Valheim is a survival game in which you grub around in forests for wood and leather scraps and steadily build your base into a towering castle. It’s also a game in which you’re a Viking who goes on epic voyages to distant islands for fortune and enough glory to ascend to Valhalla. Why not both, right? Well, one reason why not is that these two ideals sometimes rub up against each other the wrong way.
Developer Iron Gate Studio found a particular pressure point when they came to design its portals, which instantly teleport players across the game world. “We redesigned them several times because we didn’t want people to use them too much,” co-founder Henrik Törnqvist tells me. But why would you put something in a game that you don’t want players to use?
]]>Joint winner of IF Comp last year was a text adventure game called The Impossible Bottle. You should try it! It’s free and works in your browser, and you play as Emma, a little girl who has to tidy up her house and help her parents before guests come over for lunch. At least that’s how it starts, because The Impossible Bottle goes places, and the way it goes to those places is very clever, with several revelations and a central gimmick which I’ll do my best not to spoil here. But one of its cleverest features is evident from the start: hyperlinks.
]]>Games about destruction tend not to do the whole destruction thing very well. Put it this way: for years Red Faction has been the banner for destruction in games, despite its most recent instalment releasing nine years ago and its core being rather more about shooting than destruction. While you can destroy lots of things in Red Faction, there’s not much of a game in it.
Thankfully, we now have a new banner destruction game: Teardown, a game in which you can destroy pretty much everything. But Teardown’s serendipitous and difficult journey from tech tinkering to release taught lead developer Dennis Gustafsson something important about the whole idea of letting players demolish stuff. “There’s this expectation that more destruction in games is always a good thing. But actually, it’s really, really hard to design something around a fully destructible world.”
]]>Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a game about cutting up spaceships with heavy industrial tools for cash. It’s a thrill to drift in zero-G, slicing and chopping and severing hull panels, superstructures, cockpits, airlocks, partly because the way you take them apart is up to you. You know what you have to do as soon as you get into space; you just need to figure out how.
That was also the experience of developer Blackbird Interactive as it began to develop Shipbreaker and brought it to Early Access. The theme quickly crystallised, but figuring out how freeform cutting would actually work was a lot harder, setting stern technical challenges that were never really solved, posing questions about player freedom that resulted in surprising answers, and causing spaceship designers' nightmares.
]]>Satisfactory’s Update 3 is one of gaming’s great bait and switches. For months, developer Coffee Stain had been denying that its first-person factory-building game would ever have pipes. Why would they? You could already transport liquids on conveyors, so what was the point? And then in February, the studio presented a magnificently overblown trailer which confirmed the opposite of what they’d been claiming for all this time. Pipes were coming. The chat went wild.
]]>Monster Train is a game about chuffing through the hills and vales of Hell while mincing up angels with your demonic fiends, angry plants and waxen gentry folk. As Matt has declared, it’s extremely good, and one of the things that I love about it is the way it escalates. That train ride you’re on is a wild, careening one into multiplying attack and defence.
The result is a sense of soaring power. And the coal that fuels that engine is the fact you can upgrade your cards, giving them buffs and boosts that often feel like you’re breaking the game. Monster Train’s upgrades are great.
]]>“Nikolay, right now, what do you think about Pathologic 2? Was it a successful experiment?”
“Oh yes, of course! Certainly it was! Moreover, due to the conditions in which we constructed this game, it was a miracle that we released it. But I wouldn’t say it’s the game we wanted to release.”
Even now, over a year after Pathologic 2’s release, Nikolay Dybowski and Ivan Slovtsov have differing opinions about the surrealistic survival game they played leading roles in making. In fact, they’re still unpacking their thoughts about what they created, particularly in light of the changes they made after launch to its difficulty setting, a system which lies at the centre of a game which sets out to express the struggle in death and life.
]]>Some games are made to be watched. Games like I Wanna Run The Marathon. This hardcore platformer was designed to be played by four streamers for the first time at Fangame Marathon 2016, presenting a succession of eyewatering challenges intended to please the crowd.
And no wonder: it’s a supremely entertaining and pacey gauntlet of cruel traps, wry references and intricate level design, set across various sharp fangame parodies of games like Sonic, Mega Man, VVVVVV and Pokémon, incredibly. Seeing it played is like watching someone simultaneously unravelling a puzzle and telling a joke.
]]>I have a real issue with the sea. That enormous blue conceals awful primal horrors which I can’t help but be fascinated by. So you can understand why I admire Raft, the survival game in which you try to stay alive on a rickety wooden craft constantly circled by a giant shark.
That shark is Raft’s principal antagonist and it sits at the centre of many of its survival mechanics (as observed by Steve Hogarty in his early access review of the game). Yet players have developed a strange relationship with it. “They talk to the shark and name it,” co-developer André Bengtsson tells me. So does his team: Bruce. “He gives you a kind of company out there, even though he’s trying to kill you.”
]]>Untitled Goose Game is a game about being a horrible goose, about making a mess and watching hapless Brits try to clear it up again. But under all that, it’s a game about things. Apples, hair brushes, keys, mallets, toy planes, tulips, teapots. After all, it takes things to mess things up.
“Items are the language of the game,” co-designer Nico Disseldorp tells me. “They’re both the tools and the reward. They play a really central role in so much of what we do, and how people play.”
]]>Ori And The Will Of The Wisps feels so good to play. The fluidity of Ori’s movement; his quickness and agility; the sense of his weight and presence in the world – he’s a product of both traditional animation and leading graphics technology which developer Moon Studios has built up over years to make a sequel that surpasses the already beautiful Ori And The Blind Forest.
]]>Oh, to visit Spokane on a bright summer morning. Bakersfield, Albuquerque, Reno and Salem. The evening sun shining across the surface of the I-10. In these locked-down times, American Truck Simulator is a chance to tour America, or at least its western edge, running from Washington in the north down to California in the south, and over to Utah and New Mexico in the east.
These states are articulated by highways and truck stops, industrial centres and sweeping multilevel interchanges. But that doesn’t mean their sweep isn’t glorious. America is, after all, built on trucking. The industry’s motto is, “If you bought it, a truck brought it,” and in ATS you get to experience mass haulage in a world which aims to mirror, as close as it can, the great American west. But it was built in Prague, on an engine that sometimes requires clever tricks to represent the scale of it all, by a team of map designers who are strangers to American culture.
]]>There’s a lot to be frightened by in Hunt: Showdown. Bee ladies, dying horses, a scuttering spider-beast. Slavering hounds, alarms made of clattering hanging bones, zombies. Ducks. It’s like this whole bayou hates you.
But the swamp and its horrible denizens aren’t Hunt: Showdown’s antagonists. The real source of tension is other players. Every detail of this shooter’s design is about engineering a sense of threat from the fact that running around this grimdank hellhole are other people who are aiming to end your bog holiday early.
]]>Just before Generation Zero released nearly a year ago, things looked great for the game. Its trailers and screenshots promised a dynamic and expansive open-world cooperative shooter, with robots to fight and a beautiful and detailed 1980s Sweden to explore. And it was made by Avalanche Studios, a developer long-known for its open-world action games. Aside from a little controversy when artist Simon Stålenhag pointed out its thematic similarity to his distinctive art, everything seemed in place for a successful launch.
“We felt really good,” product owner Paul Keslin tells me. But that feeling soon changed. The game was beset by crash bugs and complaints of repetitive play, and its Steam review scores tumbled. For its small development team, the reception was a shock – “Immediately, the feeling was not a good one”. The post-launch plan was thrown in the bin, and so began the long job of turning the game around in the eyes of its players.
