IndieCade 2013 - Empuzzlement

thanks for coming out it's good to see a lot of people are interested in puzzles which are a very interesting subject I'm gonna just recap very quickly who we've got here so I'm me I made a mario clone about about rewind and my current game is walking around an environment doing mazes it's soso but to talk about this these games in a more interesting way you know this is a sort of a classical platformer linear sequence of puzzles with a little bit of allowance for non-linearity and this game is a fundamentally nonlinear world with a little bit of linearity built in so there's been an inversion of the of the way puzzles are presented to the player and approached next we have drokken who made this game star seed pilgrim which is sort of an action puzzle game and the way that tetris is or something like that fish Bane which is a platformer with what do you what would you call that like functional things activities that you can do that are puzzle II I called it like a harpoon surfing game just because it sounded cool that's accurate I need to made a bunch of other games as well and mark 10 gosh who made this game orb tower which is a game about trying to get a ball where you want it to go it's unreleased so you haven't played it he also made this game yeah I got coude which is about understanding the fourth dimension and getting blocks where you want them to go it's also unreleased so you probably haven't played it unless you played it here like two or three years ago and this game is a little harder to visualize so we have a little fun video that so I wanted to keep this more of an open discussion with us sort of just following whatever points seem interesting so this isn't you know stringently there is there isn't a list of questions that we're gonna plow through however I have one to start just to get the momentum going because it's a topic that I've been I've been interested in lately and I don't necessarily have conclusions on you know there's this idea in game design a lot like when people are analyzing game design right they'll talk about game mechanics you know and you know what that is and and especially in a puzzle you know what that is because the puzzle sort of based around mechanics usually and there's this further idea that the mechanics of a game are somehow an abstract functional layer that is different from the visual presentation or the audio presentation right not just in the MDA framework where you say something like mechanics dynamics aesthetics but but in general that's the way it's thought of is you know there's actions that are performed and then there's the way those are displayed and you can factor those apart and what I've found personally is that the better I get at making games the less I believe in that kind of thing I don't really think those two things are separable and that's interesting to me because in puzzle games in puzzle games are some sense the most abstracted and discretized kind of game right to be a good puzzle you need to understand what the fundamental operations are and have intent so there there needs to be that clarity of mechanics right but at the same time I don't think for any of our games that's independent of the presentation so you know in me I could a you spent a long time making that game just look good yeah and also you know aside from looking good which I think has mechanical ramifications just setting up the visuals so that people will understand the level better yeah right in ways that are not strictly functional operations on the level or on the mechanics and you know it's like I saw you in an interview on Starsky pilgrim you sort of said well the game really came together when the music was added you know and the sound effects were added and suddenly things had punched yeah right so that's generally what I'm thinking about and who you guys has something to say I have a lot to say about this so so the the way that I that I set up yoga Kure is that the the game is based on these four dimensional tiles so minecraft has like three dimensional tiles and this game has four dimensional tiles and the level is really small so that there's very few tiles so it's very easy to track is really easy to know what the game state is if you just think of just the tiles because there's very few of them but then your position is still it's still it can be anywhere and things in the world can be don't necessarily have to fit within the tiles but gameplay wise it's exactly all that matters really are the tiles so everything that add on top of that is really trying to get the player to understand this structure that I've set up and I think for example working on the the trees and and and every object that you see on top of it like I spend a lot of time improving the way that they function with respect to the fourth dimension like it used to be sort of a hack in the way that they were displayed and now it's like more correct and that more correct part not only looks better but also feels better - it looks better it feels better when you see it but also the player picks up on it more and even if it's instinctive so if you if you just move around and and don't really at first you don't necessarily notice what's happening with everything that's not a cube but then after a while right I think you notice that after a while you start picking up on what's happening and you see oh I'm seeing these big slices of trees right and then you somebody you might pick up on that and then there's like you can go very deep into like all the details that have been put in