Second Wind [Intro Music] Like about half a million other people I've
been playing a fair bit of Balatro lately, the incredibly hard to explain to other people
poker-based deckbuilder, and its massive success illustrates the kind of impact a truly original
gameplay idea can have. The old saying is true: build a better mousetrap than your neighbour
and the world will beat a path to your door, except for the parts of it
that like mice, I suppose. But it's very easy for us snobby media types
to say "come up with new gameplay ideas," it's a lot harder to actually DO that. For
example, I've been concerned that melee combat mechanics in video games are basically
done innovating. Every single game now, it's light attack, heavy attack, dodge
and parry. Even the shooters have parry now. I don't know what the fuck a "parry
bullet" is or how it differs from the regular kind and apparently Suicide
Squad didn't feel like explaining. So I was trying to think of some interesting
new idea for a core combat gameplay thread. Specifically, I wanted to think of something
I'd be good at. When combat mechanics come down to having the faster reflexes or
the better strategic planning ability I tend to suck harder the older I get, but
what I am really good at is anagrams. It's so disappointing that hardly anyone plays
Babble Royale anymore 'cos I could PUNISH at that. I played it on stream once or twice
and inevitably got stream sniped but I'd just take them apart anyway. It was like ants
trying to stream snipe a trapdoor spider. So I was envisioning an idea for a melee combat
system where encroaching enemies have seemingly random letters floating over their heads, each
tied to a specific button on the controller, and you damage and push enemies back by pressing the
buttons in an order that spells out words. Longer words doing more damage. So it's anagrams crossed
with a sort of on the fly combo system. There's a lot you could do to min-max for your personal
vocabulary strengths, too, like equip a weapon that does double damage when you spell out words
relating to animals, or to toilet-related slang. That'd be something I'd absolutely slaughter
at because it rewards the players who can solve anagrams the fastest. It'd make up for every time
I got the pangram in the Spelling Bee on the New York Times app and looked around to see nobody
there to admire my cleverness. But then I realised that if I wanted to prototype this out I'd need to
program a game with a list of every single word in the English language. Maybe there's scripts and
databases I can download somewhere to make that easier, but I'd still need to go through and flag
all the words that are animal and toilet-related. I powerfully couldn't be arsed to do that, so I
thought, okay, what if it wasn't about language? It'd be a pain in the arse to translate,
anyway. What if it was maths equations rather than anagrams? So there'd be numbers
and symbols floating around the enemies and you'd have to arrange them in the right order
to make valid equations, like 2+4=6. But wait, that'd be much less flexible than anagrams
in terms of being able to do more damage with longer entries. And besides, maths? What, are
we an educational game now? Nobody thinks maths is fun. Nobody you'd want to be trapped
in conversation with at a party, anyway. Alright then, I thought, let's strip numbers AND
language out and make it completely universal, like how Rainbow Billy used colours and
shapes in place of numbers. So there'd be a bunch of coloured shapes floating
around the enemy and you'd have a list of combinations that translated
into different attacks - no, no, no, now we've just reinvented fighting
game inputs! Or possibly Guitar Hero. You see how hard this is. And it's even harder
to come up with an interesting new combat system if you overthink it. Overthink any game mechanic
and most of them will eventually boil back down to "press the correct button next to the dude."
Ideas like Balatro don't come from sitting down and thinking about it, it's a single spark
of genius that came by taking an established game mechanic and reframing it through a unique
perspective rather than iterating or building upon it. We start with card-based deckbuilding
such as in Slay the Spire or Marvel Snap, but where such games use cards to represent fantasy
battles and are drenched in appropriate theming, Balatro takes the standard mechanics of
a deckbuilder and applies it back to card games in the classical sense. An act spiritually
akin to strapping a rocket booster to a donkey. Which you'd have to admit would be spectacular
to watch, however the donkey might feel about it. It's the kind of innovation that seems obvious
in retrospect and after it does gangbusters causes a lot of people to kick themselves for
not having thought of it first. It makes me wonder what other new concepts we could come
up with by applying the same thinking. Like, Dungeons and Dragons uses d20s to represent
fantasy battles, let's make a version of Yahtzee with d20s and deckbuilder elements. Or,
expand upon the idea of fantasy versions of casino games. Soccer involves kicking a little white ball
around, and on that level at least is spiritually akin to Roulette. Imagine a soccer game on
a giant roulette wheel. So you think you're kicking towards your goal but then whoops, the
wheel spins and now it's the other team's goal. I just made those up, but then I did a search
and there is indeed a Balatro-inspired Yahtzee game on Steam slated for a quarter four release
called Pimp My Dice, which is about as clever a title as could be expected. So yeah, the vultures
are going to be circling. I'm glad Balatro has announced they're doing a mobile version 'cos I'm
sure there's going to be about fifty knockoffs of it on mobile by the time I finish my next
blink, but I wouldn't even be mad. It'd be like contentedly watching seagulls fight over my
discarded sandwich crust. I'm not bothered because I've already gotten what I wanted out of the
sandwich. The satisfaction of knowing that indie games are still the trendsetters, the starting
point, the very beating heart of this industry. Because, to zero back in on the point I'm trying
to make, indie games are really the only place where innovation CAN happen. It's easy to be
pessimistic about the future of video games if you only pay attention to all the layoffs
and cuts we've been seeing lately in what I'm increasingly hesitant to call the "AAA"
industry. I've heard gloomy voices talking about being in the midst of another video
game crash and everything is ruined forever, but we've always known the big money industry as
it's been in the last few years is unsustainable, the bubble had to burst some time, and the
reason for that is because triple-A development overthinks too much. How can it not overthink when
you have a hundred plus dudes on the development team all thinking about stuff and trying to look
busy. So on the off chance that an original idea does come up it's drowned by obligations to
monetize and push the spectacular graphics and make sure to include gear grinding so the armour
polishing department can have something to do. I really enjoyed the indie
game Pacific Drive recently, and what I liked about it is that it focusses
on driving and doesn't really have combat. Do you think that would still be the case if,
say, Ubisoft were making it? I doubt it, they'd probably copy paste their usual Far Cry
first person game template, do a quick find and replace and end up having guns just because the
gun department made a whole bunch and nobody specifically told them not to. Even Ubisoft's
recent lower scoped things like Prince of Persia and Skull and Bones couldn't resist the urge to
pump in some RPG or crafting bullshit because that's easier than explaining to the C-suite
that the game works perfectly well without it. Video games aren't going to crash or die
anytime soon, don't you worry about that, they might have to wean themselves off their
addiction to enormous amounts of scope and money, but Balatro should illustrate that video games
will be just fine as long as mad people are still having mad ideas. Nothing's going to get
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