I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for accountability on actually releasing a game. To that end, I'm going to go through the development process to release a game. Here is the transcript from the twenty-sixth episode on building the player profile for your game:
Welcome to another adventure mechanics side quest. I'm Chandler. Good games aren't easy to make, per se, but they can stumble on how everything interacts and still be good. Great games take all things and make them work in concert. A story that works with the actions of the player to not only make the game more immersive, but also get the intended emotion across. Today, let's talk about using mechanics in your game to make the point.
If you've ever played a game where it intentionally pushed you to a specific playstyle, such as the desperate decisions in Papers Please or being a true hero in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you'll notice that the mere act of playing gets you into the game more than, say, an abstract puzzle or bit of expository lore does. As the old idiom goes, actions speak louder than words. When a player is doing something diagetic in your world, you're demanding that they buy into what you've created. You're asking them to be an active participant, not just an observer. This buy-in is very powerful. It's forcing them to actively think about the action they're doing and can push them to do things they otherwise would object to. And if your game is about getting a message across, that is valuable. Let's talk about that.
Do you have a specific emotion that you want to get across to the player? Do you want them to feel desperate or overwhelmed or like they're contributing to something good, bad, or ugly? Make them do something. Sure, you can preface it with lore and audio dumps, but those are the appetizers to the main thing you want to get across. When a player realizes that they're not the good guy and are committing heinous acts, they're more likely to think about what they're doing. When the player has to balance their home life requirements with their duty to check all the paperwork at a checkpoint, they're going to feel that pang of desperation. And as long as you don't get too heavy handed with the message, you'll get the player to consider what you're getting across, at the very least. For a less extreme example of this, let's look at a contentious mechanic in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and it's sequel: Weapon durability. In previous installments, your weapons were linear improvements and indestructible. You could rely on them being there when you needed them, unless they were consumables like arrows or bombs. In the latest installment, however, you can lose your weapon mid-fight. You'd then have to either scrounge a new weapon, retreat, or stockpile weapons for that eventuality. This encouraged more planning, reacting, and the feeling that you're just scraping by. It made the collapsed world of Breath of the Wild feel, well, wild and dangerous. Sure, you have a stockpile of weapons, but the red moon is just around the corner and you're a long way from safety. It made the world feel challenging, not just being told that the world is now a dangerous place. All of that is in service to the story that the game is telling, too. This isn't the comfy Hyrule you've played through in other games, it's different. And when you pair weapons breaking and being a finite resource with the respawning enemies, it's hard to not feel that the game is actively trying to kill you. And that makes the world so much richer and more engaging, as opposed to just telling the player it's a dangerous place, but letting them clear out areas to be safe.
If you do this poorly, however, you can have mechanics that actively conflict with what you're trying to convey. Take, for instance, the return to office situation that Adam Jensen has in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It's the first social hub in the game. And like any social hub, it's encouraging you to stop, talk with everyone and explore. Especially after the intro, where Adam is thrown around and grievously maimed, it feels like narratively we should be doing the "welcome back from sick leave" with our old co-workers. But the game is actively fighting this by having a radio buddy incessantly nagging us to get to the helipad for our first mission. This builds tension, but it's also demanding the player to ignore all of this interesting stuff they've just been introduced to and chase the main plotline. There's something to be said for putting that tension on the player, especially towards the climax of the game, but this isn't really near a climax. It's at the very beginning of the game. Barely introduced to our character, barely familiar with the controls, a new area to explore, and being demanded to ignore it all and chase the story. Now, I'm not a particularly good writer, but this, at a high level, seems to be a good place to change plot points around, to better align the story to the mechanical progression. What mechanics are we looking at here, though? It's a social hub, so we want the player to get used to the controls and learn that actively talking to people yields rewards. Sure, there needs to be something to push the player along to the first combat mission, but the timer introduced here mechanically is actively pressuring the player to go in half ready. Now, if that was the point of putting this exploration social hub before the action, fair enough. But it doesn't feel that way to me. Instead, it feels like the game is trying to get a message across, but the message is clashing with the mechanics. And while I'd love to critique Deus Ex further, let's get back to the reason I brought this up: The mechanics are actively fighting against the message here. If you want to keep the player actively engaging with your story and world, you need to be mindful of what the current mechanics and story are telling them. They should be working together to get the overall message across. And in the case of Human Revolution, that's just not happening at the beginning of the game. The only mechanic that is conveyed with this area is that if you dawdle and explore the area, you're going to be punished by the game later. And that's not necessarily the point of a social hub, especially in a Deus Ex game. Be extremely careful about what actual message you're sending to the player with your mechanics and story at any given time. If you're having issues identifying either, playtest the area in detail.
When you're looking at the message and story, make sure you're not judging the player for their choices. There can be consequences, sure, but the game shouldn't moralize those consequences. In the Deus Ex example, the first mission is a hostage rescue. And if you're too slow to get to the chopper in the social hub, you're put in an actively worse situation when you finally get to that first mission. It works to get the message across. But then the game has your radio buddy yelling at you for being too slow, moralizing the consequences. And then the message becomes you're working for a terrible boss who wants to micromanage you and not actually resolve anything. That's a different message, isn't it? If that's what the team was going for, then that message comes across clearly. But if not, then the moralizing done by your radio buddy has single-handedly pulled the message off the tracks. That's why I say to be very careful when you want to moralize or criticize the player's actions in your game. You may have made a fun mechanic, but if the message is that your fun mechanic is bad, actually, then you're going to have the mechanics and message conflicting with each other. And you don't want to have that in your game. You want them both to be working together. A moralizing message is much easier to disregard when you're having too much fun with the mechanics. Don't ask your players to make the choice. You may not like what they're going to do.
Well, that should be enough for this side quest. As always, if you have any comments, suggestions, or feedback, reach out under this episode or to me directly on various social media. My handle is jcsirron. This has been an Adventure Mechanics Side Quest. I'll talk to you next time.
