The Mechanics of Movement in Games

The Mechanics of Movement in Games is important!

The year is 1996, you’re playing Tomb Raider on PlayStation, and you need to jump between 2 platforms. What do you do? First you have to line up the jump by walking to the edge. Then you have to give yourself a run up. You then sprint to the edge of the platform and hold the jump button knowing that Lara will leap after exactly 2 more steps, then in mid air you have to hold a different button to reach out and grab the other platform. You must keep this button held as Lara Pulls herself up on the other side. That’s a stark difference to the way Lara moves in her more recent games. She now has a media acceleration and an ultra-responsive jump, so you don’t need to run up anymore. You can move her in mid air, so you don’t need to line up the jump. She automatically reaches out for platforms and grabs them, so you don’t need to press another button.

To some, the old way will seem clunky and frustrating. The more modern controls, which were brought in when Crystal Dynamics rebooted the series with Tomb Raider: Legend, a much more palatable and accessible. Of course there’s a lot of truth to that. Tomb Raider 1 operated on an unrealistic grid system. It was designed for a digital input, and it was the result of a developer’s first unrefined grasp at working in a 3D space.

I think we also lost something in the transition to the ultra-simple traversal controls we see in games like Rise of the Tomb Raider and Uncharted. The old system demanded expertise. You became a master of the controls, like how you learn to subconsciously flick-trick in and out a very grind and manual in Tony Hawks. You had to act deliberately and with intention, like dare I say it, Dark Souls. In Tomb Raider leap across a giant chasm is almost as terrifying and rewarding as it would be in real life. Whereas that exact same jump in the decade later remake Tomb Raider: Anniversary is so bereft of challenge that you barely even register that it happened.

“The old system demanded expertise. You became a master of the controls…”

The slow decline of mechanical sophistication in Tomb Raider is traversal. From adding annoying automated movements like monkey bars, to removing the need to hold grab, to removing the need for a run up, looks even worse when you compare it to the way the Franchise’s Combat has evolved. We’ve gone from wildly firing at bats, to doing stealth kills, making head shots, taking cover, readying arrows, making and throwing bombs, destructing enemies, pulling down structures, and juggling different ammo types. These mechanics make Combat and Tomb Raider dynamic and interesting. You have to consider your options and figure out which strategy to use on which enemy. You can improve your abilities by through upgrades and just practice. You need dexterity and to remember complicated control schemes, and it’s rewarding when you successful kill a bunch of baddies. Traversal has become practically automated. Jump at the colored ledge, hold her direction, press jump, hold her direction. Surely we can do something more interesting than this.

Thankfully we can. A number of smaller games show us that movement can still be as deep and involving as like murdering a dude. Perhaps the most obvious example is first person parkour game, Mirror’s Edge. This game is all about movement, and you have so much control of the way protagonist Faith moves through the world. She has acceleration on her run so she can jump further after she has built up speed. She can tuck mid-jump to clear high fences and roll when she hits the ground to avoid fall damage. Her large repertoire of moves gives you more options when moving through a space. In this alley section you can run up the stairs like a damn chump or you can bounce off the wall, and climb her up here, and volt over this bar to get to the same place in far less time.

For the most part the Assassin’s Creed Games heavily automate movement. The most recent entry Syndicate, you don’t even need to climb up buildings anymore as Evie Frye essentially pinched Batman’s grappling hook from Arkham City.

I’d be remiss not to point out the grasp mechanic in Assassin’s Creed II. While in mid air, Ezio can reach an arm out mid-jump to snatch at nearby ledges and ropes to avoid a nasty drop, or to take an alternative route. Experienced players can use this to give themselves more control when exploring the city’s rooftops.

Ubisoft’s experimental game, Grow Home, has got this great climbing system where the two triggers are used to grab with your two robot hands, and you must do that carefully and rhythmically to climb up these massive plants. As you get higher and higher, and nervously wobble along these thin branches, it gets genuinely quite tense. Compare that to climbing this massive tower in Tomb Raider 2013, which you heroically scaled by holding up on the analogue stick. Lara might look terrified, but trust me you won’t be.

