrasted them rather sharply in my mind, though neither title suffers for the comparison. Rather, I’d like to highlight how certain elements of Mark of the Ninja’s design align perfectly with how I like to play stealth games.

Since most stealth games allow for a great deal of player agency, there are many perfectly valid ways of playing them. Some move through the levels like a ghost, others prefer to murder everyone from the shadows. Some are willing to go loud if their stealth is broken, others hide and try again. My preferred approach is to play each scenario as flawlessly as I can. I like to ascertain a situation, determine a strategy, execute it, then figure out how I could have done better. Can I avoid alerting the guards? Use fewer resources? Turn the environment to my advantage? I treat it like a puzzle, playing it over and over to find the optimal path.

In theory, there are “try again” mechanics built into the stealth genre. Your character is weak, so the guards can kill you quickly. Alternately, you escape and wait for the alert to die down. Either way you get a chance to reevaluate your strategy. However, both of those options are time-consuming, and the delay makes it difficult to iterate on a plan. Once you sit through a death animation and loading screen you’ve already forgotten the specifics of your recent failure. I made a point to pick up Dishonored on PC, allowing me to use quicksave and quickload to narrow down my perfect approach.

I didn’t have to micromanage my saves in Mark of the Ninja. The checkpoints are generous and there’s no score penalty for death. When my plan went badly awry, the window for recovery was small; I either died or escaped within a few seconds. There’s no minute-long ambiguous alert state, just clear immediate success/fail feedback. You could say Mark of the Ninja is the Super Meat Boy of stealth games: you die a lot, but you’re already back in game before that has a chance be bothersome. Iterating on a plan isn’t a tedious process when you can immediately begin executing your next idea.

Another element that supports the “puzzle” approach to stealth is predictability. As Anthony pointed out, Mark of the Ninja’s clean 2D presentation and excellent UI make it an exceptionally deterministic game. You have the unlimited ability to freeze time and line up exactly where your ninja distractions are going to land. Vision cones and noise radii sharply visualize the limits of a guard’s awareness. Everything is a known quantity, making failure a fault of planning rather than execution. The ability to know the outcome of individual actions with certainty gives players the confidence to create complex plans.

When I feel comfortable with a stealth game’s mechanics, I often like to invent impromptu challenges for myself. Can I fit all the knocked-out guards into one closet? Can I reach that far ledge with a pile of physics objects? I’m always impressed when the game recognizes and encourages these actions. For instance, I grinned when Dishonored popped up an achievement for reaching the top of Kaldwin’s Bridge.

Mark of the Ninja takes this idea one step further by taunting you with challenges. A prompt appears when you enter a new area, with instructions like: “kill 3 gasmask guards while they are walking in poison gas”. It’s entirely optional and rather difficult to pull off, but who can resist the temptation to try! The fact that this challenge exists is also a hint to new players: here’s something fun you didn’t know you could do. Completing challenges helps reinforce the player’s knowledge of how certain game mechanics interact. Reifying the made-up challenges that experienced stealth gamers give themselves helps encourage an improvisational mindset in every player.

Mark of the Ninja is a spectacular game, one that makes stealth mechanics accessible and readable without reducing their complexity. Furthermore, it support the puzzle-like stealth experience that I love: figuring out a plan then executing it flawlessly. I can’t wait to see what Nels and the team at Klei come up with next.

Oh, and I completely agree with RPS: the ninja protagonist should be named Mark.

This week saw the release of Valve’s new beginner-friendly level editor for Portal 2, dubbed the “Perpetual Testing Initiative”. Many have praised this new software for its accessibility, and have advocated it as an entry-point for first-time level designers. I had a chance to experiment with it a little myself, and I’d like to explore some of the specific principles Valve employed to create this remarkably approachable editor.

Booting up the editor for the first time gives you a simple rectangular testing chamber. The walls and floors can be dragged in any direction to expand the space or create connected chambers and corridors. Puzzle devices are dragged and dropped into the world from a tidy panel on the left side of the screen (very much like The Incredible Machine.) Right clicking these elements in the world exposes a small selection of options, and allows you to connect them to other devices. Simply moving the camera around the 3D space will likely be the most challenging interaction for a fledgling designer.

The editor is stylized like a blueprint: elements appear simpler than they do in-game, some devices (like the Aerial Faith Plate) project dashed path lines, and ceilings / backward-facing walls are automatically hidden from view. A working knowledge of Portal mechanics is assumed, as there are curiously no tool-tips to explain how the various devices function. Even I had to use trial-and-error to figure out how the Track Platform works, as the official Valve wiki is unfortunately sparse at the time of writing.

A great deal of editor’s simplicity derives from the fact that it’s not a generic tool designed to make levels, but rather a very specific tool to make test chambers. Test chambers in the Portal universe have a well-defined format. They are white, sterile, closed and grid-aligned rooms. They contain some permutation of the 32 devices. They necessarily have exactly one entrance, one exit and one observation room (which functions as the level’s main light source.) These fiction-appropriate constraints keep the editor simple by limiting the number of possible ingredients.

The devices themselves demonstrate a similar simplicity; both input devices (buttons, laser catchers) and output devices (laser emitters, piston platforms, etc.) maintain only binary states. Attaching several inputs to the same device will require them all to be active (logical AND), but there is no sanctioned way to achieve OR, NAND or XOR. Connections between devices are always visible to the player, as the editor automatically generates an in-game dotted line between them. Keeping the interaction between devices simple allows the editor to abstract away from any sort of complex scripting logic.

Fundamentally, the Portal 2 editor works so well because of the judicious use of physical constraints. In The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman describes how these types of limitations “constrain possible operations” such that “desired actions can be made obvious.” Since it’s almost impossible to do the wrong thing in this editor, the only possible actions are correct ones. Designers are thus free to experiment without fear of breaking the level in an esoteric way. The only clearly incorrect operation I’ve found is placing two devices in the same spot; the feedback for this error is clear and immediate.

In my few hours of experimentation I made a simple test chamber called “Ducks & Drakes”, which you can download and play by hitting subscribe in the Steam Workshop. You should also check out the Perpetual Testing Challenge over at the MapCore Forums.

Moving Pixels – League of Legends

Since it’s been seven months since my last post, here’s a quick list of what I’ve been up to lately: I gave a talk at Juegos Rancheros (Austin’s indie game collective) back in November. Pax Britannica was ported to Montreal’s Arcade Royale and demoed at the Prince of Arcade showcase. Mostly, though, I’ve just been working hard on Starhawk (look for it on shelves May 8th!) However, all this does not excuse my writing hiatus; I’ll endeavour to resume regular blog cromulence over the next few months.

While I’m not typically a shmup player, lately I’ve been enjoying a great indie shooter called Jamestown. It piqued my interest with its colonial Martian setting and beautiful pixel art. However, the game’s lasting appeal rests in the strength of its peculiar Vaunt mechanic.

