There are lots of tropes and idiosyncrasies
that let you know you’re dealing with a ‘VIDEO GAME’. Stuff like level up systems, glowy red barrels
and floaty FPS hands. But there’s one trope that can be especially
divisive. Collectibles. Collectibles have the power to be compelling
goals, or to be the worst kind of filler. They can be uniquely crafted experiences,
or scattered randomly and without purpose. Hmm, kinda sounds like collectibles are a
tool to me. We should figure out how to use them for good. Let’s talk about collectibles in games and
how you can make players want to collect ‘em all. Or just collect ‘em some. Depends on your goals. We’ll get into it. Today’s episode is sponsored by Audible. I use Audible to keep up with my book club,
and I’ve got a new audiobook to recommend. A Memory Called Empire by Arcady Martine. It’s about a space station ambassador who
gets way, way over her head after her predecessor meets their mysterious demise in a high tech
alien society built around art, aesthetics, and subtlety. It’s really unique and fun to read, and
it won the Hugo award, so it’s objectively the best sci-fi read of 2019 I guess. It’s excellent, and it’s on Audible. New members get access to the all-new Plus
Catalog, too, with thousands of select audiobooks, podcasts, Audible Originals, and way more,
all included with membership. Go to www.audible.com/designdoc or text ‘DESIGNDOC’
to 500 500 to get one free audiobook, a 30-day free trial, and explore their Plus Catalog. Link’s in the description. Collectibles at their most basic level kind
of seem like a chore. So how do you get someone to do chores? You’ve gotta motivate them. There’s a giant toolbox of techniques you
could use, but most tools that motivate fall into a couple of categories: Extrinsic and
Intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is really straightforward. Give someone something to do something. It’s not rocket science. Give out a reward for doing a thing. In games, that can take a few different forms. The easiest way to motivate a player to collect
stuff is to just force them to do it. Do it, or else no game for you. In games like Mario 64, you can't get further
in the game unless you grab some of the castle's Power Stars. Obviously, if you do it wrong, this is a little
heavy-handed. Motivating through coercion is not a great
long-term strategy. If you're forcing a player to do something
unpleasant, they're just going to quit your game. Mario 64 does two crucial things to get around
the coercive bit: it lets you choose from a list of stars to collect, and you don't
need to get them all to move forward. Without both those system features, players
could easily get stuck on one particular star and bail out of the game entirely. That structure was tweaked in Mario Sunshine. Collecting shine sprites will eventually unlock
new levels and powerups in the hub world, but most shines don’t impact the story progress
at all. You have to complete the 7th episode on every
main stage, one by one. Lots of players would like to skip some of
them, like the Sandbird, but you’ve gotta push through if you want that final stage
and ending. Everything else, every other shine, is technically
optional. On the other extreme is Rayman 1. Rayman 1 has collectibles of a sort with these
cages. The game makes a big deal out of destroying
them, but you can just go level to level, ignoring them if you want. For a while. The game has a nasty trick up its sleeve. To get to the final boss, you have to get
every single one of the cages. A lot of the cages suck to find and are hidden
behind non-intuitive, invisible triggers, and it's super easy to get frustrated and
abandon the effort to get to the end of the game. The later Rayman games adopted a simple threshold
system, more like Mario 64. Good move. Another extrinsic way to get people collecting
is to offer in-game improvements tied to collectibles. In many action-adventure games, the collectibles
aren't tied to story progress, but they do give you bonus experience, items, cosmetics,
upgrades, or techniques. Think of things like the Golden Skulltula
quest in Ocarina of Time or the 99 Dalmatian puppies in Kingdom Hearts. Gather enough stuff, and you unlock something
that makes your character a little better for the rest of the game. Spider-Man has several side quests focused
on collectibles that offer XP and special tokens to unlock costumes and upgrades. The collectibles act as a breadcrumb trail. Every individual collectible is a clear step
forward towards that ultimate prize. Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair's bees
are kind of a hybrid system between progression and improvements. The game's final stage is the titular Impossible
Lair, and it's a grueling, lengthy test of your skills. You can try your luck whenever you want, but
if you go through the game's other missions to collect the bees, you'll gain more hit
points to use for each run in the lair. The system is both a way to improve your character
and directly ties into whether you'll complete the game. There’s a segment of players who tend to
be compelled to collect everything they can find. For them, an elaborate reward for completing
the collection is a great gesture that helps make the time spent collecting it all feel
worthwhile. Mario Galaxy’s reward for gathering all
120 stars is an entire additional campaign - Super Luigi Galaxy. You get to do the whole game over again as
Luigi! No it’s not just a palette swap! Luigi has a few changes that make the game
tougher - a great reward for a player who has mastered the rest of the game. The Crash Bandicoot series has always had
a challenging but fun road to 100% through its collectible gems. Crash 4 brought the game into the new era,
and it has collectibles too! A lot! A lot a lot! The volume and difficulty of the gems in Crash
