Open-Ended Puzzle Design at Zachtronics

[Music] hello everyone so I'm Zack this is drew you introduce yourself yeah my name is drew messenger Michaels I have a podcast called everybody's talking at once Zack has been on a couple of times and he didn't want to just do a talk so I'm here pretty much just as someone Zack enjoys talking to about his games yeah so he's gonna introduce I'm gonna back off the Michael there he's gonna introduce the games that he's made over the last 10 years or so and then I'm gonna ask him a bunch of questions that you probably didn't have time to prepare because you didn't read the entire Zack like book that that is recently got kick-started and yeah I'm hopefully gonna get some good stuff out of you yeah so what despite what it may look like I'm in charge here I'm here as a provocateur you're in charge yeah yeah last year they assigned me a provocateur but this year I got to bring my own okay so we're just gonna blast this cuz I think the discussion is what's really interesting whoo so who here has played Daktronics games or who hasn't I think that's the better question okay so I'll be really quick because there's not that many people here so we're gonna talk about three games mainly today Jinjin io is the first one so these are the Oh God so from from like a historical standpoint electronics we were a privately owned company we did indie stuff it kind of was like whatever we I went to work at valve for ten months and then after that I came back to Zack Tronics and we like sold Zack tronics to another company and I was like new Zack Tronics and so these three games are like the new Zack Tronics games so shinjin IO is the first one I'm just gonna show the trailer really quickly and describe what's going on so this is a game about you build circuit boards and you write code into them and you have to build products you can see at the bottom there's like little timeline graphi things those are the inputs and outputs to this like machine that you're constructing so it's definitely like a programming game and there's like cool cool parts that you can integrate with there's like a screen on the side and you can see like in this case if this was our trailer actually that we we built like a circuit like the puzzle if you solve the puzzle it will light up the screen in that way so it's like somewhere in between like a simulation and a puzzle and stuff like that these are just some other other puzzles for it just showing off the nature of it the game is sort of as I guess because just like tea is 100 was still again we did before it has lots of documentation like you actually have to read a manual in order to play this game it also has a solitaire game just because opus Magnum second game we're going to talk about here's the trailer for this this is kind of a throwback to like Space Camp are some of my older games you build a machine with inputs in the form of like little marbles and then outputs in the form of like groups of marbles and you have to build a machine that turns those inputs under those outputs so again same formula and it skips in this trailer but there's like an optimization aspect to it I guess that's like the primary draw of the game but yeah it's it's about like optimizing you see that like now like that's a smaller solution there's like an infinite number of possible solutions you can build by Epis magnin was kind of famous because I had a GIF exporter in it that worked really well and I think that kind of made it I helped it blow up on the internet when it came out it's definitely our most successful game today it jewelry Adam Beauty is my favorite I still feel kind of good about writing that but yeah but you can put all these cool things and it's cool because there's like a real aesthetic component to it that is the embrace infinity that's that's out of like a diamond commercial yeah so yeah whatever it also has a solitaire game in it and then exit Punk's is our most recent game here's our kick-ass trailer this is like a like a 90s alternate universe hacking game kind of cyberpunk II it also has a manual in the form of a zine actually too zine issues that we sold as like fancy printed scenes in it you also write assembly code and then all the puzzles are like little networks that you you have to accomplish things within so maybe you have to like find a file and bring it back there just one you have to hack a highway sign with countercultural messages like wake up sheeple there's also like a game console you can program there's also a multiplayer modes blah blah but it's all about programming and they're all little scenarios like here's the scenario where you have to like repair part of your body like it's like fixing something like in the heart and like the puzzle is designed after like vaguely how your heart works and what regulates your heartbeat is that there's some scene pages there's also solitaire game and then there's also a second like arcade bonus minigame thing and that's the end of this so now you guys know everything about all of our games so that's cool thanks for coming yeah so I so I did a book which is a bunch of game design sketches and stuff and some of you guys might have heard of it I'm gonna use this for reference because this has all of my sketches in it and so this is this talk it's kind of based off a talk I gave it my you where I brought out like a couple of documents and showed them off like now we have access to all of the documents on the archive so I'm just gonna use this for reference once I put us into the right mode okay yeah okay cool so we're good so we can we can get started I think and then just when stuff comes up I'll just flip through it up there yeah I mean so let's get started here for anybody who doesn't know your process for designing a puzzle begins on paper yeah right so you you make yourself a worksheet that essentially expresses the system of the game you're working on and then you create each puzzle on one of those worksheets yeah so first of all why do you do that besides a general love of paperwork yeah I like I like paperwork I guess this is fair to say which is like a weird personal quirk it's um it helps me organize my thoughts which is kind of nice okay so first you need to capture the ideas right and so being able to capture is important but like everything can do that right like if you're really drawing on like a tablet or like going into OneNote that captures the information but I I really like paper forms because they they give you like a format right so like I'll pull up a picture obviously that's why we're all here to look at these pictures a good one 152 is the Stamper in the shipyards and infinite Factory is that okay sure yeah start simpler than that maybe so so here's a good example this is for infinifactory which is a game that we I didn't introduce but I mean like obviously it's super crude but there are places to write specific things and it seems stupid but like this this kind of it forced it allows you to create a process that like forces your mind into that process and so now what I'm trying to come up with 40 of these which is difficult it's difficult to come up with a bunch of puzzles all at once it's it's really clear what needs to be filled out and then afterwards you have like a physical record and so like with with opus magnum I pinned up all of the puzzles on the wall in our conference room and then you could look and see like okay we're like where is the game to say me where is like where is there's something missing where there too many puzzles like in like you can do it like visually and that's I think that's like a big part of our design process in general is creating things that when somebody looks at the game state they can visually like figure out like what's going on in the game right they can read what's going on in the game and in the same way like we've created a process where we can text up up in the wall and just visually without even having to think about it you can like kind of quickly assess where you're at with all your stuff right it also probably makes it easier to figure out like difficulty curves which I imagine is really hard with your games you usually we have to test those Terry well I would hope so yeah yeah but that's probably one of the more interesting things about your paper process is there there is I I think it's fair to say a longer than normal period during what you've designed the puzzle but no one has played it very very few people have played it yeah it's not like a like a valve style iterative process where you prototype something and then you get a bunch of notes then you prepend then you iterate on it within the game engine it's more like you're iterating on paper yeah yeah so that seems very different and is that just because like paper is higher resolution than any screen we've come up yeah that's true and that's also true yeah I don't I don't know it's I guess it's kind of hard to defend like the paper thing is like a thing that I don't know like come on say you should use paper as a design tool but like I'm also not trying to talk you out of yeah yeah yeah yeah so yeah okay so the other thing that I think this book and like these drawings show is that Zach Tronics puzzles more than most puzzles I think are always story beats they specially in these last three games they've conveys something about the world or the characters they move things forward I think you'd be sad if we didn't mention cool dad oh yeah Biggs and or wedge of the Zack Tronics universe yeah yeah but I think it's interesting to think of these not just as puzzles or as you know escalations of a single challenge but as expressions of a system that's part of why the form thing makes sense is Zack Tronics games more than most games rely on the player understanding what the pitch is what the actual sense of the world is definitely we talked about that process yeah so how do you how do you decide what is gonna be a toothy enough concept for a Zack Tronics game like alchemy worked but you know like submarines really starting at the beginning yeah yeah yeah okay so I guess the I should