When activated, Vaunt grants the player a seemingly arbitrary list of benefits: a brief bullet shield, followed by increased damage and a score multiplier for as long as the energy meter is kept filled. In practice, this mechanic gives Jamestown its own particular systematic rhythm of tension and respite. I’d like to use Vaunt to explore the idea that a game mechanic can have an inherent dramatic arc similar to those created by traditionally authored stories.

When I speak of a dramatic arc, I mean something along the lines of the three-act structure commonly used in storytelling. Strongly authored media (films, books, plays, etc.) map very nicely to this kind of structure, as does the authored content in video games. For instance, a level in Jamestown is composed of a series of increasingly intense enemy waves followed by a climactic boss fight. The pacing and intensity of this level design is determined entirely by the game’s creators.

When examining a game’s effective dramatic arc, we must of also take into account the player’s agency. The abilities that the player has control over can increase or decrease dramatic tension. For instance, a bomb move that kills all the enemies on screen gives the player a breather, thus creating a moment of dramatic respite. A slow powerful attack creates high tension (as the move charges) followed by low tension (as the hit connects.) These types of mechanics create a parallel dramatic arc authored by the player. The two arcs superimpose each other, interacting in a sort of wave interference that heightens some moments and dampens others.

What would the dramatic arc for the Vaunt mechanic look like? It begins with normal moment-to-moment gameplay, with its mild variations in intensity. Some high-tension impetus for activating Vaunt would then occur: a mid-wave difficulty spike or simply the filling of the energy meter. In response to this event, the player hits the ‘B’ button to activate the bullet shield and begin Vaunt mode. The momentary safety of this shield creates a brief nadir in dramatic tension.

After the shield has expired, Vaunt mode remains active as long as the player continues to replenish the energy meter by killing enemies. As I mentioned previously, remaining in this mode grants a score and damage multiplier. These multipliers increase the benefit of skilful play, which in turn increases the innate tension of moment-to-moment gameplay. Furthermore, surviving the duration of Vaunt mode grants an additional score bonus. The dramatic tension increases parabolically as the potential benefit of the survival bonus accumulates over time.

Vaunt mode can terminate in three different ways. The most desirable outcome, illustrated in the graph below, is when the player runs out of enemies to kill and the energy meter expires gracefully, granting the full survival bonus. In terms of dramatic tension, this would be a plateau followed by a resumption of normal gameplay. If the player instead becomes overwhelmed during Vaunt mode, she has the option to press ‘B’ again to activate a second bullet shield. This choice ends the mode prematurely, only granting half the survival bonus. This outcome would be represented graphically by a second brief peak in tension. Finally, the player could die during Vaunt mode and lose out on their survival bonus entirely.

These graphs reveal some general ways that a game mechanic can increase or decrease dramatic tension. When they provide momentary safety, increase performance pressure or ransom potential reward, they have a strong dramatic effect over time. We can also see how the mechanical tension interacts with the authored dramatic arc. The encounter design provides the high-tension impetus for activating Vaunt, and the level’s difficulty strongly influences which way the mode will end. The nature of Jamestown’s Vaunt mechanic works in concert with its strong level design to create an exciting gameplay experience.

The MDA framework asserts that game mechanics create an aesthetic response in the player. When we observe this response over time, we see patterns of dramatic tension and reprieve that match those found in storytelling. We often praise the narrative power of heavily-authored games, but the best video game tales often emerge from system-centric games like Dwarf Fortress, Civilization and EVE Online. If we acknowledge that game mechanics have inherent dramatic arcs that superimpose the authored content, then we can begin to analyze mechanics in terms of their storytelling potential.

SpaceChem is a remarkable puzzle game about fake chemistry. The game challenges you to build a factory in order to transmute the given input molecules into the given output molecules. While chemistry is the theme, on a mechanical level it has more in common with programming. The methods used to tackle challenges in SpaceChem are akin to real techniques used by computer programmers. I’d like to elaborate on these manifold similarities, as well as explore how games like SpaceChem could be used to promote procedural literacy.

The player commands two circular “waldoes” by laying out paths and instructions for them. The waldoes follow the path and sequentially execute any instruction they come across. They can grab, drop, rotate, sync, bond, fuse, request input or dispatch output. The waldo’s analogue in computing is the processor, a hardware component that sequentially executes basic operations defined by machine code. Like processors, waldoes are the engines that drive the control flow of a SpaceChem factory.

When a waldo grabs a molecule, it gains the ability to perform instructions directly on it. In other words, a grabbed element is more readily and rapidly available than one lying elsewhere on the grid. Conceptually this is analogous to storing data in registers, a form of computer memory that is accessed very quickly and that the CPU manipulates directly. Just as a waldo can only grab one molecule at a time, computers have very few registers and must therefore rely on caching.

If grabbed molecules are like data in registers, then molecules left on the grid are cached. The cache is a larger, cheaper form of memory, but it is slower to read and write. Data must be written from the cache to a register in order to be manipulated directly by the CPU. The amount of memory in SpaceChem’s “cache” is governed by the area of the grid (8 x 10). Each coordinate on the grid can therefore be considered a unique memory address. This analogy is enforced mechanically: a factory “crashes” if two atoms collide on the grid, since you can’t store two values in the same memory address.

Each factory has two waldoes, and they must be properly coordinated as they move through time and space. This coordination is facilitated by the sync node, which tells a waldo to wait until its twin has also hit a sync node. Parallel waldo management is akin to parallel programming, and they share the same perils: deadlock, starvation, race conditions, etc. The waldoes are like threads operating on shared memory space, and sync nodes are functionally similar to semaphores (operations that tell threads to signal and wait.) Operating two waldoes simultaneously in SpaceChem forces the player to confront the same shared resource problems as parallel computing.

SpaceChem and programming involve similar challenges: laying out simple instructions to achieve a complex result while managing limited time and resources. Like a good software specification, each puzzle is clearly presented as a black box defined only by its inputs and outputs. The player lays out instructions, starts up the factory, observes errors and corrects them, iterating until the puzzle is solved. Solutions can then be further optimized to take less time and use fewer instructions. SpaceChem and programming are engaging, flow-inducing activities because they have an identical inner loop: implementing, debugging and optimizing.

At this year’s GDC, Michael John asserted that programming is 21^st century literacy. If computer programming is currently considered esoteric knowledge, it’s because our general education is not preparing students to think about problems in an algorithmic or systematic manner. Ian Bogost calls this procedural literacy: “the ability to reconfigure basic concepts and rules to understand and solve problems.” SpaceChem may not be an ideal game for the classroom (it’s far too difficult, for one), but it strongly suggests that the best way to learn about and engage with complex systems it to play with them.

