Antichamber: Three Years of Hardcore Iteration

hello everyone I'm probably just gonna start a minute early I've been told to remind you to turn off your cell phones and I'm gonna say just to begin with for anyone that was at my talk yesterday this is going to be much less emotion and much more hardcore analysis my name is Alexander Bruce I'm the creator of antechamber a mind-bending psychological exploration game that was released on Steam at the beginning of last year can I just how many people know what this game is everyone perfect so how many people would need me to play the trailer again or they've all played it no one perfect that's going to save me time so you all know what this game is this was a big success as an independent game despite being such an unconventional game and so part of the question is is how that happened from a design perspective because this was a very unusual game so to begin with this was my first commercial title and I'm a self-taught designer I did do a Bachelor degree in computer science and multimedia so I understood programming and some multimedia but or everything I learned about design I learned by trying to make this game and then gonna break this talk into two parts first I'm going to talk about designing a remarkable game and whatever the hell that means then I'm going to talk about designing a commercially viable game so to begin with why design remarkable games if this was the industry when I was starting out I'd been playing games for 20 years and I was looking at some of the stuff that was coming out and I was thinking some of this stuff just isn't interesting me anymore I'm a very critical person and I will look at games and sighs I'm not very fairly quickly so for example when a lot of the press was going a bit crazy over Gears of War and talking about cover-based mechanics I was looking at it at a very shallow surface level saying well I already played operation when back on the Nintendo 64 like I know what cover shooter mechanics are like and that's not interesting to me and certainly the big focus on like more Hollywood Hollywood esque games stories cutscenes none of that was doing it for me so I thought if I'm going to be making games and this is what everyone else is doing I want to be well out off doing my own thing trying to see what else we can do with games and some of that looked like this in 2000 I know I covered this yesterday but in 2006 I made this world full of tiles that I could sweep algorithms across because back then people were exploring very physical destruction in games and I wanted to see what non physical destruction would look like rather than having everything crumble realistically I just wanted to get the world to do whatever the hell I wanted other interesting ways of destroying geometry and in 2007 I made this recursive space mode because I wanted to see what asteroids would look like in 3d I'd never seen it done in games before which meant that I then had to solve we're in doing perspective off to infinity or getting the best best estimate of that and what I made a number of other prototypes as well that I'm not going to talk about but what these kinds of systems did as they proved that I was able to make interesting systems which got me in the industry but while it was in industry and what looking at other independent games I was like these guys are making full games they're not just making interesting systems and if I want to prove myself as a designer then I also need to prove that I can make interesting games as well so in 2009 using make something unreal as there has a deadline and AD as a goal I thought I'm gonna make a complete remarkable game and I'm going to use my geometry in space prototypes because they were the most interesting thing that I had prototypes so far and I just couldn't stop thinking about them over the years and because I was entering make something unreal I thought I'm gonna have to stand out visually here and if this was like this was the ball which was one of the other Grand Finals winners in the end and it was winning a lot of prizes throughout makes something unreal and I said I can't compete on that level but the advantage I have is that a lot of these entries look fairly similar they all ultimately look like Unreal Engine 3 games so I'm gonna go down the other end of the spectrum submit something that looks nothing like an unreal engine 3 game and because I knew that I wasn't a network programmer my old geometry prototype couldn't run across a network and I didn't know how to solve that at the time I was turning it into a single-player puzzle game which meant I didn't have to deal with that problem and as I was doing that I thought death in games is something that is really starting to irritate me because there's a lot of people who were talking about immersion in games and they were talking about how immersive something like portal was except you know how many of the this story and the characters in the world building was except then I can just get shot and I can die or I can fall into lava and die and then I push a button and I just teleport back to a checkpoint and I just try the puzzle again and this was a Gaming accepted thing and I was like if I want true immersion then they should have some other way to solve that or at least explain it rather than just teleport me back to where I was and at the same time I thought I'm also going to remove trying to remove physics from this game as well and the reason I was doing that is because I was getting very irritated by a lot of puzzles in video games because to me a puzzle is something that for example I can pick up off the shelf and not understand what it is not understand how it works mess around with it for a while and the moment that I understand how it works I've solved the puzzle execution is not the issue anymore whereas in a lot of video games I could run into a room I could instantly look at the elements of the puzzle put them together in my head and then the actual problem that I was solving was how to actually execute that task or how to solve the combinatorial explosion of all of these different elements and I thought I'm going to remove death I'm gonna remove physics because also with physics you know jumping puzzles or a physics block rolling in the wrong way that's all just execution when I've already worked out how to solve the puzzle so a moving death presented a problem immediately because one of the puzzles that I thought was really interesting that I wanted to design with my geometry in the game with this gap that was too odd to jump over and if players tried to jump they'd fall and they'd fail they had to walk in order to get across and this was a bit of a stab at tutorials in games where they'd be like you jump you've done exactly what the game is required and I was going through this again and again and I wanted to try and subvert that but without death in the game I couldn't have something like players jumping and then just falling on spikes and dying and then just teleporting back and trying the puzzle again and I also when I was trying to work out how to solve this I thought well maybe I could have it so that players jump and they fail and they end up at a at a gap down the bottom and then they have to just like run back up a staircase and then and then try the puzzle again but this is actually more problematic than death because now rather than an explicit fail state we've made an implicit fail state so players don't necessarily know that they failed in doing this and when they've worked that out running back up the staircase and trying again is just a waste of the players time and so in order to solve this I thought I still need the failure State for this puzzle but I can solve this in a grander sense by just redefining what failure means yes you've jumped in you failed this puzzle but I'm just going to have you land down the bottom and have somewhere else to go on the immersion point menus were also something that we're irritating me you've got a really immersive game and then you push a button and a 2d interface just pops up over your face with no descript with no reasoning and I thought I'm going to get rid of that as well but I still do need ways to change the resolution I still do need a map in my game because I've got this branching map structure so I took inspiration from the ready rooms in natural selection which were physical spaces that the players could run around in in the lobbies in order to choose their team and I thought I'm gonna make a physical space in the game and I'm going to wrap the options and the the progress and the menu around that and then gonna use the fourth wall as a way to taste the player with the end of the game so that I also gave them a bit of a goal and when I was testing this as a student in 2009 players would sit down and they would play the game and they if I wasn't saying anything they'd play for five minutes and then they would lose interest in it and they'd give up and story in games is something that you could typically use to get around this you'd try and motivate players in other ways because they were following this story but there was no possible story that I could think of that would explain this bizarre world that I was creating because I was just trying to solve problem after problem