explain the framework kinda so so that the the with Shenzhen IO we sort of started developing a process for making these kinds of puzzle games and so like I mean I guess it's most of you have played games you kind of these games you kind of understand that like they're the puzzles are not random like they're connected together each puzzle is is intended to be like a small story and so this is something we've like really doubled down on pages which one pitches oh yeah there's a let's see here 2:58 there's a bunch of I think they're opus magnum ones okay yeah so yes so we've actually gotten kind of like locked into this process now for better or worse but so our writer Matthew will when we come up with a pitch for a game which we'll come back to in a second like how do we start like the first concept but like when we actually figure out what we're making like okay this is a game about alchemy and you're gonna build machines that do alchemy we sort of started like coming up with ideas for what the world is like it's kind of like a fantasy kind of thing and everybody loves that and then we like I basically like tasked our writer Matthew with coming up with a list of like pitches for puzzles in the game and so we call them puzzle pitches and each one of them is like a small little narrative thing and you can see some oh I guess I shouldn't leave too much text on screen for too long because then it's gonna distract you guys but like the idea of also the the one of the opening puzzles Novus Magnum is you turn Alette into gold which is yeah really in real life alchemy that's like the ultimate expression of the art but the whole joke is in this world that's passe yeah exactly and so that's actually one of the I think that's like one of the for the first real puzzle you do is turn one into gold and so that that's interesting because that one didn't come straight from Matthew that was like a like oh it turns out in our engine is actually really easy to create like you know gold from lead and then so like we should like create a pitch that captures that thing and then shove that to the front some of these are more like I would have never even thought of them try thing with a good one oh there's one about like a stamina potion that's that's one of the classics for opus Magnum it's a stamina potion for an heir who or somebody member of the family who is having difficulty creating an error maybe and stamina potion and so I would have never thought of that for a puzzle like that's not where you come from when you're like okay how can I challenge people to combine two inputs together with no and so so Matthew came up with that one and and then like basically hand it off to me and that's where it's my job it's like the puzzle designer to come up with like okay what's a molecule that kind of like a folks this thing right like well I mean Oh an opus Magnum it's all about fake molecules there's no real system there so like I was creating like you know like something that like how do I like a visual language I guess like a visual language that doesn't really mapped anything real but like something like so that everything feels real within the system and then like map that like into this puzzle yeah you're hitting the secret sauce and this might lead us to the way things get started but you said I mean the exact thing you said to me one time was that you'd be in a worse position if you were smarter which i think is yourself a facing way that's saying what you meant was that you have a quality of personality quality that your audience doesn't necessarily share which is that you want things to be simpler when you learn about a concept you start thinking about alchemy or you're looking at integrated circuits or something your brain always wants to come up with the version that's gonna make more intuitive sense and be easier to manipulate yeah and you can see in sort of the user created levels for some of these games that that's not necessarily an instinct that everybody who's into this kind of stuff would share they wanted to be a really complicated math problem or something you always want to sort of abstract it down yeah to where it's gonna be repeatable and a game essentially definitely yeah so is that is is it fair to say that that's sort of when you know that this is going to be a site Ronix game or could be is when you're able to abstract things down boil them to their essence like that a little bit yeah I mean I think that's I mean really I mean it's it I guess this is almost more like a production yeah question which is like how do you how do you know or how do we know when we want to make a game and like that the we have lots of game ideas right and so it's not just like pick any game idea and then proceed to like Bernie you're making it we have to kind of evaluate concepts and see what that and I and a lot of times it probably comes down just to confidence like that it's like III think like okay we're gonna make a game about alchemy so I'm on the line to make like a bunch of puzzles that are like little like molecules and that like have enough mechanics and at some point like an ending your soul it feels like it's like yeah we could probably do this right and I think for me a part of that is figuring out like a simplified model of how it works I guess with alchemy it's not real so it's easy but like with shin-chan I oh it was like okay what like what is a way in which players can connect things that look and feel like microcontrollers without being as complicated as microcontrollers the idea to make it a simulation would have never crossed my mind it's just like coming up with like a simple version of it yeah we yeah and that a lot meaning is now the time to talk about cool dead because that because I think it's it's probably for anybody who hasn't played a shin-chan I oh cool that originally was an idea for a game you didn't release correct me if I'm wrong the second golden age which is something you kind of chopped up for parts and bits of it up and a bunch of other games but 217 I think is cool bad and this is it so you know we talked about it like really briefly when Zach was introducing the games but in chené chené io you're making stuff very often you're making the kinds of simple electronic junk that a lot of us buy and use briefly and never think about again in this case there is a a musical you know artist named cool bad who wants a bunch of light-up vape pens that will change color in sync with each other for a concert yeah so you're creating that mechanism yeah yeah so like we can talk about the creation of this yes exactly so like how did like did this begin with cool dad being extremely funny which I would agree that he is or did this begin with the idea of synchronizing lights or is that not even relevant I think like probably the way to trace this puzzle is that it started off in a game we never made second Golden Age and then it became oh god okay so start off in this game single nature it was just a character it was just part of the story and then it from there we can't we didn't make that game and then I remember how it became in 2 shens and I was just like I just love that idea right I just remembered that and loved it and and it was sort of like worked it into the story somehow and then at some point I probably pitched like an idea for like what it could be physically like that it's like lights up right and so there's like that since it's like that's kind of like weaving together like like things that I I could imagine being plausible in like the world like the mechanical system that we've created rightly you can't just make anything with circuits like it has to be something that's like a circuit like a problem that could be solved with circuit boards so there's like a mechanical part that I'm bringing and then there's the narrative part of like math you having to write something that he can like live with and make work and then they just kind of like circle around each other and like push back and forth and so like the like the light-up RGB you know like the specifics of the puzzles that you've like an RGB LED and you have to sequence like the different you know you turn on like red and green and blue and now it's like white or you can turn on red and red and green and make yellow and that kind of thing and so like that that's definitely like a mechanic side thing that kind of pushed in but like it was taking this this story element from a previous game and it like it it was never in at no point I guess it's like a lot of puzzles are built I mean I guess that's there's a lot of ways in which art puzzles are different from other puzzles but there was never a solution in mind there wasn't even like oh I want players to learn how to do this specific kind of thing it was just like well you know like electronic like one common thing in electronics is modulating things with pwm which is like an electronics thing that like that would be a cool idea for a puzzle like it's not like like it that's not like like like a lot of puzzle games that are really mechanical seem to be that like it's like they they have an idea for like a way that mechanics could be used together just in the game not like in the universe of the game but in the game itself and it's like oh I'm gonna make a puzzle that like scratches that itch that uses that like this thing I figured out as a designer yeah for us that's never part of it right it's just like well PWM is real in real life so we could make a puzzle about that and then like cool dad is a character who's real in this universe and so we can synthesize those together but like at no point is it ever about like how players will perceive it it's just like let's make something that's real within the game yeah nor is it crazy I guess I don't know a big traditional puzzle design at least you know I like you know small see conservative puzzle design says you make a working system and then you slowly take away parts yeah and then you challenge the player to put those parts back in the proper place and usually is like the proper place as though there's only one yeah I get the sense