I enjoyed attending all the talks and took extensive notes. While a lot of the notes are just “write down what the slide said”, I think the process of doing it forced me to pay attention throughout. Maybe thanks to that, I somehow managed to attend at least a dozen hour long talks without fidgeting incessantly or zoning out. It’s probably the stimulants though.

I decided to compile the notes and summarize my thoughts on them as a form of self reflection, so that I can digest these talks and their takeaways. Also, I haven’t posted on here in forever, and if I want to be taken seriously I guess I should be more diligent with it.

This first series of reflections is on game design related talks of many flavors, from narrative to combat, from helping the player to helping yourself.

“Fake” Choices Are Just as Real

Ashley Ruhl gave a great microtalk on using “Illusion choices”, player decisions that do not change the game state, to complement traditional “Divergent choices” in creating games with meaningful decisions.

This talk immediately resonated with my experiences with the game UNBEATABLE (that I love to hell, but that’s a post for another day). Almost all of the game’s dialogue choices were illusions. This isn’t a problem by itself – Ashley gives the example of Kentucky State Zero, an amazing narrative game with zero divergent choices – but the emotional impact of most of them were undersold or nonexistent, and I quickly felt like I did not need to pay attention to the choices anymore.

Overcoming Frictions to Innovation, Within and Without

Joel Burgess and Steve Meretzky both gave a microtalk on innovation in games from very different perspectives.

Joel explained his self-critique approach as a designer, asking “Is this better or just different?” and distinguishing good changes from bad ones. This is a multi-step process that starts from identifying one’s underlying emotions behind the change, evaluating the change using external perspectives and anchors, and implementing the change in a measurable way.

Steve takes an external perspective on the spectrum of innovation from exact copies to wildly innovative, considering the material circumstances that would warrant designing towards either extreme. He makes a point of identifying innovation as not just a creative or mechanical change – the method of delivery and context surrounding the game may be enough innovation for a game to find success.

These two microtalks complement each other by each addressing the intrinsic and extrinsic challenges a game designer has to face. Joel’s ethos of game design as a process of self-improvement is one I deeply resonate with, while Steve’s pragmatic understanding of designing for a market is a welcomed reality check.

Designing for Yourself (Sustainably)

Adam Saltsman, creator of Canabalt and Finji and father of two, explains his philosophy that allowed him to continue making many games on the side despite having minimal time and wanting minimal pressure.

His adorably named “Corgispace Manifesto” (Corgis, because the games “have short legs on purpose”) has three mantras:

1. Do the easy and not obvious thing.
   • Resist the dogmatic urge to do otherwise (the hard and obvious). That’s for people with money and time, and you probably have neither.
   • Follow the grain (what’s natural) in all things – your tools, your brain and thought processes, and even your specific game. If it’s hard, work around it, not through it.
   • Truly easy things tend to be not obvious.
2. Separate ideas from formulas.
   • Ideas are the motivations and emotions that drove you to make the game. They are simple, vague, and tend to be things you notice rather than invent.
   • Formulas are the designs, systems and your preconceptions that tries to capture that idea. They are complex, unpredictable, and liable to becoming too risky or costly.
   • Every game concept starts as a jumbled mess of ideas and formulas. When things go wrong, Separate them, keep the idea, and change the formula.
   • Ideas you start working on become way, way more valuable.
3. Game design is about noticing things.
   • As a designer, you want your player to notice the things you noticed when ideating and creating the game. Create revealing moments that make the player notice.
   • Design like a player by following the art loop: Play your game, react to what you notice in the game, and design the game around what you noticed, then play some more.
   • Fuck around and find out! Design in a way money can’t, and feel the shape of a game as it first takes form.

As a modder, I realized that my personal process of creating was highly similar to Adam’s approach. Similarly limited by time, I iterated quickly thanks to Garry’s Mod’s ability to hotload code changes, constantly playing with my creation to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. It was a process that brought me a lot of joy and sustained my interest in game development, and I am glad that there are others who recognize that it’s important for game design to remain a fun, enjoyable process.

Three Perspectives on Tutorials

Ian Schreiber, Lauryn Ash, and Monica Fan each gave a microtalk on video game tutorialization.

Ian evaluated tutorial design using cognitive load theory, identifying the three types of loads – Intrinsic, Extraneous, and Germane – and how they fill up the player’s mind under different circumstances. While it’s impossible to measure the exact load of each prompt and gameplay challenge, this is nevertheless a useful framework in considering what kinds of mental burden a game is giving the player in the critical early hours.

Lauryn triaged tutorialization with an importance/urgency matrix, providing a suitable approach for every mechanic or concept that needs to be explained. She made the observation that traditional full-screen text tutorials and quick-time events are not simply “bad tutorials”, but need to be deployed appropriately.

Ian and Lauryn both took an analytical approach to the challenge of onboarding players. While their framework differs, they both make the point that the timing of a tutorial is critical to its success. Too early, and the player will be overburdened by unnecessary information and forget when they actually need it; too late, and the player will not receive the help in time and feel frustration.

