<![CDATA[Lamplight Forest - Lamplight Forest Journal]]>

<![CDATA[Lamplight Forest - Lamplight Forest Journal]]>Sun, 28 Apr 2024 00:31:44 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[Mage Drops Dev Log: The Road to Easy Mode]]>Thu, 19 Aug 2021 03:31:46 GMThttp://lamplightforest.com/lamplight-forest-journal/mage-drops-dev-log-the-road-to-easy-mode

Hello all and welcome to our first run of weekly devlogs that will help share some insight into how Mage Drops is being developed and how the game experience is evolving around player feedback.
As with most things that are still a work-in-progress, the ideas, inspirations, and features that we discuss in these devlogs may or may not make it into the final product.

First up for discussion is the implementation of an Easy and Tourist Mode for Mage Drops.

Since Mage Drops appeared in Early Access on both Steam and Itch, feedback has fairly consistently identified strong level design, beautiful environments and a steep if not sheer difficulty curve.

Difficulty and a rich diversity of challenges formed by obstacles and evolving abilities is a core feature to the identity of Mage Drops. That said, we want Mage Drops and its story (more on that in future weeks) to be accessible to a wide range of players, not just the S-Rank Super Meat Boy masochists!

Players should be able to clear levels at their own pace to enjoy the full magical journey of Mage Drops and then return to earlier levels to develop their skills and aim for higher rewards. However, it is important that we manage that difficulty tuning so Mage Drops doesn’t become an extended tutorial-like experience that lacks in challenge and loses the thrill of overcoming said challenge.

To this end, we have already added additional checkpoints to some of our longer levels to ensure a bad shot doesn’t mean losing all your hard-earned progress.

We have also calmed down the aggressive rising water levels that occur in World 3: Ruins World, though the challenge is still very present.

That said we believe there is still space to develop a more accessible option for players to enjoy Mage Drops so we are hard at work on developing a true Easy Mode to be selected from the main menu screen, as well as a Tourist Mode for even more accessibility.

Easy Mode:
• Additional paths and traversal elements per level (more clouds, bounce pads etc.)
• Additional checkpoints
• Additional health recovery tokens

Tourist Mode would be an option for players who don’t want to be distracted from the story and gameplay. In this mode there would be no stroke counts or rankings at all and would have the Easy Mode level layouts.

We don’t have an ETA yet on when Easy Mode and Tourist Mode will go live but we are hard at work on getting the balance right, so Mage Drops remains an engaging, skill-developing experience regardless of your game mode preference.

Mage Drops currently has 5 unique Worlds on offer to players with over 60 challenging levels to enjoy. If you have any feedback or questions, be sure to drop by our official Discord found via the link below:

Orchid of Redemption Discord: https://discord.gg/nAQfxKJ6vu
Mage Drops is available now in Early Access on Steam and Itch or Wishlist for our (tentative) late 2021 launch:
Steam: http://bit.ly/372pEwZ
Itch: http://bit.ly/2WnT8TW

Next devlog we’ll take a look at how we’re using the mystical art of procedurally generated level design to help evolve the future levels of Mage Drops!

Until next time,
Orchid of Redemption

]]><![CDATA[Quantum Leaps, Alpha & Omegas]]>Tue, 09 Feb 2021 18:21:28 GMThttp://lamplightforest.com/lamplight-forest-journal/quantum-leaps-alpha-omegas

I’ve tried to write this article a few times, but each time I stop myself because parts of the discussion feel a bit stupid, but this is a great point to start with, maybe there’s a separate article in it later down the track. For me as a 38 year old, there’s often a tricky hump to get over when discussing games, which is the lack of emotional maturity in video games. This is largely down to games being a young medium as I’ll discuss further on, but in the last 10-15 years we’ve seen the issue is trickier than that, as many people have tried to create more emotionally mature games with varying levels of success. On the whole storytelling has gotten much better, but I believe there’s been some big mis-steps with games like Dear Esther and the like being so revered when they unfortunately do nothing to bridge the divide between storytelling and gameplay (ie their gameplay has nothing to do with their story). The notable exception being the Giant Sparrow games, Unfinished Swan and Edith Finch which are both definitely a step in a better direction, recognising at least in part that gameplay should do the telling.
So the flip side that I learned from some of Dear Esther’s ilk is that sometimes the attempt to be emotionally mature can leave a very bad taste, so this has given me a new appreciation for the time and place to be dumb, fun and simple.
So I guess that’s a bit of an on-ramp for some of the stuff I don’t feel completely comfortable talking about in-depth, but that’s one of the enduringly strange things about video games is that we constantly end up analysing and referencing things like a plumber and his mushrooms and turtles.

