games: Recent Episodes

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To save games, we have to build new local ecosystems
The games industry is in crisis. Last year 10% of developers were laid off, while startup funding evaporated by 77%. This year has been worse, with foundational “resets” in gaming investments from major players like Microsoft, Tencent, and Meta resulting in major studio closures. Something is breaking, but there isn’t consensus on what is happening, why it is happening, nor how the future can be shaped into something sustainable. I don’t have all the answers, but I do have a theory that links the various arguments I have heard from developers, studio heads, publishers, and investors over the last four years.

The industry is crashing because we have consolidated the ecosystem into a monoculture where each release has to compete against every game in the world through narrowing market channels. This is not just “oversaturation”; there are more people playing games than ever, but they are playing a shrinking number of releases. This means that the winners score bigger jackpots, but there are more losers who take home nothing. At the same time, old formulas for success no longer work – so hitting the jackpot doesn’t create a pathway to sustainability. As long as every game has to stand on top of the world or be crushed by it, we will see dramatic rises and falls that will eliminate the class of professional craftsmen that can only develop from experience gained in sustainable environments.

The only way out of this maelstrom is to break the walk towards monoculture. We must develop new subcultures for buying and selling games.

Monoculture is the consolidation of once disparate markets. Platforms now resemble each other in features and content – controllers have been standardized, graphical differences are indistinguishable, physical releases are phased out, multi-platform releases are the norm. Xbox doesn’t just compete with Playstation for platform dominance, now Xbox games compete with Playstation games for attention on Steam. Monoculture is not just releases, though, but the methods available for marketing these releases. The games media landscape has been deliberately decimated along with most other forms of boutique media. We are without many magazines and blogs where prospective players go for one thing, and discover other new things along the way. Human curation has been increasingly replaced with algorithmic filtering that just further surfaces what is already popular.

We have gotten used to believing that taking over the whole world is a good thing – who doesn’t want their game to be popular? – but building the pathways towards that homogenization has put us into this mess.

There are many other popular talking points about why this crash is happening, all of which are based on truth, but I believe they are all symptoms of this larger sickness of monoculture. To explain further what I mean by monoculture, I’ll run through these other talking points and explain why any solutions to these various ailments won’t be enough to fix the industry. Then I will explain the type of solutions I think need to actually be taken to build new sustainability.

Industry Crash Theory #1: Post-COVID RecalibrationDuring COVID lockdown people played more games, so publishers spent more money to capitalize on the expanding market. Low interest rates made borrowed money cheap, which encouraged speedy greenlights for expensive projects by new developers. Then the lockdown ended. Now, people are buying less videogames, resulting in less money than there are professionals. Interest rates are up, so financers can’t take risks and need a return on their investments. Funding is cut, projects are cancelled, developers are laid off, and studios are closed as a natural calibration to the smaller market, adjusting after an artificial and temporary surge.

This is a very tidy explanation, but if it was the only story then the recalibration would have been swift and singular. We were too big, now we are smaller again, back to business as usual. This was a naive but understandable expectation in 2023, but three years later it cannot justify the existential panic demonstrated by major platform holders and publishers as they scramble to come up with new corporate strategies.

What COVID did was it accelerated the monoculture. Want a game? Go to Steam, no trading with a friend or browsing local shops. Want to play with people? Join a Discord, and good luck introducing anyone to something unfamiliar. Want a new friend? Watch YouTube or Twitch, parasocial connection is the best you are going to get.

Journalism, magazines, and anything else that made up a subculture buckled under an isolated online world. The algorithm didn’t curate, it just disseminated the most popular stuff. Everyone who wants a game goes to Steam and sees the front page. What goes on the front page? The most popular thing in the world. What becomes the most popular thing in the world? Whatever the streamers are playing. What are the streamers playing? They play whatever the most popular streamer is playing – after all, that’s the only person who can make a living streaming. An iceberg balancing on the tip of an iceberg. Sucking on the world through the straw of your 13-inch laptop monitor.

