Getting unstuck
Prototyping our way out of game design despair
Hello! We’re back. I took a month off from newsletter writing, which pained me a bit, to be honest. We were in the weeds trying to work out the core mechanic of the game a bit more (collecting the little sound sprites), and honestly… things just weren’t coming together all that great.
Part of making games, I’m realizing, is coming up with really fun ideas in your mind, testing them, and then discovering that what sounds fun when the coffee first hits doesn’t always equate to fun in practice.
This can be stressful at times because you’re always going into the unknown when prototyping new ideas. It can use up a lot of time and energy, and when an idea doesn’t pan out, it can feel really disheartening.
But – as a game designer, I’m getting better at coming up with cheaper versions of the thing we think is cool. Then we can watch if fail more quickly, iterate and hopefully find what we’re looking for faster.
All of that preamble to say, we’ve landed on a core mechanic that we’re pretty pumped about. Is it the final version? Probably not. But directionally, we think it’s exciting.
Gathering sound sprites – v2
A few months ago, I realized the way we collected sound sprites in the game was… kind of flat.
There was no real danger or challenge in it. You just sort of chased them around, played music at them and they disappeared into your hat to be crafted with later. It was boring and confusing and felt “game-y”. There were no enemies to pressure you. It was just kind of blah.
I was digging around for old games featuring instrument playing as the core mechanic and I happened on this PS2 treasure that I’ve never heard of and am not sure if anyone actually ever played.
In Herdy Gerdy (which I assume is the sound the game’s characters make as they walk), your goal is to use your musical instrument to herd small creatures into a pen and keep them away from predators. Which… seemed thematically pretty similar to what we’re doing here!
In our case, the creatures you’re protecting are the sound sprites... but we needed a “predator”. Silence isn’t inherently evil in our game, but it is definitely an ominous anti-sound presence. So it makes sense that if you’re trying to herd little sound sprites around, the Silence would in some way aim to block you from doing that.
We chatted as a team about it and decided to try out a pied-piper style herding mechanic.
And it was surprisingly fun. I made this simple prototype in Unity. I wrote a few scripts to make the sound sprites pause and hop vs. just constantly moving like zombies towards the player… and it was immediately really satisfying, even in this visually simple state.
We finessed it a bit more and ended up here:
Now, instead of the sound sprites shrinking down into some fictitious inventory, they follow close at your heels as you navigate the Wilds. Which sounds like a small change, but it actually has a significant impact… For two reasons:
1. The sound sprites are now susceptible to being swallowed up by Silence or being waylaid in some other way.
2. The sound sprites can actually assist Opie in getting through obstacles and explore further into the Wilds.
So we get added danger and added strategic choices. Do you grab a few sound sprites and leave the Wilds quickly to deposit them? Or do you use them to explore deeper and discover new abilities or maybe new passages into other parts of the Above World? Or do you just grab a bunch of them and feed them to hungry-looking Silence? It’s up to you, you sicko.
Patrick and I have a short art sprint coming up in two weeks. We’ll be looking to add lots of detail to the Wilds + get into visual design for Silence. After that, we’ll be finessing the demo and hopefully have it ready to share by end of April / May. Stay tuned!
Monthly Inspiration
This month’s game: Balatro
I have a problem with games that are inherently addictive. What I mean is – I have a problem with personal self-control when it comes to games that make you want “just one more round” looks over at snapped-in-half Overwatch game disc, RIP Zenyatta. I’ve avoided Balatro for a while for that reason, but I finally decided to give it a go.
What a crazy ass game.
It’s like someone heard about poker one night at a bar, then woke up the next day and kind of remembered how to play and decided to make an entire game based on it. Each playthrough has you building increasingly powerful poker decks (like making an entire deck of clubs cards, so you’re guaranteed a flush), and using bizarre jokers that let you do you things like score multiple times in a round, or build straights by skipping numbers here and there. It’s a brilliantly designed game, and I highly recommend it, and I have put it down and have stopped playing it because I do not trust myself.