like the texture on the ground also changes based on where you are there's um like there's the one block that has the stripes and just when you when you travel through the fourth dimension the stripes kind of come to these they kind of stretch out and it's just one color and it really like it communicates the idea of a fourth dimension and really like just it's like I didn't even think about it that way but it's it's really cool right so yeah so that's all like in the hopes that the more correct the representation of the fourth dimension is the more your brain will be able to pick up on the details with sort of saying like if it is if this system is correct then your brain will have a better chance getting it which is I don't know like I'm it's still kind of a theory I guess I feel like puzzle games are kind of at their most powerful when they're there when they're the systems that they're built on the kind of the reality that they present is consistent and like I think maybe could it does that really well because it's all based on like this fourth dimension stuff and all the presentation goes towards that and I think like presentation isn't just visual and audial it's also I mean like I I guess I have to bring this up because of start asleep ill Graham it's also say like a tutorial like if there's a character telling you what to do that's part of the presentation and it's all kind of part of the puzzle because puzzles are things that go on in your mind and like the minds a really crazy thing and just even the even the subtlest thing like a little a little hint but you don't even notice can go a long way towards affecting the way you think about the puzzle yeah I actually have a couple things to say about that right there so so when I started testing out the witness on people you know I went to a couple places like Game Developers Conference and had people play it in room and I would sort of sit back and watch and I do the thing that I had done before about like not we bother people and just sort of watch and what I learned from that experience is that usually those play test sessions were not useful at all actually for the the subtler and the the more non-classical your game is and the more it asks something of the player the less the or the more difficult it becomes to get people to have an authentic play experience with it in any kind of artificial environment so in that case it's like I'm sitting there in a hotel room and either this person knows like oh the developer of the game is sitting here right and they feel like they're being watched right they feel like they're being judged if they're slow at a puzzle right and that got even weirder when it was developer friends cuz then it's like weird you know social status things going on so so later the next year when I did a press tour so I travel around a different cities still with the game in very low level of presentations so things were made out of blocks and stuff but it was still supposed to be very clear how to play I would just leave the room I would set the press up with the game and I would go to lunch I'd say call me if it crashes it probably won't you know 98 percent chance it won't crash and then I'd come back two hours later and we'd have a discussion about it and you know that worked a lot better and that I think extends into the game as well so if you have a game suppose you have a game that goes kind of Nintendo style and you started out and there's a character telling you how to do everything right explicitly hears dialog boxes and then won't let you go on until you do the thing right in that kind of a game you're setting expectations for what the player is supposed to do and I think you'll find them like later in the game less able to actually solve puzzles 'lord a stretch or to do anything because you've you know like the game industry got into this situation where we kept making games easier and easier and I think it's because like the dawn of tutorials happen and we started doing all these tutorials there's actually I was talking to someone about Zelda and kind of like in you know only a lot of games that are kind of like sort of puzzle like they're not really committed to puzzle but they're like oh we want to have puzzles you'll there's like maybe like a piece of information that you need to complete a puzzle but it's it's not actually the information that you need because you can't solve the puzzle before you get the information you actually have to go and talk to the person and say oh if you push on this stone it opens the door but before if you pushed on the stone it wouldn't do anything and like like and but like in the first Zelda I guess like people the only thing I remember is own said something what like uh Peninsula it's like go to the peninsula but you could have gone to the peninsula without them telling you and I think that's like kind of like a big like that shift is in the direction of here's like a thing telling you what to do and kind of hovering over you yeah yeah you know the way I try to attack that now I mean we'll see you in the next game because my next game is probably to be very different but in the witness' we're very careful never to tell you how to do anything there's like one prompt at the beginning that tells you kind of what the controls are but you start out and you're in this hallway and it's like well you have to take the initiative to go forward and like do a puzzle and it's very simple but you are you are building your own momentum of of someone who's going into the world and encountering things and I