but there was a very specific reason that I was designing the world in the way I was as I was teaching the players specific things about how the structure of the world worked and I didn't have a good solution for this but when I noticed that when I sat down with players and I was talking the entire time explaining all of this explaining why I had constructed the world like this then players were able to play the game for an hour and they were finding it really interesting so not having a really good solution I thought right now I'm just gonna take the little insights that I wanted about the world and I'm just going to compress them down to textures and just paste them around the world so that even if I'm not there players can learn something about what I had intended and the moment I did this players then just wanted to run around and read all of the signs in the game and I'd given them some motivation and one player whether it was a positive comment or a negative comment he said these kind of sound like fortune cookies so I thought that's fantastic I'm I'm a student let's just run with that I can take risks I'm gonna turn this into a little philosophical art piece because I can so what all these decisions did was they gave me a very remarkable Unreal Tournament 3 mod there were a number of things in the game that were worth talking about whether you thought they were good at whether you thought they were bad they're at least worth talking about and they were very different to what the industry had done and I had some success in festivals with this I entered cents of one a night I got picked because the game was very expert like experimental I did well we make something unreal and I got an honorable mention in the independent Games Festival so after some of this I then had some money from make something unreal I knew that the Unreal development kit existed so I thought awesome I'm gonna now turn this thing that is apparently working into a commercial game and when I started talking with other independent developers about what I was making then the feedback changed and it was now along these lines I'm always lost there are too many dead ends in the game the map should tell me where to go restructure the entire thing basically people were saying nothing about this game is working it's just a mess and I was thinking about this for a while and I had kind of done this to myself I had definitely designed something that was well outside what the industry expected and in the process I'd made something that was completely inaccessible and kind of unapproachable to people who had the expectations of commercial games and it wasn't it it was no longer cool to people that I had taken something like Unreal Tournament 3 this really violent shooter and turned it into a philosophical art piece now as a standalone game people were just comparing it against every other standalone game that existed and I had people asking me this question do you want to create something new or do you want to create something that you can sell and my answer was I want to have both because there are games like World of Goo and braid and portal though they're clearly these new games that are able to sell and my thesis was that yes I'm currently outside of the market but what if I could just get myself to the fringes of the market I don't have to be the most commercial thing I don't have to be banging the center of what the market was support I just have to touch the fringes and then assuming that if I did that the market would then you know expand and support these weird kind of games and so in 2010 I set out to make a commercial game and the reason that I made this decision rather than just starting again on something else is because even if I had decided to start in the middle of over the market and try and push my way out there was no guarantee that I wasn't going to end up in the same position with with something that ultimately just wasn't working and it seemed much cheaper and much less risk to just spend a couple of months trying to make the game a little bit more accessible so that then I could turn it into a mud and so that then I could sell it so I was looking at all of this early feedback trying to work out if I could address any of it directly I couldn't remove the fact that there were too many dead ends because by removing death and by implementing this branching map structure there had to be dead ends in the again that's just what branching map structures give me and I couldn't restructure the entire game because the branching map structure was a way to redefine failure and in order to in order to restructure it so that that was no longer a problem I would have to go back to having a linear game which is what the next point is about as well but the other problem with people encountering puzzles that they couldn't solve was that that was actually part of the trick some of the times players could encounter a lot of puzzles that they could solve they just didn't understand how to solve them yet with the map flashing red so with the map telling a player where they should go or with puzzles flashing red if the player can't do them leaves are going to be problematic because these were really just ways to cover up the fact that I had kind of screwed up the design of the rest of the game and then players we're just going to be relying on these external feedback rather than actually looking at the puzzles and determining on the spot whether or not they could solve them which was absolutely not what I wanted which meant that by definition players were always going to be playing this game and they were always going to be lost that's just how it seemed I designed myself into a corner but I stepped back from all of this and I thought what are people actually saying through all of this feedback and I tried to reinterpret it like this general navigation in the game requires too much attention and there's not enough feedback for progress which means the players always for your last they always feel stuck they always feel like they can't solve things because the game isn't doing a good job of telling them when they've learned something and letting them know when they've made progress in the game and part of the reason that this happened was if I had taught players something over here and I needed them to apply it over here that meant that in the old version they just hit a dead end and they would need to know to push a scape to go back to the map to then teleport to somewhere else and as soon as they pushed escape and looked at the map they had way too many choices so they were probably going to make the wrong choice and they were gonna end up somewhere else and I thought I've already got I've already experimented with space in the past and I've already got a couple of puzzles that are about messing around with space so although I can't physically restructure the world in 3d what about if I can just put in non-physical connections between these puzzles that way players don't have to understand that they should have pushed escape and then go in somewhere else I will just do the work for them and I will just wrap them back around in space and put them exactly where I want them so I'll give you an example of how that played out right at the start of the game we've got this jump and if you if you fail the jump you get all the way down the bottom but part of the trick here was that there was actually another path in the middle of this long fall that players needed to discover and players were getting stuck here because they jumped down they'd run around all day on the bottom and they'd push escape they'd go back and they'd run around all up the top and they would just never discover this middle path the actual solution here was that players had to know that they had to jump down from above and then air control their way into the middle of this section which which players just never understood so I thought I'm going to wrap players back to the middle and that way they're standing across a gap and that way they can definitely see that this other area in the game exists and the expectation here was that after being wrapped around players would jump down and they'd fail they then get down to the bottom this would be a familiar area this would be they'd they'd work out that this was at the bottom of the long drop so they'd try and go back up the top and then they would jump down and then air control their way in what actually happened was more likely as players would rap back to the middle they'd see an area that they'd never seen before they'd jump down the bottom then they just run around the bottom maybe they'd go back up the top they'd run around at the top but they would never actually work out that this middle section existed it always just seemed like a new area every time I wrap them back around to it because they'd never seen it before except for this one player who at e3 did this unexpected behavior he jumped down and he was looking down when he did it any accidentally air controlled himself to where I rap players back to and then he turned around and he saw this gap and he tried to jump across and he fell down he learned that he could walk across the air up the top so then after he was wrapped back around he said I had this is a familiar area and then