Industry Crash Theory #2: Games are sold for too cheapThis concern comes in many flavors. 99¢ games on the App Store destroyed the value of mobile games; Steam sales trained audiences to wait for steep discounts; Xbox Game Pass cannibalized sales. Accessible development tools have made it too easy for low-skill developers to flood storefronts with cheap crap. On top of it all, game prices stayed the same for two decades while inflation rose. Any of these factors are used to argue the conclusion that somehow we have to get audiences on board with game prices going up, or concoct new schemes for microtransactions / subscriptions / ad integration.

Devaluation occurs when there is oversaturation, but that oversaturation is further problematized when disparate markets merge audiences. The oversaturation of Atari cartridges that caused The Videogame Crash of 1983 only mattered in the United States, whereas Europe and Japan were unaffected. Similarly, Apple standardizing 99¢ phone games didn’t affect the console or PC space at the time, because the mobile ecosystem was so divorced from “the videogame industry” that it had different developers, audiences, conferences, journalism, even scholarship. What is new is that platforms have been trying to meld these different markets together – God of War on Steam, Resident Evil 7 on iPhone, Red Dead Redemption on Netflix (really!). This march towards homogenizing markets was a key motivator for the Epic v Apple antitrust lawsuit. Media giants are battling to build and control whatever could become the digital portal where the world goes to play any and all videogames. It’s a cynical calculation that whoever owns the monopoly on the monoculture is the only one who wins from oversaturation, while developers vie for their 15 minutes of fame.

A singular market is doomed to crash totally. The benefit of having a network of different ecosystems is that if one starts to buckle, the developers can translate their skill to adjacent markets. This keeps experience in circulation, and increases innovation as ideas carry from one subculture to the next. Imagine if the 1983 game industry crash had reverberated outside the USA? Nintendo would have never entered the console market.

Industry Crash Theory #3: Games cost too much to makeWhen Insomniac Games was hacked in 2023, some existential questions leaked too. Spider-Man 2 cost almost three times as much as Spider-Man 1 to develop. Internal documents asked, “is 3x the investment in [Spider-Man 2] evident to anyone who plays the game?” There is no world where the game would sell three times as much as its blockbuster predecessor, and expecting it to do so is laughably outrageous. But get a few drinks with AAA game developers and you will hear some variant of this story. Budgets have ballooned, but quality is elusive. To players, it has not become obvious that the largest studios are struggling to release more than one game during a hardware generation.

The studios and their budgets have been bloated with inefficiencies. Greedy and lazy developers have to learn to do more with less. Austerity is the reckoning for a pipeline that was too generous and soft. For a company to compete today, they need to be nimble and lean.

That’s a harsh scarecrow reaction, but as with all these theories I think there is a degree of truth to it. If we compare the development environment of today with the 90’s and 2000’s it feels like a different planet. How much they accomplished with so few people, such rudimentary computers, and so quickly! Up to Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar averaged a major GTA release every two years. GTA VI, on the other hand, has taken 13 years to make. How many copies will it need to sell to be considered a success against its $2 billion budget? And how much can that audience grow, if their target demographic of 17-year olds were infants the last time a GTA came out? Even if it is a success and the most profitable media release of all time, I suspect there will never be another game made like GTA VI. It is the end of the line for this style of blockbuster game development, like Cleopatra was for the opulent 60’s roadshow film system.

How did we get here? It would take several other chapters to dig into the technical reasons why HD graphics have outsized costs, or how big box engines increased production problems rather than streamlined them. Those are worthwhile problems to investigate, but above any technical reason is a historical narrative that has guided publisher decision making until this point.

Games are a hits driven business, but there was a period of time where it was possible to forget this. During the “console wars” between Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo around the sixth and seventh generation, platform holders split the market between cheap indies that could flesh out their catalogues and their own big AAA game launches. There was a wide gulf between the two – an indie developer couldn’t dream of matching the technical sophistication and visual splendor of the AAA releases. What players called “real games” required hundreds of expensive specialists to produce, and there were only a few of these big games released a year, so the competitive field was relatively lean. AAA games became a formula, and we all know the beats: first-person or over-the-shoulder camera, narrative delivered through voice-over, skill trees and ability/weapon unlocks, photo-realistic lighting. Assembling a AAA team was hard, but if a publisher could do it then the math was simpler than it is today. Put more money in, more money comes out. If the game had cutting edge technology and looked better, people would show up.