think that's that's important so now you have a you have an interesting balance in being a coude because you require people to be proactive but you have NPCs that sort of tell you things but they can't tell you that much because they only ever have like a sentence at a time yeah a lot of it is teaching I sort of see two things I see teaching about mechanics that any regular game would have like push blocks and jump on stuff so if I need to teach you about pushing blocks I'm ok with that because it's just really a basic thing but all the 4d stuff is all nonverbal so yeah so that's that's sort of how I split it but then I saw so it makes me think about like how do you how do you do that without actually you know how do you teach things without actually using words right and in starship program is it's like even goes like on the other and where it's like not even teaching you anything it's like totally about discovery yeah and but I mean like even starts to pilgrim teaches you like the very basic stuff like that I mean it's just the same as like movement and pushing blockers like if you don't know this like this isn't the cool stuff I want you to struggle with because like if you're playing gaming you're struggling with like just the basic stuff and you figure it out it's not like oh wow now I understand how to push blocks it's like all right and I can push blocks now and then there's like that barrier between kind of starting and getting into like what the game is really exploring which is the sort of mentions right well in Star Steve pilgrim definitely there's there's nonverbal communication that's that you can't even follow up on yet right like so you start your you're in the the once you get into the actual world right there's like some hard blocks there and you know before you know they were sort of in a ramp that went up and now now they're it's sort of in a ramp that leads in a direction but there's no way to eat them all you know because you can't you can't get to the top one until you actually build something which requires you to have gone into the other world right so there's a there's a mixture of this is telling you something right that blocks are relevant in this outer world right sorry if anyone hasn't played this game we're spoiling it or more likely they just have no idea like hard pilot what are these guys talking about this is a challenge that we have is keeping things I don't know interesting but I've I have to mention because we're talking about the presentation of puzzles there's a game called la mulana and I I've been thinking about like I liked it for a long time and then I actually thought about the puzzles and the puzzles aren't good at all they're they're really dumb it's it's all just based on like oh you've got like the right item and use it in the right place or like you just like press down and this turns out you go into this pot like a like a Mario pipe but the presentation of the puzzles is is kind of amazing because I mean of like there's like you you have to do everything yourself and you can just like walk by a puzzle and it doesn't matter for now and like just I think like I really want to make a game like la mulana just because I just this amazing just you're just surrounded by puzzles there's a lot of puzzle games I mean it seems like the the easiest way to design a puzzle game to say like here's a puzzle to solve it and even if you're not explicitly saying and if it's like here's level 1 next comes level 2 it's your you're communicating like you have to solve this puzzle right now this is what you're doing and I mean I'd really like to see more games where the puzzles are less clear like like not the solutions but that they're even there and the the I mean the rewards for la mulana it's kind of like a Metroidvania a little bit but the the rewards for puzzles are all these like weird stuff like there's a bunch of puzzles that you get like more health from and there's puzzles that give you access to entire new areas and I don't know like I guess I like mystery and puzzles like outside of the kind of like contrived like here's your here's your box that's where the puzzle is I like it to be like I'd like to see more puzzles that are like that actually well you have a special challenge right because your basic mechanic is very hard to visualize so you have to go an extra mile in leading people into it that a lot of games wouldn't have to right and this isn't I mean I'm not trying to non legitimize puzzle games that just say here's a puzzle like that's like that's still a thing like I still really interested in like you know like learning about how something works and then using that knowledge to solve things yeah do we want to pop up the slides and talk about your dependency chain connects to what we're saying oh alright I'll decide it's cool but yeah I guess I have optional things that you don't know exists I guess yeah but and braid had that too like optional stars that you don't even exist unless you yeah I mean those were the obvious optional things in braid has where I want to say something interesting but I don't want it to be quoted afterwards if you're in the if you're in the press turn your brain off so there's actually multiple levels of optional puzzles in braid right and the Stars is sort of one of them the stars are not like you have to be a very thorough player to know that they're there right but once they're there it's a very classical deliberate challenge it's like a hard challenge it's harder than the main puzzles in the game usually and it's a it's a puzzle solving