he just tried to run off any just fell and he got really frustrated that this that he just failed this puzzle and I I thought this was a bit of a stupid behavior like I'm not sure what he was expecting would happen and he said well you just taught me up here that if I couldn't jump over something then maybe I should try walking over it because there might be a surface here yet when I applied that here that didn't apply so now I just don't understand the logic of the world and I said you are 100% correct I have made a mistake here you have just given me the solution to this problem that everyone is having and so the next iteration on this puzzle was to add a ledge so that when players could jump down there to begin with they could turn around they could see the other side of the gap and they would try and jump across to it but later on when I wrap them back around then they would try and walk across and they would walk on the air instead which is exactly what this person had done what actually happened looked more like this players would jump down at the beginning of the game and then they would just run across and I was like I was like what the hell is going on like if players have no idea that they can walk on you I never taught that to them and yet everyone just knows that they can do it and I'm it took quite a lot of watching players to realize what was actually going on in early versions of this game this whole area was red and the line work was very sketchy which meant that it was actually quite hard to make out where the ledge was and so people just assumed that there was a complete floor beneath them and they would see something interesting off in the distance and they would just run across to it and so I thought all right I'm gonna make the ledge stick out more because I'm going to color the bottom and the tops of the staircases they're white and that's going to introduce more contrast between the ledge and the gap beneath it and so now you had some players who would walk up they look down they'd see a gap and they'd definitely try and jump across but you had other players that still just ran across and again I'm just wondering how they're doing it and I noticed that this was happening in most often with players who weren't good with camera control and would leave their camera pointing a little bit too high they just couldn't see the ground beneath him so I said I'm gonna make this much more apparent and I'm gonna remove one of the lights from underneath this puzzle so now you can see there's definite bend in the light you don't need to be close to the gap and look down to see it you can just see it from far away because the light would only Bend like this if there was a gap beneath them otherwise it would Bend across the floor and I still had this issue with players who had their camera held too high and these were the players who needed the most help these were the most casual players because they didn't understand FPS controls and I didn't want to turn off those people so I thought to solve this problem I'm gonna make it so that they have to look it down at something otherwise they won't be able to progress so I put in a half-height constructing wall as well and this was actually a good change in general because it meant that this puzzle was now very different to the puzzle up above now long now it was no the floor the players had to walk across now they had to walk across the floor and then work out how to get navigate past this wall as well and what most players would do was they'd run across they'd hit this wall and then they'd try and jump over it and they'd fall other players would then when they wrapped back around again would learn that they had to walk around this wall and then get off to the middle section and so this had finally solved this specific puzzle for all kinds of different player types and so what have we learned here the difference between these two puzzles although it's a very bizarre puzzle in both instances are very small all I've done is remove one light I have colored some surfaces white I have added a Ledge so that players jump down the first time and can turn around and have some familiarity with what the other side looks like before I expect them to get across there and I've added this constructing floor and wall and I've also learned that my assumptions about what players would do were pretty much always wrong every time I thought I'd solved it I needed to test it again and then some other unexpected behavior would come up and what this also did was it enabled dynamic difficulty people of all different kinds of play styles were able to progress through the game and so for example you've got explorers like me people who just love breaking games no matter what the game is they just want to understand the system and break it and what these people are going to do is they're going to start the game they're going to see a sign that says jump and they're going to explore their other options they're just going to try and walk across instead worst case is they fall the same as everyone else best case is the ground constructs underneath their feet and they can brake sequence and get across to the other side then you have a different kind of Explorer which is people who will follow an instruction until that no longer works so they'll follow this jump instruction and then that will fail so then they'll think AHA this is one of those games that's all about subverting my expectations and so now rather than jumping again I'm now just going to try and run across because jumping clearly didn't work up above me and some of these players would encounter this half-height wall and again think jumping is probably going to be failing so I'm just going to try and see what else I can do they would work out on the spot that they could walk around this wall and it's okay for these people to encounter the middle section of the game before they've done the bottom before they've done the top because these kinds of players are used to encountering things out of orders and just figuring out things on the spot the path of least resistance players would see a sign that says jump and they would jump they'd see a gap and they would jump these are people who would be more used to playing things like FPSs who were just used to running gun and just go go go until things just no longer work and this also worked for the most casual players because if players still had this problem keeping their camera too high the first time they encounter this half-height wall they still wouldn't see it beneath them but they'd know that they were no longer moving forwards so they'd try and push jump they'd fall they'd then wrap back around there later know that just jumping didn't work so now they would be forced to look around with their camera and you might be thinking this is a very bizarre problem like how on earth this is applied to any game other than antechamber and I'm going to justify this by saying that what I've done here is not actually any different to what you can hear in the commentary for valve games so for example in the screenshot from Portal the commentary at this section says we've noticed that players have a difficult time looking up and so here we've got these shafts that move up and down to sort of you know draw the players attention we've got lighting on the top half of the screen and we've got a half unfinished ladder so that players are going to want to know where that ladder leads they're going to want to look up and all I was doing with my subtle changes with making the players want to do specific behaviors this may still seem very special case so now I'm going to step into another iteration and this is the first section of gun puzzles so once the players get the guns these are much more logical things rather than the lateral thinking things that I've just described and this is also more akin to chambers in games antechamber is all about solving corridors but in other games you've got one big room that contains multiple stages of puzzles and then players solve the level and they progress so in this section although we've still got corridors what you can see here is all actually one puzzle and part of the puzzle is that the players need to get all four tiles in this puzzle suite of the final door so the individual elements look like this there's a laser a door and the door is blocked by a tile after that you've got a laser a glass window and a door you've got two doors to block slots only one of the doors is held open you've got a half-height wall with players to never get past you've got a series of three doors all activated by one block flood and the block slot when blocked will open the first and third doors and it will close the second door you then have a block slot a glass window and a door behind it you have a series of trip wires that will activate two doors and another trip wire that will close that doors you've got a spring pad with another tile underneath it and finally you have this door that requires all four tiles from the puzzle and just for the sake of proving a point here was the original solution to this thing and I'm gonna go through this very fast if you get overwhelmed don't worry I'm gonna slow down afterwards and talk about things in detail so players start the puzzle they take the