One of the reasons Grow Home works is because hero BUD is animated in real-time instead of using pre-canned animations. That’s the secret behind the mad flash game Gurk II, because this game is all about building momentum as you tense your muscles to lunge yourself towards the next handhold. The shirtless ginger climber must be able to bend and flex in all sorts of directions. The game also benefits from an absurd control scheme, where you have to hold various letters on the keyboard to clime. Developer Bennett Foddy told Wired that he intentionally made players “Grip the keyboard just like you would cling to the cliff”, and says his games tap into “A kind of neurological magic which makes you feel like you are the character, rather than just controlling a little guy on the screen.

You can go even further than that with the genuinely, quite brilliant, and utterly exhausting Rock ‘N Roll Climber for WiiWare, which has you gripping and releasing different buttons on the remote and Nunchuck, and then physically reaching out to scale a cliff. Once at the top you play some air guitar, obviously.

If you don’t want to go quite so literal in your climbing metaphor perhaps look to a different Ubisoft game, I Am Alive, where your character has a stamina meter that depletes when you climb up buildings. You expend more if you jump while climbing, and if you use up the whole meter you go into a tense last ditch scramble that leaves a lasting impact on your stamina bar. This like the grip meter in Shadow of the Colossus, makes you think more carefully about how you’ll approach climbing in the game.

What all these games do is prove that climbing can be challenging and a nuance. By asking you to consider things like momentum, inertia, and grip strength, they prove that traversal can actually be a mechanic that’s very bit as deep as combat. They also give you options. Where the route for a room in Rise of the Tomb Raider is often linear and prescribed, these games ask you whether you want to take the slow and easy route or the fast and dangerous one, and provide a tangible sense of reward when you pull off the tricky combination of moves, and perfectly-timed button presses that the hard road requires. Many of them use their controls to make you feel closer to the action on screen, and use real-time animation to capture the dynamic and analogue nature of scrambling up a wall.

If Lara Croft wants to trade in climb ring for killing, that’s her business. You do you, Lara, I’ll find my fun in the Challenge Tombs. For a second imagine the Tomb Raider Game with the physics of Mirror’s Edge, the tense grip meter of I Am Alive, and the hand over hand climbing of Grow Home, and just try and tell me that it doesn’t make you a little bit excited.

Visit Mark at Game Maker’s ToolKit on YouTube to see more awesome videos like this!

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Shovel Knight Is The Perfect Blend Of Old School Gaming Nostalgia

Why Shovel Knight Is The Perfect Dose Of Old School Gaming Nostalgia

Some games are all about nostalgia. They remind us of the good old days, the days before microtransactions and military shooters and massive updates. Maybe we should thank or blame, depending on your experience, Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform where we give designers millions of dollars not to make new games but to make distinctly old ones, games like Bloodstained and Ukelele and Thimbleweed Park. I hope all of those developers have played this game, Shovel Knight. It was also a Kickstarter project generating some three hundred thousand dollars for its developer and perhaps more than any other game successfully tapped into this sentimentality for the past. I’m Mark Brown, this is Game Maker’s Toolkit, and here’s how Shovel Knight did it.

With his blue armor plating and the way he battles similarly shaped boss characters all with similar names, Shovel Knight is definitely reminiscent of Mega Man, but he doesn’t shoot lemons out of his arm. Instead, he’s got a short shovel swipe that brings back memories of Ninja Gaiden’s stubby sword. His downward plunge is reminiscent of DuckTales. Shovel Knight’s special moves are cribbed from Castlevania, most notably the throwing anchor that works exactly like Simon Belmont’s iconic ax. Levels are picked from a map, like in Super Mario Brothers 3, complete with these enemy encounters, and the towns, where you level up and talk to other characters, look like the ones in Zelda 2.

Instead of trying to copy a specific game from yesteryear, Shovel Knight borrows liberally from the entire NES catalog to make a game that reminiscent of 8-bit games in general. That’s smart, because when you’re trying to evoke the memories of one game or one series, you’re not only trying to compete with the actual game, but also people’s nostalgic memories of that game. That’s something else entirely. Old games look better, sound better, and feel better in our heads. We misremember the size of the worlds and the lengths of the quests. Our memory is rose-tinted. We remember the epic moments, but we forget about the grinding. We remember the thrill of beating a tricky level, but block out the one-hit kills that had us breaking controllers.

“Instead of trying to copy a specific game from yesteryear, Shovel Knight borrows liberally from the entire NES catalog to make a game that reminiscent of 8-bit games in general.”

