How Not To Make Downwell
Hello! My name is DJ DeWitt, and I’m a web developer in Chicago who spends a lot of his free time making games. This weekend, I’m making a game for the first-ever Game Maker’s Toolkit Game Jam. This means I have 48 hours to think about the theme, come up with an idea, and make a video game that you can play on Sunday.
Okay, I’ve done this a handful of times before. It’s possible. Let’s do this!
The game jam theme is based on one of series creator Mark Brown’s videos on game development, Downwell’s Dual Purpose Design. It’s essentially about games that adhere to a Shigeru Miyamoto design maxim:
A good idea is something that does not solve just one problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once.
In the jam description, Mark gives a couple examples of multi-purpose design: Attacking an enemy also heals you or refills your ammo (DOOM, Hyper Light Drifter), pressing a button makes you jump as well as fire your gun (Downwell), swimming allows you to travel more quickly and reload your ammo (Splatoon).
So — to put it less eloquently than the father of Super Mario and Legend of Zelda did in the pull quote — doing a thing should also do another thing!
Easy! All the above examples have movement, and a gun that you shoot and reload. So let’s just tie shooting the gun and/or reloading the gun to a movement button (up, down, left, right, turn, crouch, dash, double jump, ground pound, stand still, etc.) and we should be good, right? Well…
“The goal is not to rip-off Downwell!”
In the Discord channel where Patreon backers of GMTK can discuss their progress, Mark ended the jam description with the above bit of advice. Even though the series consistently encourages designers to push towards the unknown, a theme based on a video that has a specific video game in the title has the potential to lead people to adhere too closely to that game’s formula. It would be a bit of a bummer if the result of the jam was a gaggle of games about shooting a gun, reloading a gun, and moving a gun around a space.
This means that the real challenge is to stay close to Downwell in the intentionality of its design ethos, while staying as far away as possible from the specifics of Downwell’s design decisions.
That’s a bit harder than making another gun game. But wait — what was the latest video Mark released? The one he released right before the game jam started? The one about how developers who emulate successful games tend to “just copy [the] approach, and use very similar locks, abilities, progression, secrets, and world design” instead of coming up with their own solutions for evoking the core feeling the original game set out to explore?
Ah. I see what you did there, Mark. Nice.
The video is called Do We Need a Soulslike Genre?, and in it Mark defines a four-step process for creating a new genre:
- Make a game that is innovative and widely successful.
- Create many clones of the game that copy nearly everything about the original, save a few minor tweaks and different set dressing.
- Change the formula by removing everything save one or two traits, then add in traits unseen in the original or clones.
- Realize that the most versatile shared trait represents the transformation from an original and its clones, to an entirely new genre with a diverse array of entries.
In outlining how genres develop, he hopes we can speed up the evolutionary process and skip past step two, a stage where a bunch of really talented developers just make clones of an innovative game without adding much to the design conversation.
So how do we get to steps three and four? Mark has a few suggestions:
“Make the genre about just one or two elements.”
Transitioning from step one to step two means deconstructing an original game to a laundry list of easy, repeatable steps. Transitioning from step two to step three means “tossing out most of the features of the original game”, then adding new mechanics and ideas the original never even considered. So one approach could be to break a game down to a list of ideas, then cross most of them off the list.
As an example, Mark traces the influence of Rogue, a turn-based, grid-based, ASCII art RPG about exploring randomly generated dungeons on Spelunky, a fast-paced, colorful platformer. Spelunky-creator Derek Yu regularly credits Rogue-like games he loved as a child for the groundbreaking design of Spelunky, despite the fact that Spelunky only takes two (permadeath, procedurally generated levels) of the 14-item feature list required by the Berlin Interpretation of Roguelikes. He then further obfuscated its Rogue inspiration by placing those concepts inside a frenetic platforming game.
I think another useful example, though, is the “Walking Simulator” — which is essentially a “First Person Shooter” without the “Shooter” part. When you start to lose track of whether you can even classify your game as part of the genre you were originally emulating, you can tell that you’re entering uncharted waters. It’s at this point that you can start to fill in the gaps again, pulling in details from other sources so as to turn your concept back into a playable game.
“Find new ways to capture the spirit of [insert game here]”
Mark notes that while mixing and matching mechanics from various games can eventually result in new, interesting experiences, attempting to define and capture what concept the game is about, or what the game intends the player to feel, is a more esoteric approach to emulation that can result in a greater diversity of experiences. Even more so when different players devise their own interpretation of what a given game is trying to accomplish.
One example Mark gives for the spirit of Dark Souls, a brutally difficult, third-person action RPG, is “the joy of untangling a complex backstory told through item descriptions and statues.” If Dark Souls is ultimately about interrogating your relationship to a history pieced together from textual and visual artifacts, we might say that A Normal Lost Phone, a mobile game about navigating a stranger’s phone, piecing together a narrative from textual and visual digital detritus, is ultimately Souls-like. Yet if you started from a list of mechanics, it would take a long time to turn the former into the latter.
Okay, but do you actually have an idea yet? Because tick..tock..tick..tock…
I do! Writing this post was my ideation process: by writing down my thoughts and fears, I made them into something outside of myself, so that I can more effectively engage with them on their own terms. It’s a useful exercise!
What I’ve concluded is that to make a game that pushes the concept of multi-purpose design into new territory, I need to strip Downwell down to an abstract, Platonic ideal — one that resists functioning as a clear blueprint for game development. Which brings me back to my rephrasing at the top:
Doing a thing should also do another thing!
I have absolutely no idea what a game built on that principle would look like. Excellent! Platonic ideal achievement, unlocked.
The next step is turning that formless idea into something concrete again, interrogating what the spirit of “doing a thing should also do another thing” really is, and identifying both original and inspired mechanics, systems, and themes that will emphasize that spirit.
This is what I’ll be up to for the rest of the weekend. With hard work, lots of coffee, and a bit of luck, I’ll have another post at the end outlining how I took “Doing a thing should also do another thing” from a weird concept to a compelling video game.
Until then, happy jamming!
You can follow me on twitter @djdewitt. I highly encourage you to check out all of Mark Brown’s Game Maker’s Toolkit videos, then resolve yourself to fund more amazing episodes via his Patreon.