tile which trusts the door they stand in front of the lasers they block the door they run through they don't have a tile to block the next laser so they turn around they take it from behind them it shuts the door they turn around they block the laser they ran through they get to the double doors they can't take the tile from behind them because it's behind the glass window so they have to continue moving forwards they stand between the doors they closed the first door they turn around they open the second door they get through to the wall they take the tile from in front of them they turn around to the previous puzzle they open the first door they run through they closed the second door they use that tile to then block the door that's even further back to continue moving back to then get the tile they can now run through the door which they've blocked by a tile they can take that back they can open the second door closed the first or closed the second or jump over the wall take the tile back go to the three doors they can open one door they can open the second door block that open the third door unblock the first one block the third one closed the second one block the first one take the tile round through they can take the thing obviously you're laughing obviously you can see that this is a pretty stupid first puzzle all right so some of you are probably thinking what a disaster like just scrap it and start it again alright but I did actually like this puzzle because this did actually require players to understand and apply a hell of a lot of knowledge all at once but one of the major problems here was that I've required players to be a psychic because players had no idea that there was this door at the end that required four tiles and so most players just wouldn't turn around they wouldn't take the tiles from behind them they would just continue trying to progress forwards which meant that most players in this game would get through to this door that required four tiles and they would have none and they would think well that sucks and some of them would just rage quit on the spot others would go back and they would try and work out the entire sequence now you could think that because this is an advanced puzzle maybe I could just take it and move it elsewhere in the game but even if I did that I'm still going to have the problem that I've required the player to be a psychic here and that's always going to be frustrating required plate we're requiring players to be a psychic is just always going to be frustrating in any puzzle game as far as I'm concerned the actual solution here was if we can acknowledge that getting through getting all four tiles through that final door requires players to have learned everything about the gun that's fantastic we can just leave that there as the path that the Explorers can use and if they happen to work that out they already know everything about the gun so we can just skip them straight to the next upgrade whereas the path of least resistance players are the ones we're just going to keep trying to get forwards and they're going to end up at this door without the four tiles and that we will pose the question of how do you get four tiles through to the store but they don't actually have to solve it on the spot some people won't be interested in that and they're just going to continue down this path of least resistance and that path is going to introduce them to things much more incrementally and then we can give them a harder puzzle so having made that very one simple change I'm going to run through it again and you'll see how much of a difference that made stand in front of the laser block the first or run through take the tile from behind you block the laser ran through stand between the doors close the first door open the second door ran through take the tile from behind you and shut the door use it to jump over the wall take the tile back block the first door open the second door block the second door close the first door open the first and third doors run through take the tile from behind you run through open the door behind the glass window run around to the tripwires run straight through doesn't matter that you've just closed them behind you because you've opened this last door and now the path of least resistance players can just continue on we have removed a hell of a lot of frustration just by adding one extra choice for the players and we haven't actually removed the original solution at all so now I'm going to go through Amy and I'm going to talk about the issues that I had with the first puzzle where sometimes my expectations or my assumptions didn't match up with the reality of what players did which was which meant that players weren't going to be learning the right information or they were still going to be unnecessarily frustrated which was not what I wanted it was just mistakes I had made in the design so some players would take the first tile and then just block the laser instead of the door they'd run through they'd turn around they'd unblock that laser and then they just lock the second laser now this may not look too bad because players have still solved the puzzle and they've still worked out how to move forwards but they've actually learned the wrong knowledge here and we've introduced redundancy as a result I really wanted players to learn that they have to block this first door because that's the whole reason that the second door exists after we teach players to block doors then they have this problem of how do I block a door that's behind a glass window and then they learn that they can also block lasers and so to solve this we introduced one more laser which means players can still try to take the tile and then block the lasers but then they'll get the feedback that the door is only half opened and in order to open it with just one tile they must stand between the lasers and then block the door and the second puzzle remains unchanged so those puzzles are now very different to each other and that it ensures that players are learning things in the correct order then we get to this double this section of double doors and we've just taught players how important it is to take tiles in the world these are your resources this is how you solve puzzles so players get to the second door and they take the tile which shuts the door in front of them and now they are stuck and they just have to start the whole puzzle again and this is a problem because we've just required players to be a psychic because there's a whole lot of players who would look at this scene and even know that this was a door that this thing on the roof was actually a door that was open so to solve this we had two glass windows and his forces players to stand in the middle of these two doors so they can't lock themselves out they closed the first door they open the second door and then they get through to the half-height wall at this half-height wall players would take the tile from behind them and use it to jump over the wall and sometimes because the wall was so high they wouldn't be able to jump over with just one block so they'd place another block make a bit of a staircase and then they would just jump over the wall and get to the next puzzle and they'd say well now I have no tiles on my gun which I need in order to open this door but if they turned around these tiles were now blocked by a wall that they couldn't even if they tried to jump over it they just couldn't see these tiles so once again players just have to push escape and then try and try to think again because it once again we've required players to be a psychic because why would they think to stand on this wall and take the tiles with them so the solution to this was to fold number one it was make the wall a little bit lower which meant that visibility to the next puzzle was better but it also meant that players could use just one tile in in most situations in order to just jump over the wall and if they jump straight over and they forgot to take the tile with them it doesn't matter because we've put in a half-height staircase or we put a staircase up to the half height wall as well because the actual puzzle here is working out how to get over the wall it's not working out that you need to take the tile with you it's not working out that you should have taken it because otherwise you can't go back which then lets them which guarantees that they can then get to this three door puzzle with at least one block so for this one again we've taught players that taking boxes is really important and some players would think that this was a dexterity puzzle they'd see multiple doors opening at once and so they think I'm I need to take the tile really fast and then just run through the doors and they had no idea that this third door existed because they couldn't see it behind the first door or the second door as they were opening so players once again just get stuck and this is just more unnecessary frustration that I didn't intend so the solution here was to let them know that there are three doors and I do this just by rotating the doors around and adding a glass window now as players place the block in the slot they can definitely the behavior as they place it and they take it and because of the angle of this players can't take that block