Shovel Knight dodges most of that, because it isn’t tied to the expectations and baggage of a specific game, but it does have to contend with our cognitive bias of what retro games in general were like to play. To do this, it first takes everything that make those games so good: the strict focus on a single mechanic and imaginative level design that conjures up dozens of ways to explore that idea, the precision and consistency that comes from chunky characters and grid-like levels, the secrets and the bosses, the way these games taught you stuff through level design instead of tutorials, and the way they let you start playing in a matter of seconds.

But, it’s not afraid to throw away the stuff that sucked about those games. Most notably, the punitive death systems that were a hold over from arcade game design and a way to stop you finishing these games in an afternoon. You won’t find yourself running out of lives, or witnessing too many cheap hits, or re-spawning enemies. The game might knock you back when you get hit, which is what sent you to your death over and over again in Castlevania, but Shovel Knight quickly gives you air control to get back to safety. Oh, and you also don’t have to blow on a cartridge to stop the game from glitching out.

When fixing those issues from the past, Yacht Club borrows from modern games when it makes sense. The game’s got a system where you lose your money when you die, and you have to make your way back to where you failed to reclaim your loot, a system ripped straight out of Dark Tales. It makes sense. It gives your deaths meaning and introduces a layer of tension, without forcing you to replay entire levels or start from scratch. The checkpoints also let you pick your own difficulty which is a more modern way of thinking about challenge. If you break a checkpoint, you will get a big load of loot, but you won’t come back to that area when you die. A clever risk versus reward setup and proof that Shovel Knight isn’t just ripping off other games, but coming up with ideas of its own.

Here’s the one that’s going to get me in trouble with the commenters, but Shovel Knight is also more progressive than most NES games. Many 8-bit adventures were about saving your girlfriend or your sister or a princess from capture, and while Yacht Club does reference this, it flips it on its head by making Shield Knight strong and capable.

In essence, Shovel Knight is tricking you. It makes you think you’re playing an NES game without you fully realizing that you’re actually playing one without the limitations of that console. Nowhere is that more true than in the presentation of the game, because, hey, no NES game looked like this. The most obvious change is the switch to widescreen to fit modern TVs and hand-helds. It also has full parallax scrolling which is where the foreground and background layers move at different speeds to suggest depth. The NES only had one layer, so games like Shatterhand, Return of the Joker, and Sword Master used animated tiles and backgrounds with distinct horizontal lines to fake the effect.

Shovel Knight totally cheats by using multiple layers, like on a Super Nintendo. The game can also render loads of sprites on one horizontal line without flickering, there are more particles on screen than the NES could handle, the game’s got a higher color palette, and there are more colors per sprite and more palettes simultaneously on screen than were allowed by the hardware. The music is more faithful, but perhaps not to western ears. It mimics Konami’s powerful Famicom only via C6 sound chip gave the Japanese version of Dracula’s Curse three more sound channels to play with. Here’s how that compares to the US release.

Plus, Shovel Knight ignores the limitation that score sound effects cut through the music on the NES, as sounds and music had to share the same channels. This game cheats and plays both simultaneously. To most people, they won’t even notice these tricks. It looks and sounds faithful to the NES, because this is what retro games feel like in our memory. When you play a game like Mighty Gunvolt which is more slavishly faithful to the 8-bit aesthetic, looks a bit too plain.

Shovel Knight presents us with four principles for successful nostalgic design. It borrows from multiple sources. It takes the best bits of its source material, and isn’t afraid to modernize what didn’t work, and it presents the games with a familiar retro aesthetic, but with a rose-tinted filter. We can use this to see why other nostalgic releases did or did not work. Hyper Light Drifter borrows not just from a link the past but also Mega Man Zero, Miyazaki movies, and Diablo. It’s challenging and oblique like a good retro game, but has smooth analog controls and liberal checkpoints. While it has 16-bit pixel art, it has a unique color palette and more things on screen that any Super NES game would dare show.

Mighty Number 9, on the other hand, is just trying to be Mega Man. It takes everything from those games, not just the frantic boss battles and themed levels, but the frustrating deaths and limited lives. Its visual style is just, what is this? This isn’t anything. It was supposed to remind us of the best bits of Capcom’s Forgotten Hero, but ended up reminding us of all its worst traits, even the awful, awful, voice acting.