4 go way too far towards feeling like a punishment. Each of the 38 stages have 6 gems apiece to
collect, most of which you get at the end for meeting conditions throughout the stage. 3 gems for collecting 80% of the fruit in
the stage. One more for getting through it in 3 lives
or less. That one’s tougher but doable. There’s a hidden gem somewhere.. Uh… THERE it is. BUT THEN THERE’S THIS GUY. The gem for destroying every single box in
a stage in one go. Yeah, these have been a staple in the series,
but not like this. There are three main problems. Number One: The stages are much larger in
Crash 4 than in previous games, maybe triple the size of the original trilogy. There are usually well over 100 boxes to break
and LOTS of places to hide them. Number Two: They hid them very, very well. Look at this. Whether the boxes blend into the background,
or are completely offscreen, or require you to hit a switch and then backtrack (god I’m
getting Rayman 1 flashbacks), the hardest boxes in this game are much harder to find
on average than in the original trilogy. Number Three: There are also tons of ‘do
or die’ moments and points of no return, like on-rail and chase sequences, on top of
some pretty difficult platforming challenges. With boxes to get. You need borderline perfect execution to hit
them. Miss one, and you’ll need to go back to
the last checkpoint. It can be 10 to 20 minutes combing a stage
for every box, only to realize you missed one and have no way to go back. Plus, even if you get them all you’re not
done. The additional “N. Verted’ stages are
the same thing but mirrored and with some… uh… helpful visual filters. It’s the exact same challenge, just repeated
to fill time, or it’s more annoying to complete. PLUS, there are even more side stages that
are half new and half reused designs, so you might need to go through some segments 4 times
perfectly to truly 100% the game. It’s all optional, thank goodness, but it
will really put a damper on the fun for completionists trying to see everything in the game. Extrinsic motivation can be real blunt. A big sledgehammer of a tool. But what if you’re looking for a way to
motivate your players with something a little more refined? A little more personal? Maybe your collectible system could use some
intrinsic motivation. Instead of encouraging players by giving out
something tangible, intrinsic motivation works by getting a player to want to complete a
goal for its own sake. The collectible is there to mark a journey
that was its own reward. You could start with the absolute basics:
Have a cool sound cue or a little sparkly visual effect when it’s collected. A dance might do the trick. It sounds shallow, and it is. But it works. Anything that makes the collecting of the
objects ‘juicier’ will help make collecting more satisfying. But we can go deeper. Intrinsic rewards focus on the journey, not
the destination. Collecting a game’s collectibles can create
fun experiences in their own right, and the collectible itself is just the mint at the
end. This fits great with games that focus on movement
and exploration. Strategically placed collectibles can be incentives
to push yourself to use all your skills to get somewhere a little tougher than normal
or to see a scenic vista you may have missed otherwise. Celeste is very upfront about its optional
collectible strawberries. They don’t unlock anything. The ending is a little different depending
on how many you get, but otherwise, there's nothing extrinsic to be had here, and yet
they're still very compelling. The strawberries are placed in very hard-to-reach
locations, and in a game all about mastering your character’s movement mechanics, they
work as tangible bragging rights. They’re an extra layer of optional challenge,
and since the game saves your progress all the time, the strawberries work as a pretty
enticing incentive to go out and thoroughly test just what you can do. Banjo-Kazooie’s collectibles don’t really
promote mastery like Celeste, but they do encourage exploration. The game still has one of the better designed
collectible systems even after all these years. Mario 64 was the blueprint for the 3D collect-a-thon
platformer, but Banjo-Kazooie refined the concept. Sure it has plenty of extrinsic progression
- Jiggies lock away levels, Jinjos unlock Jiggies, and so on. But it’s amazing just how fun and relaxing
it can be to explore everywhere and clean out the collectibles on every stage. Going for 100% completion is how the game
is meant to be played. The nice little chimes and fanfares when you
get stuff are well-designed, but the real star is how the collectibles are placed. The notes serve as a breadcrumb trail to all
sorts of points of interest and to other higher-priority collectibles like the Jinjos and Jiggies. There’s a flow to how they’re all placed
and how the placement supports the level design and your character’s movement, always there
to give a little suggestion to try something you might not have thought to try otherwise. Breath of the Wild is on the other end of
the spectrum. It's NOT meant to be a game that you 100%. The sheer volume of stuff you'd have to collect
is daunting. 136 shrines, 226 named locations, 394 things
to photograph, and of course, the 900 Korok seeds are more than the game reasonably expects
you to get. But just because there are so many things
to get doesn't mean they aren't still placed just as purposefully as Banjo-Kazooie. Breath of the Wild is a celebration of exploration
and discovery, and the collectibles help goad you into following the game's cycle of exploration. A peak leads to an item. An item suggests another place to go. Overcoming the travel guides you to more places
to discover, which leads you to more collectibles as milestone rewards, which lead you to more
places to go, and so on in a loop until you're happy with the amount of time you've put into
