Ramble III: A Perfectly Reasonable Somewhat Reasoned Screedy Diatribe

Preramble

Sometimes you want to indulge yourself and curl up with a pint of Häagen-Dazs White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle all by yourself. This little rant is one of those.

A Perfectly Reasonable Somewhat Reasoned Screedy Diatribe

I would like to put forward a candidate for the Worst Thing in Games award. Forget pay-to-win or buggy messes or QTEs or forced slow-walk sections. The category winner, by a country mile, is the invisible wall. Literally (in a metaphorical sense), the worst. A travesty. A sin against the gods. They create a visceral reaction in my guts. A fiery anger that can’t be sated. These mime-adjacent abominations are the most terrible thing that has happened in games in the history of ever. They’re pure evil.

And, unfortunately, they’re also fairly necessary.

Let’s start with the whole ‘necessity of evil’ aspect. [Philosophical tangent redacted for time and sanity. -Ed.] Aside from any metaphysical discussions, invisible walls let developers create boundaries, which often make games better. 

Players gonna play, play, play, play, play (or so I hear), and they will definitely go off the path. They’ll do this for any number of reasons, from intentionally exploring with an enthusiastic curiosity to unintentionally wandering with an enthusiastic meander. Sometimes off the path is good and a core part of the game, but in other cases, off the path just leads to bad. Players get confused (and frustrated) or lost (and frustrated) or stuck (and frustrated). With the invisible wall, designers can help avoid these kinds of frustration and focus the player’s (and developer’s) time on the core experience. 

So yes, grudgingly, invisible walls are an important dev tool, from a heavily linear COD level to the edges of the expansive province of Cyrodiil.

But while invisible walls are an important dev tool, a boundary that is just an invisible wall creates its own big ‘ol pile of frustration. They break the rules of the world, can’t be anticipated, and set up the worst kind of surprise – one with only downsides. Rather than playing the game, the player is left guessing at the intentions of the developer. A player may not even notice they’ve stopped moving forward, and when they do notice, they’ll often assume it’s their mistake for not understanding the world or a bug. They’ll spend unreasonable amounts of time trying to keep going, and then blame themselves when they finally realize it was just an invisible wall, as if that’s an obvious thing to expect in an otherwise visible world.

A simple solution is to include a world-appropriate physical boundary. Fences are great. Or buildings. Or a police checkpoint. Or a tangled alien growth. Or lava. Or a towering cliff. Or a tall hedgerow. Or a different fence. Or… [Yes, yes. Enough. -Ed.] With a visible boundary in place, the intended playable space is clear, and players can navigate the game with a bit less confusion. Once the physical boundary is there, having a tall invisible wall that accompanies it is reasonable and will help prevent players from getting Somewhere Bad™. 

When building these boundaries, the simplest wall may be functional, but it won’t be particularly engaging or natural. A bit of chaotic variety goes a long way. A fence connected to a house with an alley between it and the next house that’s blocked by a pile of trash connected to… The irregularity in the boundary makes it more interesting and helps the world feel real while still bounding and guiding the player. 

This variety can be pushed even further by widening the world and pushing the boundary back, just a bit. Consider a country road with classic country fences running along either side and classic open country fields on the other side of the fences. This will clearly guide the player down the road, but not much else. Instead, move one fence to the far side of the open field. The playspace boundary is still clear, but the open field on one side will break up the monotony and give players something to consider briefly. The world is suddenly bigger and more engaging without any more uncertainty on the intended path.

When creating these boundaries, a good minimum height should be about a bit taller than what players are expected to jump and climb over in normal gameplay (otherwise, it’s easy to confuse the boundary with the intended path). Simple low walls work well when the player can jump and climb like a moderately encumbered tortoise, but once they can spring or bounce, these start to look more like a fun playground. With higher mobility, taller works to a point, but can be hard to make natural. In these situations, boundary layers with increasing height can be a good option. A first boundary should be passable but not inviting (like a low rooftop or jumpable fence). This first layer still guides the player down the intended path, but it can also reward them for exploring (with a good flanking path or goodies to find, for example). The next layers can then be taller to create a clear gameplay boundary while feeling more natural. Bonus points, the layers create some great parallax!