that you don't think about puzzles that way at all it is more like what makes sense within this universe or maybe even just the universe yeah and if it's a valid problem than any solution someone's gonna come up with it works within the system is by nature by its nature a valid solution yeah exactly yeah yeah so that's I think for a lot of people who design puzzles bonkers I guess I don't know right I mean I've never like in that's that's this is something that I've been wrestling with a little bit is like are these even puzzles like does that even matter like right right I don't know I don't care I guess yeah well it's intuitive to you that's yeah yeah that's really interesting about it is I think I think you you've said before that you've you know you've tracked in the book there are a few just like non-aggressive yeah yeah that you may they're bad I mean they're not your best yeah they're not bad but they're not they're not chené chené IO level interesting yeah partly because they're not narrow devised yeah partly because they're not your lane and partly I think because especially with these last three games there's always an insistence on a connection to like the physical world of the game yeah with alchemy you're you know with Wii and opus Magnum you're always making a thing that makes sense in the world like the stamina potion makes perfect sense in the context of these great houses yeah the cool bad vape pens or something that you can picture it's and that's the thing that almost exists right like there you know changing Bay pens or not you know yeah all that out there yeah and even in XO punks you know I mean it's it is one of those act Ronix coding games but it's sort of in the wrapper of one of those act Ronix I think what you've referred to as the gluing spheres together games right like it looks physical oh use the X's the little you know executable dudes who are deploying the viruses they move around in space you can see when it breaks yeah right so like if you want to talk about that fridge let's talk about that yeah I'm gonna flip back so this is one of our I don't really know what the theme of this talk is unfortunately sorry it's white wires Ektron exposes the way they are what are we do yeah so this is what something that's super-important at Daktronics and I'm gonna show you oh it's probably gonna string at the beginning because I don't know how to use powerful no one does okay so we're gonna look at this so this is a game about building circuit boards and writing code and the thing I want to draw your attention to are the the bevels on the sides of the chips and that they're they're physical right like it would have been really easy to make this game where they were just like symbolic kind of rectangles but we like tried really really really hard to make them look extremely physical and this is one thing that I'm not really sure even how this resonates with our players or if it drives our success but like everything in the game is supposed to look like you could just physically pick it up off the board and like throw it or something right and it's like the hearthstone does this pretty well right like everything feels really physical and like a lot of people who make programming games and things like ours don't do this at all and I like to think that this definitely makes the screenshots of our games pop more and like the like the chip on the right like we actually have like a shader running to make the L so we have a whole there's a whole engine engine gen io that lets you make like custom LCD screens and it actually does like shader to layer it to make it look like you can kind of like to see the light shining through it and to make it really feel physical and I this is kind of one of those things that maybe it's just taste and it's impossible to tell like if it matters but like all of our games are designed to be super physical opus Magnum is a bit more abstract regular your alchemy table goes infinitely in every direction yeah but it doesn't matter like it's still I guess I don't have a solitaire game folks the same I doubt that everything is really physical and like really see where the marbles would actually like slot in yeah exactly and like in contrast the solution with like space Kevin I was gonna say that is something space chem does not happen at all yes base Kevin just sort of has circles everything looks very flat they're floating there's a lot you know like there's nothing like the isometric view for example and Xbox exactly and so that like this this was a game that was sort of looking like we were ever maybe kind of worried that it could be too symbolic and too abstract and then like I was playing Mega Man Battle Network for weird nineties game reference or whatever as 2000's and I was like oh we should totally do this as like chunky isometric platforms and and it I I don't know I think it works I think it takes the game that what otherwise look way more boring and like kind of pops it up a little bit and yeah and just yeah I thought what I think and I'm sorry if this is disappointing to anybody in the room but one of the interesting things about SAC tronics puzzles is it's not possible I don't think to talk about the puzzle design and why it works without also talking about things like story in art direction I don't think you think of those things as necessarily separate things yeah and maybe there's a good time to talk about you know the process of creating a game I think for you lately the last three games anyway has involved primary research you're saying oh yeah you're playing Mega Man Battle Network you were looking into actual hackers eanes 600 well that's just a personal that's just me very often I get them from my actual like history into our game is you yeah yeah I mean if you want to talk a little bit about your hacker I was never a hacker but I used to read 2600 in high school and I was like obsessed with it you aspired that's the correct term probably yeah I really really wanted to be a hacker and I'm not it never was but and it's don't even know what that means but yeah when we made X of punks that was totally like a chance to indulge that yeah and there's I mean primary research is of course again harder in something like opus Magnum where you're making it up right it's a fantasy world do a certain degree gets all made up yeah well sure okay yeah alchemy yeah I really made up but there's a history of people thinking about alchemy and there's also like you said it's true it is it is actually kind of based I mean like the we tried to base it off of like alchemy which is unfortunately not a science and and hard to you know to base stuff that is unfortunate I agree yeah but but I guess what I'm trying to get at is you try to make it as real as as possible with Shenzhen it's extremely real right yeah you could you could have the puzzles in Shanghai oh look like diagrams or something yeah and all the same visual information would be there they would arguably be arguably be just as readable yeah but the aesthetic of that game where you feel like you're in a place I do think I mean I'd be curious to hear what folks in the room actually when he gets Q&A but but whether or not it makes it sort of easier to get into I think it definitely makes it more believable and yeah yeah yeah so we we have like the the manual first engine I know is filled with these Dalek data sheets like this and these are absolutely based off of what real data sheets look like like we printed out a bunch of real data sheets from a bunch of companies and then sort of like synthesize that internally and use that use that to create these new things so the game could look like that right but it does yeah I think that's pretty pointed yeah totally and and so we there's a funny anecdote I guess that we we sold like a thousand binders like like custom binders that held the data sheets in it and somebody like one of our like somebody that is like a friend of like somebody who works at the studio but also as a chronic fan bought one of these and like had it sitting out at home and as his wife found it and was like oh are we are we moving to China what is what is this for you know because it has like a fake like employment letter at the beginning of migration for immigration forms and yeah oh yeah there's like an unfilled immigration form in the beginning which is great right because I mean because that stuff's a good example of like you know these manuals are not just utilitarian they don't just teach you how to play the game you don't just flip to the one that's relevant to your puzzle their roleplay I mean it's your the the immigration form is your D&D character sheet kind of in this act Ronix world the first the first five pages of it are just storytelling yeah yeah it's and their storytelling throughout I mean this is probably the most integrated and true in XO Punx where instead of a manual which you have with with tea is 100 or Shen Jedi oh you have ziens and these scenes you know like some of it actually gives you practical information that you need in order to solve some of the puzzles you know unless you're just incredibly intuitive or you looked it up and read it or something but it also has a bunch of information about how these hackers relate to each other there's recipes and that stuff is absolutely not strictly necessary to solve any given puzzle but it's 100% necessary to get into the spirit I think maybe that's more important than people realize when you're dealing with super abstract puzzles yeah I guess we don't know I'm this one we don't have any data on any of this stuff right so like we don't we're not able to like fork the universe and make like boring except honks and fun EXO punks and see how they do don't a be test where it's just like frictionless cubes and you know blank yeah yeah yeah I think it's important to me right and that like that's this is how I am able to make these games is by doing all the stuff like I couldn't like if we didn't have like the story coming like before everything I do I don't know if I would know even know what to do so talk to me about the the