In a previous post you mentioned how games are still such a young medium. Let’s explore that
Well this depends on the framing so I’ll jump back a bit into my personal history. Although the bulk of my formal education was not in games (my undergrad was in music technology) I was lucky enough to have some experience being immersed in gaming academia during my PhD. One of the key things I learned very quickly was that when games are taught at a university level, they are never just talking about video games, they’re considering the whole human history of games: everything from ancient boardgames to sports to video games. So in that sense games are not a young medium at all, and while video games do represent a huge shift, I’ve found that the more I open my mind to the history of human games and “play”, the less it seems like video games are as much of a great leap forward as they seem.
What I mean by that is, as I grow as a game designer and I read insights from other game designers, I find more and more that foundational principles “discovered” by video game designers – eg rules about game balance, scope, constraints, risk versus reward etc – have already long existed in board games and sports. And I say this from my own experience of gradually discovering rules, tools and constraints that work for me, that I could have come to much sooner had I opened my mind to taking inspiration from board games, sports, and “play” in the even broader sense of engaging with any aspect of life in a playful way, rather than taking inspiration only from video games.
To give a few examples, the developers of FTL: Faster Than Light had a very strong board game influence, which led to them really crystallising the game down into its simplest components, as they had such a deep appreciation for what could be done with a single static game-board. In a very different way, the game Myst was inspired by DnD, to the extent that they role-play/improvised the game as a DnD scenario, to flesh out the world and identify any potential issues before going into full production. But in both cases non-videogame influences made these games much richer and more focused experiences.

When I design games, I’m guilty of leaning too heavily on my knowledge of video game history. This is an easy trap to fall into, because as one becomes more and more of an expert one’s ego loves to revel in its encyclopaedic knowledge. But on a good day I’ll catch myself and do better to get some perspective. I at least have the regular touchstones of chess and Lewis Carroll’s story Through the Looking Glass. While I’m not a chess player at all I have an ingrained feel for the rules and the possibility space, and combined with Through the Looking Glass I like to imagine a story space that can unfold by the intricate interactions of just a few simple rules. And it matters to me because it lasts. Like great music, great games should be able to last hundreds or thousands of years. But will many video games last? I wonder if the more complex a videogame’s ruleset, the less likely it will stand the test of such long periods of time. Just speculation, but it’s easy to imagine say Tetris still being popular hundreds of years from now because of it’s pure and simple ruleset. On the flipside, only a decade or two ago one might have assumed the same for realtime strategy games, but curiously they disappeared, or at least were subsumed by other genres. But it’s hard to imagine many other games that really strike such a resonant chord, especially the majority of contemporary games that are often a complex jumble of many different influences and gameplay styles. Anyway, whether a game can last a thousand years is not as important as what in can contribute in the here and now: if a game only lasts 5 years but it inspires thousands or millions of designers and players and helps evolve the practice, that’s what matters most.
So I guess the point here is to continually recognise what the fundamentals are – sometimes appreciating why they last, and sometimes having a feel for why they need to change.

So getting back to the title, lets explore what you mean by Quantum Leaps
As I mentioned in a previous post, despite games being a young medium there are countless examples of games that represent “quantum leaps” ahead. There are really so many of these now that it depends on your framing as to what constitutes a quantum leap e.g. this could be explored in the realms of the commercial, technical, gameplay dynamics, rulesets, etc
I’m not really interested in exploring any one particular avenue but really just exploring a few examples that have succeeded in many of those respects, and I guess a personal reflection of the kind of miraculous sense of how these things came together, that all the disparate ingredients locked into place.

Super Mario Bros
There’s not much a need to say about this that hasn’t been said a million times before, but really this is the game that set the standard for what a quantum leap ahead looks like. I was born in 1982 and this game came out in 1985, so given the timelines I was more of a Super Mario 3 fan, and always found the original’s controls to be a little too janky. But every now and then when I take a look back at this game, I’m often surprised that things that I thought originated in Mario 3 actually came from the original. To me that’s where its significance matters perhaps most of all, in the fact that it went above and beyond. The foundation of it was already a great game, but they made it incredible by combining imaginative flights of fancy with deeply grounded gameplay legibility, a contrast that has played out through every Mario title since and which arguable is so compelling in itself that the series continues to get away with little-to-no story.

