How The Hex Builds One Game From Six Genres
In December of 2018 I interviewed indie developer Daniel Mullins about his as-of-then two released titles, the suspense puzzler Pony Island and the cross-genre whodunit The Hex. I thought the audio of that interview had been lost to a hard drive failure, but a few months back I discovered a copy of the interview on a thumbdrive. So, this then is the second of two stories to reveal some of that transcribed audio to you, the first of which was focused on Pony Island’s development and release, and the second — the one you’re reading now — on the development of Daniel’s followup title: The Hex.
Some of this will be a little bit of a retread from our previously released Pony Island story, but if you haven’t read that story yet I’d be remiss not mentioning these next few details. Until the development of The Hex, Daniel Mullins was not a full-time indie developer — but it was success of his previous title, the aforementioned, mind-bendingly devious Pony Island, that allowed Daniel to pursue what he told me was his “dream” of full-time indie videogame development. While Pony Island was the product of a year of part-time development, The Hex was a different beast. In the newfound paradigm of full-time indie development, The Hex was the result of over two years of work, creating a game much broader than the game-jam game turned runaway success that was Pony Island. But before the formal development of The Hex, Mullins worked for a month on a rouge-like RPG about eating pie. Nothing really came of this prototype, but I want to mention it because we’ll revisit it when we get to talking about the art style of The Hex.
So if you’ve gotten this far and haven’t already played The Hex, what exactly is it?
The Hex is a cross-genre whodunit, but what exactly does that mean? Well, unlike the one playable pony in Pony Island, in The Hex you’ll find yourself taking control of a whole cast of different characters, all of whom embody a different videogame protagonist and genre archetype. As you control each character the style of gameplay will shift based on that character’s associated genre. When I first played The Hex I couldn’t really think of any other game that had done anything quite like what The Hex did, and I wondered where exactly the inspiration for such a game was born. As it turned out, the source of The Hex inspiration was not in videogames at all, but in the world of film:
“The inspiration was just a simple thing. I saw The Hateful Eight, the movie by Tarantino — and I just got home from that movie after enjoying it and just — I was in a mode where I was like ‘What of this game idea, or what about that?’
And probably any other movie, I would start thinking about, ‘How could this be a game?’ — if I had enjoyed it. But this was the one I saw, and I started thinking about, ‘How could that be a game?’. And I was thinking about just the dynamics of the mystery and the interactions between the characters. And then I was falling asleep that night and then I kind of thought, ‘Oh what if they were videogame characters?’ — because of course this is a videogame and I like to tie that in if possible.”
And so began development on what would become The Hex. Inspired by Tarantino’s snowbound Western, Mullins needed a cast of characters. But knowing they all needed to fit into certain genre molds, how exactly was such a cast chosen?
“So I started at not the characters, but the game genres I wanted to include. And my guiding star for that was that I wanted to have three games that were very hand-eye-dexterity focused — like more action — and three games that were more methodical and thought heavy. So I just tried to think about what would — given that constraint — what would provide a good amount of variety, and which ones were kind of like, would be expected? Like, if you’re picking six game genres you’d be hard pressed to avoid doing ‘the platformer’, so that one kind of felt obligatory. Same with the Turn-based RPG — felt sort of obligatory. And then I just tried to balance it and provide variety between them.
And that really appealed to me because I thought it would provide a constant sense of novelty not only for the player but for me — as the developer — and it was true that it was easier to keep going on this really long game when I knew that, ‘Oh the next chapter is totally different with wildly different challenges and things I can do.’ So I think that was kind of how it started.”
This variety in genres and gameplay stemmed in part from Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design, which taxonomizes game genres as “head” or “hand” genres. In designing the different chapters of The Hex, Daniel wanted to find a good balance between these “head” games, like the turn-based tactics or RPG sections, and the “hand” games, like the fighting or shooter sections. Now another key challenge with implementing all these characters and story beats, each with varying styles of gameplay — as defined by the genre of the present chapter of the game — was how to deal with the player controls.
One of Daniel’s key design philosophies was that the whole game, regardless of genre, needed a uniform control scheme — and so designed the whole game to be played with mouse and keyboard — specifically WASD and left-click. The trick then was deciding how to map those controls organically to the gameplay specific to each genre. Mullins spoke at length about this process at the DevGAMM Game Industry Conference in Moscow in 2018:
“The uniform control scheme was important because I want you to be able to pick up these games — and The Hex as a whole is 6 hours or maybe a bit less — so you’re only spending about 45 minutes or so in each one of these [chapters], and I don’t want you to be guessing at the control scheem or having to learn something complicated every time.”