primary research for example in X punks like what is that process like and why is it important to you because you wanted to be a hacker but I think it was important to you not to just remember what it felt like you want to be a hacker in the 90s but to actually look at primary sources about people who were or wanted to be hackers in the 90s yeah so I think the real the real danger that we talk about internally is not misremembering it ourselves but copying the way that other people think that they remembered it which is weird like there's lots like if you think of like the 90s right there's like a zillion games about the 90s out there now and like they have a lot of stuff in common like remember floppy disks yeah do you remember the internet like do you remember dial-up sounds like there you go the 90s right and and for us like we also remember floppy disks and dial-up sounds and stuff but we don't want to make a game that's just that right and we want to like sort of put our own spin on it and once it's whole that we found especially useful with Xbox and now I guess we're like addicted to it is we went back and found a bunch of like 90s cyber culture documentation so like I have like a stack this big of like wired magazines from the 90s that I bought on eBay you can buy it all on eBay it turns out I guess that's like an ad for eBay by old game you know all stuff to use as reference materials on eBay yeah we have a copy of the Wired style guide which tells you how to write like Wired writers and like what cool words to use and like you know when it's like the I bond you can call like yeah yeah the Internet the information superhighway yeah shortened to I by everyone I'll know what you mean yeah exactly it's totally allowed possibly encouraged you should make up words and they should have at least three hyphens and yeah it has to be like Compu global hyper mega net exactly yeah yeah it's yeah so we found that we found like too much like Timothy Leary like mondo cyberculture stuff that was actually useless it turns out maybe a second order way cuz Steve Jobs was obsessed with it or whatever yeah that comes later yes not the 90s so so I think that comes again it comes through really clearly in EXA punks because a lot of the levels are real hacks or they're based on yes yeah whether it's you know yeah brute-forcing a credit card or or I wrote down the page number for snacks net which is an exit Punk spoiler so I don't know if we we're going to talk about snacks no all right let's talk about snacks net that is 3:41 anybody here deeply sad about getting spoiled on X upon I think anybody here who really you know who cares deeply has probably played it so that that's all right so this is a really good level really good puzzle in its own right but it's also a really big turning point in the story yeah and it's also based on one of the more famous hacks in the real world do you want to talk explain it did you who knows what Stuxnet is so so Stuxnet was a virus that got into everybody's computer worm I guess technically not a virus but it got into everybody's computers like [Music] later I don't know and it turned out later that it was actually like designed by like a government or something to specifically disable an Iranian nuclear centrifuge facility and everybody's like what that's kind of weird and and so like when we were going through like historic acts like we're like okay we want to make a puzzle where you have to like write a virus that disables like a nuclear centrifuge you know and that was kind of just like a thing on its own and we're like okay how do we fit that into the story and so we had like a bunch of other elements that we just kind of wove together and made that viable like in the in the case of in EXA plunks there's a convenience store that is rapidly spreading and is also has like some sort of like reality is fake cult thing going on yeah yeah where they and so this is just kind of synthesized from like stuff that we felt was kind of in the air like you know it just seems kind of 90s like difficult's you know companies convenience stores right you know it's just kind of nineties right like it's there was no convenience store death cult as far as I'm aware but yeah convenience stores and death cults are two of the most nineties things imaginable so yeah stick them together yeah and and then we were able to tighten with like other points in the story like as a character who works there and then we're like okay like she can uncover this kind of thing and like yeah yeah yeah can you walk me through like the puzzle itself like what was interesting about the nuclear center for you centrifuge thing from a puzzle design turns out nothing this is actually a really tough one so I looked up documentation for nuclear centrifuges and tried to find out like there's actually like a huge does that sound whirring I don't know it's the murmuring you know we're on camera it's okay so I'll explain it and so there's actually like so I was trying to figure out like okay what actually happened in this hack so first place Wikipedia right do some research there not a lot of information i I guess there's actually fair amount of information but I found like a report that was put together thereby like a security agency or something and they were talking about this is exactly what happened during this hack and this is exactly how it was supposed to work and it turned out like they were doing two different things like the the main thing they're doing is they were like spinning up the the centrifuges - it turns out that there's like a then unstable speed for the centrifuges that like in order to get it up to speed you have to like take it you have to bring up the speed and you have to take it through this zone where it's unstable and like the solution they had which was just to do it to get through that zone as quickly as possible but hypothetically you could like bring it down into that zone and then it would like vibrate a little too much and then like the metal would expand and then if you like slowed it back down like the metal would contract and somehow it would cause it to like like jam and then like it destroyed it was actually really an effective I don't think it really slowed the DEM down at all I think it was a failure but um but it created chaos okay well I don't actually don't think it really I think created chaos in the general public I should like the real takeaway of Stuxnet which is kind of interesting from from a perspective anyway yeah it's as much about what it makes reality appear to be as the actual effect of the hack Biggs a lot of hacks you're doing and exocomps are stupid yeah they're making all the copiers go off at once at the copy place oh yeah ordering a pizza you didn't pay for or like you know dumb stuff yeah arguably less dumb but they're turning it into a puzzle so obviously like though the only way to do this is like okay you have to like we're kind of like stuck you know reflecting this reality sell like we're gonna have centrifuges in it and then you'll like increase the speed and then hold it at a point and then wait for it to shake itself to death and then bring it back down and like that was the first version of the puzzle we made and it was terrible it's actually one of the worst puzzles in the game it just didn't work within the system it's a sort of like real-time control aspect like a lot of it I don't wanna say it's a complaint we get but a lot of our puzzles especially like Shenzhen IO and exit punks they're not like feedback systems it's not like like there's not like a puzzle like Oh drive the car around or whatever and the reason why is it's really hard to Telegraph like what you have to do how close you are to solving it if the puzzle just has like these are your inputs your outputs it's kind of limited but it makes it really clear and it makes it really like approachable if it if there was the thing whereas like drive this car around the simulation you'd have to figure out like not only how to drive the car and how to write code that does that and how to do a good job at that which is basically they all use turned down they turn into like writing a eyes or something but you'd also have to like figure out like okay what are like the physics of this car simulation and like then you'd have to like write like a test framework so you could directly control the car it was like no that's that's just gonna look that's gonna get away from the point of these games which is you're supposed to know what you're doing when you're supposed to write the code to do the thing that you know that you have to do yeah so so again like said this this became a sort of like a like a feedback based simulation where you have to like you know get it up there and get it shaking and then like bring it back and it didn't work at all and so we ended up like this was one of the puzzles that we kind of like scrapped the entire thing and then made a new version of the puzzle that was just like oh god we just need anything that'll work in this case so maybe that's a bad example but we ended up getting making a puzzle that was better yeah and had a gimmick and this is actually maybe one of the rare examples of the kind of puzzle designer it's like okay what's something that would be mechanically interesting and how can I like make that agree enough with the subject material that I'm comfortable with it so this would be one of the points where I compromised and just make like a puzzle and then like try to integrate it better but it's kind of an interesting puzzle it's unlike a lot of other puzzles in the game because it was designed from that kind of mechanics and sneakily this is I think the other bit of your secret sauce which is that you base this stuff on the real world you try to ground that as much as possible but you're not beholden to making it a copy of the real world in any way yeah and another good one hundred you were changing the way the language worked right up until oh yeah and came out all of these right which is not something you could do if you were basing this on real assembly yeah or something