Street Fighter II
Street Fighter II’s crystallization is, for me, much more dramatic than Mario’s. Maybe platform games were already established in a more primitive sense (eg Donkey Kong) and because there’s a lot you can do with platformers, there’s a lot of ways to approach them and introduce more or less puzzle or arcade elements, etc, etc, but the one-on-one fighting game almost begins and ends with Street Fighter II and very few things in that genre have proved an enduring value add, which is arguably why games in the genre continually rely on huge player rosters and massive (or bizarre) visual spectacle as their site of innovation.
So what did Street Fighter II crystallise? First of all getting the scale of characters on-screen. This is a big deal in any genre with a fixed-offset camera, but there seems to be less margin for error in fighting games. It not only helps with the precision of timing your moves, but it also helps to sell the visual identity of each character, and Street Fighter strikes an amazing balance of iconic characters. It would be easy to say any good character designer could come up with 100 diverse new characters like that, but when you look at say Tekken or the King of Fighters series, are those characters really iconic and stand the test of time in the same way? Is each one really dramatically unique? Sure it was a simpler time when Street Fighter II was released and so the 8 playable characters and 4 bosses was enough, which of course it wouldn’t be anywhere near enough now. But easy to see that having such a small cast of characters allowed each to be intimately crafted, and that in more modern games with larger casts, this just gets diluted. Though the cast definitely shows its age in terms of only having one female character. For contrast, look at some of the characters in Street Fighter V like Abigail or Fang, their over the top designs would be more at home in a King of Fighters or even Guilty Gear game.

Secondly, gestural controls are a big one. For me as a designer, whenever I think about creating some kind of a gestural input, my first thought is Ryu’s famous ‘hadouken’ gesture (and side note I always loved how perfectly the hadouken “slide down to right” gesture pairs with its animation of drawing in and pushing out the energy-ball). But this is definitely more of an alpha-and-omega* thing in that it seems like such a great idea, and works so well in this game, but if you try and implement it in your own game you quickly discover that the gestures used in Street Fighter II are pretty much the only ones that can work, at least with a traditional joystick or controller. It seems weird, but there’s just about nowhere else to go from there.

Beyond that, there’s so much more, the music, the scenery, the UI slow-motion knock-outs, the jump height, play speed, all of which have been refined over the years throughout the genre, but never with significant deviation from the blueprint that was this game. I don’t say all this as a fighting game fan, but as someone who marvels at how powerful and resonant this perfected form can be when discovered (and how the perfected form can continue to be perfected!)

Maniac Mansion
Ok so commercially it’s not even remotely in the same ballpark as Mario and Street Fighter, and certainly not as beloved as designer Ron Gilbert’s later Monkey Island (arguably the alpha and omega of comedy-adventure games), but a landmark game nonetheless.
Maniac Mansion didn’t crystallise things in the same way as Street Fighter II, and I’d happily argue that Monkey Island and others sanded down those rough edges and failed experiments, but some of Maniac Mansion’s failures are what makes it a great counterpoint to this argument. I’m sure most designers could agree on, and I’ve heard Ron Gilbert himself discuss, issues with the design of this game: too many characters to choose from, too many action-command/verbs, too many baffling things that can go wrong (characters can get killed or captured with little warning, items can be used in “wrong” ways, necessitating a restart of the game), all of which were identified and fixed not just by Lucasarts, by in the genre as a whole.
But apart from these remaining issues, Maniac Mansion crystallised the point and click adventure interface (it wasn’t the first, but it was the first to do it well), before that, most adventure games still required you to type in what you wanted your character to do. And so much more was packaged into Gilbert’s SCUMM system, the adventure game engine created for Maniac Mansion that became the basis for so many famous adventure games to follow. The history and innovations of SCUMM are well worth delving into if you’re interested in storytelling or adventure systems.
So while point and click adventures have, at least commercially, gone extinct, the legacy started by Maniac Mansion has endured and evolved through influential games like Monkey Island, and highly innovative titles like the musical adventure Loom which was a key reference in my own PhD research into musical gameplay.