This market split had dissolved by the time the PS5 released. Mid-sized studios can now meet the expectation of “real games” because the genre signifiers are baked into the big box engines. Physics, controls, and lighting in Unity and Unreal are industry standard whether you are on a team of two or two hundred. This has eroded the market split that platform holders initially cultivated. Sony funded Journey and other indies because the expensive PS3 was struggling to gain a market share, and indie darlings created cool, sophisticated branding that drew in savvy players. AAA publishers benefitted from indie releases because indie game players weren’t casuals – they were the most hardcore part of the audience, and continued to purchase AAA games on their platform of choice. But in today’s world why buy Sony’s Marathon (peak 88k concurrent Steam players, dev team of 400+) when the same platform has Escape from Duckov? (300k peak concurrent Steam players, dev team of 5)

There was another generation shift that eliminated the indie/AAA market split – Gen Z aged into the primary gaming audience. They are a generation that grew up during COVID lockdown, and hanging out after (or during) school meant playing cheap online games together. For them, videogames mean Minecraft, Roblox, snake.io, Among Us. Graphics are low value for this generation. What they play prioritizes sociability, easy access, and low-stakes situations. This is antithetical to the hardcore AAA game model, which prioritizes individual immersion and deep systems for prolonged progression loops. As Gen Alpha ages, this shift will become even more pronounced.

Without the market split, legacy studios are no longer fighting the 2010’s AAA war – they are now in the mud with all the indies. While we can recognize in retrospect why “Friendslop” resonates with Gen Z players, indie devs operate out of luck more than strategy. Peak’s success was an accident – the hits we see are simply the 1 out of 10,000 developers who have sacrificed their life savings to take a shot at making something. When an indie developer fails, they disappear invisibly, so we can’t chart the toll. Now that large studios are fighting on those same terms, everyone can see how often and how devastating release failures can be.

Indie development has always been about forming a garage band, where just a handful become superstars, and many die young. Now that the market has coalesced, the largest players have become garage bands with 400 musicians.

Industry Crash Theory #4: Lack of technical innovationsThe current generation of consoles fail to transform the way people play by not offering any novel technology, so players haven’t gotten on board. Maybe if these big publishers released some truly innovative games that wow us like they used to, they wouldn’t be in this mess. I think that this argument resonates emotionally with many people. It feels true! I love my PS4, but I never upgraded to PS5, even though I have credits on a few titles for the system. Everyone probably has some form of feeling: “This was going to be the future. I thought I would care more about it than I do.”

Blaming lack of innovation is a very “End of History” type of claim. Everything that could be tried, has. It assumes that games are subject to carcinization – the theory that multiple different species independently evolved into what we recognize as the crab, which is an idealized form for their environment. But if all games are turning into crabs then they must be sharing the same sea – a monoculture.

When games have to compete for the same global market they can’t afford to have any idiosyncrasies. The algorithm ensures that survival depends on popularity – everyone either loves your game or they won’t even see it. Any game that tries to appeal to any one person’s individuality will necessarily alienate other people, and risk dooming the game’s discoverability. This is true of all art, but especially true of games because they are a behavioral medium. If a player does not understand how they are supposed to play, the game comes to a halt. If you are trying to build depth you have to trust that your audience has some familiarity with your genre space or cultural background, so you can use shorthand to jump past tedious introductory concepts and take players to new places.

The best game you have ever played is the best game for you because it speaks to something deep and personal. Sharing that game with others can then be an expression of yourself. Let’s play together, and understand each other. More and more this intimacy will be lost, as subcultures are subsumed by monoculture.

Going back to console hardware, we can agree that the Nintendo DS was an innovative console. Foldable screen, microphone, touch controls before the iPhone. Now, Nintendo’s new console is basically just a larger version of its decade old last console. What happened to innovation? The monoculture killed it. The Nintendo DS was experimental because it was not developed to replace the GBA, and Nintendo’s business was supported by both home console and handheld ecosystems. Nintendo was prepared for the DS to fail. Instead, it became their best selling console. However, after the Wii U failed Nintendo consolidated their market into a single ecosystem.