]]>When Supergiant Games started to make Hades, their Roguelike action-RPG, they had plenty of experience making narrative games. Across Bastion, Transistor and Pyre, they’d found they were pretty good at telling stories. But in a Roguelike? And what’s that? They intended to put Hades in Early Access? Could they ever fit with the kind of rich characterisation and storytelling that made Supergiant’s name?
“We were really curious to see if narrative could fit into an Early Access experience,” writer and designer Greg Kasavin tells me. “And it turns out, it immensely benefits from it.” I have to agree. Hades’ Sisyphean-twitch-action, in which you take repeated runs through the Underworld in an attempt to escape your hellish dad, is brought to life by a setting within the rancorous interplays between the gods of Greek mythology, and dynamic story design which responds to your progress.
]]>When Yacht Club Games decided to style Shovel Knight after the NES games that inspired it, they took that project seriously. Shovel Knight can’t fill the screen with 1000 bullets or radically switch up how it plays. It has to stay true to its inheritance, else, as programmer and co-designer David D’Angelo tells me, “It’d stand out as bizarre.”
So its bosses naturally follow classic rules, too, including its final one, the Enchantress. Here, Yacht Club faced the challenge of producing a fight with the same restriction of four attacks and 20 hit points as all the other bosses, while also acting as a striking culmination of the adventure. But the real challenge began when they went back to redesign her another three times, once for each of the game’s expansions. And now the project is finally done, these four riffs on the same battle are a chance to witness a studio jamming on and exploring the nooks and crannies of its design.
]]>“A lot of fun stuff happens when you try to do stuff with physics,” says Wilhelm Nylund, head of Landfall Games, and the intelligent god behind Totally Accurate Battle Simulator’s legions of gangling warriors.
And yet physics has given him an enormous amount of grief over the course of TABS’ development - as well as all the other games he’s made at Landfall. Physics, after all, makes everything harder. “If you want to do something in the game, you need to figure out how to do it with physics instead of just doing it,” he tells me. And that’s why TABS, which is all about watching ridiculous parodies of extreme violence, is great.
]]>The first Unity Of Command was designed for the open steppes of the Eastern Front. There, the major battles were about manoeuvre, with tank units chasing and covering miles of ground for their objectives, and lines of infantry moving to counter and support. The steppes were perfect for UoC’s unique focus on maintaining your army’s supply lines.
So, when designer Tomislav Uzelac began thinking about turning to the Western front for its sequel, he knew he had a problem. The big battles of France and Italy were slow and attritional, crossing mountain ranges and facing enemies dug into forests. “The question was, how do you go from Case Blue, where you cover 1,000 kilometres in Russia over a month and half, to Monte Cassino, where you stay pounding on one position for six months?” he tells me.
The answer lay in pushing and pulling at the frontline between military accuracy and game abstraction, and in exploring tiny design details which you’d never think could lead to making a vast theatre of war this fun to play.
]]>Oh, the rats. The rats and the rats. If you don’t like rats, it’s best you don’t read on, because in A Plague Tale: Innocence there are thousands of them. They’re the stars of its grim medieval show, swarming around you, chittering and lunging and responding to your every movement.
And they presented their creators at developer Asobo Studio all kinds of problems to make. Their every little detail is the result of lots of experimentation and many wrong turns as their programmers and designers laboured to both make them feel horribly alive, while also building a game around them. After all, no one had tried before to make a game about surviving throngs of vicious rodents during the Black Death. Merry Christmas, Mechanic readers!
]]>When a game’s cutscene begins and the dialogue starts spooling, I can’t help it. My phone comes out and I’m scrolling. From being active I’ve suddenly become passive, and rather than stay engaged, my brain impulsively turns to Twitter, Reddit, anything, to feed its pathetic desire for reward through light interaction.
But I don’t during Katana Zero’s cutscenes. When this action game halts its razor-fine combat to tell you its story, I sit forward. That’s down to its interrupt system, which lets me choose whether I want to hear NPCs out, or whether I want to tell them to shut up. “I honestly hope more games adopt the interrupt system, if nothing else because it just feels like a much better way to tell stories,” developer Justin Stander tells me. “It’s less reading and more doing.”
]]>In Noita, you can destroy every pixel. Walls, lakes of blood, rock mass, bodies, piles of gold, wooden piles, minecarts - if it’s there, you can mess it up. But there’s one place where you probably shouldn’t do that.
The Holy Mountain is a moment of respite on your journey downwards in this very physical take on the dungeon-delver. It’s somewhere where you can recoup your health, buy new wands and spells, and prepare yourself for the next area on your journey into the depths. But if this sanctified place should become damaged, you’ve just angered the gods.
“I’d point out that angering the gods is probably one of the things that people don’t like about the game,” developer Petri Purho tells me. The problem, you see, is the worms. But there are many reasons why angering the gods exists in Noita, reasons which tap into the very bedrock of how the game works.
]]>“It’s hungry mother. It’s trip to the fair. It’s bad trade. Magic beans. Jack’s cow, angry mother. It’s surprise beanstalk. It’s climbing the beanstalk, giant’s castle, giant’s wife, golden goose, self-playing harp, escape with the goose, chop down the beanstalk.”
Mark Rosewater has been head designer on Magic: The Gathering since 2003, overseeing the creation of thousands of new cards in the collectible card game that spawned them all. Among 269 new cards in Magic’s latest expansion set, Throne of Eldraine, some tell the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. Others feature pie-baking and big bad wolves, and some spin out Arthurian legends. All together, they form a densely intricate game of attack and defence, playable both as physical cards and in Magic: The Gathering Arena.
]]>Every MMO has to have a mount. Mounts are a reward, a step in the endgame that helps you feel like you’ve finally mastered an MMO’s world. Finally you can get around quickly. No more of that plebeian walking. And with the game feeling like it’s in your grasp at last, you even get to show off your achievement with the flamboyance of your steed.
Guild Wars 2’s mounts are the best mounts in the MMO business. They’re beautiful to look at, they do interesting things, and they feel so good to control. And here’s the thing: they’re inspired by Metroid and Zelda.
]]>Hypnospace Outlaw is a game about surfing a fictional 1999 internet, a web of GeoCities-like pages made by a community of weirdo artists, rock stars, scammers, edgy teens, pastors, hackers and spiritualists. It’s funny, bizarre, poignant, and sometimes dumb, just like the early internet that it spoofs.
But it’s also a game, so its wild thickets of pages, all written by distinct personalities, are also navigable and carefully laced with puzzles to figure out. How did did the three-strong team behind Hypnospace Outlaw make something so playable out of something so chaotic? The answer lay in looking at how the early internet worked.
]]>Baba Is You is a push-block puzzler in which words change the rules of the game. Push a baba block next to an is, and then push a you on the end, and now you’re controlling a four-legged, long-eared critter. Add another rule, flag is win, and you can beat the level by moving Baba on to the flag.
Baba Is You is therefore a game about creating game logic from language. And it’s a remarkable example of the thorny mechanical and metaphysical problems that arise out of trying to encode meaning into words, and then words into a game. These are some that caused its maker, Arvi Teikari, his biggest headaches.
]]>Brittle Hollow is a doomed planet. For a start, in about 22 minutes’ time, it’s going to be destroyed, along with the rest of Outer Wilds’ solar system. And also, up until that apocalypse, Brittle Hollow will also endure constant bombardment by meteors, which will smash away great crystalline chunks of its frigid surface, so that they fall away into the black hole at the planet’s centre.
“That place is ridiculous,” Outer Wilds creative director Alex Beachum tells me. “Brittle Hollow was the last place we finalised, for what are probably obvious reasons.” He and his team had to get an entire planet to fall apart, perhaps while players are standing on it, and perhaps if they’re tearing through space on the the other side of the system. Outer Wilds is a game in which epic-scale events happen on a minute-by-minute basis, and Brittle Hollow was its greatest test.