Even with all of this, physical bounds aren’t always a reasonable solution. In a multiplayer map where you can fly up high into the air from a massive exploding robot (just a random example), invisible walls would greatly frustrate the joy of falling with style.  Of course, landing outside the playable space would break the MP balance, which is also not good. In these cases, letting the player know they’re out of bounds and giving them a clear warning and chance to correct it is reasonable. Aside from flashing big red warnings and klaxons, here too, level design can help. Keep the edge of the playable space discreet and clear, and the out-of-bounds area simple and uninviting. A no-mans-land without cover or excessive detail won’t entice players and helps guide them back to the playable space.

Which, I suppose, all comes back to a plea – set clearly visible boundaries. [Good relationship advice, too. -Ed.] When built well, these visible boundaries invisibly guide the player, creating a natural border in the world that informs, focuses, and avoids my kids having to listen to yet another ‘dad’s in level design mode’ rant.

Postrambles

• Art provided by the talented Cup O’ Soup.

• Another boundary option is to embrace that it’s a game and make a clear (if somewhat immersion-breaking) artificial boundary. Grounded 2, in their pre-release, put up some very obvious ‘under construction’ caution tape boundaries paired with the invisible wall. While this may be less immersive, the intent is obvious and it’s easy to implement, leaving more dev time to work on the rest of the game.

• Practical Advice: With higher mobility, a wall that is about 1.5x higher than the player can jump is about the height you need to stop players from considering it as a potential path. For distance, it’s more like 2x how far they can jump. At these distances, most players won’t consider that as part of the main path (though QA will absolutely find ways over or across…)

• More Practical Advice: When creating invisible walls along the perimeter, make them much taller than would seem reasonable, and then a little taller still. Otherwise, you’ll just end up doing this later when QA inevitably finds a way past the shorter walls.

• For built boundaries to work, they have to go hand-in-hand with the overall design of the level. The overall player objective has to be clear while also doing many (many many) little things to nudge and guide the player. Something I’d like to cover at some point, but this LD Workshop on guiding the player has a lot of good practical advice right now.

Ramble II: Game Dev Magic - Attenton to Detrails

Preramble

For this one, I thought I might stray into some of what I’ve noticed about the work of making things, some of which are games.

Game Dev Magic - Attenton to Detrails

Game developers sometimes talk about their process being magic, which rings true, if they’re thinking of it in the Teller (of Penn & Teller fame) sense: “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” 

Coming up with a brand new magic trick (at least from what I’ve read) appears to be fairly similar to game development - inspiration strikes, sleeves get rolled, trial and error is followed by more trial and more error, then refining and refining (and refining and refining), until it’s finally time to share it with the world and hopefully delight a few folks.

It’s the refining (and refining and refining) that I’d like to talk a bit about – the extraordinary amount of effort to make something seem effortless, which appears to be a universal truth of creating good things. 

Recently, I was listening to the truly excellent bonus content for the truly excellent show This American Life. This particular discussion involved revisiting an older segment. At one point, amidst the discussion of emotional tone and story structure, Ira (of Ira Glass fame) observed, “...it went through my head, add .4 seconds, add .4 seconds right there. Cuz I’m a crazy person.” He was referring to the littlest of pauses to pace out the story just a smidge more.  That comment felt very familiar, and it shows someone who has spent years editing and adjusting radio stories to be the smoothest possible, obsessing over the tiny details.

Of course, tiny details are also part of game dev.

Sometimes the tiny details are design decisions. With multiplayer map design, after the foundation is in a good place, a big chunk of development time on the best maps (at least the ones I’ve seen being made) is spent detailing and making small adjustments. Over months, the designer spends hours upon hours wandering the level, shifting window locations and nudging cover to adjust sightlines, trying to balance it all (and inevitably missing the one annoying corner that some talented QA person rightfully abuses in the next playtest).

Sometimes the tiny details are artistic.  I’ve worked for years in the vertex mines, nudging bits of geo around, trying to make a world that looks good. Floating grass is my personal nemesis (to be fair, my mediocre superpower is seeing floating grass in games, so, like all great nemesis,  it’s a foe of my own creation), and I’ve spent much of my professional life readjusting grass. Set the z-offset to -3, random rotation and scale (0.85 to 1.15), a bit taller and denser near walls, add a litt… [Nobody cares. -Ed.] Maybe not the most (or even 50th most) glamorous part of making something look good, but like the .4 second pause, it’s part of making the whole feel complete.