with a tangible reward right you get this star and there's you know when you've got all of them and all that there's other stuff in the game that are puzzles that don't really give you an acknowledgement the like it's a softer it's a softer reward state or something but they're there like if you're a if you're a player who's really interested in the game you know theirs is not that many but there's probably five or six puzzles that are like that and and they're harder to see I mean they're easier to see because they're right there you don't have to like bounce off the level or something to get to them but they're they're harder to see because if you if you're gonna if you're the type of person who's just gonna go until something stops you which is often what happens in those platformers just go right past them right so I'm actually I'm interested in that idea right in in in the idea that more I don't know how to say this in a less snooty sounding way but but like the the idea that you should always get a reward for something good you did is kind of for kids right unfortunately that's what we based most modern game design on but but really there's this idea that a mature player the appreciation of the situation better than like oh you got a star right it's nice if the game acknowledges at least to remove any ambiguity like oh this is yeah this is what we were going for right but the idea that there has to be a reward of some kind is is unfortunate and it's a little bit like when you design that way it's a little bit lowbrow I guess I mean I guess it's cuz like it's kinda we're kind of doing off-topic but I mean most of the time when you solve a puzzle it doesn't reward more type of roars whatever like I'm not sure if like a stars or reward is like any like I mean if the reward is going to be a star or nothing I definitely take nothing like like I agree with you there but um rewards for solving something they have like a lot of power to feed into the rest of the game in you know in a meaningful way yeah a little bit like that and it doesn't I mean this is just la mulana again sorry you guys have a different topic you wanted to bring up I was talking about how let's just do it it's kind of an evolution of what we talked about and solve this right now right it's kind of yeah our talk that we gave here two years ago which was talking about how you want your if you want the plot you want the player to learn something about this particular puzzle right so that means you don't want them to solve it accidentally because they don't understand what you're trying to do right and you also so that means you want them to know when they attempt a solution you want them to know what you want them to have a model in their head of what the solution is gonna be and like attempt it and you know see if that worked or not and then you know hopefully you solved it so the way that I set up a lot of the levels in me I could and I think is like the perfect well for me for this game I think it's great is like make make this the space of possibilities that the puzzle can be and very big but make it so that the solution is really close to your starting point which is kind of what I representing here so like there's plenty of states that you could be in that are totally out there and you know don't really like your gonna explore this space but you're not gonna go and actually you might be completely off and never be able to come back right but if you know what the solution is it's like super easy it's like you know like four steps in that case very like from start to end it's only like four steps or three steps if you if you if you count the arrows I guess yeah step would be an hour so like yeah and then so yeah so this is just like just different states that the puzzle can be in and a starting state and nine state which is the solution and then so this is yeah so this is kind of like a theory and then I actually did it for an actual level in the game which is the level that we just saw so you start over here and the colored arrows are just so that it represents it better it's just regular arrows and yeah so like there's a ton of states but you know you can get lost over here and that's not going to help you at all or get lost over here and that's not going to help you at all so it turns out that the solution is just this and right like one two three four five steps there's like there's there's variations too like small variations as long as you end up in one of the end states you're good but if you go if you go over here or over here you're screwed so you just have to know that you just have to know what that means right and it's very deliberate right it's just like oh one two three four yeah I mean I I actually I can ask a question that I don't know how I'd answer myself how like a kind of more generically like how do you start designing like just a level and like do you consider this or is it just kind of like I think this is sort of a second step the first step is just what is the level about right like so here it's about taking this box from inside a temple and moving it outside of the temple so that you can jump on it to get to the goal so because I knew that taking there's all this literature about the fourth dimension where they talk about all these these miracles disabilities yeah all these things that you could do if you could move in 4d right or you know yeah manipulate objects in 4d and so one of them that comes up all the time is moving object from an object from from a closed container at least closed in you know in 3d and so I wanted