If you follow me on Twitter or elsewhere, you may be aware that I moved from my native Montreal to Austin, Texas last year to work for a new studio called LightBox Interactive. We’ve been requisitely tight-lipped about our project until this last Friday, when we finally unveiled Starhawk to the community.

Starhawk is a third-person shooter for the PS3, and a spiritual successor to Warhawk. The game is set on the lawless frontier of space, where the rush to mine rift energy incites conflict between the scrappy Rifter union and the post-human Outcast. These two factions form the basis of the online 32-person multiplayer. The single player campaign follows Emmett Graves, a gunslinger pariah hired to protect the small mining town of White Sands.

The core of the game is characterized by fast-paced action and air/ground vehicle combat on huge open maps. The most iconic of these vehicles is the Hawk, which can transition from a nimble airship into a staunch mech. It also features a new system called Build & Battle, which allows players to quickly call down fortifications, turrets, vehicles and reinforcements in real-time on the battlefield. This distinctive system unlocks a multitude of strategic options and gameplay styles.

Starhawk is currently set to release in 2012, and you can follow its development on the Starhawk website. You can also check out a profile video of our studio and interviews with the project leads on G4. I’ll also add the usual disclaimer that opinions expressed in this blog are always my own and do not represent my employer.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of Deadly Premonition. Everything you’ve heard about it is true: it has atrocious combat, compelling mystery, laughable graphics, memorable characters, inappropriate music, etc. The game is full of fresh ideas and has stuck with me for months, but I still wouldn’t feel comfortable broadly recommending it. I would, however, like to examine one particular section of the game that I think was both absurd and oddly well-designed.

The sequence I’d like to highlight occurs very early on in the game. Having arrived in Greenvale the previous night, FBI agent Francis York Morgan (“please, call me York”) heads to the Sheriff’s Department to begin his investigation into the murder of Anna Graham. He is greeted there by mild-mannered deputy Thomas MacLaine. Visibly flustered by the small town’s recent tragedy, he has lost the key to the evidence locker and requests Agent York’s aid in retrieving it. He further notes that the key can be identified by its “Southern Flying Squirrel” key holder.

At first glance, this seems like a fairly typical time-wasting fetch quest, albeit one that eventually reveals a humorous twist. However, the hunt for the squirrel key rather cleverly addresses a number of high-level design considerations. Namely, it serves a purposeful role in establishing character relationships, aiding player navigation and setting a tonal precedent.

Right away, the reasons behind Thomas’s request tell us a lot about him and his relationship with the other characters. His reaction to Anna’s death shows that he is kind and sensitive, and the fact that he lost the key demonstrates that he is mildly incompetent (or perhaps just inexperienced) as a police deputy. It is strongly suggested that petitioning York’s aid is motivated by a desire to avoid confrontation with the Sheriff, George Woodman. This hints at the nature of their relationship: Thomas is meek and very intimidated by his grouchy superior.

After receiving Thomas’s request, the player is allowed to freely explore the Sheriff’s Department. The building is rather large, with several offices on the first floor and a prison and firing range in the basement. Depending on the player’s exploration path, she may first stumble upon a “Pointy-Tailed Flying Squirrel” key in an inauspicious storage room. However, when this key is returned to Thomas, he politely explains:

…Ah. You don’t know your squirrels, do you. This isn’t the right key holder. This is a Siberian Flying Squirrel. It’s closer to a land-based squirrel. The Siberian Flying Squirrel is larger than the Southern Flying Squirrel, and has a standing tail while the Southern has a hanging tail. But we’re looking for a Southern Flying Squirrel right now.

There are, rather absurdly, five types of squirrel keys strewn about the Sheriff’s Department. One key is hidden in the locker room, another in the kitchen and yet another outside the firing range. Furthermore, as items they are only identified by description, such as “long-tailed”, “grey” and “striped”. Agent York, who frequently voices his urban prejudice, presumably lacks the country knowledge to discern their exact species. The Southern Flying Squirrel key (described as “curvy-tailed”) is found in cell #5 of the basement jail, which is the furthest room from the starting point.

Having the player complete the same fetch quest up to five times may seem ridiculous. However, remember that this sequence takes place during the player’s first visit to the Sheriff’s Department. It’s a location that plays a crucial role in Deadly Premonition, and the player will have to return here very frequently during the investigation. Obliging the player to initially explore the building from top to bottom ensures that he will be able to comfortably navigate the space in the later sections of the game. If the player ever wants to talk to the Sheriff or interview a suspect in custody, he’ll know exactly where to go. Even jail cell #5 plays an important role towards the end of the game.

Finally, the absurdity of this sequence helps to establish a whimsical tone running in parallel to the more serious otherworldly murder investigation. Deadly Premonition is an open-world game, and Greenvale is full of colourful characters who ask York to perform optional odd jobs for them. These side quests are as strange and as varied as fetching ingredients, competing at darts, chauffeuring an old lady, answering medical trivia, and catching a legendary fish. The player may feel compelled to disregard these excursions in favour of concentrating on the serious task at hand. The fact that a trifling chore like the squirrel key hunt is integrated into the main storyline suggests that it is perfectly acceptable to indulge the local populace’s strange demands.

Deadly Premonition’s squirrel key hunt is remarkable because it subtly conveys a great deal of information about the game, the town and its inhabitants in a short playable segment. It’s emblematic of the best kind of tutorial: one that is completely integrated into the core game and teaches through play.

Few online multiplayer games have become as habitual for me as Team Fortress 2. I’ve returned to it every few months since its release back in 2007, usually to plumb the strategic depths of a handful of familiar maps. In August of 2008, the Heavy update introduced Steel, a community map created by Jamie “Fishbus” Manson. Its complex layout and objective structure immediately intrigued me, and after hundreds of matches it has become one of my all-time favourite multiplayer maps.

Steel is an asymmetric attack/defend control point map. The red team begins with all five points under their control, but the blue team only needs to claim control point E within the allotted time to win the game. While E is open for the entire match, capturing it early is a daunting challenge. The control point is perilously situated right outside the red team’s spawn point and across a bottomless chasm. To make matters worse, E’s capture timer is twice as long as any of the other control points.

To facilitate their assault on the final control point, the attacking team can unlock strategically advantageous layout changes by claiming four optional control points (A through D). Bases shift, objectives change, new routes open up while others are closed off; every change has a significant impact on the high level flow of combat. While other control point maps tend to split each stage of combat into a segregated segment of the map, Steel cleverly folds five stages into one large contiguous layout. Each sequential pairing of A-D and E effectively functions as a distinct stage of the match. This iterative repurposing of the combat space is a large part of what makes Steel unique and noteworthy, and is a something I believe is deserving of detailed design consideration.