And then sometimes the tiny details are both art and design. One place these combined for me was in Titanfall 2. In Into the Abyss, I’d wanted players to have a big reveal of the insane underground factory we were creating. There were both design considerations (intentionally making a narrow approach, both focusing the player’s view and helping them feel safe so they could be comfortable as they stepped out), and artistic considerations (consulting the artist I was working with to get the best position for the reveal, one that considered composition, framing, diaganols to guide the eye - arty things). Of course, some players still happily ignore that completely, barreling forward (in retrospect, I don’t think the smattering of enemies helps as they prime the player to look for more combat rather than slowing them down, but c’est la guerre). But some didn’t, enjoying the view, and the time spent making those adjustments was just one example of the many small decisions that fill the day-to-day of making a game.

Which is all to say, a lot of the magic of making good games is heads down, putting in the work, and paying attention to details [That’s the name of the thing! -Ed.]. The longer you do it, the better you get at anticipating and addressing them, but they still need to be done. Game dev is filled with days upon days focusing on all manner of tiny details, so this is the smallest glass raised to the creatives who spend so much of their time doing that.

Postrambles

• Art this week provided by talented eldest child, Rion.

• The teller quote is from this article in Esquire. I also recommend any content you can find where Teller talks about his process (or really anything). He’s great.

• The This American Life bonus content is from their subscription service, Life Partners. I’m sad that I’ll never come up with a name for a thing as good as that, and the content is pretty great too. The section I reference is from the episode ‘Nancy’s Deep Cuts’ with Nancy Updike, TAL producer.

• One of the first tiny details I remember noticing back in the olden days of the nineteens involved cutting walls to match the grout in the brick texture. Kingpin: Life of Crime springs to mind as maybe the first time I saw this (blink and you’ll miss it in this very first hall). I’m tempted to go into the antiquated process [Please, no. -Ed.], and I remember using that inspiration to figure out how to do that myself in some of my first attempts at levels, then breaking things by doing so with structural brushes (that’s what we call a learning experience).

• Practical MP level design advice: In early level iterations, leave multiple windows open and playtest to see what players use, then just close the ones they don’t.

• Workflow practical advice: Quickly grab multiple screenshots, taking pictures of anything that bothers you as you walk around the level. After 5 minutes of wandering around, you’ll have 15-55 screenshots of things you want to fix. Then you can just go fix them. Or, at least, the 85% of them you remember why you took them. The rest will be fixed if they matter. Mostly.

• The time put into creating games (at least, in my experience) is something that cannot be avoided. But that doesn’t mean crunch is inevitable. Smart cutting, great production, and finishing things before moving on are all part of making games in a healthy way (and also seem like a topic for another ramble…).

Ramble I: Easter Bunny, Professional Level Designer

Preramble

Around the last few Easters, I kept finding myself thinking about Easter eggs in video games.

Not (as would be natural to assume) the developer-placed secrets, (though I love those too). Instead, I’ve been thinking about how our family’s annual Easter egg hunt reminds me of level design and how players engage with the environment. So I went and wrote a thing.

Easter Bunny, Professional Level Designer

On Easter morning, a variety of colourful plastic eggs appear in our home, poking out from behind book spines and from under bushes. We push away thoughts about that creepy bunny skulking around laying them, and instead enjoy the delightful chaos of kids prowling like young hunter-gatherers.

The best hunts strike a balance between three things: good hiding spots, clever egg positioning, and egg-weenies. [Originally ‘eggcrumbing’, which seemed like the worst portmanteau possible, but now we have egg-weenies… -Ed.]

Good hiding spots are interesting objects that are fun to investigate. They whisper, ‘Hey, pst, Buddy, I’ve got something to show ya...’ (but not in a Pennywise sort of way). Something can be interesting because it’s unique (a stuffed Gudetama), or requires extra attention (the cluttered knick-knack shelf), or stands out because it stands alone (the wilting potted plant in the corner). Good hiding spots also give a variety of ways to hide the eggs, making them interesting to investigate, even if nothing is there. 

Clever egg hiding also adds to the fun. Too visible and the hunt becomes a race, too hidden and you’re finding eggs on Thanksgiving. That still leaves a lot of wiggle room, from a yellow egg camouflaged in a bunch of bananas to a green egg-butt poking out from behind a red plaster butte. Finding the right balance turns every potential hiding spot into something to be investigated fairly thoroughly, with some having quick payoff while others take a bit of work. This variety leads to constant investigation and engagement.