to make a level about that and I was very clear and so then it was about like how do I make it and so then it was more about thinking like oh can I do something like this right can I can actually make it so that you you can get lost in on inside your answer to oh like how how do I start making something I guess so like it's kind of it's it's kind of a weird process so for me these days it usually I have something an idea that I'm interested in and what idea means depends on where in the project I am right if it's at the beginning of the project it's really vague it's like oh you know maybe it's rewind or something right but as you go into it it's like okay I've played around with this a bunch and I've seen some specific things that can happen and I feel like when this one kind of thing happens there's actually a lot of interesting ideas that could be explored over there and so I just kind of start playing with it and seeing what happens the witness is a little bit different like playing with it in the witness was a lot of the time just designing puzzles on graph paper instead of in code because I could do that it's faster and then just like looking at I'd be like staring at this graph paper you know solving this puzzle in all the different ways in my head to see what would happen but yeah for me there's there's always a question and the designing of the level is an attempt to answer the question or to get more information about the question just like just like a like a like a what-if like with the mechanics of my game like what if what if I did this I mean like I guess I'm tucking I put myself now but like I know that when I'm making like a puzzle game it's kind of like I'm just sort of like playing with what I've come up with I'm just like oh this is kind of fun to play around with I wonder if I can make like things that are actually difficult to do with it and then well that's actually the structure of both braid and me a guy CUDA actually is you go into different realms that have different different pages of what-if questions right so like what if you were across the fourth dimension all the time also or what if some objects can't be rewound right and then there's a whole world full of things that explore that you know yeah I think a lot of it from yeah like what you're saying it from you is just like I'm programming this mechanic about blocks that can be longer than you know that can not just be one by one that they can be more than that like to buy one or whatever and then I'm just I have to debug it so I'm placing lots of objects in there and I'm seeing like does this work and then I realized oh wow you can do that like or you can float over there or like this block is just floating in mid-air for no reason and then that's a lot of the levels were just made that way it's just there's an interesting parallel there yeah between what I was saying earlier like somehow the ideal puzzle game player at least of one of the games that I want to make is is is gonna try and go a little bit beyond the basics that people might expect and like be inventive and bring something to it right and I think I think there's different kinds of designers when when they sit down and design a game right some people are just like look making a game where you throw rocks at enemies and once they've typed that in like they've got their game sort of right and you and you try to make interesting levels but there is a different there's a different quality that we're talking about which is which is I've left no stone that I'm going to throw it enemies unturned right in the way that I throw it and and whom I throw it and that that generates most of the magic most of the time right it's like fur for both braids and the witness for me most of the best moments of the game I didn't picture when I sat down to start making it it's like they came in this process yeah I'd be interesting to to know about you know that for your game like just like coming across things I didn't really expect yeah we're just like for example like you did you come up with them mechanics beforehand and then explored what would happen or was it like I'm sure it was like there's some what star seed pilgrim was really weird like I don't even really know how it happened it was also a long time ago but like I just sort of I had the idea of like planting seeds and they grow into I can say shake right and it wasn't very fun because I just had these this one seed and it just grew into stuff because I thought it was a good idea to make it actually grow into plants and then it kind of got abstract and I just I just designed them all it on a piece of paper and I just like I guess this is kind of like a cool set of blocks and I just coated them all and they turned out to work but then and then like I mean there's stuff that happens later on that some of you know what I'm talking about and that was just like I what would happen if this rule was applied and it turned out that a bunch of them were just really weird kind of reinterpretations of what you've been learning the whole time there's actually really similar to what's going on in breeding actually it's a little different it starts you pilgrim it's a little bit less structured yeah yeah and I mean a lot of the things that I've made like I made a game called fish Bane where you're just this little guy and you throw a harpoon and you can you can jump on top of it and you fly along but that wasn't really the original intent I just I just wanted to make like I I had I thought maybe like when the harpoon sticks into a wall you can