like that but that's something we people say often like oh why don't you use like JavaScript or like real assembly it'd be great if I could like learn like real like arm assembly it's like no it wouldn't be great like that would not be the same it's yeah chin chin IO is a good example of that that we had the the sleeping behavior worked one way and just kept confusing people and so instead of trying to like teach them harder we just made it easier to use right and like that's there's a lot of these these kind of like factors that push back and forth like we can make something that's more realistic but we can also say okay we're just gonna like stop and just make something that we can actually do or you know like with puzzles we want to do something that's informed by reality or we just want to make something that's mechanically sound yeah how do you know when you've pushed it too far or not far enough as far as it being reality is it yeah you know people have a bad time okay yes when somebody's playing your game and having a bad time you know you up sure that's like the only objective measurement and I never mean having a bad time because people don't have a good time with our games anyway and they're notoriously difficult to play test because people don't feel good about like our games infinity where your wife was testing a puzzle and it took her eight hours to realize oh this is impossible yeah yeah I didn't accept a minute I was like it's not impossible keep trying and yeah it was a good sport about it like we've definitely had people who we were okay so space chem had just come out and we were out like like a really like low-cost like festival like a local festival thing and we had set up space count on a computer like a local school and and somebody came by and played it for like five minutes and they just kind of I just walked away it's a common reaction to our arcade sound yeah I just kind of disgust I mean we have like as Magnum is set up in the igf pavilion and it's just like five people just gonna walk in well okay so so let's talk a little bit about tutorials right what do you talk what do you think of as the bumpy funnel oh yeah cuz you I don't always call it the bumpy fun well you you haven't I can cite my sources and show my work but it's it's like you I think there's a little bit of chaos in what words act Ronix puzzles are in it's impossible for it to be a gentle difficulty curve and sort of a traditional way that's why some of the more recent ones you can pick the order you do them in to a certain degree right in chunks but I think you said you're really careful about let's say the first four or the first five years to make sure that people get on board it the care drops dramatically or for the course of the game right the first puzzle it has to like work perfectly with most people and like the next puzzle they have to not get lost and like by the time you're halfway in like who cares if you complete the game or not right like a lot of people don't and a lot of people don't but some people do and like trying to balance for like what's the right level like we can't just have like a difficulty setting to make sure that everybody can find their difficulty and get through like it's a puzzle game like if it's too easy people complain that it's not there's not enough there if it's too hard people just stop playing like it's unclear if you even have to beat a puzzle game to like play it right like right eating it is necessary I don't know it's like a philosophical thing I don't really know the answer Jim I mean the more there's a story the more it feels like yeah resolution yeah yeah so we yeah that's definitely a thing to think about too is how it ties in with the story but yeah was the original question well how do you make tutorials yeah lumpiness so yeah so like hypothetically when you're doing it like there's the idea of like a concept map or whatever like in education stuff we're like you you start with like something that you teach people first and you build out there and if you try to like I was just talking about this like yesterday like if you try to just like jump all the way to something on the outside of this concept web like they're not gonna have the the dependencies necessary to understand that and this is like a theory and like real education not like whatever we're doing here and that like you you you need to figure out like basically like a dependency map of like which which concepts are dependent on other ones and so hypothetically if we were really good at this we could like figure that out and like test it and like figure out like okay what concepts do people have to learn before they learn other ones like our games are kind of like like an educational space and that they have lots of concepts that work together in emergent ways and they build on top of each other and I'm like I'm not smart enough to build that map right so like we sort of end up solving it the bad way which is that like we kind of put somebody on the game we see where they get confused and then we either try to like better like we try to create it so that they either like just understand it because we've simplified it to the point where it's intuitive enough or like wheat or they can like learn what's going on like with like a tutorial a common thing we do in our in our games now is like the first stage you'll be like not so some people will suggest that they would they would love to see more like half completed puzzles and our games where it's like half completed you have to figure out what's missing I will never make a puzzle like that well you're the first puzzle is often like that well the first putt no it's that there is a solution to one puzzle over here and then there is another puzzle over here and if you're actually different right because you see like a fully working example here and then you have like a space to do your own while it's still on screen sure at the same time so opus magnum but tutorial isn't a bunch of these our other games there's just like one of them and then you have to just like off and read the manual or I guess but that's alright there's no butts Magnum you're you're cramming for your exam yes exactly it makes sense that there's a bunch of sort of guided exercises before you get set loose it's funny you say it makes sense that that's the case like obviously the story conceit came after sure right like we want it to feel like it's obviously that way because of the story yeah yeah yeah well you talked as well about how when you approach tutorials the story beats are almost like the the character becomes an analog for the player and in the sense of like an opus magno oh yeah and it's a is is impatient with the fact that he has to go through a tutorial that's your players yeah they in infinite factory the the the people you're seeing dead all around are the people who wash out before they get very far into the game right thank you exactly yeah I think I think games work really well when like the or at least our our puzzle games work really well when like the the player is in a similar space I think that's why so many games start with like characters with amnesia yeah is because like the player also doesn't know what happened prior to the game starting and also wants to know what the hell is yeah exactly and so yeah that's like a little story trick is like like I can't like physically aligning like the mental state of the characters with the players that are on the same boat that like our players really wanted to skip people we saw people complaining about wanting to skip the Opus Magnum tutorial and it's like oh cool we wrote the right story to go with it you're totally in Anytus yes wanting to skip there's a lot of layers to wanting to skip a tutorial in which the protagonist is complaining about wanting to skip yeah yeah all right should we put up an early puzzle while we're talking about this yeah maybe like 264 is I think tell us if a calcification and bonding in opus Magnum okay page number or maybe it's an early sketch of that concept it's the final exam yeah okay yeah so this is super simple but it really sets you up for everything that comes after yeah yeah what about it what about yeah well I guess I guess this is a good example of how you can teach somebody this kind of system because like you said it's not the same as teaching someone fractions or biology or something like that I think you've actually one time compared to the Neil steffanson book like an ax thumbs I would it's called where the monks have to learn an infinite amount of useless information that's moving on our games yeah do that a lot though even though people like your games yeah the monster bleep pretty good but but like building those maps for what is essentially fake knowledge but knowledge is gonna be useful to you within the fictional world that you're in yeah something that you guys have gotten much better yeah space cam I think it's you know this is I think it's fair to say space come does not have the world's best tutorial no it's terrible okay well this is the bumpy follow thing he was talking about so so we made space come had no idea how to like teach people how to play a game like Space Camp and we we built a bunch of screens of text with pictures and like when you start a puzzle it's like here's a full screen of text please read this understand it look at the pictures get it and then play the game and it doesn't work surprise like and a way that you could also build tutorials which also spoiler alert does not work is that you can walk people through a process and you say hey you're not you know you have no free will like you have to gonna tell the Khitan carousel story do so well we get to that so what a lot of tutorials try to do is they'll say that like you like don't do anything now click here now click here now click here now click here and they kind of explain why you're doing it but they're really just telling you click here just click where we tell you to and now you know how to do it you're like what no I just was telling looking where you told me to and even if you're