There is, of course, more to Shovel Knight than nostalgia. It’s built by ex-Way Forward developers who have years experience making 2D platformers. The level design is top-notch, and it’s charming and funny, without relying on memes or groan-worthy references. But above all, it’s a fantastic example of nostalgia done right.

Visit Mark at Game Maker’s ToolKit on YouTube to see more awesome videos like this!

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How to make a good video game tutorial

“The best example of this is of course Portal, which was 90% tutorial but was so much fun that none of us seemed to notice.”

We’ve talked previously about how a good tutorial is integral to being able to deliver a deep, rich game and still reach a large audience. Today we’re going to talk about how to actually put one together. While the specifics vary from game to game, there’s a few simple rules that pretty much every game should be able to follow.

Number one, less text. Text is a terrible way to deliver a tutorial. It kills pacing, it destroys immersion and it’ll often be skipped by the very players that need the tutorial the most. Like everything else in games, your tutorial should be interactive. The player should play through the actions they have to learn. This not only creates a better experience for the player, but it also ensures that they actually understood what the tutorial was trying to convey, as opposed to text or even in-game cinematics where once they end, you have no idea if the player actually understood what you meant.

Number two, don’t front-load your tutorial. Many game designers seem to think that they need to deliver every piece of information the player will ever need right at the beginning of the game. Any first year teacher or HCI student can tell you how bad an idea that is, yet somehow we manage to forget it all the time when building games. If you front-load your tutorial and teach the player everything at the beginning, they’ll be overwhelmed with information and under-supplied with engagement. Throwing so much information at a player right away means they’re likely to have forgotten a lot of what you taught them by the time they need it. It also means that they might very well get bored with your tutorial and either start rushing through it, skip over it entirely or simply turn the game off in disgust.

If a player skips your tutorial, you’ve failed as a designer because you’ve wasted resources making your game less engaging for the player. Instead you should provide the player with information as they need it. Introduce game play elements as they become important. If you do this, the player gets to start playing faster. It allows you to give them information in digestible chunks, and it means that they’ll get to start practicing what you taught them, right after they learn it. Remember that this goes for all the parts of the game, not just the commands the player will input.

If there’s a UI element that they won’t use right away or a menu they won’t do anything for the first thirty minutes of the game, don’t clutter up the screen with it. The less info you throw at the player from the outset, the better. When you do introduce new UI elements or commands, it’ll be even easier to make the features you’re introducing glaringly clear, because there really can be little confusion about what’s being introduced when a brightly highlighted compass or a mini-map suddenly slides onto the screen.

Number three, make the tutorial fun. All the time in this industry, we trumpet the fact that people learn better when they’re having fun, and somehow we seem to forget this fact when we build our tutorials. Your tutorials should be exciting and interesting. It should be as engaging as any other part of the game. This is hard to execute on but vital. For most games, it’s necessary for at least some of the tutorial to happen at the very beginning. Like with books and movies, humans are prone to snap judgments about their entertainment. If you can’t grab the player in the first ten minutes of play, you’re going to lose a large part of your audience. The whole point of the tutorial was to make your game accessible to more people.

Here you simply have to remember to use all of the things that make the game play you’re teaching fun in the first place, and then make it fun in the tutorial too. The Modern Warfare training missions, Basic Braining in Psychonauts, the City of Heroes intro mission and the Death Knights Starting Quest chain in World of Warcraft all are great examples. The best example of this is of course Portal, which was 90% tutorial but was so much fun that none of us seemed to notice.

Number four, reinforce learning through play. Going along with making the tutorial fun and distributing the tutorial throughout your game is the idea of reinforcing the things taught in the tutorial, by highlighting their use in game play. You don’t want to make this hammy or overly telegraphed, but you need to help the player understand how to apply the tools they learned about in the tutorial during actual game play. Again, if you can make your tutorial feel like game play or better yet simply be game play, this should mostly solve itself.

Number five, listen to your players. Your tutorial’s probably the most important thing in your game to play test. When you’re a designer who’s been working on a project for a year or two, it’s very easy to think that things are intuitive or obvious, that are actually totally incomprehensible. When you build a system and spend eight hours a day with it, it becomes second nature. That’s great but it often blinds us to what needs to be taught.