climb onto it and that would be cool puzzles but I mostly just want to have like a guy like having um holding a harpoon and like being able to run with it and so I just made it so you threw a particle which is the harpoon and if you were holding move at the same time it just kind of looked like this little guy holding our harpoon and running with it and then it was just kind of like what if like because you're running along with it I was jumping I'm like what if you could just land on it and I just played around in this test level for like an hour flying around everywhere and it was awesome and then I made a game out of there's I mean like our pointing click adventures puzzle games like if it's just like like so the interesting thing about pointing click adventures is they run a continuum from having all the classic problems of adventure games which is that yeah you're pointing and clicking but every place that you could click is like a different if statement in a piece of code and you you can't have any intention as the players you know because it's just like I clicked on this one pixel and then the vampire came and bit me and then I lived for a thousand years in flew a spaceship to another planet and now I'm in the next scene it's like that's what adventure games were like a lot of the time um but sometimes sometimes they get more systemic and systemic is not even the right thing because I don't think it has to be a system but you do want the ability for the player to kind of know what the games about and to be able to make a plan that sounds like a plausible thing that might solve a puzzle before actually doing it right like the system might be faking it but it's still pretending to be about something and then you're in your head you have a mental model of that system and that's what when you formulate a plan that's what you're using so if there's like for example if it's something about water running and turning a crank or something like the water might not be simulated properly but you're you and your head can think about yeah well actually in the days before point-and-click adventures infocomm actually got some shred of this idea and started doing a pretty good job of it sometime so like the spell breaker series for anyone who's old enough to go play those you learn a series of spells and the spells are just little verbs that you can type in but they work consistently and they're implemented with if statements but it's like look if if you have this unlock spell you can use it on anything that's locked right and another one that system me in a slightly different way is called Norden Bert couldn't make heads or tails of it which is like a it's a word game game and you actually have tools that operate on words so like there's this one thing and it called the T remover where you apply it to any object and it takes the letter T out of the name of the object and usually that gives you garbage but sometimes it turns one useful object into another useful object right and so so that idea even existed back in the 80s that's pretty cool and yes it's too bad we went through a dark age when people forgot it there's a just on the same note you're talking about like magic words there's a it's like no one knows about a few people know about it but it's a little text adventure like an indie text adventure called Suva knucks SUV eh and UX but in it you you kind of like find this spell book and you're not supposed to have found it but you find it and it has like maybe like five spells but they're all made of like multiple words and the words actually sort of form like a little language and you could just start combining them in different ways to what the spell book taught you and I mean that's kind of like just like if statements to like if you make something sticky what does that mean like that's one of the spells and I think I mean that's really cool and it's all your statements and it kind of becomes bored systemic so then our system is always necessarily better than still or like well the thing about its system is you're kind of you get a better level of consistency for free yeah you also potentially get depth for free well I don't you also get surprised right well you did surprise well so emergence is there's two kinds of surprise and they're related right so one is surprised for the player as their cleaner right and that's like spelunky kind of surprise or something and it actually both of them always happen because as soon as you start making surprise for the player you're going to get surprise for the designer to probably just something that like you make like pop out at the player but like oh yeah a monster closet though is not the kind of surprise we're talking about emergent kind of surprise it's not like twist ending surprise yeah so and that's what's interesting to me as a designer is the surprise to the developer which can then turn into surprise for the player hopefully does usually but for me that's always a good sign that I've progressed as a game designer in my understanding of the craft and of using games as a lens to view the world is when I got some new surprise by asking some of these questions right and so you don't get that with if statements but you do maybe get a kind of a playable game with your statements so I don't you know I don't want to go into some kind of I've definitely subscribe to the system's religion but I don't I don't want to be here to preach the system's religion because there's other ways of doing things that are interesting as well just be careful yeah um yeah it makes me think about