Contrasting these two is Monica’s empathetic approach, using the perspective of an average player with real life concerns to highlight tutorialization challenges beyond a designer’s control. In a world filled with burnout, players are consuming games in fragmented sessions, often days apart and while dealing with distractions. Traditional, long-winded AAA tutorials that frontload information fall apart when played in this environment, resulting in player frustration. These invisible problems don’t show up during paid playtesting and slips through the cracks of AAA design-by-committee processes.

Monica encourages designers to think about what their game asks of the player holistically, and find a sweet spot between skill breadth and depth by doing less with more or doing more with less. Games with fewer verbs that result in complex interactions, as well as games with many verbs but do not demand mastery, will give players who already have plenty of challenges in life a more enjoyable experience.

While not every game will benefit from Monica’s proposed approach, I find this unique perspective valuable for identifying how one’s players will engage with their game, and finally shine some insight on why all my Deadlock teammates fucking suck at the game.

Making Interesting Points of Interest

In talking about creating Points of Interest for OuW2, Dan Qiao provides useful frameworks with practical examples to help design spaces that are sensible and memorable.

Dan lists four worldbuilding pillars of each POI that grounds it within the setting of the game:

1. The player fantasy being fulfilled in this level (e.g. being a secret agent)
2. The story premise behind the location (justifing its existence in the world)
3. The local premise, i.e. the player’s journey through the level
4. The aesthetics of the level, how it fits into the biome. (Usually the artist’s responsibility)

In terms of spatial design, Dan designs each POI around one of three pillars:

1. Actor – One or more NPCs critical to the level, such as a boss or a leader. Their introduction and encounter becomes the highlight of the level.
2. Action – The interactions and events happening to the player in the level. This can be combat, stealth, platforming, or picking up a key item.
3. Staging – The theme and storytelling elements of the level. Informed by art and composition, the level reinforces and deepens the setting’s various elements.

As someone who takes a very slapdash, vibes-based approach to level design, I am very interested in using a more measured approach like this when the opportunity arises in the future.

Iterating Combat Through Vibes and Numbers

As a game balance aficionado, I simply could not miss Rob Donovan’s talk on The Outer Worlds 2’s weapon balance and Theodore Fishman’s talk about Ghost of Yotei’s combat system. Both games are sequels to a well-received but flawed first game, and each talk tackles a specific aspect of system design related to being a sequel.

For OuW2, the core FPS combat systems remained highly similar, but with a crucial difference – the sequel no longer scaled enemies to the player’s level. To address the balance ramifications of this change, Rob Donovan lays out a three-step approach:

1. Make it Balanced – Relative to each other, weak things are weak and strong things are strong.
2. Make it Challenging – For the intended audience, weak things are weak and strong things are strong.
   • Breakpoints, or hits to kill, is a crucial metric as it impacts perceived durability of enemies.
   • The goal is for players to stay in the flow state, where challenge and skill raise at the same scale and always match each other.
3. Make it Fun – A notoriously vague and subjective feeling.
   • Rob identified two common failure modes – “trash mobs” that are trivial due to low health, and “bullet sponges” that have too much health relative to their threat.

As someone who also had to balance over two hundred guns, I will be the first to admit that I have not been using spreadsheets as much as I should. However, I did independently realize the importance of breakpoints in how players perceive weapon strength, and I feel validated by Rob’s perspective on the matter.

On the other hand, Theodore Fishman’s design challenges for GoY were far more expansive in scope. The sequel was expected to deliver on a blend of fresh and familiar, and finding the right balance required both vision and iteration.

• In formulating a design direction, Theodore stressed the importance of retrospection, searching for “retroactive pillars” that appeared in the final game but not the original design document.
• For feature development, the GoY team used a “fantasy forward” design approach, centering the fantasy of the Wandering Ronin, using cinema, literature and anime/manga as inspiration.
• When tackling the original game’s low enemy variety, instead of simply adding more, the team evaluated and addressed core mechanics that caused the issue, allowing them to create enemy diversity in an efficient, thematic way.
• For the challenge of expanding on boss battles, Theodore and his team leaned into into the spectacle and drama specific to each boss, and threw curveballs towards players to surprise and challenge them. The spectacle is both visually demanding and ties into the boss’s gameplay curveball, asking players to appreciate and pay attention to the spectacle to succeed.

The amount of detail Theodore went into every design decision and iteration gave me valuable insight into the processes of a AAA-scale studio. With my limited experience in enemy and encounter design for my Garry’s Mod projects, I’ve always found enemy variety and boss design to be exhausting, daunting issues to tackle, and I hope I will be able to utilize these approaches in the future.

My Personal Takeaways

1. Strive for self improvement and self reflection as a designer. Find the fun in every design decision you make, or don’t make it.
2. Design for your enjoyment first, then playtest to ensure players can find the same enjoyment you did. If it isn’t working, figure out what isn’t getting across.
3. Formalize your design processes. I tend to do the right things but never put them into the right words, which hinders self-reflection and iteration.
4. Front load the game’s cool factor in a minimal package. Everything else should be drip fed slowly to enhance and augment the central player fantasy or core appeal.
5. Game development is pretty fucking hard.