Case in point, James was once brought in on a consulting gig for an RPG-esq PC game. As a designer, one of the first things he always does is press every button, but after about fifteen minutes of trying, he couldn’t figure out how to open his inventory so he had to ask. The answer, triple click the player. After years of working with the system, no one in the company even thought twice about it. Here, simple play testing is the answer. As always, don’t talk to your players. Watch where they get stuck. Watch what they have trouble with and then listen to what they say to you. After that, then you can ask questions.

Additionally, be mindful of your demographic. It’s very hard to get past our own personal perspective, so sometimes we forget the things that seem second nature to us, might not be to everyone. For example, James recently had an astute young designer come up to him, shocked by the realization that the young end of the demographic he was working with, might not be able to read yet. Luckily with quick thinking and dedication, he was able to work around this one and deliver a tutorial that any age can use. You’d be surprised how many senior game designers forget similar things.

For all you beginning designers, the most common one to forget is that not everyone might be familiar with the conventions that you’re used to. Using WASD to move? Better make sure your target audience is used to that, otherwise you’re going to have to teach them.

Lastly there are two more simple tips to remember. One, tutorials should be skip-able, or shouldn’t interrupt the flow of play. You don’t want to have to force everyone to sit through your tutorial every time they start the game again. Two, anything conveyed in a tutorial should be accessible at all times. It doesn’t have to be in any deeply immersive fashion, but simply putting a help encyclopedia in the options menu or giving the player access to how-to videos from the pause screen will go a long way.

After all, we’ve all come back to a game after having put it down for six months and forgotten how to do that one stupid thing. If you can’t easily go back and refresh yourself on how to play, you’re going to put that game down again and probably not buy the sequel. For all this, the biggest reason that tutorials seem haphazard and in many cases just inadequate, boring or terrible, isn’t because most professional designers don’t know this stuff. It’s because often the tutorial is left as one of the last things to be completed in the development cycle.

How can you distribute the tutorial through game play if all the game plays are already built? How can you make sure your tutorial’s fun if you’re scrambling to get the product out the door? Simply put, as a designer you have to think about how you’re going to teach the player to play your game as you’re building it. If you don’t do this, if you don’t consider the communication problems that are inherent in every complex decision in your game, you’ll deliver a clunky, front-loaded tutorial at the last minute and it’ll really take away from the players’ experience.

It’s not something that’s hard to do and it doesn’t actually cost any development dollars. It just take discipline. Discipline to always be mindful of how you’re going to teach the player as you build the play itself, because every game is an education. Every game brings us to worlds we’ve never been to and throws us into situations we don’t recognize. Every game asks us to translate between some series of button presses or clicks and actions happening on a screen, so every game requires a tutorial. If you’re mindful of this and disciplined in your design, you can create the best tutorial there is, one that no one remembers is there.

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What The Silent Storytelling principle is

“The silent storytelling principle is where you unravel the story of the game through your actions rather than someone explain it to you.”

In today’s episode of Good Game Design we’ll look at the silent storytelling principle. Most games have a story of some sort but there are different ways for a game to tell it. Some do this through cut scenes or dialogue boxes, while others take a more organic approach through gameplay. The silent storytelling principle is where you unravel the story of the game through your actions rather than someone explain it to you.

A good example that comes to mind is Shadow of the Colossus. The short introduction in this game shows you bringing your dead girlfriend to this ancient temple to try and bring her life to life. Then some omniscient voice that calls itself Dormin tells you it might be possible if you kill a bunch of colossi. That’s it. You don’t get a lot of story in the beginning. Instead the true story of the Colossus story is revealed in the small details. When you kill your first Colossus these creepy black tendrils shoot into Wander’s body. That doesn’t seem normal. Then when you go back to the temple the voice just tells you to go slay more colossi. Eventually you might start speculating why he wants you to kill them in the first place. They don’t seem to be bothering anyone and they don’t even pay attention to you until you start shooting them with arrows or attacking them. “You stop it!” You start to wonder if maybe you’re the bad guys after all you’re just doing the bidding of some villainous identity.

This is amplified by the fact that Wander slowly transforms over the course of the game, turning more pale and evil looking as tendrils continuously enter his body. This isn’t told to you explicitly, you just start to form these thoughts as you destroy Colossus after Colossus. The ending confirms your suspicions. As it turns out you were never able to bring your girlfriend back to life, but instead you’ve made in possible for Dormin to be resurrected using your body as its vessel. It’s surprisingly in depth for what little story is actually told through cut scenes. Most of the story is felt as the player’s uncertainty keeps sneaking up on them while Wander slays innocent beasts.