So let’s unpack *Alpha and Omega
I’ve already said a lot so I’ll keep this brief. Street Fighter II is the main game that got me thinking about this: genres, ideas or concepts that begin and end with a certain game. As I discussed above, the one on one fighting genre begins and ends with Street Fighter II, ie I would argue there has not been another quantum leap in the genre since that game, there have only been incremental refinements, and some unsuccessful tangents (eg Tobal and Toshinden notably tried to break the fixed-axis gameplay, but in both cases it didn’t stick). To a lesser extent, 2D platformers all live under the shadow of Super Mario, but this genre successfully made the transition to 3D where I would argue that Mario doesn’t reign supreme (after recently replaying Mario 64 I can’t believe it’s still held in such high regard as the controls, especially the camera, are frustrating beyond belief, though I give props to the star-collection system and hub-world of the castle)
Maniac Mansion is the exception as the genre still had more latitude to continue to innovate after this, but as I mentioned there’s something definitive about the original Monkey Island, some magical combination of the genuine sense of adventure combined with the humour (some truly timeless comedy moments, like picking up the idol from underwater or the “confetti/wax lips” sequence), fourth wall breaking before it was cool, all mixed with the lo-fi aesthetic of its time. The sequel was great, but its terrible ending almost serves to say that as fun as the ride was, the original really said it all.
So alpha and omega matters to me, because it’s important to know when to move on. If something begins and ends with a definitive game, maybe a radical change is needed.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to say hi in the comments and sign up to Lamplight Forest for updates on our games

]]><![CDATA[My “Pandora’s Box” Game Inspirations]]>Tue, 12 Jan 2021 22:48:23 GMThttp://lamplightforest.com/lamplight-forest-journal/my-pandoras-box-game-inspirations

So today I’m looking at games that are inspirations for me as a developer. But these are special cases, not necessarily inspirations in the sense of having an emotional or mental significance for me (although often that too), but in the sense that my mind has filed them away as lets say “game designer toolbox” games: which is to say each of them represents a particular concept or set of concepts or mechanics that my subconscious bubbles up to me again and again when I’m designing games.
But “game designer toolbox” sounds very dry, so I’m calling them Pandora’s box games, since they also contain the tantalizing risk of over-scoping due to the scale or potential of their ideas.

The Witness
I suppose it’s not uncommon for designers have one or a few games that they catch themselves referencing a little too much. For me that’s The Witness. From the first screenshot I ever saw of it, years before it was released, I knew it was something special, even though I didn’t have a clue what the actual gameplay was at that point. My next clue was an early preview/interview video where Jon Blow played through the first 10mins or so with an interviewer and introduced a lot of the gameplay concepts. In that video he said something like “instead of players collecting items in the game, they explore it to collect concepts in their own mind”. A lofty ambition, but after playing the game who could really say it's not executed exceptionally well.
While you could say that mastering many games out there is like learning a new language, The Witness is one of very few games where this is literally true – all around the game world are symbols whose meaning we learn (but being symbols whose meanings are rules rather than words, their “meanings” are paradoxically more abstract and more concrete than verbal meanings), and these symbols are connected to places, both as a strong game design memory-flag for the player (“remember this symbol that you learned in this area”), but also could be read as an allegory for how language evolves out of its surroundings.
So what does this all mean to me? I guess the “players collecting concepts in their own mind” is something I love, and yet my own practice has naturally drawn me away from. Even from my very first game I tried to have minimal UI, no inventory, etc, but being true to myself that just didn’t suit the kind of games I needed to make. Nonetheless, I hold this principle of Jon Blow’s in high regard, even if it serves as a counterpoint to my own practice, that’s still an invaluable thing to have.