and then try and run through because there's too much space between where they have to be in order to take the block and where they need to get to from running and they can't stand in the middle of the puzzle and try and take the block either because the glass windows in the way which forces players to know that they can't do this with one block so they have to turn around in order to take the block from behind them so they'll run back up a staircase they'll try and take that if they just try and take the block they'll shut the door so they can't do that which forces them to have to run forwards and understand the second block isn't currently helping them with these doors yet so they can take that turn around block the door behind them then take the first block then run through and take the second block then get over the wall and now the solution to this puzzle remains the same block the first one I open the second one block that closed the first one open the second one and ran through and take the second one and the final problem here is this glass window some players would forget to take this block from behind them or they'd take it and just not open this door and what these players did was they'd run up to these tripwires they'd try and run through the doors and then they would just lock themselves in because they had no idea that they needed to open this final door so what we do here is we add one more door it's part remains the same we add this one more door and this door is activated by the same block slot so they must add the tile here turn around in order to be able to get through the door so if we look at the original versus the final one all of the solutions in this puzzle that I had originally intended remained the same all we have done here is we have removed any unnecessary points of frustration we haven't dumbed down the puzzles so that it really you know holds the players hand or requires simpler knowledge we've just removed players and we've just removed spots where players can screw themselves over unintentionally and the point about this is that even in this version despite how long and frustrating it was there were still players that would get through this whole puzzle and then they would quit five or ten puzzles later and the reason for this is because players don't quit something when they're first frustrated frustrations not linear either the more frustrated players get the more likely they are to get more frustrated and eventually very as this ramps up this will lead to players flailing they won't be thinking about what elements of the puzzle are in front of them anymore now they're just going to try and start brute-forcing things and when brute force no longer learns that's when they're going to quit the game and the reason I'm talking about this is because people kept on asking do you use any analytics to work out where players quit your game you know so that you can work out what puzzles are wrong and what things need to be resolved and I said no because they're actually going to demonstrate the wrong problems in the game because once again there were a lot of people who were able to get through this and even after I added the one part at the end which which dramatically simplified the puzzle the moment-to-moment frustration we're still building through all of the other sections of this puzzle and it still meant that by the time players got to later puzzles even if there wasn't anything wrong with those puzzles they were just somewhat harder puzzles because that's the nature of puzzle progression they just had no mental energy and then they'd quit and if I was using analytics to say well players quit at these puzzles so these are the ones that I should fix I'd spot fix one puzzle and then they just quit at the next hard puzzle and I'd spot fix that and then they just quit at the next hard puzzle the actual problem here was that the earlier puzzles were either too frustrating or they didn't teach things in the right way so by the time players got through the later versions of puzzles they didn't understand knowledge and then they'd have to work things out on the spot or they just wouldn't know the solutions and that's when they would quit so if I wasn't using analytics my method of testing was to keep watching everyone at shows and well that was one example because I could then just see how people who had never seen the game before would try and progress through the game normally and I would also do longer one-on-one sessions I'd sit down with people as they played through the entire game I'd also submit to festivals as a way of blackbox testing basically I submit this game in and I just get a yes or a no back from the festival sometimes there's no feedback at all and this was good for when that when I'm when I have to give the game to players at the end of the day not everyone who plays the game will give me feedback about what didn't work for it I was also submitting new builds to older players so that I could get feedback on how the game was progressing and sometimes I would just send the game off to galleries or festivals in my absence around the world and I would just see what people posted about the game online when I wasn't there to watch anything about it just so I could see what was interesting to players and what was frustrating to players and this this brought me back to this issue with refinement where as I was fixing everything in the game as I was spot fixing all of these individual puzzles I then started having issues with general navigation the individual puzzles weren't that weren't a problem anymore now the problem was how all of these things connected to make a large game and part of the problem here is in an old version we had a puzzle that looked like this we've got this unstable bridge with the riot poles above it that will destroy it if the players try to run we've then got this white s-bend that connects to another puzzle that the player needs to use blocks to block a laser to get through a door and both of these individual puzzles were fine by this stage but this s-bend in the middle was causing a bit of a problem it was a very good technical solution form of my known Euclidean space because I could guarantee that as the player was standing in this bend they definitely couldn't see the puzzle behind them and they definitely couldn't see the one in front of him so I could freely just load in and out sections of the world or I could just teleport them to an identical s-bend but the reason that that worked as a technical solution was also the reason that it failed as a design problem because it meant that the players had to spend a lot of time standing in all of these empty white corridors and it got really difficult to work out how all of these puzzles connected together so the solution here although it made things harder technically was just to cut all of that stuff out and make it so that I could be standing at the start of this unstable bridge puzzle and immediately see what was coming up to me and in the distance without any corners anywhere and another way that this helped another area that I did this kind of fix was by using compression here we can see after the players get the level two gun there are three puzzles in increasing difficulty and the player has to do them in this order because they have to understand one before they can get on to the next one and the problem here is that it makes a lot of the world look the same there's a puzzle then there's a door then there's a puzzle then there's a door in it it doesn't do much to help puzzle fatigue and repetition and the solution here was to compress situations like this all down into just one room and because this was a resource puzzle players still have to execute all of the different stages of this in exactly the right order but they just feel like the doing something more interesting than just opening a dock and opening a door with the key and then getting through the next one and it also makes the area look a bit more interesting once we've cut all of that stuff out sometimes there are areas that can't just be directly connected but we want players to have some insight into what's coming up next to motivate them so then I started adding foreshadowing everywhere and in the final game there's this glass window players can see the gun through it but they can also see this black tile go past and we do this so that when players get to in between these glass windows and they see this somewhat familiar blue area as they look back through this glass window they see the purple area and they're like I have definitely been there before this is where I was just a couple of minutes ago and I definitely feel like I've made progress in the game and four areas that the play I definitely can't solve because they don't have the right resources compressing everything down like this and making areas more interesting also meant that I was doing a better job of teasing the player and making them want to work out how to solve these puzzles because they could see interesting things behind the puzzle that they couldn't get past and this meant that this also helped when players wrapped back around to these areas with the right tools because there were just more visual cues that would highlight that this was in a recognizable