To demonstrate this, I’ve annotated the following overhead maps to visualize a loose concept of “combat flow”. The lines represent optimal or strategically valuable routes from spawn points to objectives, and tend to represent where combat will take place. By analyzing these player flow patterns, we can better appreciate how each phase of the match demands that players redefine and reinterpret the combat space.

Phase One – Control Points A & E

The first optional control point available for capture is A. It is situated in the southwest corner of the map, inside a small shack atop a gently sloping hill. The defending team can reach A by simply stepping through the western gate of their spawn camp. They have a 60 second setup phase to fortify the control point undisturbed.

To capture A, the blue team has a choice of two main attack routes. The spawn camp’s main exit opens into large wide corridor winding around to approach the point from the west. Curving around the enemy spawn point in this manner affords a certain degree of safety. However, this route has several drawbacks: long sight lines make defending Snipers a serious threat, a blind corner could conceal an enemy sentry nest and Spies often lurk in the open plain’s nooks and crannies.

The alternate northwestern exit of the blue team’s spawn sends players onto an elevated plateau. This point overlooks the capture point, making it an ideal shooting range for Demomen and a rapid launch point for Medic ubercharges. To dissuade blue players from poking over the ridge, astute defenders will often place a sentry gun on the elevated platform in the back corner of the base.

Control point E is open for capture throughout the match, though it is exceptionally difficult to do so early on. It’s located on a small circular platform surrounded by a bottomless chasm, a gap that can only be crossed by double jumping (Scouts) or rocket jumping (Soldiers/Demomen). The path to E is quite long, winding past locked capture point B. Furthermore, the defenders can quickly respond to an attack on E by exiting through their spawn camp’s eastern gate or sniping from the western window.

Control point A can be a tough nut to crack, so an all-out assault is often not be the best approach. Skilled attackers will apply calculated pressure at E in order to pull some of the defensive force away. This allows their team mates to make a push for A while the enemy forces are distracted. The tactic of splitting the defender’s focus in this manner is crucial to offensive success in Steel.

Phase Two – Control Points B & E

Claiming control point A unlocks two nearby doors: one through the back of the shack leading to D/E and the other opening a short underground route towards B (not shown on above map). The first path permits the attackers to stealthily assault E, though the efficacy of splitting the defenders in this phase is greatly reduced due to the close proximity of B and E.

Control point B is a rectangular yard in a courtyard surrounded by tall buildings. A small wooden fence blocks the western approach. Since the point isn’t immediately visible from the defender’s spawn point, it can be quite difficult to recapture it once the red team starts pushing. An alternate path from the defender’s spawn camp leads to an east-facing second storey window, an ideal camping spot for defending Snipers and Demomen.

The blue team can mount their attack along two parallel paths. Travel on the lower path is slightly longer, sloping upwards into the underside of B. The route bisects a man-high wall, which can function as loose cover for both sides. There’s also a ramp leading to the roof of a small shed, but this detour rarely provides an offensive advantage. The higher path leads to a ridge overlooking the entire courtyard, an advantageous position that carries the risk of high visibility. There is also a windowed hut on this ledge, just opposite the one available to the defending team.

Phase Three – Control Points C & E

If the blue team manages to capture control point B, two major changes occur: the door blocking the eastern path towards C slowly opens and the red team’s spawn camp is shifted to the far northern side of the map. Though the defenders continue to spawn right outside E’s northern approach, the attackers have effectively gained control the entire southern half of the map. You may notice that the blue team’s camp is now far away from current objectives; this is a key element of the attack/defend asymmetry, but the disadvantage can be negated by the strategic construction of teleporters.

The area around C is characterized by a strong contrast between high ground and low ground. The control point is located on an elevated balcony nestled into the back corner of the base. The red team also controls a small ledge just south of their spawn camp overlooking C. Both of these positions are high above ground level, offering long sight lines for Snipers and elevated sentry nooks for Engineers. Fighting in the pit below often devolves into a messy brawl, somewhat favouring Pyros and Scouts.

The blue team controls an opposing elevated ridge on the southeastern side of the base, which is a great place for Engineers to set up camp. Large rock crenellations offer convenient cover for Soldiers, Snipers and Demomen to bombard C’s defences from. The western path is also a strong candidate for offensive fortification, as it allows quick access to both available control points. From here, blue players can move between C and E almost as quickly as red players, splitting the defender’s focus very effectively.

Phase Four – Control Points D & E

If control point C is captured, three bridges extend across the chasm surrounding E. This layout change has two important consequences. Firstly, whereas control point E was previously available only to Scouts, Soldiers and Demomen, it can now be captured by any of the nine classes. Secondly, a major central route now connects the north and south ends of the map. Both of these factors make E significantly easier to capture, spelling doom for uncoordinated defenders.

The red team can immediately reach D and E through the spawn camp’s western and southern doors respectively. With the final control point now vulnerable, the defenders must be vigilant about concurrently defending both points. This is usually achieved by moving between bases as threats arise, though a cleverly constructed sentry gun can cover both approaches at once.

The blue team can now take advantage of a door that was unlocked in the first phase, allowing them to traverse the long northwestern path from A to D. The winding eastern route previously used to attack B and C now becomes the principal attack vector for E.

There are also two minor attack routes that I omitted from the diagram for clarify purposes. Firstly, any blue players left straggling at C at the end of the last phase can sneak westward by passing in front of the red team’s spawn camp. Secondly, there is a window overlooking E from A which is ideal for Snipers (you may recall that this nest was previously under the red team’s control in phase one.)

Phase Five – Control Point E

Occasionally the blue team will manage to capture all four optional control points before capturing E. Claiming D blocks off the red spawn camp’s southern exit, forcing defenders to take the longer western route to get back into the fight. The three bridges to E also sprout guardrails, protecting players from being pushed into the abyss. The blue team can continue their assault via the roads from A and B, or attempt to intercept respawning red players at D. These layout changes put the red team at a severe disadvantage; their only hope is to make a noble last stand and try to run out the timer.

I suspect that these diagrams and descriptions will fail to evoke the real experience of playing Steel. Beyond the inherent limitations of projecting a 3D space onto an overhead map, there are multitudes of small clever design decisions that these high-level illustrations fail to capture. However, I hope these annotations do reveal how Steel cleverly creates five distinct combat scenarios superimposed over one layout. This unusual map rewards those who can reinterpret the changing space around them. Failure to attack or defend Steel is often more fundamentally a failure of adaptation and imagination.

Only ten months after promising that they were “coming soon”, the folks of No Fun Games (Kira, Renaud and myself) have finally finished porting our one-button real-time strategy game Pax Britannica to OSX and Linux. You can check them out at our fancy new website, or download them directly here:

Mac Download / Linux Download

Unfortunately, the OSX version of the game is currently lacking gamepad support due to a platform-specific issue with GLFW. We’ll be sure to release an updated version of the game if that’s ever patched!