Inside a Star Filled Sky (ISFS)
Doesn’t that name in itself just take you on a journey? As soon as I heard it I knew this game was for me. It came out a year after the Inception, and I’d be curious to know whether its “worlds within worlds” design was inspired by that film. Whether it was or not, ISFS is clearly happy doing its own thing. Not only can you go inside worlds inside worlds, but you can go inside enemies, where their insides are a level and you can change their attributes by how you play that level, and you can go inside powerups and change their attributes, and all of this is infinitely recursive – so you can go inside a thing inside a thing inside a thing, to infinity!
Now apart from that, what’s the game about? Yeah, well not much else unfortunately, you just use this brilliant recursive structure to shoot things and get to the highest level you can. So that’s not what is interesting to me. Beyond the recursive stuff, which I could explore forever as a game designer, if I had any idea how to make it, there is one shining jewel from this game that has set itself in my mind and stayed there for over 10 years now…
…but it’s not easy to communicate. Maybe I can summarise it like this: I’m in a level, pinned down by an enemy that I clearly can’t get past in my current state, so I go inside the enemy to try to weaken it. While inside, I find a particular type of powerup that would fix my problem out there, but it’s not powerful enough, so I go inside it to power it up, there I have to play through a few stages to get it to the level of power I need. So then I return back up through those levels, out of the power up which I now collect, then out of the enemy which I can now get past. This has all taken say 10-15 minutes. But the jewel of my personal experience was, when I returned to the enemy-situation that had caused me to go on that tangent, I remembered why I had gone on that tangent. As in, only then did I remember. Up until then I was in another world, I had a different purpose.
Hmm, I don’t know if this will make sense, but it was a powerful sensation. Imagine if you emerged from this life you’re living now, your whole life from birth to death, and it turns out it was just a small piece, a side mission, of a bigger life that contained many such lives. It was like a little flash of that. Enough said I think!
So it happens from time to time when I’m working on something that, in my game design document I’ll reference the “Star Filled Sky Experience”.

Gunpoint
I’m tempted to just say nothing else except CROSSLINK: that’s the aspect of this game that I just love and think about often. Looking at something like hacking in the Watchdogs series, it’s easy to see how a similar concept can easily be diluted. But Gunpoint does it so perfectly, aided I’m sure by the fact that the game is so minimal, so there are few distractions in the way of getting this mechanic just right, and communicating it to players so clearly.
Aside from its specific implementation in the game (ie interconnecting electrical devices) which in itself has a world of possibilities for a game designer to explore further, the concept of interdependent connections, and the resulting emergent problem solving this can offer players, could be applied to any other context you could imagine (magic systems, social systems, character behaviours, etc, etc), and has such huge untapped potential.

Breath of the Wild (BotW)
After Majora’s Mask I hadn’t played any Zelda games for a long time before BotW. For several reasons I basically stopped playing any game that had any kind of combat in it (I’m just over it, on so many levels). But when I saw the BotW team’s GDC talk, and specifically the stuff about what they called the “chemistry engine” I was absolutely sold on this game. In fact after simply watching that talk, and before I’d ever even played the game, I started designing a new game based on that chemistry engine principle.
After a while this idea has just become second nature, so unlike say Star Filled Sky, I don’t often reference BotW in my game design docs, but that’s really the genius of the chemistry engine, it’s low hanging fruit, it’s so obvious and “real world” that once you have it in your game design toolkit you don’t really need to consciously think about it, it’s just there to use as you need it.
For me the second piece of the puzzle of this becoming second nature was my experience with Mario Maker 2.

Mario Maker 2
This is just a short one because, through my game designer’s lens Mario Maker is less a game than a fun game design tool. In a nutshell, my revelation moment was seeing each component of the Mario games – keys, springboards, timer-switches, pipes that spawn objects, etc, etc – and seeing them presented in this clear and simple UI. It was like half the work was done for me already, so I started prototyping a lot of this functionality, not for a specific game, but just as a foundation of components that I could use for any game I was working on. Then not long into this process, the chemistry engine stuff started to get included. I ended up leaving this prototype behind, but on a later game project, without even thinking about it, I started to implement this way of thinking (which could be called an entity component system, but I think that term is way too broad to really mean much) and eventually fully realised this robust system of modular behaviours including those Mario Maker and chemistry engine inspired aspects, and much more beyond.

Risk/Rewards of Hidden and Secret Information – Cinco Paus and Toe Jam and Earl: Back in the Groove
Sure there are tons of games that skilfully explore “risk/rewards of hidden and secret information”, it just happens that for me these are the two the crystallised in my mind why this concept matters. And I love that these are such different games from each other, but when I’m writing game design docs my subconscious will often say “the game should do etc etc using hidden information like Cinco/Toe Jam”. I think this amalgamation works for me because there is such a polar difference between how these games use hidden information and what’s at stake: in turn-based Cinco, every move matters, the board is small, danger is always close, every risk has a high probability of failure. But in Toe Jam and Earl, you can kind of do whatever and just bumble your way through, if one present (the game’s hidden information “currency”) doesn’t give you a boon you need, there’s probably five others close at hand that will.
While Cinco’s learning experience for me was a slow unfolding (i.e. how could this much density really be packed into this little experience?), with Toe Jam it happened in an instant: I opened a present to get a pair of rocket-skates (“this will help me speed out of trouble”) then immediately skated off the edge of the level. It was hilarious and unexpected, and the happy shock of that made me immediately understand, at an experiential level, the power of risk and reward in hidden information.