area and it also meant that once players solved that puzzle and that was standing on the other side they could immediately work out how they had entered the room and how they needed to exit the room or which connections they had already taken and what all of these changes were doing was they were adding landmarks and vistas to the games these are interesting areas of the games that help players identify where they are in the world and these were typically at spaces where the world interact like intersection points in the world players that places that the players would encounter multiple times so when they got wrapped back around they'd be like I have definitely been at this area before I know that I came in through the green path and I now need to go out the yellow path but eventually we run out of visual information to do this especially with a game that was designed to be so minimal which is where sound design came in as the next solution now using sound design to make your game more interesting or assist with navigation there's obviously nothing new but it was interesting frantic chamber because if I wanted to make the game sound how it looked it would have sounded really dead and clinical because there's not much that actually happens in the world unless the player is making something happen so I could have done interaction sounds nothing else in the world really looked like it would make sound and one friend who had a PhD in how people experience space was really on board with the philosophical theme and he said well why don't you just make the game sound like life and I thought this is going to provide a really good contrast against the visual style of the game in the same way that something like Canabalt had really low fidelity graphics but really high fidelity sound or in the way that limbo changed up their dynamic and brought all of the sound design to the foreground and pushed the music to the background so I thought I think that's the right idea and I think that will help because in areas like the art gallery if I can make that sound specifically like an art gallery or if I can make it sound like the ticking clock there then every time players get wrapped back around to that space or they get anywhere near that space they can be like a harm coming back up to the ticking clock but I've got a picture of Disneyland here because another friend who had a PhD in audio and audio engineering linked me an interesting paper about how the sound design of Disneyland worked and he said the things said that early on people would just take the shortest paths around Disneyland before there was any sound along any of the individual paths like any different sound between the paths and when an audio engineer came in one of the first things he did was just put different music along every different path and although it was unintentional what this did was it meant that people now started taking all of these other paths through the park even though they were no longer the shortest paths they were just taking them because subconsciously they wanted to walk around and hear different sounds than they'd heard from taking other areas and so then they extended it further by saying no matter where you're standing in the park you're going to be listening to completely cohesive song and if you walk a hundred feet you're going to be listening to another completely complete song but it's going to be completely different to the one that you were hearing a hundred feet away and if any point along that transition you stop you're also going to be listening to a complete song and this was helping me because it meant that adding all of these different sound adding all of these different sounds around all different paths in the game meant that players were going to want to run down different paths just to hear how they sounded in addition to how they looked and having sounds of things like birds and waves and wind was also really good for calming the player down when I was at times giving them very frustrating puzzles and the impact of all of these small details was that the reception to the game just continuously increased and what this was doing was telling me that none of the ideas that I had initially designed into the game were actually commercially unviable it's just that my execution of those ideas was getting in the way of what was actually special about them these were people who would sit down and see the game it's something like III and then so much stuff just got in their way so much unnecessary frustration the sound design wasn't good had all of these reasons for the game to just turn them off which brings me to the final stage of iteration I'll talk about this one first so what what this does what all of these changes that I was making we're doing we're making the game more accessible an accessibility is is a bit of a weird turn because when we say accessible people typically think you know I don't want to add birds to my game to appeal to a casual audience I don't want to have to dumb down my game I don't want to have to add tutorials to my game and what I have to say to people is that that's just one kind of accessibility that's accessibility with regards to appealing to a wider audience whereas the kinds of changes that I was making here we're a different kind of accessibility with regards to not discouraging your audience again these were the people who sat down and they were interested in then they just got up and left and examples of discouraging my audience in earlier versions were like this in earlier versions the edge detection although it clearly had a defined art style early on the edge detection was really sketchy and and imprecise which meant that as players ran around the walls the edge detection would swim a lot and against the harsh colors of the world it really burned players eyes and it was giving players migraines and my brother for example was like I'm really enjoying the game but after a couple of hours he just had to stop because of how the edge detection was hurting his eyes so I went off and I fixed my tech which meant that the game had an even more defined look and an even more clean look that wasn't going to turn people off in the same way as the sketchiness did it looked more considered and another example was softening the aesthetic and in the old version I could only make primary colors with my lighting which meant that when I wanted areas like this big colorful area I had to do all kinds of crazy things with lights and every time they intersected you ended up with like patches of black around the place and Adam Saltzman also really enjoyed playing the game and was giving me feedback all along the way eventually said late in the process he said I don't understand why you only use primary colors in your game and he linked me to a whole bunch of color theory and I said I understand color theory but my tech doesn't allow me to apply any of that and he said well you should fix your tech and I said he said I said I I know that I should probably fix my tech but I don't really know how it works and I'm pretty sure that it just does this and he's like no that sounds like you really need to go off and learn how your tech works and fix it because this is this a significant problem and as soon as I did this it immediately looked better I could now get these nice soft colors around the world I could get interesting blends between spaces and it also meant that I no longer had to differentiate areas by putting crazy combinations of lights I could just put one purple white that would and it would be the only purple light in the game and it would immediately make that area look different to every other area in the game and this meant that in screenshots now the game looked much prettier and it wasn't just turning people off with all of these harsh colors another example of this was aiming prediction this was not a game about dexterity and I was trying to remove that from the game as much as possible and we could see in this first screenshot that this player looks like they're going to block this door open but once they fire the tile it's actually going to be off by one space and then the door will still shut which is just going to be frustrating because it's not what the player intended so then they're gonna have to take the block back and try again and they may miss again and so I decided I'm just going to put in aiming prediction especially because the whole world is aligned to a grid and it's kind of difficult to know whether you're on the edge of a grid space or not so I put in this aiming prediction which meant players no longer had to waste time by firing tiles and having the wrong thing happen they could just move the cursor around until it was exactly where they wanted and then they could hit the fire button and the tile window would end up exactly where the player intended another iteration was with how the game was tutorial I x'd in earlier versions I would just give players a complete instruction sheet that would just tell them everything up front which they had to hold in memory I never told it to them again and then they would have to run through all of the puzzles and apply all of that knowledge whereas in later versions of the game I only showed them what buttons they needed to use and then I never showed