reading it there's some part of your brain that's not interpreting exactly in actual information so this is like a totally bogus pops I think I'm gonna mention a study that was done that has nothing to do with this and then I'm gonna draw a comparison and because I drew a comparison from a study it's gonna make it sound authoritative but you shouldn't listen you shouldn't take it that way because it's not that's not how these things work but I'm gonna do it anyway demonstrate how not to gather knowledge yeah yeah exactly well so in a way this is a metaphor for how we gather knowledge ok so we'll come back to that - don't let me forget that so there's a study that was done by a moral scientists in the 1960s called the kitten carousel has anybody heard of the kitten carousel if I didn't know that guess they pull the picture able yeah so and I'm totally probably getting it wrong so that doesn't even matter right because it still works in layers so kitten carousels you take two kittens who were born in the dark and have never seen light and therefore their eyes don't know what's going on and then you take them out of the darkness for like half an hour once a day because it's the 60s and you can get away with this and you put them in this like carousel configuration where so there's I'm gonna just kind of pantomime this so there's like a like a what do you call it like a like a cylinder and there's like black and white stripes on the cylinder so there's like a visual pattern and you put the two kittens in it and you put them on this little carousel thing and so one of the kittens can walk and walk around and when it walks it'll pull the other cat the opposite direction and because it's like a cylinder the cats will see the same thing but one cat is walking and one cat is being shuffled and the cat that walks will develop like a functional visual cortex system and the cat that has just dragged along but sees the same visual input well not and so this now science science metaphor time is over this is kind of like tutorials right and that like if you if you if you have a tutorial where you're just telling people where to click and your tell it like you're showing them what happens when they click and you're telling them to click it it's not the same as somebody thinking ok what am I trying to do and then they click it and see the reaction right like you write that feedback loop just getting like a one-sided feedback loop where it's not a feedback loop it's just stuff coming at you it's not the same as try something see what happens it changes your model as you do that a possibility of screwing up I think is actually really important to not only screwing up an ideally you want it to be that you can't screw up but you have the autonomy to take the steps right that little kittens locked into that little thing it's not gonna walk out of the science experiment I'm living normal kitten life but science metaphor time was over it's ya know it's it's you you you and so this is the bumpy funnel and then we got this from like a taking a scientific research paper at least this time from a games department and then interpreting it into a way that we were thought made us feel good yeah and was not necessarily true but the the way we designed tutorials is a bumpy funnel where you you create like environments where players can learn on their own but you're trying to funnel them towards a goal and so they're just kind of doing like literally random stuff I don't if you've ever seen somebody play test your game they will just try random stuff because they have no idea what's going on but you've constructed this funnel in a way that they're kind of like working their way towards the end stochastically whether they want to or not and and that's how we design tutorials is so create these experiences like and it's it's a lot like like in a platformer or whatever like you have that first level in a platformer where you're walking down the hallway and you can only go right and there's a wall on the left and then it's like there's like a little obstacle and like all those sign on the wall it says like press a to jump and then they figure out you jump over it like that's great because it's a platform where everybody's play platform at this point right but like we do the same thing with our games but it's just different because it's not like necessarily I think that somebody knows how to play or whatever and they may not even know what they're looking at initially yeah um you look at an alchemy table and opus Magnum what sexually are you looking at right they must to explain that to you in a way that at least at this point in game history people don't need it platformers explain to them generally yeah yeah and that's one the hard parts we actually had to like constant one of the hardest levels in opus Magnus design was the first one where we're just trying to explain like what the hell is going on cuz like the idea that there are inputs and you're gonna transform them into outputs right it's like that's that's hard to explain weirdly like platformers are easy they are so you were saying the kitten carousels for how you gather now so it doesn't like it doesn't matter if I got the kitten carousel thing right or not right because I'm not actually talking about the development of visual cortexes but I'm using it as like a metaphor for something so it's a story right and the stories have you know the ability to like convey information or whatever instead of like like yeah I'm by no means like an authority on like the development of like feline visual systems but like it worked as a story to convey this idea and it worked as like inspiration they get you know it feeds into like the process right right and everything in our games is like that like I'll read about something on Wikipedia not be an expert in it and not understand it and then make a game about it right in the same sense that the goal of this talk is not to explain visual cortex development the goal of as a chronics game is not to teach you about the thing it's ostensibly about yeah and in the same way that this talk is not meant to teach you how to make games right it's just like this is this is information that you will then take and turn into maybe something useful to you right might slightly be talked about how not to make games or how not to make puzzles which is to say don't just you know don't don't take the top ten ways to make a good puzzle and sort of copy-paste them and you know even if they're not working for you or someone is not having the reaction you want them to stick with it because oh this is how it's done this is best practice maybe don't do that maybe yeah I mean you're not giving advice yeah I don't think advice anymore that's fair when did you stop giving advice and you know okay I know I don't think it yeah yeah I don't I don't think I advice is like transfer like it doesn't my situations are different anybody else's this so I gave a talk that was kind of like this but more like spiritual than like technical like if we can call this technical last year and one of the some of the feedback I got was they're like you know like you should pick better people to interview than Zach because like he's clearly been successful and so like you can't you know you put this guy up there just saying like just just do your thing and like don't try to like worry about being successful but it's like I've already been successful and so like a survivorship by yeah exactly like in that and it's true right and it's like I yeah I don't like we got lucky like a lot of people get lucky yeah like I don't know I keep but I'm not qualified to give anybody advice yeah yeah I was trying to draw the patterns between the games that you would say were they're creative or commercial failures and the ones that are successes and one or both of those ways right yeah I think there are patterns but that's not to say that's a formula that other yeah yeah can we talk about a late puzzle real quick yeah yeah um so as things how am i how long do we want to leave for all these questions we're gonna do we're gonna do questions we're gonna do a lot of them but they're gonna be really fast so there's lightning round so if your question think of how to say it quickly yeah yeah I'll explain the rules later but yeah we'll do one more thing where we 282 so you talk in the book a little bit about how often the puzzle that you think is gonna be the last puzzle ends up being too hard to be the last puzzle oh yeah yeah yeah so so we have a theory which is that the last puzzle in your game should not be the heart or the last anything in your game should not be the hardest and then because like sometimes people go and do this and it sucks because like the last level is like really hard and like you just can't like you get the last space-camp level yeah and puzzle is really hard like that's kind of bad I don't how many people get to that and then don't complete it it's actually a couple levels before though I've seen a lot of people complained but like nobody gets the end of game it's like it's like house I gotta drop out rate and grad school is really low not because grad school is easy but because if you're there you're just you're in it anyway exactly yeah and and so I didn't I didn't escape room for the first time and we got like all the way through and then we got stuck on luck the very last thing and it was clearly like a little difficult to tick up and it like it was felt kind of cheated I think we came all the way like we should be able to finish yeah right and so yeah in general we try not to make the last puzzle hardest but at the same time like it there's a really like strong instinct to I think we do it all the time we drained out too you started making the next-to-last puzzle well super hard and then there's a gimme not a gimme but like you call it a cinematic puzzle I don't think I want to do that but I don't think we pull it off like the last level one an opus magnum I think is harder than the second to last one because like I can't help myself like it's yeah you just want to make a puzzle that's like