Game Design Thoughts: Trust and Discovery

 

When people talk about "modern game design" often the meme is that the game is constantly throwing tutorials at you, breaking the 4th wall, having some "sidekick" narrator explain every single thing happening on screen to you in excruciating detail. Even something as basic as exploring a scene is taken out of a player's hands with the advent of weird chemtrail looking lines of smoke that try to lead the player from one quest checkpoint to the next.

Even in some of the most open ended and high autonomy play spaces, like in Tears of the Kingdom, you are still somehow forced to complete tedious "go here and talk to him, then go there and talk to him" style quests as part of the main campaign of the game.

While I think that everyone can agree that the pure obfuscation of some classic games, which were intentionally designed to be so impossible to decypher on ones own accord as to require them to purchase a $20 walkthrough guide, were definitely not great-- I, like many other gamers of an older era, prefer erring toward obfuscation as opposed to over-explanation.

After all, part of the gameplay experience, in my opinion, is discovery. Trying things out, seeing what works and doesn't, and being sometimes very excited when you stumble upon something that feels special. It's what makes a game less like a to do list, or a set of chores, or worse (a literal job), and more like a space for play, fun, and leisure.

One of the ways I try to cultivate this perspective in Sonic RPG is by trying to make it possible to do everything in more than one way.

For battles, I am often thinking about what the "best way" to defeat a crew of opponents is given your party at any given time, but I am also trying to think about alternative approaches that will still work but just maybe cost a little more skill points to do. I want the game to be possible to beat without someone needing to master QTE attacks and dodges, but it should be notably more difficult. And for many encounters, I want to think about ways I can encourage the player to explore as many skills of their party as possible, not just throwing out Attack over and over again. Sometimes this means making special new bots for you to fight (or combinations of bots) that explicitly challenge you to think carefully about your moves otherwise risk getting KO'd.

For puzzles, sure some are required to progress in the game, but most I would say are entirely optional and just there to gate you accessing a chest with a cool item in it. As seen in episode 6's tunnel map, I resist telling the player explicitly how the power switches work. I allow the player to simply discover how things work relying on affordances (e.g. how electricity allows environmental machines to function and that "tick tock" sounds imply there is a time limit on something happening). Some may reasonably claim that this is not accessible to people who have never played a video game before (or been rushed to do something via clock before), and that modern game tutorials, which a veteran gamer like me considers burdensome, are actually a way to make games accessible to absolute beginners.

I think that is a totally valid argument. That said though, I still prefer tutorials that are more seamlessly integrated into the gameplay content. As someone with ADHD, one of the things I hate most about playing boardgames, for instance, is when that one friend tries to info dump every single rule about how the game works before you begin playing. For my brain, I simply cannot hold that much information in my head upfront. As such, my modus operandi is to simply stop listening and wait patiently for them to stop talking so we can start the game. My preferred approach to playing board games, even complex ones, is trial and error. If it's my first time playing, I do not expect to win anyways, so introducing the rules to me incrementally, over a play session, and in context of what I am already doing, in my personal preference.

Knowing that not everyone shares my neurodivergent eccentricities however, it does occur to me that perhaps walkthrough guides of the past, and Nintendo Power articles, were possibly serving those inclined opposite to myself. People who wanted a lot of hand holding, explanation, and exposition, and that their want (or perhaps even need, in order to feel capable of playing said game) for this style of tutorialization has been historically exploited for extra profit, whereas my inclination has been the default, cost-free, and normalized game playing experience. I think that is a possible nugget of hard truth here too.

But even holding all of this, I think it is fair to have games that are meant for some people's experience more than others. I am not drawn to play games with enormous internal complexity, like survival games or Eve Online, let's say (possibly because my ADHD finds this excruciatingly taxing). I assume people who like those games would in turn maybe not like my game, or not like platformers, or other "accessible" games, and I think that's ok. The beauty of having so many people making indie games in the world (especially games that are intentionally distributed for free) is that we can have super niche experiences that aren't always trying to appeal to a mass audience or hit a market segment. The work can be itself, unapologetically.