Finally, a few egg-weenies can keep the hunt moving around. Egg-weenies (probably not whatever you’re thinking) is a pretty atrocious term for an ovoid version of the Disneyland Weenie - they’re something that calls from a distance, guides you (with fun distractions on the way) to a new location, and delivers more discoveries once you’re there. A bright purple egg balanced proudly on a wall outside sends all the kids running through the back door and gives them a whole new area (with all new hiding spots) to explore. 

In the end, the kids get a sugar rush, and I steal some jelly beans, munching on them while thinking about level design.

In videogames, an ‘egg’ can be any prize for the player, from much-needed resources to narrative collectibles. Good hiding spots require some additional thought – always consider the context, environment, and game rules; each game creates its own universe, and the ‘Easter egg hunt’ has to fit naturally within that specific world.

On one end of the spectrum is Astro Bot, a game of pure creative joy where great hiding spots abound. Giant robot holding a watering can? Great! Put a bot in it! The level design is linear and fairly focused, with clear boundaries that guide players through. This restricted path and lack of clutter make any object stand out as a potential hiding spot and worth investigating. While this could get old, these spots brilliantly leverage the core gameplay, so checking every tree or finding a way onto a slot machine is both enjoyable and almost always delivers a payoff. Astro Bot also does a great job of making those colourful prizes cleverly peek out. Bright boxes and dancing bots and shiny coins all encourage players to continuously examine the world itself, checking objects and locations from different angles to see if maybe there’s something worth finding. 

A grounded and realistic game presents different challenges. The Last of Us franchise has a similar level design to Astro Bot (when reductively reduced to ‘get through the level and collect stuff on the way’), but they also have a highly detailed environment that could overwhelm players in their search for trading cards and rolls of duct tape. By embracing the groundedness of the world and hiding goodies in logical places, the game gives players the tools to make smart decisions about where to look. A bathroom would have pills, a gas station has a workbench, and a gamer’s bedroom would obviously have an energy drink can. By embracing the context of the world, the game design guides players naturally in their hunt.

An open world magnifies these problems but relies on similar solutions, while also being able to take advantage of weenies to great effect. The Elder Scrolls series (special thanks Oblivion Remaster for late-night destractspiration [Sorry. -Ed]) is one of many examples. Players can go almost anywhere and find almost anything, including the mundane (someone needs those callipers and tongs, right?). Along their travels, they catch glimpses of many alluring locations that beckon from the main path and are great weenies. Consider the spired building on top of a distant mountain that will… ahem… pique the player’s interest. Once there, not only do they get the delightful prize of a cool new house, but from the top is a grand view of the surrounding world dotted with more locations calling the player to investigate.

One last masterclass example - Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where the game manages to bring all these ideas together at almost every turn. Hyrule is littered with interesting hiding spots, plenty of prizes, and many, many layers of weenies.  Often, the layers of the hunt overlap beautifully, from the macro to the micro scale. Consider one example I found in a quick scrub of a full playthrough: a pond will always grab attention, and from there, the chests on a dock are both prize and weenie, since from chests, it’s a pretty good angle to notice a nearby puzzle and get a Korok. This very small example of weenieception [Sorry again. -Ed.] is just one of many upon many that lead the player through the world, and is covered very well (with other great insights) in this short bit of required reading from GMTK.

This is all just a surface scratching, but I had the itch, so here it is. I’ve found that design inspiration comes from everywhere, and like the Easter egg hunt, with good hiding spots and clever positioning, we can weenie players around [Really? -Ed.], guiding them to explore our worlds, one colourful egg to the next to the next to the next...

Postrambles

• Art provided by talented middle child, Cup O’ Soup.

• At some point, I went on an aside and created an eldritch history of the Easter Bunny, “cursed by the Ancients to hide eggs he can never enjoy himself, forced to look on with envy. The Easter Armadillo was sacrificed to the ancient gods after years of hiding the eggs too well. The Easter Tortoise just left them buried in a pile in the middle of the sandbox.” I have absolutely no memory of writing this.

• In TLOU, I found it neat that, with comic books, they had a way of making something colourful that stands out in a fairly muted world while still fitting the context of the world itself. It was a nice example of an appropriate colourful ‘egg’ that also doesn’t feel out of place.

• Empty space and patterns are other ways games can guide the player’s attention. BOTW uses both of these very smartly – sparse fields and hills show at a glance what isn’t worth checking out while also drawing attention to anything unique, especially things in an unnatural pattern like a perfect ring of rocks.

• At one point I also bent over backwards to try to work in the fact that kids who like black jellybeans are, by their nature, chaotic evil. This I stand by.