These varieties of gameplay also raised the interesting question of tutorization. Did each gameplay section require a tutorial? Daniel described The Hex as a “game about games”, and as such didn’t anticipate many sales of the game to folks who had never in their life played a videogame before and somehow stumbled across his game during their very first foray into the Steam marketplace. Mullins found during playtesting of The Hex that very few sections of the game needed much tutorialization — if any at all. But some sections, like the chapters for the Fighting and Turn-based Tactics characters, did require some extra guidance for players. But even these tutorials could be twisted to further the metanarrative of The Hex:
One trick I did when I did need a tutorial was I tried to mask it in the story, so at least when you’re doing the tutorial it feels like this section of gameplay has ap urpose and is contributing to the narrative, rather than you just sitting there and me being a teacher telling you how to play. So in [the] RPG, there is a tutorial, but it’s also part of the story. There’s this annoying tutorial giver character, who treats you a bit too much like a baby — you’re probably familiar with this in some games — and then you actually end up killing the character as part of the tutorial. And this is not just a gag but a plot point that comes up again and again in the future.
Now I mentioned near the beginning of this video that inbetween Pony Island and The Hex, Daniel had worked for a short time on a pie-themed RPG. Well, this unfinished project ended up being one of the key aesthetic inspirations of The Hex. Among the challenges of creating a coherent game amongst multiple interwoven narratives and varying gameplay styles was how to make each genre and style of gameplay feel coherent aesthetically. Daniel is, by his own admission, not from any sort of artistic background; and this was one of the primary reasons development of the game was so much longer than Pony Island — even with the shift from part-time to full time development:
“I think the main contributors were the art style, because with Pony Island a lot of the screens were just text sitting on a blank screen — and I could create that in minutes. Whereas in The Hex a lot of the time you’re looking at a fully illustrated scene and that of course takes a lot longer.”
But even without a background in traditional art or color theory, there was an elegant solution for tying together all the seemingly disparate elements of his game: a palette generator.
So what I did was just use an online palette genrate to create a basic coor palate, created some variations of it, and then applied it very liberally all over the game. I wasn’t obviously adhering strictly to the palette because it’s so limited, but I found that even by doing this in a sort of sloppy way I ended up with somewhat of a uniform color profile for the game.
Even the music of the game contributed to the coherence of The Hex, with frequent Daniel Mullins Games collaborator and composer Jonah Senzel incorporating themes and melodies from earlier portions of the games into those players would hear later in their play sessions.
And if you’re familiar at all with the games of Daniel Mullins, you’ll know they are famous for their secrets. Well, I was interested to know how far in advance these kind of things are planned out, since I know of at least one secret in Pony Island that was actually included after the game launched.
“It kind of happened naturally as I was creating level and content, where I would — let’s say I’m creating a cave system or something and then I accidentally create a little offshoot, or like it just happens that the cave splits and there’s this little secret offshoot, I would say ‘Oh, I could just cut this because I don’t need it anymore or I could leave this little empty hidden space here and then later I might put something here’. So there was kind of like a process of accidentally creating nooks and crannies, and then later, later, thinking, ‘Oh this would be cool. I’ve got an idea for a secret, where can I put it? Oh I can look back at my little list of nooks and pick one of them’. So I would create those hidden areas, and then later when I was, maybe writing dialogue for a character I would think, ‘Oh this could be elaborated on in an indirect way’ — and that would be the secret.”
Now, I actually don’t really want to get too far into any discussion of the narrative, as we could be here for a very long time and I’d spoil a whole lot of this game for you. Suffice to say, if you enjoyed the subversive, meta narrative of Pony Island (or games like it), you will definitely enjoy The Hex.
If you happened to be one of the many people who bought itch.io’s Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, but haven’t had a chance to look through the literally thousands of things contained therein — know that you now own The Hex, and as such have no excuse not to play it. And, if you’re interested in Daniel’s next game — which I am to an extreme degree — the game-jam game it’s based on, called Sacrifices Must Be Made, is also available on itch.io, and was actually released shortly before I originally interviewed Daniel back in 2018.
The games Daniel Mullins makes, though often deceptively simple in their appearance, are some of the best games on the market.