I’m tremendously grateful for all the positive feedback we’ve received about Pax Britannica. In particular, this video review by Joe Larson and his son Andrew reminded me why I started making video games in the first place. (UPDATE: The video is no longer available.)

Minecraft was my gateway drug. It seduced my imagination with grand ideas: setting foot in a dangerous new world, gathering provisions from the wilderness, erecting meagre shelter and surviving on your cunning and creativity. Regrettably, these concepts quickly wane once you learn a handful of commonsense safety rituals. Late-game Minecraft becomes a different game entirely, one largely centred on erecting impressive macrostructures or testing the limits of redstone torch circuits. This minor letdown gave me a taste for “harder stuff”, which led me to the seemingly impenetrable pioneer simulator Dwarf Fortress.

Dwarf Fortress has a peculiar dual inheritance: the permanent death and procedural generation of Roguelikes and the city-building strategy of games like SimCity. Its well-deserved reputation for inaccessibility is rooted in several factors, most notably the extreme austerity of its graphics. Simply learning to mentally translate a screenful of ASCII into a bustling dwarven settlement is a considerable endeavour (though a sprite pack certainly helps). Underneath this mess of characters lies a byzantine system of mechanics that drive the game’s detailed world simulation.

The scope of this simulation is almost inconceivable. For starters, every dwarf has a unique name, equipment, proficiencies in various professions, work orders, religion, moods (sometimes strange), relationships, and health status categorized per limb. The world generator models elevation, temperature, rainfall, drainage and erosion to generate several dozen biome types. These biomes are populated by thirty kinds of trees, a few dozen types of rock and ore, and several hundred creature species ranging from elephants to hydras. Despite its anachronistic low-fidelity graphics, the sheer quantity of information being processed and updated under the hood necessitates modern computing power.

Agency in this complex world is expressed through the dwarves, but they are not directly under your control. Instead the player outlines a high level task (dig here, store wood here, construct a workshop here) and the game chooses a dwarf to perform it based on certain criteria. As far as I can tell, this aspect of the control scheme is unique; strategy games usually require manual unit selection before issuing simple commands. Dwarves are highly autonomous once set up with the proper facilities, and will occupy themselves with eating, drinking, sleeping and working without the player’s input.

Regrettably, this remarkable system also has a massive flaw: the nontrivial task of managing who does what. Each dwarf has a list of “labours” that he or she is permitted to perform. These labours loosely correspond to professions: mining, wood cutting, farming, masonry, hauling etc. This system allows you to maximize the benefits of your specially trained dwarfs. After all, you don’t want your best farmer to be hauling barrels while your expedition starves. However, needlessly restricting labours can create a work bottleneck or leave an overspecialized dwarf idle. Managing labours manually becomes extremely tiresome once your dwarven population swells to thirty or more, necessitating third party spreadsheet applications such as Dwarf Therapist.

One aspect of Dwarf Fortress that particularly appeals to me as a programmer is that its systems are not inherently complex. Instead, the complexity arises from the interaction of many simple systems. Tarn Adams described this design philosophy as: “finding the key, basic elements, finding the rules that govern them, and then activating those things in the world.” For instance, one of the first challenges for a new dwarven settlement is securing a source of food, and the safest ways of doing this is subterranean farming. In order to plant crops underground, the soil must be muddied by temporarily covering it in water. Rather than having one preordained way of doing this, a number of interesting options emerge from Dwarf Fortress’s sophisticated fluid dynamics simulation. One method involves setting up a dwarven bucket brigade to carry in water from a distant source. Another option entails digging out the side of a murky pool so that the water flows into a larger chamber. Advanced players can even work out complex irrigation systems using floodgates and pumps. Hungry dwarves, thirsty plants and simulated water physics intersect to create an interesting problem.

The intersection of simple systems is also responsible for Dwarf Fortress’s peculiar difficulty scale. The level of challenge associated with any given playthrough is largely determined by the choice of embarkment site. Each biome offers a distinct set of flora and fauna, and is further classified on axes of savagery and alignment. Evil and untamed lands are teeming with dangerous creatures and are thus far more perilous to inhabit. Proximity to other civilizations is also a difficulty factor. Human and elven neighbours will send trade caravans; goblins neighbours will send raiding parties. The most pernicious threat to dwarven pioneers is the presence of aquifers: underground layers of water-saturated soil. They’re difficult to dig through, can cause accidental flooding, and halt excavation toward more valuable ores. Since all of these gameplay factors are presented on the embarkment screen, it’s up the player to choose how difficult their experience with Dwarf Fortress will be. For instance, Tim Denee was clearly playing on “hard mode” when he chose to embark the Oilfurnace expedition in a haunted land infested with undead and riddled with aquifers.

Dwarf Fortress is chock-full of fascinating design ideas and endless procedurally-generated adventure. Don’t let the steep learning curve scare you away: grab a guide, embrace the philosophy that losing is fun and strike the earth!

Back in late April, the No Fun Games gang (Renaud Bédard, Kira Boom, and I) took the train down to Toronto to participate in TOJam. Over three days, we hacked together a silly game called Tea Time Quarrel. Since then we’ve had the opportunity to present the game publicly at TOJam Arcade and the Mount Royal Game Society. However, we never got around to officially releasing it… until now!

Download Tea Time Quarrel (Windows)

Though we’re quite proud of this little experimental game, our excitement for releasing it is tempered by the fact that the majority of players will not have the hardware peripherals necessary to play it. Tea Time Quarrel is a multiplayer game designed to be played with four game pads. There simply isn’t enough room on the keyboard to allow four players access to six keys each, and the limited scope of the game jam meant that we did not have time to implement a variable number of players.

Partly in light of this unfortunate restriction, I thought I’d write a little bit about how Tea Time Quarrel is played and what our design goals were in creating it.

The central idea behind Tea Time Quarrel occurred to me when I was reading an article about the fundamentals of game design (which I can no longer find, but may have been Jesper Juul’s “The Game, the Player, the World”). The article asserted that the rules of a game are agreed to by all players beforehand, and are fixed once the game begins. My inner contrarian balked at this statement; why couldn’t the rules of a game be defined dynamically¹? Could the strategic creation and election of new rules be a second-order game mechanic?

The goal of Tea Time Quarrel is to be the first player to reach 100 points. Players can perform a modest variety of actions: jump, run around, collect teacups, attack goats², attack other players, etc. However, none of these actions will inherently bring them any closer to a victory condition. Every twenty seconds one of the players is given the opportunity to propose a new rule. Rules follow a simple four-part syntax:

This may look complicated, but it’s quite simple in practice. For example, the rule “Each Teacup Adds Points” would give a player one point every time she collects a teacup. On the other hand, the rule “Least Jumps Removes Speed” would reduce the walking speed of the player who has jumped the fewest times overall at the end of each round. While the vocabulary seems rather limited, it can still produce 128 valid rule combinations³. Due to scoping and technical restrictions, it should be noted that the effects of rules do not currently trigger other rules.