Relentless (aka Little Big Adventure)
I got this game one Christmas, probably in my early teens, and it was one of those times when you feel understood, as in “this game gets me”. While I was too young to understand some of the themes going on, I just felt its resonance and loved it. Looking back on it later in life I appreciated more how well it pulled off this edgy theme of “Twinsen, a descendent of a line of magicians is imprisoned in an insane asylum by a cruel dictator for having prophetic dreams about the end of the world. These dreams are telepathically communicated to Twinsen from a celestial creature in the centre of the planet” which all really contrasts with its lighthearted, playful fantasy-like appearance.
The very first thing you have to do in the game is escape this asylum, find your way home and discover and claim your magician lineage hidden in a secret room in your home.
Great background but that’s more story stuff, so in regards to this article what matters to me is the players ability to select “character states” which is at the core the gameplay. You can choose between normal, stealthy, athletic or aggressive modes. Maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal, maybe it’s just an old way of thinking and now if we want to go into different character-modes we can just hold down a button. Yes, that’s definitely true. But as a child I interpreted and remembered these modes as “emotional states” like you could switch from one emotion to another, and that determined what your character could do. Which, if you think about it that way, hopefully you can see what a vast and under-explored possibility space that is!

So that’s my lucky seven Pandora’s box games. So many more I’d love to talk about, but I cut the rest from the list as they were really just honourable mentions and not games that genuinely came up in my day to day practice (ok maybe also Future Unfolding for its entirely nature-based puzzle system).

Thanks for reading. Feel free to say hi in the comments and sign up to Lamplight Forest for updates on our games

]]><![CDATA[Rad, Readability and Respecting the Player’s Time]]>Wed, 06 Jan 2021 00:16:29 GMThttp://lamplightforest.com/lamplight-forest-journal/rad-readability-and-respecting-the-players-time

So today I’m talking about the game Rad by Double Fine, and how it’s made me reflect on readability, which I’ll explore from a few different angles (this was going to be about roguelikes also, but the focus shifted while I was writing it).

So in the last post you talked about Spelunky as a catalyst and hinted at your own journey into roguelikes. Want to unpack that a little more?
Yes, so what I was hinting at was that I’m currently developing a roguelike (which for brevity let’s call “TI”, which I won’t say too much about as its very early days, but it’s a more modern 3D take as opposed to the traditional 2D grid-based style. This project was initiated in direct response to reading Derek Yu’s Spelunky book, which unlocked a very achievable proc-gen formula for me (see my previous post).
During my general game research into roguelikes I rediscovered Rad via Tim Schafer’s Double Fine retrospective No Clip documentary and decided to check it out since I was already deep into my roguelike-research mode. But this post is not so much about Rad itself but rather the contrast it presented to me. Since Rad and TI have some surface-level similarities (similar camera perspective and world-navigation feel) I found myself comparing Rad’s art style to my own. Now this is not often helpful when your own game is in a prototype stage, which TI is, and I recognised the envious nature of my reaction, but I opened my mind to what else was there. There was a strong positive aspect to the fact that TI was/is so visually simple. In a word: clarity.
Playing Rad from my couch on a modestly sized TV screen meant a lot of squinting and leaning forward to try and make out what’s going on. This has certainly happened with other games, the worst instance being Death Stranding where the insane barrage of tiny UI prompts and menus made the game unplayable unless I stood a meter away from the TV (no exaggeration, this was how I played the game), but in this case it was specifically a UI problem. For Rad, although UI was an issue, it wasn’t the only problem, there’s a general clarity problem.
At this point I should say that I’m not picking on Rad specifically, for me it was just the catalyst for this conversation.
So the characters in Rad have this outline around them, and it would be interesting to know if this was an attempt to make them more clearly distinguished from the scenery, which is not an uncommon thing to do. Regardless, I bring this up because that points to the real issue for me, and lets me zoom out to contemporary games at large. Visually, Rad is too busy. That’s what it all boils down to for me. And this is ironic as the game references the 80s so much, an era that has remained one of the most iconic decades because of its bold, distinct-yet-over-the-top simplicity. It feels like Rad has the over-the-top-ness but not the simplicity.

