Gamification

Today I’m lying in bed with a headache that makes me want to reenact that one scene from The Dark Knight with the pencil, just in case it might help. But writing is better than doing nothing, and my laptop screen runs dim enough that it at least isn’t making things worse :)

The Subtle and Terrifying Art of Game Design

Getting into a new form of art is always a tricky and slightly terrifying time, I think–it’s incredibly easy to lose yourself in how far others have gone, get buried in the incredible work created by people who have dedicated years, decades, even their entire life to this one craft, and then look back at your meagre starting point and sigh, overwhelmed by the sheer weight of how far you have yet to go. 

Of course, in most cases, “how far you have yet to go” is a fake and silly concept. You, the individual, do not have to write with the skill and beauty of a revered author for your words to be worth writing; you don’t need to paint, or play, or sculpt at a professional level to make art worthy of releasing into the world. You can just do things for fun, you don’t need to be comparing yourself to anyone, let alone the masters with orders of magnitude more experience than you, and you’re only going to hurt yourself by doing so. Instead, compare yourself only to where you were before, and as you go you will find your current self to look more and more favourable in comparison.

This changes a little when you decide to make that art form part of your career, though. In that case, you kind of need to be at least decent at it, in a semi-objective sense.

Game Design as an artform kind of… encompasses a lot of weird and complex parts, and the end result is kind of nebulous when you look at the starting components. Which is the case for all art, I think, it just depends how you break it down, but… when I write, and it comes out poorly, I know where the problem is. The problem is in the words. Somewhere. Maybe it’s the phrasing, maybe the pacing is bad, maybe the imagery has the wrong connotations, maybe I forgot to give any of my characters distinct voices again, but it’s. There. The words. When I am working on my pixel art, and it doesn’t look right, it might be the shape or the colours or the shading or the way I’ve tried to get the light to look, but the problem I am trying to solve is there, represented by a handful of specific pixels, if I can just figure out which ones. But if a game isn’t fun, isn’t enjoyable, doesn’t feel right, then… what? I guess the simplistic answer is that the problem is there, in the game files, but is it about the visuals? The animations? Is information communicated readably, do the mechanics feel interesting and meaningful, is that sound effect the right thing for that moment, is the challenge too easy or too hard, does the whole thing need to be redesigned from the start? Or is this part of the game fine, and the problem is that it doesn't connect to the rest of the game well? There are a lot of seemingly separate factors, and it’s tricky to tell if something feels bad because it’s incomplete or if you actually need to change direction.

Our current hypothesis is that the previous version of the game felt bad because it lacked enough complexity to make it interesting, and that the systems that we had for interacting with the mechanics felt too spreadsheet-y for the feeling we wanted to convey. So our approach when redesigning the gameplay around making things has been to give ourselves avenues to change those things, add complexity in choices and give the player more natural feeling ways to interact with the game.

Artistic Analysis - Minigames

When you’re kind of just starting out at something, it helps to be able to look at successful examples of what you are trying to achieve. In our case, we have some really well designed games that we can and have been taking inspiration from, and one of the biggest ones is Potion Craft.

Potion Craft is a game about performing alchemy to make potions for your customers. In many ways it achieves what we are going for with Anvilheart, in the sense that it builds its gameplay almost entirely around the process and system of making things, and it’s been a focus for us because it has a very interesting way of presenting that system. In Potion Craft, the effects a potion can have are presented as locations on a map, which can be navigated by adding and processing ingredients; the process of making a potion with a given effect is mechanically just a combination of ingredients, but the map makes it spiritually a kind of exploratory journeying process. Many games have a system of “there are multiple ingredients/components/effects that can be used to achieve the same outcome”, but directly basing it on movement in 2D creates a lot of potential design space for different patterns, different ways to move yourself around, and different obstacles that can be presented. The actual interaction method for this system is also interestingly designed; every step, from selecting and processing ingredients to stoking your fire to stirring the potion you’re making, is done by clicking and moving your tools on-screen with the mouse. While some people rightly raise concerns about this mechanic with respect to accessibility, it does a lot to make the simple, mechanical parts of the gameplay feel satisfying to perform.

Another game we’ve been looking at, which we had suggested by a friend specifically for the minigame aspect, is Kynseed. Kynseed is a farming sim game with multiple surprisingly intricate crafting systems; considering the breadth of gameplay options that the game seemed to present, it was interesting to see that the potentially-entirely-ignorable blacksmithing system was a multi-step process. Kynseed’s minigames are in many ways opposed to Potion Craft’s, in that they are quick and simple and involve actual skill expression (mostly in time management, rhythm and reaction speed). Something Kynseed does well, something we have been particularly thinking about, is the way it frames the actual mechanics of its minigames; many of the actual interaction systems are as simple as “press a button when this marker is in the green section of the slider”, but the way the marker and the slider are presented makes them feel like distinct gameplay elements.

Implementation - Smelting

A while back we set ourselves to figuring out prototypes for minigames around some different steps of blacksmithing, so I took some of the ideas looking at these games had given me and tried to make an interesting system for smelting metal.

Fig. 1: Smelting minigame :)

The base of the game is simple. You put suspiciously spherical lumps of metal ore in a crucible, heat it up to melt them, and their elemental qualities get added to the overall magical state of the molten metal you have available (represented by the hexagon shape, which is the general UI we are working on for such things). 

This is functionally just number adding, but the idea is that by adding a kind of flowy mechanic (ore heats up and melts over time) and more analogue interaction systems (pick up lumps of rock out of boxes and put them in a pot) it starts to feel like a more interesting, complex process than it actually is. So far this… almost works, I think? It doesn’t feel great, but it is still incomplete and missing a lot of the feel features that I would like to add. For one, it would be cool to remove the numerical indicators of temperature and how much metal has been added; even if these things still have clear visual indicators, which they should for ease of actually playing the game, seeing the exact numbers makes them feel weirdly clinical to me. Directly setting the temperature in degrees feels bad, putting more fuel or air into a fire to strengthen it feels better. The other thing is to add limitations, make materials like ore and fuel consumable resources that you actually have to think about using cleverly, and add limits around the number of items used; for example, the idea currently in my head is that a particular type of item, like a sword, needs a particular mass of metal to make, so the idea is to get the right elemental balance without using too much or too little material.

Some time soon I am hoping to put all of these things together so I can see if the concept actually works, and then… when it does, I will write about why I think it does or doesn’t. For now though, we are working on other things, so that might have to wait for a bit.

Come Play Our Game!

While writing, I’ve received confirmation that we have a chance to show this game at AVCon 2023! So if you are reading this within a week or so of writing, you should come to that, you might get to try out this questionable smelting minigame (and also the others).