The Switch is the perfect emblem of a monoculture. Now you can play your games on the big screen, in bed, and on the plane. With developers no longer split between two systems, the release cadence doubled. Everything seems great, but oh no– now if the successor changes anything too much, backwards compatibility is no longer an option and Nintendo risks losing their only audience. When the 3DS had a rocky start, there was still the Wii, and when the Wii U bombed, the 3DS had become strong enough to buoy the company. The Switch 2 has had a respectable start, but is the future just shinier versions of old games? If the Steamdeck and next Playstation and Xbox consoles are Switch-likes, what does it matter what game is released on what? When every console is the same then every game will be the same.

The ice caps will melt, the world will be submerged, and we will all become fish who don’t know we are in water. When that happens, we will only hunger for the taste of crab, because it will become all that we know, even as we are sick of it.

Another crab’s treasure…A hits driven business means one in ten releases is a success, but that one success is enough to make up for the nine duds. Now let’s say your game hits it big. Top game on Steam, movie stars are referencing it, TikTok memes are blowing up. For the sustainability of the industry, what is the best thing you can do next? I want you to think about this question before moving on. Really try to imagine what you would do in these shoes.

Under the current model the best case scenario for the industry as a whole is that when a studio hits a jackpot they use the winnings to fund multiple other studios. This is what Inner Sloth did with Among Us’ surprise triumph, but even when they fund 22 studios to release new games, each release is still competing against a hundred thousand other releases. Those studios get to take a dart toss, but when 20,000 darts are thrown a year, their chances of a hit remain grim (especially since this particular deal includes no marketing). Without consistent revenue these studios will likely be short lived.

There is no sustainability possible in a monoculture. So we must break from our habits. No one will be saved by researching trends, min-maxing Steam sales, sim-shipping on every platform in every language, or using AI to speed up coding or art or any of the other worthwhile parts of making things.

What can be done?We have to invent new local ecosystems. Games for a small, dependable audience. Farm to table games for your neighborhood market, metaphorically and literally. A friend was telling me about the community of doujinshi game makers, and how it is a completely separate ecosystem from the Japanese “indie games” scene. Instead of trying to chart on Steam, doujinshi games are sold alongside zines and comics in festivals. They know their small audience, and the audience shows up for them. There is not the same festival culture in the States, but if there was one single model for local ecosystems then they wouldn’t be local, would they? So the challenge is for us developers to connect more deeply with the people we know, and make art not for the nebulous idea of “the whole world” but for the ties we know are strongest.

It will not be easy to shift lifestyles and skillsets for this change. In the detritus of the AAA industry is a professional class that was handsomely rewarded for developing hyper-specific skillsets. Environmental Collision Designers, Cloth Simulation Engineers, Technical Lighting Artists. These skills are valuable in concert with a large team of other specialists. It will be daunting to train additional skills needed to make smaller games for less money. But for the sake of the industry, we have to find the things we can do that no one else can, and make things that the people we know will care about.

We can see how some developers have carved new ecosystems for themselves where none existed before. Games are now key features of sites like the NYT, LinkedIn, The Atlantic, and countless others. They each have idiosyncrasies that line up with their audiences; NYT has word games, LinkedIn has logic puzzles, The Atlantic has history games. Or go to a museum and spend some time with their digital kiosks. Some of the games have gotten pretty good! Or how about this: there’s a bar in Koreatown here in Los Angeles called “Chi Chi” that has tablets set up on each table with networked games you can play with all the other tables to wager drinks and flirt through their chatrooms.

Games can be anywhere. We make games because we believe computers can be fun, that systems can create joy, and people can connect through play. So long as we are surrounded by computers, systems, and people, there will be magic that we can create, so long as we let ourselves imagine new dreams.

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The [Save Game] newsletter is back! After TinyLetter shut down I took a hiatus, but people keep asking me to bring it back, so here is an extra meaty one. If you are new to this series, please consider subscribing! It’s free, and in this age of social media atomization I have been finding more joy than ever in the circle of newsletters that brighten my emails.