]]>“The whole history of the Creeper World series is serendipitous and unintentional,” says its creator, Virgil Wall, in his Texan lilt. “You know how it goes with these things, one thing led to another.”
Creeper World is a singular take on the realtime strategy that Wall has spent the past decade making. Former man of the cloth Kieron Gillen once described the original as “the most apocalyptic game I’ve played in ages”, an RTS about managing constant attritional threat. But it’s also a game about simplicity. As Wall puts it, “its original purpose was to throw strategy gaming into a crucible and turn up the Bunsen burner as hot as it could get and boil away anything except the essence.”
But that’s led to 10 years of grappling with a constant problem: how do you design follow-ups to a game that was already boiled down to its essentials?
]]>The Adeptus Mechanicus are one heck of a Warhammer 40K faction. These shadowy racist warrior monks are more machine than human and worship a trinity of machine gods. They say stuff like, “From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I prayed for the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine.”
Those words are from the intro to Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus, an excellent turn-based tactics game that really gets the AdMech. Yet developer Bulwark Studios hadn’t even played 40K before they took it on. In order to make it, this small team had to negotiate decades of sacred lore and intense fan expectation while also being disallowed from following existing tactics templates, even 40K’s. Such is the challenge of making a licensed game, but sometimes great things can emerge from stricture and a dose of inspiration.
]]>You’re not the hero in Kenshi. You’re not the chosen one. There’s nothing out there for you to save - other than your own skin. You’re just another inhabitant of a huge open world that doesn’t care about you. That’s its magic, and it takes design to create a world so exquisitely uncaring.
Merry Christmas, everybody!
]]>“The units should feel like humans,” says Oskar Stålberg, co-creator of Bad North, a strategy game about little soldiers defending their islands against bad Vikings. “They’re quite stylised; they don’t have faces and barely have arms, but they should feel human in their behaviour and what they’re capable of doing. They should feel fragile and it should look like fighting is a courageous effort.”
You might be surprised about how much work Bad North does to make your tiny soldiers human. They lead surprisingly full, if short, little virtual lives, and some of the fullest are led by its doughty pikemen, whose weapon of choice presented their creators all manner of weird problems.
]]>Obviously, obviously, Human: Fall Flat is primed for multiplayer. It’s a knockabout physics game in which you play as a wobbly non-Newtonian man. He’s ungainly and awkward to control and, for heck’s sake, Gang Beasts showed how funny that combination is when several players get together.
Yet developer Tomas Sakalauskas never really saw his game like that. Human Fall Flat was meant to be a singleplayer physics-based puzzle game, a meeting of Portal and Limbo. And besides, he was pretty sure that online multiplayer was impossible. But it’s what players asked for, so what could he do?
]]>Towards the end of Return of the Obra Dinn’s four-and-a-half years in development, Lucas Pope had a friend come over to playtest it. He sat him down, explained how it’s a firstperson mystery game in which you discover the fate of the Obra Dinn, a merchant ship lost on its voyage into the Orient. Then he gave him the controls. “He played for a bit and his response was, ‘This game is about the book’.”
]]>Every three months, Grinding Gear Games adds a new league to its excellent action RPG, Path of Exile. Each league adds a new spin on its core monster-slaying action for a few weeks until the next is added, and the latest is Delve, which launched at the end of August.
Delve presents you with an infinite and pitch-dark mine to dig into, a sprint into the black of the unknown that’s almost a metaphor for its production as its makers raced to find an idea and make it fun in time for release. But as they found rather too late, the real challenge was preventing Delve’s players from avoiding the fun they were meant to be having.
]]>You’ve been tracking the herd for fifteen minutes, and now, finally, you’re close enough to see your first deer. You raise your binoculars and edge closer, but a branch scrapes your jacket. The deer’s ear twitches and it turns and trots away. You freeze. The deer stops and turns its head to look back in your direction. You crouch but the deer barks, alerting the rest of the herd, and moves on again, disappearing into the undergrowth. The hunt continues.
TheHunter: Call of the Wild is a hunting simulation that goes far beyond anything in a Far Cry or Tomb Raider. Here, you’re alone in large expanses of wilderness, following wild animals which live out lives and react to your presence in many complex ways. They’re the result of countless hours of AI design and animation that closely model the behaviour of wild beasts, but they’re also part of a game, a fact that lends Call of the Wild a fascinating relationship with the natural world.
]]>It’s pretty obvious that the excellent Exapunks is a game about hacking. Specifically, it’s a game about programming viruses and sending them into networked systems to monkey around with data, set in a great alternative 90s Wired cyberworld of PC cases flashed with black and red decals and zines set in Apple Garamond.
For its makers, though, Exapunks is a game about limitations. Its format is the result of hard decisions about how much space you get to write your code in, how much freedom you get to solve its puzzles, and how it’s presented on your screen. And even now, creative director Zach Barth isn’t totally sure he and his team got it right.
]]>Donut County is a physics puzzle game in which you are a hole and you make things fall into you. It’s a sort of reverse Katamari Damacy, in which you grow larger as you make things disappear rather than gather them up, and it was inspired by a 2012 Peter Molydeux joke.
“The idea was originally that you’d just play as a hole and I thought there’s probably some interesting problems there,” creator Ben Esposito tells me. “I also thought it’d be pretty easy. But I was kind of wrong.” As he found out, making a game about being a hole gives rise to all kinds of trouble, including game physics hijinks, human nature, and the surprisingly complex philosophy of what holes are.
]]>Samuel Boucher hadn’t really made a game before he started to make GNOG. He was an artist and graphic designer, and though he’d art directed an interactive jigsaw puzzle game for kids, that was pretty much the limit of his experience. So, really, you can say the trouble with GNOG started when he decided to post some illustrations of a game idea he had to a local indie developer forum. His art talents were quite enough to attract the interest of indie studio KO-OP, and so started three years of trying to figure out how to actually make it. “It was a really big mess,“ Boucher tells me.
]]>"One of my favourite things in the whole game is that when you slash your little weapon against the cave wall you actually get an impact, with a little recoil and rocks come out,” says Ari Gibson, animator, artist and co-creator of Hollow Knight. “It’s such a small thing, but it changes you from being just a few animations to being a present actor inside this world.”
That little hit is a perfect illustration of how Hollow Knight’s epic chitin-on-chitin adventure is built on multitudes of small details, all driven by something that developer Team Cherry say is not only the fundamental tenet behind Hollow Knight but also every other game they’ll ever make: consistency.
Warning: minor spoilers for locations and items in Hollow Knight follow.
]]>It wasn’t as if the tester was having a bad time. He was a pinball fan, after all. It’s just that every time he tried to reach for his coffee, the intensity of the game he was testing kept pulling his hand back to the controller. Half an hour later, he finished playing, picked up his cold coffee, and said he’d enjoyed the game. As he contentedly walked away, he couldn’t know that he’d brought about a turning point for its developers, who turned to each other and said, ”Did you see what happened there? This is not the game we want to make, right?”
This was the moment that made Villa Gorilla realise their game had lost its way, the moment that led to the game’s transformation into the smart and charming Yoku’s Island Express, a game that mixes platformers, adventuring in a freely explorable world, and pinball.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games. This time, Ghost Of A Tale [official site].
Every time I see Ghost Of A Tale I’m taken aback by its beauty. Its world of cracked flagstones, knurled furniture, twisting passages, haphazard towers and lush vegetation looks like it’s truly lived in by its population of woodland creatures; by authoritarian rats, scurrying criminal mice and pirate frogs.