So what do you mean by “zooming out to contemporary games at large” in regard to visual clarity?
Yeah that’s really the thrust of what I’m saying. So at uni I studied composition as a minor subject, and one of my teachers did a talk on “how simple can a piece of music be”. He framed it as himself, a successfully professional composer, being asked this question by his brother and being kind of taken aback by it. I’m sure his story probably went in many different directions, but for this context my point is “how simple can a game be?” Or how simple can its visuals be, etc, etc.
Now in the game industry we’re very lucky in a way because even simple and/or more lo-fi games can be huge hits in ways that simple/cheap movies and music cannot. We’ve seen this over and over again with games like Minecraft, Undertale, FTL, Among Us and so on, and it doesn’t seem like this trend will ever end, which is great. But as a whole I don’t feel like we take enough from that. At the other end of the spectrum we have games getting bigger and bigger, and I’m sure a lot of these big studios making these huge games like to think they have it down which they do, in some ways. But in a really broad sense games are still young, only a handful of decades old. Compare that with the long rich history of classical and folk musics around the world for example, we’re still just learning the rudiments in a lot of ways (but of course there are always those rare quantum leaps ahead like the original Super Mario, Street Fighter II, Maniac Mansion, etc)
So what I mean by “taking from that trend of simpler games” is that, to me, if a game can afford to have a certain density of visual detail then often they do it without considering whether this will add anything to the game itself, often actually making the game worse. Coming back to Rad, imagine it with more Nintendo-style graphics, I could see it being much more readable on my humble TV screen, with simpler backgrounds and more careful attention put into visually distinguishing what’s important to gameplay.
Nintendo has a long history of doing better in this regard – in a way they’ve made a science of the principle that all content should serve gameplay, and so they don’t strive for realism and they tend to get redundant information (visual or otherwise) out of the way. In this way I was a bit disappointed with Breath of the Wild. The implicit message throughout Nintendo’s history has been “you don’t need to do all this x, y, z stuff to make a great game”, they just let a game be a game. But BotW, while it has all these great gameplay ingredients, to me really fell down this rabbit hole of bloat. I could summarise it like this: Nintendo’s visual style reflects the way it treats players, it’s clear, concise and fun and get’s quickly to the point. Whereas BotW feels like it has something to prove, and it feels like it doesn’t respect my time as a player. This is a huge problem in the game industry at large.
Sure this is subjective, but for you as a player it’s a simple question “does this (whatever) game respect my time?”. As a game developer I like to play a lot of different games in a large variety of genres, so I’m often having new or unfamiliar experiences and don’t necessarily know what kind of time-commitment I’m in for, in any given play-session. So as I get drawn into, or even lost in a game, I’ll often come back to this question “is this game respecting my time?”. For example in Spelunky the roguelike principle of “don’t be afraid to die often, that’s how you learn” is honed to perfection. You die quickly, you die often, you restart instantly, your real-world skills improve (rather than just improving stats to make the game easier, e.g. Rogue Legacy) and thus your time is respected and rewarded. The other side of the spectrum is grinding in games. I’ve played enough games in my life to be able to see a mile away if a game is going to be about grinding and if so, I don’t play it. To me, nothing could be more disrespectful of a player’s time than making them grind. Yet people still play grinding games, a lot. Skinner-boxing is the obvious answer to why this is. Another explanation could be a kind of Stockholm syndrome. Again, I’m just speaking from having personally experienced both of those things, and having grappled with game addiction. But that’s a whole other topic of conversation.

So we got a bit off-topic, but it sounds like you might be saying a lack of visual clarity can lead to not respecting the player’s time?
No, but the two things can be symptoms of the same problem: does the game designer or design team have a clear vision AND a clear journey they wish to take players on? Many games have neither, or have one but not the other.
Again Spelunky is a great example of this where the random proc-gen worlds have compelling gameplay and a nice progression from one biome to the next, each with unique challenges. That stuff is good, but that’s just clear gameplay vision. The reason Spelunky goes above and beyond is that it also has the “journey” aspect where unique artefacts have to be found and used in unique ways in specific places. Part of a clearly defined journey means a clear ending (or maybe better to say a clear trajectory, even if there are multiple/mysterious/ambiguous endings). Without that, a game can just freely ramble and waste the player’s time. Again it takes two to tango, but that means the responsibility is as equally on the developer as on the player.
And so, coming full circle on this conversation, having a clear vision should mean that you as a developer should be able to see anything that is confusing, cluttering or obfuscating that vision, and clear it out of the way so you can present a powerful journey to your players.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to say hi in the comments and sign up to Lamplight Forest for updates on our games

]]><![CDATA[Welcome to the Lamplight Forest Journal]]>Sun, 03 Jan 2021 04:30:16 GMThttp://lamplightforest.com/lamplight-forest-journal/welcome-to-the-lamplight-forest-journal

Welcome to the first entry in Lamplight Forest Journal! I’ll be freely exploring the world of video games in relation to my own journey as a game developer and game fan.