wow at the end and that often means harder definitely the Space Marine game like of it from years ago kind of does a good job of this that like the the final boss battle is almost like a like a QuickTime thing which I'm sure pissed off a lot of people but it was kind of a relief after like having to slog through it all but it's just like oh it's just over thank God you know yeah yeah other developers like that what the tomorrow corporate games usually break out of the conceit of the game from moment or something it's usually not even a puzzle for ya it's just some stuff yeah yeah yeah so huh I mean I feel like you've gotten better at that kind of pacing stuff both at the beginning and at the end the middle is probably still chaos but it probably can be chaos because the whole idea is being literate in the system yeah you still divide them into chunks in a smart way I mean do you feel like you've gotten better I think the testing is the real thing yeah we collect lots of metrics for all of our puzzles and so we know like how hard they are basically and I talked about this all the time it's it's super important like I've built like a metric system for a friend and yeah like yeah it you know like it's super useful you cannot you don't know what's going on your game especially for making a puzzle I can't imagine making a puzzle game and then not having like collecting all the data about people trying stuff not being able to solve it etcetera stuff like that like it yeah I guess people probably do it because Indies are not the best about like like collecting metrics from there yeah we've alluded to this but I don't want to leave it unsaid to your games have sort of an opt-in hard mode in the sense that some people care about the heuristics and the grams and some people don't if there was one of the things with opus magnum is we actually we wanted to make it easier to see easier beat the game and then you could just go deeper with optimizing it yeah I think it worked really well they made it really accessible you tried to do the same same thing of exponents but I think it was kind of harder like assembly programming is probably harder he's harder yeah I mean X bunks like Anna's dressed up like a spatial puzzle but it really is an assembly program yeah you get right down to it yeah yeah so huh yeah I mean so so last question I think before we go on to other people Eve that amount of time so how there are a few things that you have prototyped and tried to do is act Ronix games that so far you have not been able to do as i chronics games yeah one thing is open-world in the book you talk about a couple of things where you tried to create an open-world game and it didn't happen project typhoon you talk yeah yeah oh yeah I guess that's all if you got the book you'll find out about this book we've never talked about before but we can talk about here yeah yeah well these are these are unreleased games and you talk about like you know you get requests from people you know to fan remake your games that you never finish or something you say no because you might do something with it later yeah but I guess I'm interested in like there's there's open world and there is a synchronous multiplayer are two things that are sort of never quite happened in Zac Tronics games you have asynchronous multiplayer both with the histograms and with the hacker battle yeah and exa punks but you have a sense of what it is about those things that don't quite work we'll the open world so we tried to make an open world game be fenced when we ended up making opus Magnum but we tried to make like an open world exploration game yeah and it just did I didn't have it in me it was it was kind of I don't know it started off like it was kind of it seems like a cool idea and then one actually came to make it it's just like oh there's nothing here we have to reconstruct all these like crafting trees and like nonsense and like our games are fake but to me they're real and like III that that's really important to me on a personal level but like I need to make something that I can believe in and like crafting is not a thing I can believe in it's like the our games are also fake but they require real effort crafting is fake rewards with fake effort and like that's where I draw the line apparently like everything is fake or words I guess but like fake fake effort is not acceptable yeah your games do involve real effort yeah really they reproduce doing it like it's doing a job that is hopefully more interesting and more involved in a narrative that one's job not hopefully hopefully you've ever hopefully everyone this room has a great job but in general people who are coming to games are expecting a little bit more of like a narrative eyes bound yeah rewards you know yeah well yeah well structured exactly life is not well structured yeah and it is a reward structure I mean like I like in my personal life I will rail against games with that are like trying to just hook people and be addictive with these but like our games are that like our games are addictive they're they present you with little bite-sized problems that are like clearly defined and you don't have to go to meetings and whatever they don't use any of the Skinner box II extension stuff with like random roles it's like there's no loot boxes and we're still like hooking people it's still I still feel bad about it right but like that's you got to do it you got it is fun inherently sinister is that like the question you're we don't have time okay we don't know all right I'll leave it it is fun inherently sinister or do people have questions I'm imagining people do so okay so the rules for questions is you have to be like your question has to be one sentence are you ever gonna make a game that doesn't have solitaire in it no probably not okay so the solitaire thing is we really get a kick out of making solitaire games apparently like I've actually we have like a bunch of games kind of like planned as like potential games and I have solitaire games designed for all of them it's it it's kind a so I've discovered that many especially when somebody else is like funding the development of your games that minigames are a really great way to do little experiments that into like how to do other kinds of games I've actually learned a lot about making like solitaire games and I've learned a lot about like puzzles in a sort of like indirect way by making these solitaire games and like you could just slip a minigame it's like a game jam like I don't do game jams I can't really motivate myself to do game jams but I can totally like ship a solitaire game in one of our games and it's like a little game jam for me if puzzle games are about finding a solution that will be solution to a problem and design is about creating something that can solve a problem and then iterating on it to make it better are your games design games rather than public absolutely they don't the only reason I consider that like I would even use the word puzzle and describing it is that there's like a there's like a specific thing you're trying to do which with the design is often not even that true right like design is often more abstract when you're designing a game you certainly don't know what you're designing often and so like they're they're they're laser focused in the way that like a puzzle is a like laser focused scenario for opus magnum did you have all the verbs and mechanics before you started writing all the puzzles or did some come out of the process of creating those puzzles both like the basic I have a sketch in here really quickly there's too much stuff in here it's a beefy book yeah something like an ad so okay if I did this get we're not here to show the book it's just it's a it's a wealth of stuff for this talk so when I went to a Starbucks by myself one day when we were starting work on up this Magnum just like what is this game about and I just started drawing little things like this to try to figure out like water this doesn't even look like the game I don't even know what it is but it was just the beginning of a process of like brainstorming what like what the verbs are right and like what happens and so there was like an initial attempt I sort of initially proposed stuff internally and then we kind of start trying to build that and like at some point there's gonna be a narrative thing but you can kind of do the narrative thing independently like because it's there was like there's an important step but we didn't talk about which is there's a moment in the project where I will talk to Matthew I don't say I need you to go come up with a bunch of content ideas here is what we can and can't do in a puzzle and so this is super hard in exit funks because it's like okay all of the tropes you imagine about hacking we can't really do like we can't do a puzzle where it's like you need to go find like find information and like hack into a system like the game doesn't really facilitate that we need to show everything from the get-go and so we can't do that that often we need like the verbs are that you can like manipulate devices that are connected to the network or move files around as records and we have to sort of like come up with that interface and it's like we go for a walk and we talk about it and that's like a really important point because after that we can just branch off into our thing and so with opus magnum the the contract was that a puzzle is where you make a product you don't make a process in a puzzle like you you will make a process as part of it but like the Contra the narrative contract is that like it has to be like I need like a vial of this chemical or whatever and that's like the veneer face point and so like we have to figure out stuff to get to that point so I don't believe you actually ever explained how you come up with the initial concept oh okay so it's I have a lot of ideas and then I sort of have a list of those ideas and other people come up with ideas and then we we sort of keep them together and try to like that's kind of like like skimming some kind of like nasty soup and you just see what floats