them any other instructions about how the world worked because it was the job of the puzzles themselves to let the players understand what they were doing in the game and if I had done it if players didn't understand something then I needed to change one of the puzzles in the game to make sure they really understood what I what they needed to do another change was refining the science because this started off as a there's a bit of a diary for myself in a philosophical art piece it was very hey man life like it was very very bursting in the players face and I also had a title the icon and the text which meant that there was a lot of redundancy going when you may had three things essentially all saying the same thing and I had people like John Blow say this just makes it feel like you're talking down to the player because you've duplicated information so much so I thought well immediately I'm going to remove all of the titles because I've got titles on the map nodes anyway and I don't really need them on the science they don't serve any purpose and then I had all of these other players say I hate the signs you should remove the signs I don't want to read any of the text in the game and I said well it's not that you completely hate the signs it's just that you hate reading any of the text and having the icon next to the text also meant it looked very visually unbalanced so I thought I'm going to compress these down into just a square rather than a rectangle I'm going to present the iPhone first and make it so that you have to actually click on the icon in order to see the text so if people just hated the text in the game that was fine they just never had to click the icon they couldn't accidentally run past the sign and catch a glimpse of what the words said they would just never see it and this also meant that players who didn't want hints also didn't have to click the signs but it also meant that the signs worked better as hints as well because now I could put one of these signs behind a glass window and players couldn't just read the solution off the text but they could see they now had to look at this picture and try and decipher what they were looking at and then I also changed how the signs were written so they were less verbose so rather than directly telling you what the affirmation was they were worded so that they sounded more like cryptic game hints which were still affirmations of what you'd done but you actually had to read into them a little bit deeper to get a philosophical meaning out of them and then you had to read into them deeper still if you wanted to read them as cryptic hints for other areas in the game now that I've got players playing for several hours I've got the issue of motivation players play for like four hours out of six hours eight hours and they think what's the point of the game like I understand I'm solving all of these puzzles and that's interesting but ultimately I want some grander payoff and so I thought I had someone say you need a GLaDOS in your game and I said I definitely don't need a glass in my game I'm not trying to recreate portal but what this was saying was that it was missing a linear thread you know it was missing something as simple as your princess is in another castle you know that's irrelevant for 90% of the game but it's just there as a reminder that hey there is actually some point to this entire thing and in in a similar way as the g-man in half-life just someone that you keep seeing but you don't completely understand I decided to add this black tile in the game that was the only other living thing that would move around the world and the player it was always behind a glass window always out of reach and players would get closer to it the further they progressed through the game so having made all of these changes I now needed to recreate the ending of the game I needed to wrap up the linear thread it was no longer enough to say you solved all the puzzles good job and so I wrapped up the ending with with the black tile and tried to resolve everything as best that I could in my mind all throughout this process this took three years and for three years I was hearing people say ideas never finished and I was saying I'm I'm not just being a perfectionist I am only resolving things that keep on popping up as issues every time I change something I would measure how that change had impacted the game and which says constant iteration needs constant testing and ultimately you stop iterating when the cost of further iteration outweighs the benefit of further iteration so for a larger studio this is going to mean that you run out of budget or time for me budget and time weren't really my my concerns my issue was motivation insanity but ultimately by the time I got to the end of this process I did have I did have time as concern because there was this really good release window right at the end of January and if I missed that then I would be releasing the game in amongst a bunch of big triple-a games that were coming out and releasing a perfect game at a worse time would have ultimately resulted in a less successful game and so at some point I had to say this is it I'm cutting it off this is just what has to get released so if my thesis at the start of this process was that I just need to work out what changes I need to make to draw it in to what the market can accept the reality was more like this by the time I had hit where I was trying to get to the market itself had already expanded you know even their first purse and puzzly kind of space had expanded because games like portal 2 came out cube the ball Quantum Conundrum these were all in the same space but more so than that games like dear Esther came out which were very experimental first-person games and the independent scene in general is also expanding so one of the questions about this thesis would be does this work in the other way like what would that look like can you start with a commercially viable game and then try and push towards the edges of the market and so I'll give a thought experiment what would happen if we started with an RTS such as Warcraft and we made one simple change to begin with we removed the ability to produce units suddenly the unit production buildings are no longer necessary which means that we're just left with resource buildings tech trees and defenses so basically we can gather resources we can fill our bases with defenses we can build some tech trees and then we can just build more defenses we still need enemies to come from somewhere if they're just coming from absolutely everywhere that's going to be a little bit overwhelming so let's confine them down two paths I'm not going to continue the example further because all I'm doing is explaining how I remember the tower defense genre spawning in games like Starcraft and Warcraft and once this thing broke off and became its own commercially viable thing you then had other genres such as the first-person shooter combine first-person shooter with tower defense by games like sanctum so ultimately this talk the point of this talk is that the further you go away from what is commercially viable as I did in the beginning the more the onus is on you to pull the game back in to being something that the market can support which means that you have to do a lot of work to convince people why they should play your game at all but if you can VIN if you can convince people of that you don't have to convince them why they should play your game versus something else that they already know because there's nothing else like this thing that you've just described to them if you start from the middle however and you try and work your way out you don't have to prove that an audience exists but you then have to do the work of proving why your game is better than what the players already know thank you so there's still 10 minutes for questions if anyone had any questions they I think there's microphones around the place yeah hello hello how are ya Alexander I'm Ryan Miller I just wanted to say that you talked about a lot of meta analysis like meta study like what's in the industry what I want to do what's different from other games and it seems like it when you play a game you're seeing more than just like I'm not just playing this for fun you actually seem to be analyzing what's going on what's different from other games I was curious do you have any process when you're playing a game to kind of study how is this different from other things what's new what's unique unfortunately not I can't pass much of that on because I just have a really good memory and so I just remember absolutely everything that I play and so when I play something I will remember something like operation win back that I played 10 years earlier well everyone else is talking about Gears of War and I'm just a really harsh critic okay all right Thank You Alexander hey there obviously you talk about frustration a lot how you try to remove unnecessary frustration could you just say a few words about how you decide whether a piece of frustration is unnecessary or not so in the example with with the doors which I'll see if I can get back to you very quickly in the example with the three doors that the player has to get past there is one area of frustration that still exists within that