the game. If it's a lot, great. If it's a little, that's fine too. The game's ending isn't barred behind collecting
a bunch of Korok seeds. The goal for collecting them all isn't even…
you know… worth keeping… yeah… The collectibles are the catalyst for interacting
with the world, observing it, being inspired to take action, and just taking it all in. It supports the game's deeper goal, to convey
an experience, not just provide a checklist to complete. Before Crash 4 came along, the king of overbearing
collectibles was Donkey Kong 64. It's another Rare collect-a-thon, though any
subtle design cues from Banjo-Kazooie's collectible system have been thrown out the window for
a 'more is more' philosophy. The worst offender is how every collectible
is divided between its 5 characters - 5 sets of collectibles that dot each level. 5 golden bananas per character and tons of
color-coded objects like bananas, blue prints, and coins among others, each with their own
purpose like accessing boss fights, unlocking abilities and other goodies. The rewards are fine but with so many things
to collect, their placement can feel arbitrary. Wherever there's space, there's a collectible. And since they can only be grabbed by one
specific character, you'll have to scour the stage up to 5 times to get everything. This sort of filler set of collectibles can
easily destroy the motivation for a player to interact with the system you've built. OK, now you know how important extrinsic and
intrinsic motivation are to a collectible system. That’s a good start, but there’s one more
hurdle to clear. You have to support the system with useful
in-game tools to help players collect. Even if a game has great collectibles, intrinsically
satisfying and extrinsically useful, the wrong tools can still undercut how much collecting
a player wants to do. Some systems tie deeply into the context of
the game. You could learn a lot from Pokemon. A massive driving force in the earlier generations
of Pokemon was to fill out the Pokedex. It acts as a checklist for what Pokemon you’ve
seen, a guide to point you to find what you’ve seen but haven’t caught, a lore dump, and
an art gallery, all in one package that supports the ‘Gotta Catch ‘Em All’ philosophy
of the early games. Even if you can’t build something as deeply
tied to the game’s world as the Pokedex, other games support their collectibles systems
with some of the Pokedex’s constituent components. Spyro’s dragonfly just points you towards
the nearest gems on command. For collectibles that are both hidden and
are extrinsically useful, you need to be careful that you don’t run into the ‘needle in
a haystack’ problem. Spyro’s gems are finite but numerous, and
the dragonfly radar helps keep you from having to retrace your steps over and over to catch
a couple missing gems. Mario Odyssey tries to fix the same problem
with the Talkatoo and the Hint Toad. They work as two tiers of hints that can guide
you towards any remaining moons. The Talkatoo names the moons, akin to the
star hints in Mario 64, and if that’s not enough, the Hint Toad will just tell you where
they are for a small fee. They give an in-game release valve for the
frustration of missing a few moons on your checklist while not completely eliminating
the thrill of finding them. The Purple Coins in Odyssey show what happens
without that release valve in place. Purple coins are finite and necessary for
getting every cosmetic but don’t have a way to point you to them. Unless you buy a Bowser Amiibo. Not cool. At least the purple coins are easy to spot,
though. Worse are the figments in Psychonauts. They're unique collectible multicolored images
that EASILY blend into the background. It's a really neat idea, and they add some
detail and charm to the levels, but functionally they're very obnoxious to collect. They're all hard to spot, and there are basically
no in-game tools to track them, which creates a terrible needle-in-the-haystack problem. Another problem is when there’s a mismatch
between what the collectibles are trying to get you to do, and what the game’s mechanics
are built to help you do. Sonic Advance 2 hides its true Final Boss
and Ending behind collecting each of the 7 Chaos Emeralds, so you better get ‘em. Each is in a special stage, and to get to
each you have to collect 7 special rings in one special go. Find them all, hidden throughout the stage,
without dying. OK, doesn’t sound too bad yet. Maybe you forgot that it’s Sonic. Sonic isn’t built to explore. He’s gotta go fast. TOO fast. Sonic Advance 2 loves blinding speed and has
a whole lot of points of no return. And it’s built for a console prone to some
pretty severe screen crunch. You can’t see all that far ahead of you. Take the wrong route? Miss a specific jump and now you can’t go
back? Too bad. Some characters aren’t suited to explore
at all, and even if you’re playing as the ones like Tails and Knuckles who have better
traversal options, you still don’t have a way to track these stupid rings. Without a guide, you have to trial-and-error
your way through the stages and memorize the right path to find and get each ring in the
stage, then execute it almost perfectly, just for a chance to get a chaos emerald. Even if you do it right, if you fail in the
bonus stage you’ve gotta do it all over again. At least you only have to do it once… UNLESS YOU WANT THE SECRET 5TH PLAYABLE CHARACTER. Do it all again 3 more times. You said no? So did I. ACTION REPLAY BABY! So that’s some of the basics of how to motivate
players to love a collectible system. There are countless more games we didn’t
mention that have interesting takes. Let us know in the comments, and we might
have a followup episode. With the right tools and the right motivation
you can make collecting not feel like a chore. *chill vibes outro from A Short Hike*