Of course, proposing a rule is only half the story. A rule is only added to the game if a majority of players vote for it (“Democracy! Just as The Queen intended.”) This prevents players from designing rules that are blatantly in their favour. Instead, players must subtly seek the advantage while convincing other players to accept their new rule.

Whether you assemble enough peripherals to actually play the game or just have a good chuckle at the concept, we hope that you enjoy Tea Time Quarrel!

¹ Of course the rules about making rules are fixed and agreed to beforehand, so this is just a layer of abstraction.
² The “Goat on a Pole” is the TOJam mascot.
³ Rules with conditions of “Each Point” or “Each Health” can never be triggered, so they’re marked as invalid.

Minecraft is a peculiar game that’s difficult to classify. Its pedigree certainly includes the world-building of Dwarf Fortress, the procedural dungeon crawling of Rogue, and the undirected creativity of LEGO. While it’s marvellously simple and intuitive, Minecraft is not an easy game to learn. In its current alpha release, it has nothing in the way of guidance or tutorials. It’s nearly impossible to figure out what to do on your own, making it necessary to follow an external FAQ.

In an effort to help resolve this unfortunate situation, I’ve put together a small guide to surviving your first day and night in Minecraft. There are already a number of excellent walkthroughs for new players available on the game’s forum, and my advice certainly does not diverge strongly from them. However, if this guide manages to pique your interest then I strongly encourage you to purchase a copy and explore the world of Minecraft for yourself.

Welcome to your very own procedurally generated world! It’s very pretty and ripe for exploration. However, you shouldn’t start wandering just yet. When nighttime falls, the land will be crawling with all sorts of dangerous fiends. You need to start gathering the necessary materials to survive the night.

The first resource you need is lumber. Walk up the nearest tree trunk and begin harvesting it by holding down the left mouse button. The block will eventually break, dropping a log that you can pick up. Chop down a few more trees in this manner until you have collected close to a dozen logs.

To begin using these logs, they need to be crafted into lumber and sticks. Begin by pressing ‘i’ to open your inventory, then click and drag the logs into the crafting window. You will receive four units of lumber for each log you process. Next, drag the lumber into the crafting window in the shape illustrated above (one on top of the other) to create sticks. If necessary, you can split your lumber pile in half by right clicking it.

Crafting is one of the Minecraft‘s most fundamental mechanics, but in the alpha version it is very poorly documented. If you’d like to know more about the sort of things you can craft, I recommend consulting the Minecraft Wiki.

Coal is the second essential resource for your first night in Minecraft. As illustrated in the screenshot above, it looks like black splotches on a rock cube. It’s most commonly found embedded in sheer rock cliffs and natural cave formations. However, unlike wood, you cannot gather coal with your bare hands; you need to craft a proper tool.

To make a tool, you need a crafting table to access the 3×3 crafting grid. You can make one by arranging four pieces of lumber in a square. Move the crafting table to the bottom line of your inventory, use the scroll wheel to equip it, and place it in the world by right clicking. Don’t worry too much about the position, as you can pick the crafting table back up by left-click “gathering” it.

Right click the crafting table to access the larger grid, then place your lumber and sticks in the above formation. This will create a wooden pickaxe, a valuable mining tool that tears through rock and harvests certain ores. Equip it (the same way you did the crafting table) and hold the left mouse button to mine the coal. You should also gather some rock while you’re at it, though it’s plentiful everywhere.

While pickaxes are fundamental to progressing in Minecraft, it’s worth noting that you can also craft axes, shovels and hoes to speed up your work or swords and armour to protect yourself.

By the time you’ve finished gathering coal, it’s quite likely that the sun has begun to set. Zombies, spiders and skeletons will begin wandering the land shortly, and you’re in no shape to fight them with your current equipment. It’s therefore imperative that you construct some shelter to hide in. Fortunately, all the materials you’ve been gathering will help you to do exactly that. Use your pickaxe to carve a shallow cave in the side of a cliff. Any location will do, but I advise not wandering too far from your starting point (you’ll respawn there when you die). For extra safety, wall up the entrance with dirt when you’re finished.

Of course, noone wants to sit around in a dark cave all night. To get things done, you’ll need some light. Combine sticks and coal to craft some torches, then place them on the walls to light up the room. Monsters won’t spawn in lighted areas, so you should place a few outside your abode as well.

Since you’re stuck inside until the sun rises, you might as well get some crafting done. I recommend constructing two particularly useful pieces of furniture. A furnace is made out of rock and consumes fuel (wood or coal) to smelt ore, bake bricks and cook food. A wooden chest provides an abundance of extra storage space. It’s a great place to keep your more valuable items, as it will protect you from losing them when your character dies.

If it’s still dark outside, you should start digging a mine and exploring the underworld. You can find rare and valuable ores as you descend, but you’ll need a better tool to gather them. For now, crafting a pick out of rock will allow you to collect iron. Resist the temptation to dig straight down; you might get stuck or fall into lava. Instead, dig diagonally in a descending staircase shape. If you hit a natural underground cave or dungeon, be sure to explore it (cautiously!)

Similarly to coal, iron ore appears as tawny patches on rock. Smelting the ore into ingots with your furnace will allow you to craft iron armour, minecarts, buckets, etc. Iron is a very useful metal, but as you dig deeper you’ll find precious gold, diamond and redstone.

When dawn finally arrives, the morning sun will burn any monsters that are still roaming about (except for explosive Creepers, inexplicably). The land is once again safe to explore, so I recommend taking advantage of the daylight to gather more lumber, hunt wild animals or embellish your residence (here’s mine at the moment).

Once you’ve gotten the basic mechanics down, how you continue to play is really up to you. You could try spelunking the depths of the earth, building a treehouse or sailing to distant lands. There are no explicit goals or directives, just a wonderful sandbox of pure undirected play. I hope you have a grand adventure!

Ancient Trader [XBLIG]

It requires a bit of searching, but you can occasionally find a real gem in the unfortunate ghetto of Xbox Live Indie Games. Ancient Trader is a simple turn-based strategy game that’s aesthetically inspired by old world cartography and cryptozoology. Players compete to be the first to track down three artifacts and defeat the powerful Ancient Guardian.

At its core, the game is mechanically similar to the old DOS game Drugwars; the goal is to buy goods (tea, spice and fruit) for a low price at one port and sell them for a profit at another. Players must explore and uncover the map to discover the most profitable transactions, but the prices never fluctuate. However, the journey is not without peril, as players can be assaulted by sea monsters and competing traders. Combat is similarly straightforward: a game of rock-paper-scissors augmented with numerical values to settle ties. Allowing a choice of weapons gives the illusion of chance, but playing rationally makes the battles almost entirely deterministic. Players can upgrade their vessels with stronger cannons, larger storage and faster hulls.