I’ve decided to frame this whole journal as an interview with myself: I ask questions, then I answer them. A little odd I know, but I had been reading some interviews with game designers in the book Dungeon Hacks: Expanded Edition, so I got into this mode of thinking and found that really it resonated with me because that’s how I frame a lot of problem solving anyway.
But most importantly, after experimenting with this style in order to hammer out some design problems I was having (eg “So tell me about what you’re trying to achieve here. Why isn’t x working for you?” which was extremely effective in getting to the root of the problem), I found it just keeps me on track if I have a question to answer. Otherwise I tend to go on tangents.

Before we get started, how about you introduce yourself
Sure! My name is Alexander Thumm I’m the founder and CEO of the game studio Lamplight Forest, based in Adelaide, Australia. I come from a musical background (well art/music/writing really), with a degree in music technology and a PhD in expressive techniques for innovative musical gameplay. These days my skills and interests in gaming are very far ranging including game design, puzzle design, programming, art direction, and story/narrative design. I’ve designed and programmed a huge variety of (currently unpublished, more on that later) games including musical and narrative puzzle adventures, sokobans, environmental puzzle games, falling-block/match3s, 2d and 3D platformers, interactive fiction, games-within-games and much more, though my games almost always hybridise genres, so they’re never just one of those things!

So what’s this journal about? What are you aiming to achieve?
Well it’s just a journey, so I’m not aiming to achieve anything specific, but in a broader sense I looked back at 2020 and found that some of the strongest aspects of that year were about connecting with community: through online game conferences, game-business mentors, friends helping me to playtest, etc. So, inspired by a lot of game-related non-fiction I’ve been reading over the Christmas break (in particular the Boss Fight Books: Spelunky, Chrono Trigger, Majora’s Mask and Earthbound) I’ve developed a new appreciation of gaming non-fiction and felt that was the ideal way for me to be more involved with the community.
It started with playing Spelunky 2. I knew Spelunky by reputation but had never played the first one, so on intuition (I generally choose what to play based on intuition, I almost never read reviews) I started playing. I delved into the background of it a little more and knew it was more full of secrets then I’d ever experience first hand, so that led me to Derek Yu’s Spelunky book, which led me down the roguelike rabbit hole (both playing and reading about, though after a month or so Brogue has been the only one I’ve stuck with, I guess because it’s so polished and easy to play). But like Derek, the sheer breadth of what is possible in Nethack is just astounding to me, but probably more interesting to me as a designer than a player, and so without becoming a Nethack expert, the best way to discover all this is to read about it (I have the a similar feeling reading about Earthbound and Chrono Trigger, so much about them sound so amazing, but there's no way I'm ever grinding through the hours upon hours of combat)
I love too how literally roguelikes borrow from each other, even in a commercial one like Spelunky where Derek lifts stuff straight out of “traditional” roguelikes in a way that seems to both honour and transcend its source.
So anyway the other branch of this inspiration was that the passage in Derek’s book where he describes his proc gen process for Spelunky opened up a world of potential for me, when I saw how simple it was. I had been experimenting with things like randomization, wave function collapse, cellular automata and L-systems, but to read this simple passage that basically said “a 4x4 grid randomly populated with handmade rooms” (of course there’s more to it than that, but that’s the foundation) really opened my mind to how simple it could be. And really all the other complexity in Spelunky works, and is so gameplay-legible, because this foundation is kept so simple.
Anyway that was a bit of a tangent so short answer is, I’m connecting with the gaming community by sharing both what I love and what I grapple with as a player and game developer.

Great! I think that’s enough as an introduction, so we’ll follow up in the next post with where you’re currently at, which is, in a nutshell…?
Roguelikes, Rad (by Double Fine) and Readability

Thanks for reading. Feel free to say hi in the comments and sign up to Lamplight Forest for updates on our games

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