All that detail lends Ghost Of A Tale the feel that it’s the product of a large studio, of a team of artists leaning on years of experience. But it wasn’t. Ghost Of A Tale’s world was made, fundamentally, by just one person. One person, in fact, who’d never even made a game before. Lionel ‘Seith’ Gallatt created every texture, level layout and model, animated them and did a great deal of the programming that underpins it all. Not bad for someone who’d previously been Despicable Me’s animation director.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games. This time, Far: Lone Sails [official site].
It’s there when you first start the engine, in the hiss of steam as you press the ignition button and the rumble as the great wheels begin to turn. Then the music swells and you know the journey has begun.
Far: Lone Sails is a game by Okomotive about piloting a giant land boat across a destroyed landscape, about tending a huge machine through unpropitious conditions: hail and storms, fires, failure and shortages of fuel. And a great deal of your understanding of its colossal workings comes through sound, with music which responds to your actions and many layers of looping sound effects which subtly change shape as you trundle through a vast wilderness.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games. This time, Destiny 2 [official site].
When you go down to Destiny 2’s European Dead Zone, you’ll blast your way through crowds of the Fallen and run past other players. Perhaps you’ll also have a friend by your side as you stumble across Public Events and start Adventures, the action naturally flowing as you freely explore. Of course you do! Destiny 2 is an online shooter, and online shooters do this kind of thing.
But the years of work that went into creating the technology that runs it proves that Destiny 2 is no ordinary shooter. It’s product of Bungie’s ambition to meld the rich social bustle and scale of the MMO with the twitch-precision of the FPS, and, frankly, it seems a miracle that it works at all. Destiny 2’s PvE multiplayer is a crazy and surprising melding of design and technology, and this is how it works.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games. This time, Warhammer: Vermintide 2 [official site].
In designing Vermintide II’s melee combat, Mats Andersson ran through the same preset level 50 times a day for two years. This hodgepodge of the game’s most distinctive areas, enemies and swarms makes no sense and it looks terrible, but playing it about 100,000 times was what it took to ensure face-to-face brawling would be rich in heft and detail.
Andersson knew how fast he could clear that level, how much damage he should take, how many kills he should be getting; yardsticks by which he could measure each run, and it’s how clicking to swing your hammer feels like it’s caving a skull in, and why your sword feels like it can split a rat’s stringy carcass in two. “It’s very much home to me,” he says.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games. This time, SpyParty [official site].
If Chris Hecker was going to make a mistake with SpyParty, he wanted it to be the opposite mistake to the one Spore made. The way Hecker sees it, Spore’s problem was that it was all accessibility and no depth. And he’d know because he was a lead engineer and designer on Spore. So when he began to make his own game, SpyParty, which after eight years of development has finally hit Steam Early Access, he said to himself, “I’m going to go really hard on the depth.”
And so Hecker did, putting enough depth in this asymmetric two-player competitive game to satisfy 1000 hours of matches from its most dedicated players. But it’s not enough. He wants to push SpyParty to becoming 5000-hour game, and the way he plans to do it is by building his characters.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games. This time, Jalopy [official site].
”A lot of people have made the correlation between game development being a janky mess and the car in the game being a janky mess,” says Greg Pryjmachuk, the sole developer of Jalopy, a game about driving a Laika 601 Deluxe through the countries of the former Soviet bloc with your uncle. “It does seem quite apt.”
But he’s definitely being a little hard on himself. Jalopy is a game he never intended to be as big as it’s become, a project he started to escape from mainstream development. A couple of weeks back, after two years in Early Access, it finally reached its official launch, and with it has come a slew of negative reviews and angry forum threads born of a weight of expectation that Jalopy’s rattling old chassis was never really designed to live up to.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, mountain-climbing platformer Celeste and the importance of timing in its movements and kindness in its code.
Early last month, the makers of Celeste released the source code behind the game’s star, Madeline. Across 5472 lines and in variables like JumpGraceTime, DashHJumpThruNudge and DuckFriction, the code precisely defines her ability to run, climb, jump and dash, bringing her to life in your hands.
If you’re not a programmer, it’s difficult to figure out what the code really means, so I asked Noel Berry to explain how it coalesces into a character who feels so good to control. Focusing on her dash, the mechanic around which Celeste revolves, it turns out that a lot of it’s down to the game making her do what you expected her to do, and not necessarily what you actually did.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Deep Rock Galactic [official site].
The moment Deep Rock Galactic took my imagination was when I saw its dwarf miners throwing flares into the inky blackness of a cave in its E3 trailer. Few games do darkness, and here was a game trading in it. As the flares fell they lit up the faceted low-poly walls of the cavern, revealing what lay ahead: ore to mine, pitfalls to fall into, twisting passageways to get lost in, and swarms of alien enemies. It got right to the core of exploration, capturing the mystery and adventure of blundering into spaces where no one has been before. In short, darkness leans right into everyone’s favourite fantasy of being a dwarven miner in space.
]]>This is The Mechanic, in which Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Into the Breach [official site].
“I think we were resolved to having a UI nightmare from the beginning,” says Matthew Davis, co-designer and programmer of Into the Breach.
“When we decided we had to show what every enemy was doing every single turn, and that every action needed to be clear, it became clear how bad that nightmare would be,” says Justin Ma, its co-designer and artist.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Slay the Spire [official site].
Slay the Spire is a deck-building card game about careful attack and defence. And poisoning. And letting your own blood to amplify your damage, and hitting each enemy every time you lose a card, and gaining energy by hovering close to death. It’s a bit like Hearthstone, but it’s also a Rogue-like in which you ascend floors and find new cards and relics which power up your character in transformational ways.
It’s really good! And the secret behind it is a detail that seems minor, but without it your card-playing strategising would be for nothing. It’s the fact you get to see what your enemies will do on their next turn.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Iconoclasts [official site].
Iconoclasts is a platformer that feels great to play. As Robin, a daring mechanic armed with a wrench and a stun gun, you’ll run, jump and shoot your way through sprawling multi-level areas, enjoying precise movements which balance detail and nuance with smoothness. It’s a feel that’s down to developer Joakim Sandberg’s taste in games. ”Something I always enjoy in a videogame is that feeling, usually when you’ve played it a few times, of being able to push through,” he tells me. “Flow, essentially.”
Almost all of Iconoclasts’ design features are directly about maintaining this sense of flow, of momentum in which you feel like nothing is getting in the way of your intention. And one feature you’ll notice when you first start playing the game is kind of shocking.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Gorogoa [official site].
Gorogoa is a game about fitting things together. Fitting a detail in one image with a detail in another and see how it produces something new. And in making it, developer Jason Roberts found that making things fit was one of the greatest challenges he faced, whether those things were puzzles into the game's tiles, sequences into its story, or details into players’ heads.
Gorogoa is also a game about linking things together. You draw relationships between images and find them leading into and influencing wider themes. And in making it, Roberts found that each decision he made had profound effects on others, the biggest being limiting the game to its two-by-two grid.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Darkwood [official site].
“All roads lead deeper into the woods,” says one of the twisted characters in Darkwood, an excellent and haunting game of survival in a nightmarish forest. There are horrors in its tangles of subsuming wood, things you won’t quite understand, characters who aren’t quite human, aren’t quite friendly. A game in the tradition of Pathologic and STALKER, Darkwood was developed by a Polish team of three called Acid Wizard Studio, and in many ways, it sounds as if that mordant quote is a comment on their experience of making it.