A more recent game that has blown me away with its silent storytelling is the indie exploration game Gone Home. It’s an extremely story-driven game, so I want to be sure to warn you about spoilers before we proceed. Most of what you’ll learn about the story in Gone Home isn’t stated it’s discovered. You play as Kaitlin Greenbriar returning home from college to your family’s house in Arbor Hill, Oregon in 1995. You find this out by seeing your name on your bags and by the answering machine message that plays at the opening of the game. The first thing you see is a note from your sister Sam on the front door that says not to go looking for answers as to why she was gone. The front door is locked but you can find the key if you search around the front porch area and find it hidden in a duck figurine. This teaches you that you might need to explore each room thoroughly in order to progress and find out what happened to your sister.

Little do you know that you’ll soon discover information on the other members of your family as well by analysis and deduction. One of the first things you’ll see as you enter the house is the family portrait on the wall and the main lobby. You’re a family of 4, mom, dad, Sam, and yourself. As the player you know nothing about these characters but you’ll learn their entire story just by finding things in your house. Let’s start with the mother, Jan. In the front closet you’ll find a name badge that belongs to her from the forestry service saying she’s a senior conservationist. You’ll also find a note near the beginning from a friend of your mom’s wanting to hear about the new house they moved into. You realized they didn’t always live here, this was a recent move.

A more recent game that has blown me away with its silent storytelling is the indie exploration game Gone Home. It’s an extremely story-driven game, so I want to be sure to warn you about spoilers before we proceed. Most of what you’ll learn about the story in Gone Home isn’t stated it’s discovered. You play as Kaitlin Greenbriar returning home from college to your family’s house in Arbor Hill, Oregon in 1995. You find this out by seeing your name on your bags and by the answering machine message that plays at the opening of the game. The first thing you see is a note from your sister Sam on the front door that says not to go looking for answers as to why she was gone. The front door is locked but you can find the key if you search around the front porch area and find it hidden in a duck figurine. This teaches you that you might need to explore each room thoroughly in order to progress and find out what happened to your sister.

Little do you know that you’ll soon discover information on the other members of your family as well by analysis and deduction. One of the first things you’ll see as you enter the house is the family portrait on the wall and the main lobby. You’re a family of 4, mom, dad, Sam, and yourself. As the player you know nothing about these characters but you’ll learn their entire story just by finding things in your house. Let’s start with the mother, Jan. In the front closet you’ll find a name badge that belongs to her from the forestry service saying she’s a senior conservationist. You’ll also find a note near the beginning from a friend of your mom’s wanting to hear about the new house they moved into. You realized they didn’t always live here, this was a recent move.

In the next room over, you find out by a newspaper clipping that the house actually belong to your great uncle who passed away, but your family inherited it and moved in while Kaitlin was away at college. You can see by the postcard she sends home that she thinks it’s weird writing a new address for her family. Eventually you’ll find a memo about a promotion for your mother as well as an invitation to a concert from her new male coworker. Another letter by the same friend from earlier urges Jan to spill the juicy details about her new boyfriend. While it turns out it was fairly innocent there are clues that an affair may have crossed her mind at some point, but before you jump to any conclusions about the mom lets talk about Terry, the father.

By entering the library you can see Terry’s workstation, he’s a writer. There’s a cork board full of ideas and ramblings about JFK and conspiracy theories. At first I thought he was just nutty, but it turns out he wrote a successful book about the subject and is working on the sequel. Some of the notes in the middle imply he wasn’t happy with the results of his work saying he could do better. Other letters in the library explained that the company he was writing for wanted to drop him because of his shoddy workmanship he submitted recently. To pay the bills he does small reviews of electronics for a magazine, evident by the letters and receipt for the TV in the living room. It would seem he is spinning his wheel, not sure how to get his career off the ground. Near the end of the game you discover a letter in the basement from his father reflecting on his book saying he could do better, the same quote that’s on the cork board. This sort of ties the piece together. He overworked himself in an attempt to please his father, but this lead to writer’s block which in turn lead to an unhappy marriage as he was consumed with his work.