Last week I went to the 2026 Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) and filled my notebook up with interesting lessons from all sorts of developers. I have pretty complicated thoughts about this year’s conference as a whole compared to the previous years, but I’d like to keep things focused on the juicy substance of game development talks.

Please keep in mind that all of my notes are, at best, paraphrases of the original author’s words, and many of them have lots of editorializing by me based on my interpretations and connections to my own experiences.

Without further ado, here are my favorite insights from a random scattering of talks:

Flavors of Challenge: The 8 Flavors of Difficulty and How They Can Be Combined to Make Better Difficult GamesBy Brett Moody

Moody proposed a taxonomy of different kinds of challenges that games can contain, in order to better understand why some games motivate people to overcome adversity while others don’t. This talk was very exciting to me, because I had been assembling my own chart of “flavors of fun,” so I wanted to see where our observations aligned and differed.

He identified eight flavors of challenges:

1. Reasoning
   • Critical thinking (Pentiment)
   • Deductive reasoning (Return of Obra Dinn)
   • Pattern recognition (Chess)
2. Physicality
   • Hand-eye coordination
   • Strength
   • Balance
   • Accuracy
   • Agility
3. Randomness
   • Input randomness (starting seeds, like Balatro or Spelunky)
   • Output randomness (differences in outcome, maybe like an attack dealing random amounts of damage within a range?)
     • I didn’t understand this split very well, but for research I picked up Uncertainty in Games by Greg Costikyan at the GDC gift shop, hoping it will have some insights.
4. Endurance
   • This was one I hadn’t considered at all! Moody defined endurance challenges as the ability to “sustain concentration or focus”
   • Guitar Hero’s 8+ minute long level based on Dragon Force’s “Through the Fire and Flames” is not the most complicated song, but is an endurance test
   • Celeste and Super Meat Boy are a series of individual sprints, so the game is lower on the endurance flavor, while Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy is pure endurance
5. Out-of-game resources
   • Time (very prevalent in board games, but all games weigh these facets differently)
     • Setup (waiting for player input, can build anticipation)
     • Play (taking your turn, doing an action)
     • Tedium (time it takes for actions to complete)
     • Waiting (time before you can input again)
   • Money (Poker, coin-op beat ‘em ups)
   • Knowledge (trivia games)
6. Representation
   • Engaging with deeper themes can be difficult (Molleindustria games used as example)
   • Obscenity (Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days)
7. Interpersonal Skills
   • Reading Non-verbal cues
   • He gave a bunch of other examples, but sadly I didn’t have time to write them down
8. In-game resources
   • Scarcity (Survival games)

With those eight flavors in mind, Moody offered various strategies for keeping players from feeling hopeless when faced with difficult challenges:

• Pair skill growth with virtual growth
  • Consistently award stronger equipment, or stat growths
  • Common in RPGs or Dark Souls
• Parallel Challenges
  • If you get stuck on something, have somewhere else to go
  • Look at Baba is You
• Vary the flavor of challenges
  • It can keep up excitement to know that once you overcome one challenge there will be a reprieve with a different kind of challenge
• Rewards should provide momentum and direction
  • Defeating one Megaman boss helps push you through another
• Reward all efforts, not just victory
  • If effort doesn’t feel worth it, players burn out
  • Modern RPGs let players keep the experience points earned even if they die
• Foreshadow big challenges early
  • Keeps motivation up
  • Breath of the Wild’s omnipresent castle creates excitement
• Make retrying easier than quitting
  • If it takes more effort to quit out of a game than to try again, players are less likely to ragequit
  • This was the key innovation in Super Meat Boy
• Avoid “time-taxes”
  • Redoing challenges you have mastered creates boredom
  • Moody offered criticism of Bloodborne’s run-backs, which some people might disagree with, but that just goes to show the subjective nature of people having different tastes for different flavors of challenge.
• Never restart from zero
  • Rogue-lites cool features where players start their next run with a random bonus item/ability
  • Maintains momentum between runs, creates variety
• Give suffering meaning
  • A game’s story can make frustration part of the thematic arc. Players will persevere if they feel something deeper than fun.
• Give players a common enemy
  • Being part of a larger movement can be motivating, making the struggle feel less lonely and more meaningful
• Establish narrative stakes
  • If players get attached to characters then they will move mountains to get narrative satisfaction

I think these strategies are wonderful. Moody is spot on that every player will be interested in different mixtures of challenges, and some people will be more engaged in a game than others. If someone isn’t on the same wavelength with the game, they might drop out from frustration. These techniques could keep that person from giving up, and that could lead to them discovering a flavor they didn’t appreciate before. Growing players’ palettes deepens the culture of play, so I am keen to keep this list handy. Thanks for the great talk, Moody!