Whereas the gameplay is simple and sufficient, the presentation is lovingly crafted and absolutely joyous. The sepia-stained maps of fictional islands look as if they were hand-drawn by 16th century explorers. The various sea monsters are inspired by the scribbled horrors imagined in the “here be dragons” regions of ancient atlases. Minor features are animated with care: waves sway, flotsam bobs, breezes fill sails, clouds waft. The menu iconography is simple, clear and consistent with the period setting. Fourkidsgames has done a tremendous job of developing this uncommon aesthetic style, and the game is consistently delightful and polished as a result.

Whatever Ancient Trader lacks in strategic depth, it more than makes up for with its charming presentation. If you’re as fascinated by ancient cartography and the exploration of the New World as I am, I strongly recommend checking it out.

Hook Champ [iPhone]

There are a multitude of platformers available on the iPhone’s app store. The vast majority of them rely on some kludge to work their way around the device’s touch interface, often opting to clumsily emulate a traditional control pad. However, every once in a while a game comes along that embraces the iPhone’s idiosyncrasies. Hook Champ by RocketCat Games is one such game, and a personal favourite.

The goal of the game is to direct protagonist Jake T. Hooker as he escapes from a sepulchral heist. Jake’s primary mode of transportation is his trusty grappling hook, which players can deploy by touching the screen and retract by releasing it. As you become accustomed to flying through the air in this fashion, the sequence of touch and release becomes delightfully rhythmic. Should you miscalculate a maneuver and fall, you can slowly run across the ground in order to locate a convenient ledge. However, keeping up your speed is essential, as Jake is being chased by a rancorous apparition known as “The Curse”. Of course, the thrilling feeling of speed conveyed by successfully maintaining a fluid swinging motion is sufficient incentive in and of itself.

Jake can spend his misappropriated gold on a number of grappling hook enhancements, special equipment and fancy hats. This of course provides some incentive to replay and explore previous levels. Upgrading the grappling hook enables a much smoother swinging motion, which in turn makes the whole game more fun. This is a somewhat curious choice; why not make the controls this excellent from the start? The unlockable shotgun and rocket boots provide limited horizontal and vertical bursts of speed respectively, and are activated by two small buttons on the bottom of the screen. This equipment adds welcome variety, but mapping them to a meagre portion of the screen makes them difficult to deploy with precise timing.

My largest annoyance with an otherwise excellent game is a significant late-game difficulty spike. Only the most dedicated players will be able to make any progress through the unforgiving Bull Idol stages, where a floor of lava ensures that every mistake is deadly. Since there are already time trials and global leaderboards in place for the hardcore audience, I can’t imagine why the developers sought to exclude casual players from the later levels.

Plain Sight [PC]

When I’m trying to proselytize my friends to this game, I describe it as “quick-draw robot sword-fighting with Mario Galaxy physics.” That’s usually sufficiently intriguing to pique anyone’s interest, but Plain Sight is more peculiar and interesting than even that brief description lets on.

The game’s multiplayer deathmatch has an unusual set of rules: you spawn with one point, and must slay other players to steal their points. Points makes you bigger and stronger, but also make you a more visible and attractive target. Here’s the rub: your points only get banked and added to the scoreboard when you trigger self-destruction. Catching other players in your explosion multiplies that score. These mechanics give the game a strategic risk/reward dynamic: should you bank your points now, or take advantage of the extra strength to accumulate more? Should you target a lucrative point-laden player, or elude him to avoid increasing his multiplier?

The aerial combat in Plain Sight is a breathtaking experience. Swords kill in one hit, so the emphasis is placed on movement and reflexes. As I mentioned earlier, this game builds on the orbital gravity mechanics of Mario Galaxy. Each platform has its own gravitational field, so the meaning of up and down is entirely relative. Holding down the left mouse button charges a dash attack, which is used both to lock-on to other players and to quickly change direction while airborne. Combine jumping, charging and low gravity and you can soar through the sky indefinitely. Beatnik Games tuned a thousand subtle details just right to produce a wonderful sense of speed and flight.

If you’re looking for something new to play over the Labour Day weekend, I hope you’ll consider checking out these terrific independent games.

However, this year we were joined by my good friend Sven, an Antiguan foreign student who just graduated from software engineering at Concordia with me. He brought a set of dominoes with him, and thought we might enjoy learning a Caribbean game he had grown up playing. He knew the game only as “Dominoes”, but a little post-trip research revealed it’s commonly known as “Cut Throat”.

Photograph by Adam Jones, License CC BY-SA 2.0

Cut Throat derives a great deal of strategic complexity from a very simple ruleset. The game begins by dealing the 28 dominoes evenly to four players. The goal is to be first player to empty their hand. The winner of the previous hand (or the owner of the double 6 tile) plays first, then play proceeds clockwise around the table. A player can only play a domino with an end that matches one of the two open ends of play (there is no branching). If no moves are possible, knocking the table indicates that you are unable to play. In the rare event where no one is able to play, the hand is shut and the player with the fewest total dots in their hand is the winner. The first player to win six hands wins the game provided (here’s the catch) another player has won zero hands.

As a game designer, Cut Throat utterly fascinates me, and not only because it is elegantly simple and a real joy to play. It has certain unusual characteristics that make it unlike any game I’ve ever played, and I have a hypothesis regarding why that might be. Video game bloggers have long discussed how Japanese and American games have distinct regional flavours. If we consider games as cultural artifacts, then logically their mechanics will reflect such roots. Despite my extremely limited knowledge of the region, I’d like to propose the following: that Cut Throat’s unusual characteristics, which distinguish it from more common tabletop games, may be an expression of Caribbean culture.

Despite its simple ruleset, Cut Throat has a rather complex colloquial vocabulary. Of course, it’s not uncommon for unique ad-hoc language to emerge from game communities (the fighting genre in particular). However, the terms in Cut Throat are used less to describe rudimentary mechanics and more to add flavour and commentary to the game. They enhance the experience, rather than merely describe it. Here are a few examples:

• Lie down: To play a double. Since you haven’t changed the state of the board, you haven’t done any work!
• Jail: A player is in jail until he wins a hand. The goal of the game is effectively to keep at least one player in jail.
• Pushing: You are pushing the player to your left. Since you play right before her, you have the most control over how she plays. If you’re making it difficult for her to play, then you are pushing hard.
• Strong Back: Conversely, if you’re being pushed hard but are still able to play then your back is strong.
• Buoy: The player you are pushing is also your buoy. If he gets out of jail, then your buoy has floated away!
• Running From: A player will run from numbers they are unable to play on. For instance, a player with no fours in their hand is running from fours.
• Wash up: To shuffle the dominoes.
• Eat Your End: Late in the game, it’s possible that there’s a tile that only you can play on. This is clearly a very advantageous situation. If you’re forced to play on this end, then you eat your end and negate your advantage.
• Anti-man: At the end of the game, there is one winning player (who won six times) and at least one jailed player (who never won). If the winning player was also pushing a jailed player, then he has played an exceptionally good game. The losing player is then referred to as the anti-man, a slur for homosexual men¹.