Their desire to marry a strong non-linear story, meaningful choice, a threatening atmosphere, and a procedurally generated world that changes shape during play, led to serious challenges. As team working on their first-ever game, they’d blundered into tackling some of the biggest design questions in games today. “It was an extremely stressful experience,” artist and writer Artur Kordas tells me, as Darkwood’s development pushed into five long years. And part of their solution? Killing permadeath - a decision that led them deeper into the woods.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Quadrilateral Cowboy [official site].
Quadrilateral Cowboy is a firstperson puzzle game about a group of hacker friends who stage heists across a set of increasingly challenging missions. Together they tell a surprising and affecting story of professionalism, friendship and rising threat through Blendo Games’ distinctive tight cutting between interactive scenes, flipping the action from a hoverbike chase to the gang’s return to their hideout. It’s clever, pacy, and rich in detail and nuance. Pretty much, in other words, what you’d expect from Blendo Games.
But it’s not what Blendo Games - which is to say, Brendon Chung - expected to make. Quadrilateral Cowboy’s entire structure and form is completely different to what he originally envisaged. The way in which his game changed over the course of its development is a model for how a game is shaped by the realities of production, and how ideas can be far too big for their own good.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Total War: Warhammer’s Mortal Empires campaign [official site].
Mortal Empires is the logical conclusion of Total War: Warhammer. It asks this: what happens if all the races, factions, legendary lords and terrain of both Total War: Warhammer and its sequel were folded together into a single giant campaign? The answer was released in October as a free addition to owners of the two games, and it is, as game director Ian Roxborough tells me, “By far the biggest, most content-rich campaign that we’ve ever done in Total War.”
But how do you make games that are designed to be played both in discrete and distinctive smaller chunks, and also in huge and unified ones? How do you balance Warhammer’s strongly asymmetric races against each other while continually adding more? And how do you make a game as big as Mortal Empires comprehensible and playable at all?
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Football Manager [official site].
Do want to play a cavernously deep simulation of a world of viciously competing factions? Do you dream of leading your people to glory and dominating all comers? Do you relish bending complex systems of law to your advantage? Do you savour the idea of surveying the world for the sharpest operators and spying on your rivals’ smallest decisions?
Forget Crusader Kings 2. Its network of aristocratic machinations is a kid’s toy next to Football Manager. And nothing in Football Manager is quite as vast and encompassing as the transfer market, in which hundreds of thousands of players, scouts, agents, and managers live out digital careers in an international scene of countries and leagues. 25 years in the making, Football Manager’s transfer system is a blend of artificial intelligence, maths and hard data, and it’s designed to simulate the real business of football, behaving credibly into an infinite future of football. “We haven’t perfected it,” director Miles Jacobson tells me. “But we’re pretty close.”
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Dead Cells [official site].
When Dead Cells was first released in Steam Early Access in May this year, Sébastien Bénard was shocked to see how people played the game he’d spent the previous three years designing. “It was quickly a disappointment,” he tells me. They were not playing in the way he’d intended at all. They weren’t using the weapons in the game elegantly, shooting with the bow before finishing with a blade, or blocking with the shield and following up with the dagger. They were only using bows, killing everything, even bosses, from a safe range. They never put themselves in danger and they never made different decisions. They were playing Dead Cells efficiently, and completely wrong.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, What Remains of Edith Finch [official site].
The Finch house fits together in a jumble. The original building serves as a foundation for the floors that teeter on top and its rooms connect in strange and confounding ways, through hidden passages and external ladders. The whole thing looks like it couldn’t function as a building, a pile of timbers that’d tumble in a gale.
Yet, as I played What Remains of Edith Finch I found it making sense. Its rooms are fantastically detailed, and though their entrances can be through children’s playhouses and exits can be secret trapdoors, the game pulled me through. I was rarely confused or lost, and yet there are no quest markers or breadcrumb trails to follow. How What Remains of Edith Finch guides without pushing is simple, and yet complex. It’s all about:
THE MECHANIC: Signposting with words
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Divinity: Original Sin 2 [official site].
It’s the holy grail for RPGs, right, that perfect mix of a strong story and freedom to do what you want. But if players can do anything, how do you tell them a story in the right order and without bits missing? What if they kill some plot-important character or sell the magical thing that does the special thing?
Quite a few RPGs do a good job! Planescape: Torment, for one, presents a fantastically dense and interwoven set of characters and scenarios which you can approach in many different ways. But Divinity: Original Sin 2 goes a step beyond, telling a clear story and allowing - even encouraging - you to do all kinds of dumb things, all without completely breaking. How does it succeed? Well, through a feature that you’d never think is related.
THE MECHANIC: Multiplayer
Very mild spoilers follow, but nothing actually spoiling, promise.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Tacoma [official site].
Fullbright is running out of things to steal from the Shock series. “Like, we made a game that is basically about audio diaries for Gone Home, and now we’ve made a game that’s basically about the ghost sequences in System Shock 2 and BioShock with Tacoma,” co-founder Steve Gaynor tells me. “We’re running out of things to rip! What are we doing next?”
He’s laughing about it, but it’s only half true, since Tacoma is really about taking audio diaries and making them into a game. You don’t find and passively listen to them, you’re an active observer of augmented reality recordings of the crew members of a now-deserted space station. The distinction makes a huge difference, and had a profound effect on the way Tacoma’s story was written, because it posed complex puzzles of fitting dialogue and direction into both space and time. All because in Tacoma you can:
THE MECHANIC: Pause, fast-forward and rewind ghosts
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Everything [official site].
Everything is a game about everything. You can play as everything. Planets and hairs, whales and articulated buses. Pollen, spiral galaxies, tents, penguins - you get the picture. Within a few seconds, you might have moved from being a tardigrade floating on the microscopic scale all the way to being a sun hanging in a star-flecked universe. But the transitions, as you scale from from tardigrade to clump of grass to chimpanzee to forest to continent to planet to sun, feel remarkably smooth, even magical, reflecting the game’s core philosophical message: that everything is related and part of a whole, and that we are natural a part of it all too.
Under that smoothness lie a lot of design tricks by its creators, David O’Reilly and Damien Di Fede, all centred on something it’s very easy to take for granted:
THE MECHANIC: Thirdperson cameras
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Viscera Cleanup Detail [official site].
Viscera Cleanup Detail is a game about cleaning. You’ll wash blood and slime from floors and walls and pick up rubbish, bullet casings and body parts. Your slop will spill, your ichor-covered boots will leave prints over surfaces you’ve worked hard to scrub, and you’ll drop an oozing limb just as you thought you’d made things right.
It’s brutal, menial work, and every feature and level is designed to make it extra fraught with problems. “A main theme is that everything in the world hates you, or is at least indifferent,” developer Nolan Richert tells me. “The noble janitor has a miserable job to do and no one cares or witnesses their struggle. They only complain about the results. It's inspired by real life, you see.”
Also it’s fun, thanks to a set of tools that do all they can to hinder your attempts to just do your damn job.
THE MECHANIC: Physics bins and buckets and mops
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Company of Heroes [official site].
The Tiger tanks come rolling in, the artillery comes thundering down. Walls are blown wide open, buildings collapse on themselves. In Company of Heroes, the battlefield is ever-changing, munitions cutting into the map new opportunities for flanking and to be flanked. Confident pushes turn to disaster as the enemy punches through rear guards, and last-ditch defences are saved as the cavalry smashes through barricades. Company of Heroes is a deeply dynamic RTS, something that’s all down to:
THE MECHANIC: Destructible environments
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds [official site].
Somewhere across Erangel’s 64 square kilometres of towns, villages, hills, rivers and sea, 100 players are running, looting, driving and shooting each other. With every one of them having an average of well over half a square kilometre to themselves, it might sound like playing PUBG is a lonely experience, but in practice it’s anything but. The opening minutes are always intense, demanding strategy and planning. It’s all down to a clever piece of design that relates to how you’re being delivered to this Battle Royale:
THE MECHANIC: Cargo plane
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Little Nightmares [official site].
