Gameplay

As high-falutin as I tend to get with my theories and ideas, at the end of the day a game is composed of mechanics, rules, and reward cycles. So here's where I get to business and enumerate all the bits and pieces that make the game a game and not just some overly pretensious piece of vaporware.

So without further ado, I hope you don't mind as I take you through a step-by-step tour through the basic gameplay...

Title Menu

The first choice the player has is language: English or Norwegian. Norwegian is my first language; back in Norway, most games - even those developed by Norwegian Companies - generally come out only in English, because Norway is such a tiny market it won't justify the cost of localizing the game's content. Since this is an indie game, and since the story owes so much to Norwegian fairy tales and culture, I'm putting in the extra effort to localize it to Norwegian from the get-go.

Available in English & Norwegian. Kan spilles i både Engelsk og Norsk.

Movement & Interface

The game was designed to be primarily played with the mouse. I'll let these screenshots from the tutorial speak for themselves:

I've had problems with developing Flash games as if they were designed natively for consoles; In other words, I've spent way too much time imagining it played with a gamepad instead of with a mouse and keyboard. This has resulted in all kinds of problems, notably the infamous "Dragon Pants 1", which is conspicuously missing from my projects list: it was a 4-player multiplayer game I made at the beginning of my career that was unplayable because a PC keyboard cannot take more than few keys of simultaneous input at once.

For this reason, I designed Little Monster from the ground up as a PC game, and for Flash, this means a heavy emphasis on the mouse controller. I have mentioned before that Knytt and Within a Deep Forest are large inspirations for me. However, whenever I play Knytt or WaDF, I get a pretty bad case of Carpal Tunnel unless I play it with a Gamepad. With a gamepad, it's just fine. But most people on the PC don't have gamepads. What I think, then, is if you're making a flash game, admit that you're making a flash game, embrace your limitations, and make the best game you can without reaching for a system you aren't designing it for.

So, that's why Little Monster is primarily controlled with the Mouse. I have observed with my initial testers that they keep reaching for the keyboard when they start playing, though most eventually find the mouse to be a better system. I'll probably acquiesce in this regard and provide an alternate keyboard-only control scheme which would allow for WaDF-style control, but I think my mouse-keyboard combination is pretty intuitive and simple. I'll keep listening to feedback before I make a final decision.

A word on "Gaminess"

I had an interesting revelation happen to me while I was showing off early prototypes of Little Monster. People loved the story aspects of it immensely better than the platforming parts. So I thought to myself... "can I just make the platforming, 'gaminess' of the game take a complete back-seat to the story progression?" The more I thought about it, the better the idea seemed. Make it a virtual play with characters doing stuff, and then shrink the amount of stuff you have to do in-between those story sequences to virtually nothing.

So why then have any "game" at all? Well, I think there's a compelling reason, but NOT "it's a game, it has to be there." It is hard to make a morality tale without any kind of matrix for the decisions to matter in. For instance, you'll notice from the above screenshots that the player has money. Money has to be spendable on useful things that are of an inherent and recognized value to the player for money to mean anything at all. How can you have a situation where the player has the opportunity to be generous or greedy if the money in the game is as fake as in Monopoly? A large part of acting kindly involves sharing and giving of our worldly resources; so if I can't convince the player that the in-game resources have any real value, then the moral play at work is a complete joke.

So, making a game that is basically just an interactive play isn't enough. Here are my rationales behind some decisions I've made in the game:

Difficulty Selection

I hate the need for difficulty selectors in games. I understand they are necessary, because it really sucks to have everyone play on the same difficulty level - it will be too hard for some (like me, I usually suck at games), and too easy for the hard-core. However, whenever I pick "easy" as the only mode I'm able to beat a game on, I feel like a complete n00b and a loser - and this bothers me. Some games are like sports; the point of them is to be good at them, whereas others are mostly there to entertain, and the challenge is there for the player's sake, rather than an inscalable wall just to be difficult. Some games get around this by providing auto-adjusting difficulty, but this too is annoying because the computer is not always good at guessing what the appropriate "adjustment" should be based on the player's performance, and leads to strategies like "make sure you purposefully suck in the first three levels or the game gets impossible by the last boss."