Again, this is all deduced by items you pick up around the house, it was never told to you plainly. Finally, let’s talk about the sister, Sam. I haven’t mentioned yet that this game actually does have narration. When you find special items in the house and pick them up it will trigger various diary entries from Sam written to you, Kaitlin. This is regular storytelling but you find out a lot more about Sam just by examining things around the house. For example, Sam’s narration explain that she wasn’t fitting in at school but you actually feel her pain when you read the crinkled up note in the garbage about a kid making fun of her calling her the psycho house girl. Apparently there were some rumors about the house being haunted because of your uncle’s death. He wasn’t seen much outside of his home near the end. Her diary tells you that she finally found the girl who became her friend named Lonnie, but this evidence is clear from the notes and mix-tapes lying around the house.

It’s soon revealed that Lonnie and Sam developed feelings for each other and start a relationship, which is hard for Sam to deal with because of these new feelings but also because of her religious family. At least you can assume they are Christian by finding several bibles on the bookshelf in the main lobby. What I didn’t expect was the supernatural undertones present in Gone Home. The overall game feel is already spooky with the lightning storm outside and the eerie silence and darkness this massive house provides. The creepy theme is first alluded to by a book found in the living room under a pillow fort. You could assume this was Sam and Lonnie’s doing having a sleep over and reading about ghosts and hauntings. Sam tells you through her diary about how they dug into your uncle’s past and thinks he’s haunting the house, but I really understood that when I found the note they made hidden in the wall panel. They used a Ouija board to talk to Oscar and he said he wanted to come back, but they stopped when they got too scared. It gave me chills. I was scared too after that, especially when I saw the attic with glowing red lights locked in the upper hallway.

Perhaps the most disturbing discovery is when you find a sacrificial ceremony in the closet to bring Oscar back to life and the key to the attic. I didn’t want to go up there. Who knows what I would find? If you do have the guts to enter the attic you’ll find the last entry in the diary. It explains that Lonnie was going into the army but couldn’t go through with it and wanted Sam to meet her in Salem so they could run away together. That’s why your sister was gone. It’s a beautiful elaborate story that melds narration and silent storytelling perfectly into a rich tale that just left me sitting there taking it all in afterward as the credits rolled. You don’t interact with any people at all, but you feel the pain of each character as you discover what they were going through.

In most good game design episodes I have the principle I want to talk about first and then try to find examples in a video game, but when I played Gone Home, it inspired this whole episode. That being said I’m sure there are a lot of games out there that do a good job telling you details about a story silently.

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Good games teach without teaching

Do you like education games? No, of course not! Nobody does. No one like learning things while you’re playing a game. I’m kidding, of course. Some people enjoy them, but very few people enjoy a game withholding the fun from them while it tries to explain itself. You’ve probably been there. The unskippable tutorial that never ends, or text boxes that keep going and going and going. That’s why it’s such good design when a game can teach you about its mechanics without telling you a single thing. Thus for today’s episode of Good Game Design, we’re going to talk about the teaching without teaching principle.

There are lots of games out there that do a good job of this, but most recently, I’ve been astonished at how well Shovel Knight executed this principle. If you somehow still haven’t played Shovel Knight, what’s wrong with you? Seriously, this game is great. It’s gorgeous, has awesome music, and the game play is out of this world. The game is really good at taking an over-done level trope and keeping it fresh with something new. This is a standard lava level, but it’s also the green, bouncy goo level. Here’s a typical snow level, except it’s also the rainbow, pukey bridge level. The true beauty in Shovel Knight’s design, however, lies in the very first stage, the plains. Everything you need to know about Shovel Knight is presented to you in this intro level, and it’s done through game play, instead of text or cut-scenes. It starts basic, showing you a pile of treasure to dig up, followed by an enemy to dispatch by the same method. Your path is blocked by a wall of dirt, so you learn that you have to dig it away to continue. The next screen is a stroke of genius. You can’t dig dirt below you by striking to the side, but you need to break through to progress. Obviously, you need to down-strike the dirt by pressing down in the air, but let’s say you have no idea that that’s an ability you have.