The figures you encounter in Little Nightmares are grotesque. Disproportioned and baggy in places they shouldn’t be, the way they look is one thing, but it’s the way they move that really clinches the deal. Their staggering, shuffling and lumbering captures the flavour of the Czech stop-motion cartoons I spent a great deal of my childhood feeling unnerved by. They’re great.
It wasn’t easy to reach that special state of uncanniness, especially for a small team working on its first original game, but developer Tarsier Studios started in just the right place:
THE MECHANIC: Avoiding Pixar
Spoilers lie ahead, obv! No story secrets as such, though, just showing several scenes from throughout the game.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Inside [official site].
Playdead don’t design games in the same way that other studios do. They’re the result of a process where nothing is written down. There’s no script and no design document. No member of the team owns any aspect of what they make and what will go into the final game. Everything is up for change.
From that creative anarchy rose Inside, a game of the leanest pacing and most intricate staging, and entirely wordless. Story and play are entirely communicated through its meticulously constructed environments, which spin subtle mystery and challenge with spare details - a chainlink fence, a hanging rope - created through five years of constant iteration.
This is how they were made.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Crawl [official site].
Crawl is a game about cooperation, betrayal and murder and accumulating enough eldritch power to kill a god. Made by Australian indie Powerhoof, it’s a couch multiplayer game played with up to three friends, but only one of you can be the hero. Everyone else is playing a monster, but when a monster kills the hero, it takes their place. This loop, of ganging up, competing to strike the final blow and then turning on your friends, captures the essential heart of the best local multiplayer games. It’s that delicious tension of power and powerlessness, of ruthlessness and submission, of laughter and jeering. At the centre of Crawl is a lovely bit of:
THE MECHANIC: Unfairness
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Cosmic Express [official site].
There are many reasons why puzzle games designed by Alan “Draknek” Hazelden sit on top of the form. There’s the puzzles, for one thing. They’re pretty good. They explore seemingly simple rulesets and find in them huge and satisfying challenge, dragging you along for the ride. That’s as true for Cosmic Express as for all Hazelden’s games. (Actually, maybe that’s sort of literally true, since Cosmic Express is about drawing tracks to take aliens on little train rides.)
But there’s something else to his puzzles, something that opens up a sense of wonder at the depth of the little logical worlds that emerge from their rulesets and layouts. It’s also something that gives you a sense of involvement and discovery in a genre that can so often feel like jumping through a designer’s tortuous hoops. It’s that they have:
THE MECHANIC: Multiple solutions
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Hitman [official site].
Hitman developer IO Interactive is really good at making believable environments. Did you ever play Kane and Lynch 2? Seriously, its Shanghai is something to behold, a city of broken pavements, back alleys crusted with air-conditioning units and construction sites littered with cellophane-wrapped pallets. It’s a masterpiece of observation, one of the best representations of cities in videogames.
The latest Hitman doesn’t go anywhere so gritty, but it upholds the same values. Its levels are a jetset tour of places you believe could exist, but these aren’t just credible environments, they’re also machines for killing in. And the first season of Hitman closed with one of its best. Hokkaido is at once compact and expansive, melodramatic and credible, and I talked to IO about how it was designed.
THE MECHANIC: There isn’t really one tbh. Actually, maybe that’s the point here? That Hitman’s level design is a holistic marriage of function and form? Anyway, read on!
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Unexplored [Steam page].
“Dungeon crawlers are very much the hero’s journey, where you start off as a nobody and end up as the big hero,” says Joris Dormans, creator of realtime dungeon crawler Unexplored. “Or at least that’s the plan.”
Unexplored creates great hero’s journeys. As Adam said in his Wot I Think, it consistently generates some of the best ever roguelike dungeons. They often feel like they’ve been laid out by hand, organic caverns giving way to rooms and corridors, each space sprinkled with foliage and architectural details, as well as puzzles, traps and obstacles to cross. And the thing that makes them feel so satisfying to crawl is something that calls back to the fundamentals of level design, and even architecture in general:
THE MECHANIC: Cyclic design
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, SteamWorld Heist [official site].
SteamWorld Heist is a tactics game about boarding procedural spaceships with a squad of desperado robots and grabbing all the swag you can before they’re turned to scrap. It’s also a cross-genre oddity, a turn-based platformer, with presentation and polish that comes across a bit like a Nintendo fan fell in love with XCOM.
But while that observation is essentially true and it’s a big part of Heist’s rust-bucket charm, it ignores the real reason why it’s so great. And the reason why SteamWorld Heist so great? It’s down to a single simple-sounding feature:
THE MECHANIC: Realtime aiming
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Cities: Skylines [official site].
Cities: Skylines is a game about building roads. Its lovely set of road-building tools allow you to scribe beautiful curved boulevards into the gentle slopes and combes of virgin lands, and it has inspired 19-page forum topics entitled Show Us Your Interchanges and Steam Workshop lists 24,482 interchange designs.
Oh, and an incidental byproduct of a good road system is the growth of a city around it.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Darkest Dungeon [official site].
Darkest Dungeon is an RPG in which four flawed heroes face damnably transcendent terrors as they explore the ancient narrow passages beneath a cursed mansion. Notch by notch, their grasp on sanity slips and their vitality trickles thinner as their torch dims and new horror befalls them.
This is a game in which pressure mounts, misfortune crushes, and mistakes are punished. You can’t expect your party to always survive, whether driven to death or madness, and its turn-based combat plays out with the constant understanding that every decision can turn on a knife-edge: a missed hit, an ill-considered target, the wrong ability. And a lot of that tension is founded on something that on its face sounds prosaic, even old-fashioned:
THE MECHANIC: 2D combat
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Astroneer [official site].
Astroneer is a space game about hoovering up alien materials with a magic gun and listening to them plop into your backpack. And in this Astroneer has cracked something very special in crafting and resource management: it’s actually fun.
Developer System Era Software has put a peculiar focus on how resources are presented and how you manipulate them, and at its centre is an idea that’s surprisingly rare in games:
THE MECHANIC: Resources are physical
]]>This is The Mechanic. Taking a dive into Dishonored 2 [official site] with Harvey Smith, it marks the first anniversary of the column. Holy heck! I hope you’ve been enjoying it. I want to thank everyone who’s read The Mechanic, and all the amazing designers it has given me the opportunity to speak to. Here’s to many more next year.
In the city of Karnaca is a district that lies under mounds of encroaching dust. Home to the labourers of the silver mines, Batista has been worked into exhaustion. Its people are spent and the mines so overexploited that dust from them has been billowing out and falling over the streets and squares, the heavy wind whipping it up into storms and engulfing entire buildings.
Dust District is one of Dishonored 2’s largest levels, a dense network of byways, apartments and compounds peopled by downtrodden miners and two warring factions. But you don’t need to play any of it. In fact, the entire level is designed around an idea that speaks to Dishonored’s deepest design principles. Because the Dust District is all about:
THE MECHANIC: Skipping stuff
(Light-ish spoilers for both the Dust District and subsequent level naturally follow.)
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Enter the Gungeon [official site].
Enter the Gungeon’s conception was an idle conversation about what shape a game called Enter the Gungeon would take. And here’s what it led to:
1. It’s a dungeon-crawler in which you shoot guns. 2. You’re entering the Gungeon to find a gun so powerful it can kill the past. 3. Every enemy is a bullet. 4. The enemy bullets shoot bullets.
Great gouts of bullets. Bullets which radiate and fan out like flowers across the screen. Because if you’re going to make a game about guns, it kind of makes sense that it would feature:
THE MECHANIC: Bullet hell
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Thumper [official site].