An arcade-era game called Dragon Spirit had the inklings of a pretty good system: in the beginning you entered a short level and fought against a fairly easy boss. If you beat him, clearly you were a seasoned gaming veteran, and you went immediately on into hard mode. If you didn't beat him, you were probably a newbie, and the game fed you into easy mode. I drew inspiration from this and created a similar system in one of my own games, Dragon Pants 2.

However, people had some complaints: sometimes a newbie would get lucky and beat the boss, and then be plunged into a very difficult game and be immediately frustrated, and sometimes an expert would be off his game for a moment and lose at the boss, and rather than deigning to continue on "n00b mode", would immediately reset the game until they beat the boss on the first try.

Dragon Pants 2: If you beat the first boss, you will continue in hard mode. Lose, and you will continue in easy mode.

Another game, Kingdom Hearts - an RPG for the PS2 - had an interesting difficulty selection mechanic. Early on, you were asked by a mysterious force "When does your adventure begin?" Your choices were "Dawn," "Mid-day" and "Night," corresponding respectively to easy, medium, and hard. This was pretty clever, however I know several people complained that they had no idea what the question meant or what the difference between the responses was; it tried to be subtle, but it succeeded mostly at just being cryptic.

So for Little Monster, I realized a few things:

Players selecting the wrong difficulty will not enjoy the game
Players who need to play on "easy mode" are sometimes embarassed to pick "easy mode."
Players should get a choice over their difficulty before the computer tries to pick for them.
There is a difference between subtlety and inscrutability.

Informed by these observations, I provided the following question prompt to the player at the beginning of the game:

"Fairy tale" will result in a very easy game, with almost no real challenge on the part of the action. The "gaminess" is watered down, because a lot of people actually prefer this difficulty in a story-based game. If you choose a "scary story" with "lots of action", then you are playing a more standard game experience, with difficulty on the level of Cave Story or Knytt Stories. If you ask the storyteller to pick for you, you will game difficulty will be set to "ambiguous." In this case, you are dumped into "hard" mode conditionally - if you die more than once in the first level, the game will automatically re-adjust to easy mode for the rest of the game. If you get through the first level without a scratch, clearly you belong in hard mode.

Undoubtedly, most people who pick "ambiguous" game difficulty will ultimately wind up in easy mode, which is perfectly fine. That way more people actually finish this game and see the story through to the end.

Character "Creation"

The scope of my game doesn't allow for a lot of variety in the main character's abilities - so no extra classes, multiple power sets, etc. I don't see that as too much of a downside, though. I remember getting the original Baldur's Gate for PC for my birthday once from a friend. I started it up, and before I could sit down and play my friend said, "Hang on, you have to roll your character statistics better than that." He then sat down for 30 minutes rolling and re-rolling my stats, then tweaking them endlessly until he finally announced, "Here! Now you're ready to play." I was so put-off by this huge barrier to entry - making decisions at the beginning that are bewildering - that I just quit playing the game. I gave it to my brother who picked it up and loved it. Of course, he was intimately familiar with Dungeons and Dragons - Baldur's Gate was my first real point of contact with it.

Ummm... call me a n00b, but going into this much detail so early on is really confusing for me.

Don't get me wrong - I like having choices at the beginning of a game, I think it's cool - it lets me branch out in multiple directions, and it immediately hints at replay value the next time I go through it. I just don't like feeling the pressure that if I don't get it just right, I'm going to be punished for making the "wrong" choice before I even know how to measure the value of the choices! With that in mind, I decided to model my initial introductory story off of an experience I had in my childhood:

As a child, I remember interrupting my parents while they were in the middle of telling me a story, and telling them what kind of stuff to put in there, just for me. "Once upon a time, there was a-" "BOY!" "okay, there was a little boy, and his name was-" "LARS!" "okay, a little boy named Lars. He lived in a castle and had a pet-" "DRAGON!" "right, a pet dragon..." and so on. Running with this idea, I continued through the standard video game trope of picking your character's name and sex. As the Little Monster looks pretty androgynous, this doesn't require much extra content creation on my part, but helps the player identify with the little guy.