The developers at Yacht Club Games made a super-smart design choice to have our hero lock into a down-strike, even if you just briefly press down on the joystick. This way, if the player had no idea what to do, and in frustration did this, Shovel Knight would eventually lock into the down-strike position and break the dirt below him. This also makes the motion of your character so much easier to control. You can just barely press down in the air to bounce on something, then keep moving in a direction because they included this locking ability. The very next screen teaches you that you can bounce on things to reach new heights by having you ricochet off this bubble that reappears if you miss. Next to introduce is mini-bosses to you. The entire background goes black, which aesthetically makes sense, because it looks like you’re entering a cave, but it also makes sure nothing else distracts you from this new foe you have to take down. All the bigger baddies look beautiful, by the way. This might be the first time the game makes your jaw drop with how good it looks.

“No dialogue, no menus. There’s not even a pause screen. You just press start and it goes from there.”

Next up, it teaches you about hidden walls. You have to break through this wall to proceed, so it teaches you that walls with certain markings can be destructible, an then up above it shows you that some of these hidden walls will have enemies hidden inside them. What’s on the very next screen? Your first secret wall that you can spot pretty easily. It rewards you with a music note if you find it. Later in the level, there’s another hidden wall with a skeleton waiting to pounce on you hidden inside. It introduces an idea, and then lets you test it out in the field yourself. In fact, Shovel Knight is really good at giving you a small taste of something early on that you’ll need to perfect by the end of the game.

I love this section. Check it out. Remember how I said you lock into the down-strike position when you press down? You only break out of this position if you touch solid ground, or if you attack with the shovel in midair. The placement of this gem in the alcove gives you incentive to break the dirt in the wall after you bounce, which teaches you that you stop bouncing when you do this. All the game did was place some gold for you to get, but its position on the screen allowed you to teach yourself without ever even knowing it.

The level finishes off with a difficult boss fight, but its health is lower than other bosses, so it’s not too hard. This sets a precedent for a boss battle at the end of each level.

Shovel Knight is obviously influenced by Mega Man, but they decided to make a simple change from those games that ended up making a huge difference in how this indie gem plays: progressive levels. In Mega Man, you can pick any of the starting eight levels all from the beginning, so each of those levels had to be relatively close in difficulty. Otherwise, the player might quit if they happened to pick the level that was too hard. Instead, Shovel Knight decided to unlock a few levels at a time. This led to better game feel, where the challenge rose as you got better at the game.

For example, this is the opening screen in propeller knight stage. By the time you reach this level, you know that you need to bounce on these jellyfish to reach the ladder, but what if this was the very first level in the game? You might try to whack them with your shovel or jump past them. This made sense as an obstacle for a later level. Take treasure knight stage. This level is one of the hardest in the game, in my opinion. There’s a lot of instant death spikes and treacherous platforming with the underwater mechanics. The hardest part to me though, was this section with the giant angler fish. It’s really easy to get knocked off and die here. Can you imagine if this was a player’s first experience with the game? Most people would quit altogether. I think opening some of the levels at a time was a really good choice by the developers, because it felt like you were progressing on a journey instead of just completing a random set of levels.

What happens when you take this concept of teaching without teaching and take it to its limits? Let’s take a quick look at the game 140. I talk a lot about this game on my channel, but 140 takes simple game play and crafts it into a masterpiece. Even in its game design, this game has stripped away anything that is unimportant. No dialogue, no menus. There’s not even a pause screen. You just press start and it goes from there. As far as game design goes, every single element in the game is taught to you before you’re tested with it. Each node you collect will generally add a new challenge or obstacle to the level and built on the earlier concepts to create a fun and meaningful experience.

A few examples: You pick up this triangle, but what does it do? Oh, it triggers a laser shot before you get a chance to start the boss fight, so you know what you have to do first. Oh, okay, it looks like these squares are going to try and kill me and I didn’t even have to move to find that out. Now it shows me that the top squares will go first, followed by the bottom squares. Then it gives me a few challenges with this new knowledge. There’s a checkpoint after every obstacle, so the goal of the game isn’t to beat it all in one life. It’s like the game is saying, “Good job. Now try this next challenge.” The end of every level will have some final exam that combines all the pieces of the level together into a really hard section. It all feels fluid and like you’re teaching yourself.

Whether it’s Shovel Knight’s platforming design, or 140’s formation of obstacles, games have the power to tell us their goals through experience rather than hearing or reading them. Maybe you’ve played a game where it does a good job of teaching you through game-play rather than explanation. If you can think of one, tell me about it in the comments below. I’d like to hear it. That wraps it up for this episode of Good Game Design. I’m Snoman, and I hope you enjoyed this quick look at how some games operate.

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