“When people say they’re injuring their thumbs it’s too bad, but it’s kind of the best compliment you can ever get,” says Thumper’s co-designer and artist, Brian Gibson. “It means their nervous system is on fire when they’re playing.”
Thumper is a game that you feel. As you hurtle down its sliver of track, every twist, scrape and jump has a physicality that transcends its fundamental nature as a call-and-response rhythm game. You can only really play Thumper once it’s bashed its way into your subconscious, when the lights and booming sound of the abstract hell you’re flying through can brutalise your brainstem into remembering patterns of threats. And the threats that get to you, the ones that really make your fingers claw the pad, are:
THE MECHANIC: Turns
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Crusader Kings 2 [official site].
Meet Domnall, Earl of Osraige. He’s a pretty affable guy. He’s friends with his neighbouring rulers, and all seems peaceful. But he’s also ambitious and a just little crazy, and he’s about to make a big mess of the Emerald Isle.
Domnall is one of the hundreds of characters across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa that Crusader Kings 2 is simulating here in the year 1066. Whether the player is interacting with them or not, they’ll be vying with each other, allying, marrying, dying, giving birth, and generally doing all of the things that your ruler can do. Crusader Kings 2 is a game all about people. It’s about marriages and dependencies, accordances and kinship. And at the heart of how it models all these dense and messy human complexities is a single value that governs the way its little computer aristocrats behave:
THE MECHANIC: Opinions
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Sorcery! [official site].
From Warlock of Firetop Mountain on I was pretty much obsessed with the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. Of course I was: they presented richly drawn fantasies in which I could play a part, my imagination spinning on their words and illustrations. (My favourite illustrator? Obviously Russ Nicholson.) Inkle’s Sorcery! series, four text-based games adapted from Fighting Fantasy co-creator Steve Jackson’s original gamebooks, capture all that made Fighting Fantasy special and add a magical extra: the dynamism of videogames.
In fact, Sorcery! often feels more dynamic and alive than videogames. As you progress through the books, your adventure keeps getting richer, the world more responsive to your passage. It’s partly down to the increasing freedom you have to explore, but more, it’s because each book is filled with choices that feel like they have consequence; that the game is watching and remembers your every move. Sorcery! is fluid and feels player-directed, and yet it’s strongly authored. It’s like Steve Jackson is writing it for you as you play, reacting to your every action.
There’s no AI here, though. Sorcery!’s magic is down to a system that’s far simpler, but yet results in at least as much intricacy. This fantasy epic is actually just a lot of:
THE MECHANIC: Little choices
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Virginia [official site].
Virginia is a new game from studio Variable State about two FBI agents investigating the disappearance of a child. But its story is less about that mystery than it is about the lines you draw between the fragmentary events, images, locations and characters you witness, as well as lines you draw towards things you sense you haven’t.
Like Brendan Chung’s Thirty Flights of Loving, Virginia tells its story through a technique that’s absolutely native and everyday to filmmaking but it’s novel to games, at least outside of cutscenes. Games are meant to be unbroken realtime, right? And yet powerful and subtle dramatic effects are possible through:
THE MECHANIC: Cutting
(Light spoilers and references to events in the game naturally follow.)
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, colourful procedural climbing game Grow Home [official site].
Put simply, BUD is a box suspended over legs and is held together by springs. In practice, BUD is an ungainly robot child, staggering and tripping his way around a low-poly world. BUD is the star of Ubisoft Reflections’ Grow Home and Grow Up, all grinning face-grille and gangly limbs. He’s a kind of super-ambulant WALL-E, able to run, scale walls, leap and fly, in a stumbling and toppling off things kind of way.
It’s hard to begrudge BUD for his drunken awkwardnesses, though, because as you attempt to control him they form a sense of a delightfully clumsy personality: BUD’s drunken awkwardnesses are BUD. But he’s not carefully hand-animated. BUD is a bunch of maths, or more precisely:
THE MECHANIC: Procedural animation
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, N++ [official site].
What makes Metanet’s long-running N series different to other platformers? Each level takes place on a single screen, and that makes it uncommon, but certainly not unique. It focuses on acrobatic avoidance of hazards, but that makes it an elder cousin to Super Meat Boy.
Instead, N is distinctive for its use of physics, or more precisely, its take on physics. Though it uses just three digital inputs: right, left and jump, the dynamic range of your little stick ninja’s movement is incredible, and just keeps expanding as you learn its nuances. The feel of N’s blend of low-gravity floatiness, inertia and lightness is irresistible, and Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns have constantly been refining it from when the first game came out in 2004 to N++, which came out on PC just yesterday. And at the core of how its physics works is a single principle:
THE MECHANIC: Jumping adds velocity
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, RimWorld [official site].
Every player will have stories of their RimWorld colonists. Dramas set amid cabin fever, raider attacks, depressing decor, infected limbs, cannibalism and bloodthirsty local fauna. Personal dramas, tales of threat and victory, of small things and large things, tragedy and comedy. This colony-building game is designed very specifically to generate such stories. But while it feels as if they arise from deep simulation, all watched over by an AI, they’re actually the result of something both more powerful and simple. RimWorld tells great stories because it uses:
THE MECHANIC: Apophenia
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Hyper Light Drifter [official site].
Hyper Light Drifter is a game about exploring mysterious ruins and killing the monsters that inhabit them with ferocity and precision. Whether you favour a slash-slash-shoot, a dash-slash-slash-dash, or any other combination thereof, combat is built on a holy trio of sword, gun and a dash move. The dash gets you into and out of scrapes in a moment, and the sword, with a wide slash that almost encompasses 180 degrees, is your trusty mainstay.
And the gun… Being slow to fire, with limited shots and requiring careful aim, it might not seem it at first, but the gun is your most powerful asset. Its place in Hyper Light Drifter’s arsenal is down to single and subtle design feature that keeps its relationship with the sword close and maintains a sense of its shots feeling both valuable and always available:
THE MECHANIC: Recharging ammo
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Doom [official site].
Doom, the new one, has one heck of a sense of forward momentum. It’s a game of aggression and constant movement. You’re the Doom Marine: you move like the wind and your shots are unbroken by the need to reload.
At the heart of how Doom creates this response in players is a single feature which, paradoxically, is all about pausing your interaction with the game, pressing you so close to the enemy that they often fill the screen. It’s a feature, after all, that was intended to capture something special about the original Doom that had little to do with movement, but it turned out to trigger all kinds of secondary effects. The feature was:
THE MECHANIC: Glory kills
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Duskers [official site].
That atmosphere. That rising tension. That emergent puzzle-solving. That moment in Duskers when deliberate planning turns to hell, and you sit, impotent, as your team of unswerving drones are fried by radiation, pulled into the vacuum of space, or are torn into scrap by unknown horrors.
At the centre of this experience is a single decision that Duskers’ creator, Tim Keenan, says was “the most empowering thing I’ve ever done in videogame design.” It won’t sound like it could ever have such power, but if you’ve played Duskers (and if you haven’t, you really should) you’ll know the potency of its:
THE MECHANIC: Command-line interface
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Invisible, Inc. [official site].
Invisible, Inc.’s defining features aren’t its most obvious, and yet they’re all about making things obvious. This turn-based tactics game about hacking and sneaking through procedurally generated levels thrives on them, because they make you feel like a mastermind, even though your agents are outnumbered and outgunned. They make every turn a exercise in deliberate planning, and they allow you to pull the most fantastically elaborate and elegant heists. And you’d never think such simple concepts could have so much power:
THE MECHANIC: Peeking and observing
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Kentucky Route Zero [official site].