Long, boring narratives

I serendipitiously stumbled over something in this regard. Story-based games have always had the stumbling block of how to reveal the back-story. I myself have fallen into the trap of creating a needlessly long introductory story that nobody cares about and immediately skips past. I found the solution is to give the player the ability to respond in many small ways, even and especially if those responses don't really change anything "in game terms."

Tales of Symphonia: the first hour of this game is spent learning the back-story. First, you sit through a really long, boring introductory spiel. Then, the first scene of actual gameplay is with the main characters sitting in a classroom, during a history lecture about the game's backstory! I. Am. Not. Kidding.

I asked some friends, "If we are gamers, and we like games, and we like books, why don't we like reading long intros in games?" I got a couple of responses. One of my friends is truly hardcore and always waits at the title screen for three minutes in case there's an intro and reads every word, no matter how boring. He admitted in the end that this had more to do with being Obsessive-Compulsive than with actual enjoyment. Another one of my friends was the complete opposite, always skipping the reading part.

His answer was more useful to me, "It's a disjoint of medium. When I'm watching a movie, nobody comes in half-way, shuts off the projector, turns on the house lights, hands you a novel and says, here, the next scene of this movie takes the form of a book. Read chapters 6 through 7 and let the projectionist know when you're done so he can show you the climactic ending sequence."

That told me quite a lot. This explains why even gorgeous, pre-rendered cut scenes are often derided as "boring" or "annoying." We ooh and awe over them on YouTube and in anticipation of how cool the game must be, and we all like watching Pixar films and other gorgeous CG masterpieces. It's just - heck, I'm playing a game here - and the essence of a game is interactivity. So you can show me some text or even a pretty movie, but please, please, please, give me something to DO instead of just being forced to read all of it before I get a chance to actually play a game.

When I was designing Little Monster's introductory sequence, I remembered this conversation. The first thing the player gets when he starts up the game is not a long backstory, but rather a simple question: "My Child, what kind of story shall I tell for you tonight?" The first thing the player gets, is an interactive choice. I realized then that if you want a player to follow along with your text:

First of all, use text sequences sparingly.
Include pretty pictures, and videos if you can. Anything is better than naked text alone.
Get someone to edit for you and learn the maxim, "omit unecessary words."
Give the player the ability to respond, even and especially if it doesn't really alter anything

This is an area where I feel we as game designers often fall short. We are so narrow-minded in thinking in terms of reward cycles and mechanics that it never occurs to us that "yes it is okay to have a feature in a game that is pointless in terms of mechanics." Now, the point is to create a feature that is pointful (to coin a word) in terms of pscyhology. A world that never asks for the player's opinion is a world that isn't believable. Maybe we only need to respond in game terms to about 1 out of every 10 of the player's opinions, honestly. But the point is that the game gives the opportunity for feedback, whether it uses it or not. It's just as important to provide low-level input ("Hero Guy, what do you think of this new hairstyle of mine?") as well as high level ("Will you Marry Princess Blonde, Hero Guy?").

We have this ability in games - to let the audience participate and respond. That is the essence of a video game, interaction - so why do we abruptly stop the minute it's time for some backstory or text? The player's game-playing flow is smashed against a brick wall, and he's like, "I was playing a game! Where did you take it? Bring it back!" There's no reason we can't have back-story and longer dialog sequences that are interactive and interesting while maintaining authorial control.

Storytellers, real oral-tradition Storytellers, which can be found in any culture (mine came from Louisiana and Norway, respectively), know this art down cold. Grandparents, crazy uncles, this art lives on throughout humanity. They have given us humanity's oldest form of entertainment. We have much to learn from them.