to the top and starts to congeal and like at some point like will have something that congeals and it's like okay I believe in this enough I can imagine making puzzles for this and then we kind of go ahead on it it's it's hard I mean like everybody has ideas right ideas are the things that are worthless and dime-a-dozen and like you just collect all your ideas and just say okay like we have to do something so what's the best one oh when when typhoon turned out to be a disaster and we needed a project we're like oh god we need to make a game right now and it needs to be good what do we have it's like we've got this idea from 2013 we were gonna make a space chem sequel about alchemy and it's like yeah we could do that and like it's kind of like it was at the top of the list it had floated to the top yes we scooped it off and made it I was wondering if you could maybe name a game that you like made by someone else that wasn't commercially successful and what you thought maybe didn't work for it oh that's tough I it's always the game and so all the games that have failed have failed because no one wanted to play the game I I think that's kind of the thing it's probably not PR you have any games that you really like that people don't like to play I don't like games yeah he did say he doesn't play when analyzing difficulty curve senior games which other metrics beyond completion rates the big one is something we call bounce I don't think we had a chart of it we call it like bounce which is how many people will open the puzzle and then never solve it and so that means they either skipped it which is often not a thing that you can do in our games or they fired up the puzzle they're like this and then they like uninstalled the game and that was the end and that it turns out we actually an infinite Factory we did a survey where we we asked people at the end of during early access that they have the puzzles who beat puzzles like how hard was this puzzle do you think it was too easy too hard or just right and we we took that data and we looked at that alongside the more objective measure of who uninstalled the game after getting to a puzzle and they kind of tracked enough that like we feel kind of comfortable saying that when like when I when a puzzle when somebody doesn't beat a puzzle it was too hard which seems obvious but we don't like that the survey was only people who beat it and so it was even people who beat the puzzle were like no this was too hard which is like a good indicator that your puzzle was too hard like if somebody doesn't beat it and says it's too hard of course it was too hard right but if somebody beats it and says it was too hard that's like well we're on the wrong track figure four people complaining that no the puzzles take two hours said it was too hard yeah exactly what was the most craziest solution you've seen maybe that surprise you to any of the puzzles none of them really they're not so the funny thing is that when you see a bunch of what everybody's doing none of them are that surprising if people ask the like opus magnum like I don't think I've ever been surprised by anything okay I take that back somebody hacked our save files so they could overlap like a bunch of glyphs and they make these incredible solutions where it's just like they're just pulling stuff out and it's instantly being bonded and so it's just like wow it's just like a like a magician like this molecule just appears out of nowhere and you're like how did that happen and it was that was cool and that surprised me and then I had to go in and like delete all of his leaderboard entries because he had leaderboards turned on and his friends were complaining so yeah I was wondering if you had any other puzzle design takeaways from your escape room experience oh I don't I don't want to bad-mouth escape I don't want to inspect do you like escape rooms okay I I I don't dislike I've only done one so I don't know and it was fun because I like puzzle like I like feeling smart like anybody else you know and some puzzles are good at that but then like there's there there was a mechanical contraption at the end an electromechanical contraption is somebody who built electromechanical contraptions in college it was amateur and disappointing because it didn't have any feedback and you can't build like your own custom interface that has no feedback and the rest of the puzzles were great they were on paper we could solve them and then there's like this mystery box with buttons and it's just like like you don't do that I don't know that's not professional that's just somebody who had a bad time at the end you know one sentence when will you make a truly mobile game at last never we've actually pulled all of our mobile games they didn't sell well they're to support the people who run the platforms want to like get rid of old games and just like send them to the depths of hell like no you buy a PC how do you how do you clearly convey the abstraction of your game right at the outset okay that again how do you clearly convey the abstraction the system that the game is using to a new player from the beginning I don't I don't know what do you mean can you rephrase your question sure so you're you're introducing them to a system yeah verbs nouns yeah the kids how do you let them know what that language is I mean literally manuals for three out of five of them right like those opening puzzles where you see a solution they come up with your own right next to it though I think we're a pretty great tool for that right because you see a machine that works and yeah not as well as you want it's actually really confusing to show somebody a machine that works and be like here you go they're just like what the hell is this like it it kind of doesn't solve it like that I'd say that's probably one of the bigger problems with our games not being broadly accessible is that like it it's complicated it's not everybody's I don't know how people understand it like we just make the game each time I listen to electronic podcast I think maybe it would be great if you made a game about revision control that would be impossible I'm okay with taking technical topics but version control is terrible to teach people was okay so it's it's 10:01 technically this talk ends at 10 but I've been told that we can run over a little bit so we'll take like two more questions and then we're gonna stop but then we have swag so if you want swag don't leave so what kind of metrics have you found to be most useful to decide how to balance or how to decide what a good so is the bounce rate is the big one that like puzzles that are like if so the cool thing about bounce rate is that it's in like the progress of the game so if you see like bounce rate is like this and then it spikes and then it goes back down it means that everybody we got through this part of the game like a lot of people got stuck here but then the people who got stuck here we're okay with the rest of it and so it probably means there's something wrong with this puzzle with the big spike and so we actually just it's like it's not the same as like an interest curve necessarily because you don't want people bailing on your game really but like we just try to like squish those down and so often we'll just like replace a puzzle with a new puzzle that is not as hard Thanks last question hi how do you how do you design a puzzle with multiple solutions if you don't know what all the solutions are how you do it if you don't know what any solution is there's probably a lot of solutions in it you do occasionally an early access tweak a puzzle once you see the solutions and it's either like way too easy you're way too hard yeah it's not about the number of solutions right it's really a result of the system's we build right it's it's it like they're they're fundamentally open-ended systems right and that's why I think our games aren't really puzzles that like sort of like the nature of like a true puzzle is that it has one solution and you can use like logic and stuff to get to that solution like we just build systems of tools and then like say like build something that does this right and so it's it's just fundamentally different and I think that that's what enables it so like if you were to try to build a game with tools and like open-ended puzzle like not an open applause but just like like tools and tasks you would end up with a game where there are probably lots of different solutions to stuff as long as you don't add too many constraints like I've I've worked with people who made other games that were like I worked with like the prime mover guys which is another's act like and one of the things they had early on were like a lot of squares that were like closed off and so that was the suggestion I gave them it's just like get rid of that like the game is already hard because you already have to like think about how to apply these tools to build it like to solve a task like get rid of the extra constraints and it'll be more open-ended a lot of people in Shen gen io actually didn't like the circuit boards which is why opus magnum is completely infinite in size it was like the the circuit boards made it so that if you had an idea for a solution you might not be able to build it and that kind of sucks in a game that's supposedly open-ended right it's the same reason why exa Punk's let you build like nearly as many X's as you want and now lets you write as many lines of code as you want just period is someone who's terrible at it I ran into the line limitation many times and that has never even meant to be a difficulty thing that was because you can write like a like a 10,000 line program that's very fast yeah yeah yeah okay that's all for questions thank you [Applause]

Channel: GDC

Views: 29,452

Rating: 4.8974357 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, zachtronics, opus magnum, exapunks

Id: U4uH1ynH3Rs

Length: 64min 51sec (3891 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2019

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Here's the NYU talk they mention: NYU Game Center Presents Zach Barth