Cut Throat is a high competitive and energetic game. Indeed, players are encouraged to slam their dominoes on the table if they’re playing well. This aspect of the game is enhanced by this unique vocabulary; with the explanation of each term, Sven described an accompanying emotion. Lying down is cheeky, losing your buoy is stressful, escaping from jail is relieving, and being anti-manned is very shameful. “Washing up” is delegated to the player who was pushing the winner of the hand, because they evidently failed to push hard enough. Furthermore, winning players are permitted to draw from the shuffled pile before those in jail. In Cut Throat, friendly taunting is not only encouraged, it’s intrinsically built into the structure of the game.

Cut Throat has the strongest positive feedback of any game I’ve ever encountered². You may have noticed, for instance, that the winning player gains an advantage by playing first. However, there is a unique social mechanic that is far more influential. As I described earlier, the game ends in a draw if all four players have won at least once. In order for there to be a winner, there must also be a loser. Therefore, it’s common for the three players with at least one win to conspire to beat the final jailed man. In other words, they team up against the player in last place! This mechanic subverts one of the most fundamental strategies of all multiplayer games: playing to beat the player in first place.

In conclusion, Western and Japanese games tend to include some form of consolation to weaker players, often in the form of negative feedback. They certainly never stack the odds against the weakest player, then proceed to mock him for it. With its extremely strong positive feedback and institutionalized taunting, Cut Throat unabashedly offends these sensibilities. I suspect that this divergence in game design philosophy can be at least partially attributed to cultural differences. The uniqueness of Cut Throat may be an expression of its Caribbean roots. As video game studios continue to pop up all over the world, what new game design paradigms will be revealed?

¹ Homophobia is extremely prevalent in the Caribbean.
² For a quick primer on feedback loops in game design, check out Game Design Concepts.

This post is partly a (two month late) response to Chris Hecker’s GDC 2010 rant entitled Please Finish Your Game. It also condenses some rough thoughts I’ve long held about motivation and game making. It took some effort to edit it into a coherent form, so I apologize in advance if it’s a tad rambling.

In his rant, Chris expresses concern about the fixation on short development time. He worries that rapid-fire game releases (exemplified by Jonatan “Cactusquid” Söderström) have become a “badge of honour” in the indie game community. This attitude is mirrored in the industry, where ship dates often trump quality. Chris asserts that, in terms of contribution to games as an art form, Braid is worth more than 100 game jam games because it explored its mechanics to the depth that they deserved. “We need more depth and understanding”, he says. “We don’t need more wacky ideas or shallow games.”

I have great respect for Chris (I loved his talk at MIGS 2009) and thus am cautious about disagreeing with him. However, I believe his argument overlooks the real value of rapid development and its place in the creative ecosystem¹. I think that it’s misleading to compare a masterpiece like Braid with the multitudes of forgettable unpolished jam games. The final product isn’t the point; the value of a game jam lies in the process of creation. Specifically, game jams provide tools that enable amateur game designers to experiment, learn and grow.

Anecdotal evidence suggest that there are a great many people who are interested in making games, but have never done so. I suspect this is largely due to the fact that to start making games, you have to make your first game. There’s tremendous symbolic and psychological value to doing something for the first time, especially if it’s something you’re passionate about. As Havi Brooks explains, doing what you love can be terrifying:

You’re avoiding the thing that’s holding all your dreams? Good grief! Of course you are! That symbolic weight? It’s that much potential for hurt and disappointment. […] It’s not this: “Even though I thought this meant everything to me, I’m still avoiding it so clearly I don’t really care about it.” It’s this: “Wow, this means everything to me… so of course I’m avoiding it.”

Game jams provide tools to help overcome this pressure. For instance, they establish a well-defined start and end date for the project. They provide a theme to riff off. Fellow jammers can provide assistance and feedback. Finally, knowing that you’ll release a game concurrently with dozens of others reduces its symbolic value. Simply put, game jams provide a friendly supportive atmosphere for newcomers.

Those who do take the leap and make their first game quickly run into another problem: they don’t like what they’re making. After all, if you care about games enough to try your hand at making one, then your taste in games is likely quite advanced. You’re perceptive enough to know that what you’re making isn’t very good. Ira Glass explains why this is problematic: “Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. […] A lot of people never get past that phase.”

Fortunately, he also presents a method of getting past this roadblock: “The most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one [game].” In other words, do exactly what people like Cactusquid and the Experimental Gameplay Project are already doing! Experiment with weird genres, unusual aesthetics and unfamiliar technologies. Create exactly the kind of unfinished shallow games that Chris Hecker is warning us against. Why? Because nobody can create a masterpiece without first making a hundred crude sketches.

In a general sense, I worry that the burden of having to develop mechanics deeply will dissuade people from making games. If it is “our duty as developers to follow a mechanic to its logical and aesthetic extent”, then the inverse is also true; we should not make a game if we cannot give its mechanics their due diligence. This encourages designers to hold onto their ideas, waiting until they have the time to execute them with the appropriate fidelity. To quote Ze Frank: “If you don’t want to run out of ideas, the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don’t have the time or resources to do them right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack.” This attitude is anathema to amateur game development. It’s better to get those ideas out there, even if they’re flawed and incomplete!

If we embrace this sort of flawed rapid development, do we then disregard the notion of exploring mechanics to the depth that they deserve? I don’t believe we have to. As Cactus observed in an e-mail discussion with Chris, “it’s hard to decide if the game you’re working on really deserves that much hard work or not.” Creating these crude unfinished games is a form of prototyping; ideas that seem promising can be developed further². Chris himself did this with Spy Party:

SpyParty was actually an idea from Indie Game Jam 4 that I didn’t quite get working at the jam, but that I felt was strong enough to spend (a lot) more time on.

In conclusion, while I appreciate that “the good-enough is the enemy of the excellent”, I think the onus of developing mechanics fully is detrimental to amateur game development. Creating wacky, shallow games plays a valuable part in building up new developers. Attracting fresh voices and perspectives is the surest route to expanding games as an art form and creating more masterpieces like Braid. Don’t worry too much about greatness, just get excited and make things!

¹ I feel a bit sheepish saying this to one of the founders of the Indie Game Jam.
² This may have been Chris’ point all along: too few developers are following through in this manner.