Death and Save Points

There's been some debate about whether we even need to let the player be able to die anymore. Personally, I think the player should be able to fail at the game, but that the penalty for failure should generally be very low, and should never involve having to repeat progress you have already definitively conquered. As far as whether failure in the game really corresponds to "dying", that can often be "ignored in the face" as I call it. It's one of those contrivances that is fun to play with and there's certainly room for innovation in that regard, but sometimes it's comfortable to stick with a familiar mechanic. You hit the spikes and died, and now for some inexplicable reason that does not affect the story at all, here you are, alive and well, ready to try again.

I fully believe that the goal of the level designer should be to make something fun and challenging for the player without frustrating him. It is obnoxious to me when a game designer tries to dictate to me when and how I should be allowed to save my game. First of all - it is frustrating to have to repeat progress I already know I can do. If my challenge is not with hopping across ten thousand mindless gaps, it is killing the cybernetic manticore at the end of the level, then I should only be forced to repeat the battle with the cybernatic manticore, not the mindless hopping I've become completely accustomed to and can do in my sleep, but takes 10 minutes to slog through. Secondly, I sometimes have a life that intrudes on my games, and life comes first. Sometimes dinner just is happening now, and at the very least, I should be able to pause anywhere (ESPECIALLY in a cut scene of importance to the story).

Even better, I should be able to shut down my game and start back exactly from where I last left off. And for me personally, it would be convenient to be able to do that not just with my last known position in the game, but with as many save slots as I want. A lot of designers are wary of this - they point to the "cheapsave" systems that games played on console emulators have hacked in, that the original designers didn't intend. "The mere existence of a 'cheapsave' system removes all challenge to the game and ruins the player's experience." That's absolutely true. But who's fault is that? Is it the emulator's fault for luring me with the cheapsave feature, or is it Megaman 2's fault for being so gosh-darned frustratingly hard that there's no way I can beat it without resorting to a cheapsave?

Cheapsaves, the ability to save anywhere at any moment, are sometimes too much. I like the system in Nifflas-style games such as Within A Deep Forest, Knytt, and Knytt stories better, due in no small part to the fact that it is almost an exactly perfect implementation of my "Metric Challenge" system described in a previous article I wrote.

To summarize, my point is this: divide your bits of challenge into discrete units called "Metric Challenges." The player should get a subconscious feel for how big a "metric challenge" is, and he will come to regard that much gameplay as the basic unit he should be rewarded with a checkpoint for. This amount varies between genres; in an action game, 5 minutes of repeated gameplay is a huge deal, in an RPG, not so much. But 30 minutes of repeated gameplay is unacceptable in any genre. In any case, I believe a Metric Challenge, except in special circumstances, should always be fairly small and not vary in size throughout the game.

Within a Deep Forest is my favorite Nifflas game. It can be described as such: an exploration based game where the main challenge is incredibly frustratingly difficult jumping puzzles. I've already mentioned my problems with Carpal Tunnel and it should go without saying that I hate frustratingly hard jumping puzzles. So why do I love Within a Deep Forest?

Because, I know, that even though I have to fight tooth and nail to get across a single screen in this game, when I get to the end of that screen, there will be a shiny beacon of light that will save my progress.

And you know what? The game was not watered down in the least by it. It was exactly perfect and made a usually stupid-hard game genre completely accessible to a lapsed, sucky gamer like me. I was willing to try to get across the challenges because I knew I wouldn't have to repeat all 100 of them in a row just to get credit for doing it.

Little Monster will feature a similar save-system to this. It is a perfect ingredient for a great game experience.

Interacting with other Characters

Now for some less theory-based decisions, and just some straight-up mechanics. Occasionally, there will be other monsters you can talk to. They will appear on the map like any other character.

If they have something to say, a text bubble will appear as you move Nous within a short range of them.

Click on the text bubble to initiate a conversation. Since the Little Monster follows Nous, this method will have the side-effect of the Little Monster moving right up to the character in question (unless you are using the "bounce in place" key). I figured this side-effect was appropriate and even desirable.

Other Game Mechanics

I'll be updating this website as I make more progress on the game, and will announce it on Fadupinator's main news page. Stay tuned!

Other Fadupinator Projects