I haven’t a lot of patience for dialogue in games. Weighted by exposition and lumpen characterisation, it tends to lumber, but I love the dialogue in Kentucky Route Zero. Telling a story which balances the bizarre with the everyday, it communicates so much with so few words. And the technology that lies behind them is ancient, wielded by games pretty much since their advent. But Kentucky Route Zero employs a twist of design that makes a world of difference:
THE MECHANIC: Multiple choice
]]>“Saved my hide, it did. The alien's broad back shielded me as its brethren flung their fiery mucus wads; the fireballs burst, spraying flaming, red liquid that dribbled down my dance partner's legs to pool on the ground, lighting the room with a hellish, red glaze. I fired nine or ten times, finally blowing a hole clean through the alien ... a gory loophole through which I turned on the rest.”
Knee Deep in the Dead, Dafydd Ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver’s novelisation of Doom, is perhaps a little more theatrical than the Doom that played in my head during the summer of 1994. It features a sidekick and talking demons, and dramatised sequences in which protagonist Corporal Flynn Taggart finds ammo and bumps up against walls to find secrets. But it captures something of Doom’s intensely graphic nature. Doom was the first game I played that felt truly fluid and direct.
Playing Brutal Doom [official site] today feels like Doom always did, despite its custom levels and gouts of blood and gore, death animations and chugging live versions of Doom’s MUS originals. It overhauls pretty much every element of the original, and yet it’s the Doom that plays in my memory, amplifying the original’s gore and immediacy to suit a post-COD, Gears of War – heck, Soldier of Fortune – world. For me, the latest version, v20b, reaches a state of the sublime. But while the blood that drips from ceilings and screen-filling viscera are its obvious achievements, something far more prosaic lies at the root of how it works so well.
THE MECHANIC: Hitboxes.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to pauses, rewinds and dissect the systems that make their games tick (tock).
Here are the five stages of first playing Super Time Force:
1. It’s just another arcade run and gunner. 2. Huh, I play alongside my former lives? 3. Causality, paradoxes? And a time limit? Oh god. 4. I CAN REWIND TIME. 5. Haha skateboarding dinosaur
It turns out that Capybara Games’ experience of making Super Time Force mirrors that of a player’s first hour or so, except, you know, stretched over three years. In fact, it sounds like it nearly broke its creators’ brains, as they tried to grapple combining a Contra-style platformer with time travel, and getting it to both function on a computer and make some kind of sense in a player’s head.
The story of how Capybara arrived at Super Time Force’s eventual design is a model of the complexity of making games and planning time travel. And it took them well over a year before they even arrived at Super Time Force’s amazingly empowering core principle:
THE MECHANIC: Time Out
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites a developer to help him put their game up on blocks and take a wrench to hack out one its features, just to see how it works.
“I feel that combat got quite boring over the long term, it mainly felt like monsters were standing in your way.” For a long time, Minecraft's combat has been, well, not exactly premium. Clicky clicky clicky. Swords flailing at air, the basic principle behind combat being the player who clicks most wins most.
For its lead developer Jens Bergensten, it was time for change in the form of Minecraft 1.9, the Combat Update, which released on February 29. “The combat system wasn’t very interesting and we simply wanted to give it a little bit more variation,” he tells me. But how could he design something that would be accepted by Minecraft’s huge playerbase, work with Minecraft’s networking system, and be as playable on touchscreens as mouse and keyboard? The answer was...
THE MECHANIC: Timing
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites a developer to help him put their game up on blocks and take a wrench to hack out its best feature, just to see how it works.
The arrow trap that shoots the croc man that causes him to telefrag you. Being caught mid-jump by a boomerang that juggles you towards a spike trap, leaving you stunned in front of it until it springs. Shopstorm.
These are not necessarily the noblest events in Spelunky, but they’re surprising, funny, fascinating, and entirely consistent and logical and correct. They might not be exactly your fault, but neither are they, really, the game’s fault. They’re the result of a big reason – the big reason? – why Spelunky is amazing:
THE MECHANIC: How every object in Spelunky has shared fundamental traits
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites a developer to help him put their game up on blocks and take a wrench to hack out its best feature, just to see how it works.
The Witness [official site] is generally considered to be very hard. It is frequently very hard! I’m feeling a little brutalised by a succession of puzzles that I encountered last night. But I’m not sure it’s particularly hard compared to all puzzle games. Sokobond, Pullblox and Box Boy on Nintendo 3DS, Spacechem, The Talos Principle: I find all good puzzle games hard.
But in The Witness you feel peculiarly alone. Everything you know about the game you’ve learned yourself from observation and experimentation, a feature that doesn’t make The Witness unique, but combined with its sheer wordlessness, it makes its puzzles feel awfully cold when you’re stumped. And yet answers do come, because the game is always subtly teaching you, a lesson that starts right at the game’s beginning, in the Entry Yard, where you experience its:
THE MECHANIC: Non-verbal tutorial
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites a developer to help him put their game up on blocks and take a wrench to hack out its best feature, just to see how it works.
The start of a game of Risk of Rain [official site] is quiet. Your small pixel character stands in a vast alien landscape, in which somewhere you’ll find a teleporter that will take you to the next level. The end of a game of Risk of Rain is mayhem, the land swarming with monsters that you couldn’t survive.
And throughout lies constant stress and pressure. You’re ever aware of a meter in the top right corner of the screen that ticks upwards. Every five minutes, a bell chimes and the difficulty changes: from Very Easy, to Easy, to Medium, and further. The constantly respawning monsters come ever thicker and harder, inexorably escalating towards unmanageable chaos. You must never stand still and must never relent, because with every second your own downfall nears. All because of:
THE MECHANIC: Time = difficulty
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites a developer to help him put their game up on blocks and take a wrench to hack out its best feature, just to see how it works. It’s about the sweat, grease and genius behind the little things that make games special.
Here’s a question: How do you solve a problem like Geralt? There he is, stern and stalwart, everyone’s favourite low fantasy drifter. A man of rank bogs, blasted no man’s lands and rugged islands. A man who isn’t much of a laugh, or awfully fun to have a drink with.
But what if you want to extend his world, and expose him to new adventures? That’s what last October’s expansion to The Witcher 3 [official site], Hearts of Stone, aimed to achieve, but it had to get Geralt doing things he’d never normally do. So how did CD Projekt manage to get him drunk and dancing at a wedding, robbing a bank, and appraising fine art? Their solution was deft.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites a developer to help him put their game up on blocks and take a wrench to hack out its best feature, just to see how it works. It’s about the sweat, grease and genius behind the little things that make games special.
Infested Planet [official site] is an RTS that channels Starship Troopers. You control a small squad of soldiers fighting their way through caverns of hives that endlessly churn out insectoid bugs. The body count reaches tens of thousands as you capture the hives, steadily gaining and conceding ground to make best use of your limited resources. It’s an intensely dynamic game of observing and controlling flows of bugs and continually respec-ing your forces, because you’re always up against:
THE MECHANIC: Mutation
]]>This is the first entry in a new column called The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites a developer to help him put their game up on blocks and take a wrench to hack out its best feature, just to see how it works. It’s about the sweat, grease and genius behind the little things that make games special.
Alien: Isolation is an AI-driven science-fiction horror game featuring, for the most part, a single, unstoppable opponent. It’s pretty much a game version of the first Alien film: confined to a space, all you can do about the xenomorph that’s hunting you down is to distract, avoid or briefly scare it. And all around you lies terrible temptation. They feel like they’ll solve all your problems. They feel like safety. They feel like places you should stay inside. But they won’t; they aren’t; you shouldn’t. They are:
THE MECHANIC: Lockers
]]>
