The Right Moment to Storify, Iteration Paradox and Sticking to the Core
Hi!
This time, in a slightly different, more personal format, I look at my latest project TETRA - a composible Tetris roguelite about grouping colors - and share design insights from the development of it.
TETRA is a small project I did in my spare time alongside my regular job at Something Random. Having said that, although you shouldn’t expect a production-ready value from the game itself, I think the design lessons are rather universal and worth ponder upon. Without further ado, let’s dive into it!
Origins
Making a game with composable Tetris shapes was in my mind for quite a long time. I was interested in that, but found it difficult to match with anything worth doing.
After a not-so-quick romance with combining the idea with RTS gameplay, I eventually got back to the drawing board and started with a simpler idea — combining composable Tetris with Match-3 mechanics. I made a quick prototype and brought it to our Something Random office.
The result exceeded my expectations. The first prototype spread like a virus. People could not stop playing it! With the confidence gained from the first version I decided to develop the idea further. Without me noticing, I was making a quite big project (in terms of solo pet projects, of course) and found myself adding a progression, movable power-ups, random-balancing systems, a game flow & ending, a save system, shops, a cheat console, feedbacks, sound effects. The list grew exponentially. A tiny prototype became a five months commitment.
In the end, I had too much of it (at this point, I think we should all refer to it as some kind of game development syndrome of “Prerelease Aversion”) but it was totally worth it. Primarily, it gave me a solid understanding of the process of restricting and balancing emergent endless gameplay. Going through the whole development cycle of the product, even a small pet project can really open one’s eyes and I find it a priceless experience for the creation of bigger games.
Iteration Paradox
Making those small games revealed to me some kind of game-making paradox. As game developers, we focus on iterations. As Jesse Schell’s The Rule of the Loop claims:
“The more times you test and improve your design, the better your game will be.”
We all know it by heart — an iterative design is a standard approach for most of us. But game development is also a very complex and time-consuming process that most of the time takes years to complete. So on the one hand we do a lot of iterations within a single game, but not so many iterations of different games. We’re becoming experts of the details, but stay newbies of making believable, coherent, fluent and engaging games as a whole.
I think important lessons are hidden in those small projects. Lessons that can be hard to notice while being in a multi-year development of a bigger title.
A Right Moment To Storify*
For this project (and basically all projects from that time) I decided to focus purely on mechanics and leave story, fantasy and themes behind. It’s a blessing and a curse at the same time. Early on, it can really open up the design of the game — having no logical restrictions, where nothing is against the rules can lead to truly innovative solutions. But, as the process continues, I think that we need to seek a good moment to blend it together with a fantasy and work simultaneously on both aspects from there. At the right time, you need to storify the gameplay.
For many people that could not be the case. I personally like to think of gameplay first, without fantasy, pure abstraction. But many people start with the fantasy or story and try to capture it somehow using game mechanics. Then, a process of gamification of the story happens. Don’t get me wrong — both approaches are valid and can lead to great games.
To my mind, TETRA missed that moment of storifying. With every iteration on any abstract mechanical game, you calcify the gameplay a bit. Systems start to work in a specific way, there is less and less space for change, the number of moving parts decreases. If you try to storify your game too late, too many systems are set in stone and, unless you make radical design changes, it becomes really hard to match with a right fantasy. And even if you do, it will probably feel far from the core of the game.
* I coined this term for the sake of this text, but it feels good. To me, at least.
Benefits Of Having A Theme
I see myself as a rather systemic person and coming up with stories is not that natural to me as finding interesting mechanics. But, having a solid theme comes with a lot of benefits:
- Glance Value — people think in stories. It’s easier to catch the player’s attention by telling what the game has to offer fantasy-wise than telling directly what the mechanics are. Game could be extremely fun to play, but when all you can say about the game is as abstract as placing cells adjacent to each and collecting colour groups, you don’t have that many weapons at your disposal to attract players. Abstract talk requires effort. But, on the other hand, if somebody is not into your theme, it could work worse than having no theme at all.
- Understanding — when the game’s fantasy corresponds to something familiar to the player, he can understand it quicker by drawing analogies from his real-world experience. He can use his common knowledge and apply it to the challenges faced in the game. It’s easier to understand that: you place a magnet on the map and all the metal pieces of a given type are pulled by it than: you place a Collector Cell and when it is directed towards a group of adjacent Cells of the same color, the group is pulled. I’m exaggerating a little bit, but you get the idea.
- Commitment — game mechanics can be extremely engaging and can offer countless hours of entertainment. But at the end of the day, the story is the element that stays with us for the longest time. When the fun of touching the boundaries of the interactive systems is long gone, we still continue playing to find out what’s gonna happen in the grand finale. Maybe it’s not the case for such small games like TETRA, but curiosity is definitely a driving force of commitment. And stories heavily rely on curiosity.
Meaningful Goals Aligned With The Core
Having a clear and well-defined goal is essential for any game. It provides players with a sense of purpose and direction, enabling them to stay motivated. Goals also give players a sense of accomplishment when they reach them.
I like to think (inspired by Keith Burgun) of goals as extensions of the main thing you do in the game. In other words, if players keep doing the “main thing” they will eventually reach an extreme, a boundary. To my mind, the main goal should be that extreme. Let’s see it by example:
- In Super Mario Bros, you primarily go right (main thing) until you reach the end of the map (goal).
- In racing games, you accelerate forward, until you reach the finish line first.
- In Space Invaders, you shoot aliens, until they are all defeated.
- In Pacman, you eat dots, until you eat them all.
I think you get the idea. You do something, until you can’t do it any further.
Meanwhile in TETRA, you group and collect adjacent color cells until… what exactly? Technically speaking, until you remove 8 tiles from the map and survive a couple of turns more and eventually remove all tiles using final Tetra cell. In hindsight, a really lazy solution on my part… Don’t get me wrong — the goal is valid and offers an interesting challenge for the player, but it is not really connected with the main thing, the core of the game. The reason for this, I think, it’s the case of adding a fixed ending to an endless game at too late stage of development. Too many things were calcified at that point in design to make it coherent.
Progressing Without Losing The Core
To be honest the same goes with all movable special cells that you unlock throughout the gameplay. They come in handy from time to time, but to my taste, they are too far from the core experience of the game. I made them as an experiment and couldn’t let them go, even when I realized that they are not that good. That’s why I made a separate game out of them. I saw a potential in them that was not fully utilized in TETRA.
But then, even worse happened. The progression of the game relies on those special cells as well as gaining enough gold to afford them. It’s practically impossible (practically, because random is well… random) to finish the game without unlocking any powerups. So to finish the game, you need to use special cells more and more, to the point where in the late game they can become your main point of attention. So basically, every step towards the finish line, drives your gameplay away from its core.. yikes!
I think it’s not entirely a bad thing, but the proportions are out of place here.
That’s enough for today. In the second part of the series, we will focus on approaching randomness in TETRA, expanding designer’s toolbox and takeaways from the whole series. Stay tuned!
And also, if you interested in TETRA — give it a try. It’s free!
Originally posted at March 07, 2023