how when I when I design it when I designed when I started designing that game it was it was about exploring the fourth dimension like I didn't know anything about the fourth dimension almost well I knew them off because I know to clean your algebra or whatever but and so just yet this exploration was very important and I'm not interested in playing a puzzle game that's been designed by a human in the sense of like oh I've made these puzzles to have fun played on them right I care about like these very interesting topics that are very you know complicated and so it goes towards like the authorship thing right like when I when I designed a puzzle like it's about trying to be as simple as possible but it's about a thing that's 4ye like it's not about you know jump over here jump over there or whatever and so it's it sort of feels like I'm not the author of a possible interests you know you're just kind of like this would be like maybe this is a cool thing and then I mean try it and it turns out it's cool and they make it a level and them players like I have that is cool I agree right yeah so that makes it harder to like how can you do that without a system like how I I was trying I was thinking about making a game once that kind of you I mean I've made it I've made a couple of games once that use kind of like a little like arbitrary language and it was just like I you know these numbers mean these things or like you you if it's like a it was like a there's like a hacking game and you type like little words and eventually kind of like learn how to use those words to complete the game and then I was like I should probably be using like real things like like is four dimensionality even though it's not like a real thing that we we deal with in real life it's like it's it's it's something that's like it's like an extension of reality it's something that you consider and like learn about reality from and I kind of but it's really hard to do that it's really hard to make like a puzzle game that's based on something that even if it's like kind of like a realistic extension of reality so I mean I I mean I feel like braid does that too because it's just like like time as an extension of reality and that you're both kind of exploring this sorry my nose um and and like like fish brain isn't about an extension of reality it's not like oh what if you could jump on a harpoon in real life like that doesn't so I don't know like do you do you feel like like I'm just curious like how you guys feel about like arbitrary systems as opposed to have maybe more realistic forms I the thing that comes to mind to say at least is so as I design more stuff I'm moving away from reality plus augmentation like the witness isn't really that and what I'm thinking about doing next really isn't that but also to go back to the interactive fiction example you know you're talking about making a game with words that do different mean different things have you played the gaas stack it's an interactive fiction game so so it's it's a game you should it's it's it's a it's an interactive fiction game that takes place entirely in a made-up language but that sort of shares the structure of English right so it's a it's a sort of a linguistic philosophy oriented game right so you know the word and' and or' and whatever will be recognizable but the nouns and verbs will all be totally fantastical things and in an interactive fiction you use verbs on nouns right so you very quickly have to start figuring out what these things mean but you don't really know what they mean even like halfway through the game you've got like oh this thing this creature I think it's a bird-like creature somehow because of the way it's being described but I don't exactly know you know and and so you're trying to figure out yeah it's really interesting and so what what that sort of how that's relevant to the current discussion I think is if you go far enough in a certain direction if you have enough interesting subject matter you can shed light on something interesting it doesn't have to be about the physical world right so in this game you get some insight into your interaction with language and the way language helps you picture things and it's sort of an exploration of that without ever being pedantically so right it's just naturally happiness I to go back to the harpoon thing I think yeah that's I don't know I'm okay with that I don't I don't object to it yeah but you know if we went like to really then go and explore different different topics not just the fourth dimension but you know like I think I think papers please as an exploration of yeah is this a papers yeah it's an exploration of like being in that position and like it's not really it like a puzzle game but like I feel like I don't feel like it's an it's not even like I don't know like puzzle games are comic in this big category to me of like just things that are like exploring these what-ifs and more often than not puzzle games are very mechanical and I think that they were kind of like the first games that were like what if this but they're always like abstracts and stuff and like and games like papers please is it's also just a really well explored what if but it's also not a puzzle game that makes sense thank you everybody for coming and putting up with all this

Channel: IndieCade

Views: 12,845

Rating: 4.9135137 out of 5

Keywords: gaming, video games, indie, indie games, game development, indie development, IndieCade

Id: Ul_ZfzfHRek

Length: 42min 24sec (2544 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 26 2014