puzzle so I just know there are so many slides of that original solution it was way too complicated and that problem is at this section so here we've blocked the two doors and I said that then players take the first tile and then they open the first and third doors what some players would do instead is they would run through into the middle of that section and then they would take the first tile and then they would get themselves stuck which was still something that was a point of unnecessary frustration in the earlier version of the game you know I said that getting stuck between these two doors it was frustrating but in that instance I left it in there because that was more user error by this stage the players knew that those doors opened and closed and they knew the there were three doors and they actively made the decision to run up to a closed door to turn around and unblock the door behind them without opening the third door and then they get themselves stuck and that was something that I left in there because that then stopped the players from trying to sleepwalk through the puzzle and it would make them realize oh that was actually my mistake so I need to go back in and try and do that again properly and another example is at the red and blue staircases at the very start of the game there were a bunch of people who just never thought to turn around in the game and for a while I was thinking maybe I should you know put an arrow on the floor like I had done elsewhere in the game one of those guidance arrows after they failed like ten times because these people just weren't getting it and maybe they needed a hint that I decided not to do that because I thought this is actually a really good litmus test right at the start of the game for turning off people who aren't my audience if people can't solve what I think is a very simple lateral thinking puzzle even if I try and make that more accessible to them they're gonna fail at the next puzzle and then they're gonna fail at the next puzzle and that would be refining the game for an audience that I ultimately didn't want so I was happy turning those people off so it sounds like you just kind of set your own standard basically yeah I mean it's based off how I'm how I solve puzzles and you know what I would find frustrating and also by watching a bunch of people and seeing what they found frustrating when players got themselves stuck at these doors they weren't like ah screw the game for allowing me that they were all like well clearly that was my fault and they weren't frustrated cool Thanks thank you I was wondering if you could say a little more about their topologies you noticed with your players how you said that some people went straight for the path of least resistance and so I'm wondering how you study that and how you kind of clustered them together and what different types you noticed okay so like I can't define it further in two types than I did but I I studied that just because as I was going to like 15 to 20 shows that's several days of very intense testing and I'm just watching thousands of people play and again where I've got a very good memory and I'm able to just keep track of all of that I would see what kinds of things people would would do and when I saw someone do an unexpected behavior the first time I was like well that was just one person who did that and then maybe a year later at a different event I would see someone else do that very same behavior and I be like alright this is clearly a problem what can I do to make the game work for however these people think a what is the sequence of events that they did that led them to making this decision and then is that an expectation that I need to confirm or is that something I need to break do I need to put another rap in the world that continues making the game feel good for those people so it wasn't a very scientific study like writing things down it was more just watching people what they did and then trying to adjust for as many behaviors as I could thank you the common theme in all this is interpreting user behavior correctly and interpreting like it'll look at what is actually the problem and one of the things you mentioned was the fact that you know you wanted to iterate in a quantifiable manner and so I mean I know you just said that that you were looking really at the product like the steps that players were taking but I was wondering if there were certain metrics that you were using to gauge like you know how well the player was like you know solving the puzzle as intended other than just watching them no I wasn't tracking anything behind it like what other kinds of metrics would you were you thinking of I'm a mobile game developer so you know we use analytics suite like flurry and such so you know we for instance like a common one is like you know retention for like players that come back but I mean like it doesn't necessarily apply to Antichamber but I was just very adamantly against analytics because I felt like the moment I start tracking that data then I'm going to be tracking the wrong thing and one of the issues with with analytics that I know Chris hacker is talking spoken about previously is that people track what's easy to track you know and tracking what people are thinking moment to moment is actually much harder to track and no matter what I log in the game I can't track any of that information a lot of the information just came from not even just watching what people did in the game it was watching people's faces as they were playing the game so if I see someone solve a puzzle but there's like no reaction on their face and then the kind of person who was getting surprised by a lot of things that's the kind of player who I can see right then and there that they haven't picked up their correct know is that it's just gone straight over their head and I would be able to know that several puzzles down the line then they would struggle at the at the next one so it was all about catching things right at the right at the road rather than you know any further down see thank you so what was the deal with the purple cubes just cut content or as I said I got to the end of the development and I just had to make a decision to cut things off you know the purple cubes came in I think after IGF 2011 and they were going to fit a purpose and there was going to be a very meta achievement kind of thing but if you went to my talk yesterday you can see that by the time I released this game I was just absolutely exhausted and it was you know I'm a perfectionist and for me that was just a lesson in perfectionism and letting go and I know that it frustrated a bunch of players and it wasn't perfect but you know I I couldn't resolve that hi it seemed it seemed like a really common thing was instead of like telling the player you failed do this again it seemed like the theme was you failed so here's how to learn and in your branching paths you segregated the players by what they knew and what they needed to learn and you sent them in those directions that seemed like a really common theme do you think that would work for other genres of games like FPS is yes and I think that like I didn't think that this was new that I was doing this I don't have examples coming to mind but yeah I absolutely believed that you could apply this to like an RTS so you could apply this to other genres I can't exactly describe what that would look like but you know it being interesting it would definitely be an interesting problem problem to solve okay thank you hello noticed themes of sort of execution and redundancy coming up early on as things that you want to avoid but then you sort of had to encounter them again and I wondered whether is it necessary to define just new terms for where you needed things to be redundant or you needed to make things more accessible so it was about how you were executing as a designer or is it just about sort of refining where you choose to you mean I left things redundant because one set of players would just solve things on the spot and other people needed to introduce things more incrementally sorry I guess you could say the solution of adding sort of more options or mm-hmm then is a kind of redundancy and also yeah I like kinds of failsafe sure well so those seem like specific applications and I just wondered whether it's the the issue for example with the sign of having too much information in one place different kind of redundancy so that's why I was trying to remove as much information as I could from the text but I still needed the text in there because otherwise you just have these very abstract pictures and the player wouldn't be able to get the information that they need from those pictures and so again that gets to the point where I make a trade-off and I think now this is kind of the right balance and that was just a call that I had to make personally thank you all right I think that's it for time so thank you for coming

Channel: GDC

Views: 51,669

Rating: 4.9186864 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: d_0Tawc_1A4

Length: 62min 29sec (3749 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 28 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/himugamer]

This is old but still very useful. :)

[u/rws247]

I really enjoyed this talk. Thanks for sharing!