Game Designer’s Notebook: Five Obstacles to Successful Gen AI GamesBy Jesse Schell

I’ll be a little rude and say that I thought the majority of this talk was delusional. Schell asserted that silent movies were not considered worthwhile art until the invention of talkies, and that the theoretical addition of conversational AI characters will be what finally liberates game-making from trash culture to the vaunted cultural status as filmmaking. Personally, I think LLMs and Gen-AI are like fracking – sure, they can give you energy, but they poison their own well with runoff, depend on temporary subsidization, cause incalculable collateral damage, and suck up any research or investment into sustainable technologies. But while it wasn’t the intention of this talk, Schell did a good job of vocalizing even more reasons why AI technology is a poor fit for games as we understand them.

“AI technology has been around for almost a decade, so where are all the games? I can’t even name flops. Isn’t it weird that there is nothing? Why is that?”

Here are my favorite new reasons:

• Non-deterministic
  • The same input given twice to an AI will not yield the same output each time.
  • Inconsistency is the primary feature of AI. It is what makes it seem natural, as opposed to algorithmic code, which is consistent and obviously machine-like.
  • Games are systems of inputs and outputs, and need to be deterministic for a player to be able to understand the rules and dependably step towards goals.
• Agents resist limitations
  • LLMs mimic patterns but do not have any understanding of meaning, so they are incapable of maintaining a “magic circle”
  • One of the generalized differences between videogames and physical games is that for IRL games the rules define what the player CAN’T do (“your hands can’t touch the ball”) while videogame code defines what the player CAN do. If you do something you aren’t intended to do in a videogame, it risks null pointer references which can create glitches or crashes.
  • LLM agents mimic patterns absorbed from the physical world, but exist in a virtual world of code, so agents will try to do things that aren’t programmatically possible.
  • Examples: Reference items that don’t exist, hallucinate characters, prompt player actions that aren’t available
  • Hypothetically defining everything an agent “can’t do” in a prompt would take more effort than just programming a traditional “can do” deterministic program
• Players don’t want to be creative
  • The magic trick of LLMs is that a player could say anything and get a response. However, that wide open field has the “blank piece of paper” problem where players have to put in substantial effort to creatively think of the best thing to input.
  • The more open ended a scenario is, the less directed the experience is. Players become more responsible for how sucky their play experience is.
  • Deterministic models are better for curating directions for players. If games are about “a series of interesting decisions” then it is the game designer’s job to make those decisions interesting, not the player’s job!

Schell had a fun analogy: “You wouldn’t put a live bird in a cuckoo clock and expect it to come out and chirp three times at 3pm”

I don’t think AI birds are alive like that, but I do agree that the output of AI is fundamentally mismatched with the last 8,000 years of game design as it has been understood. Perhaps new forms of play are possible with the technology, but I don’t see any reason why they would be better or deeper than what creators have been practicing during our current golden-age of game development and study. Why anyone would explicitly want the end or replacement of that is beyond me. It breaks my heart to see someone with a deep structural understanding of games turn to hating them.

Constructive Destruction: Fusing Voxel Tech and 3D Action Platforming in ‘Donkey Kong Bananza’Kenta Motokura and Tatsuya Kurihara

This has been one of the more quoted and reported-on talks from the conference, so I want to focus on some general design ethos observations I came away with from this talk:

1. The games started from a crystal clear genre and technology concept
   1. 3D Action Platformer + Voxel Technology = Destruction = Donkey Kong
2. Nintendo’s gameplay spirit is to focus on interactions between game elements
   1. They identified that the core feature of voxels is the ability for reactions to exist across surfaces rather than points
   2. For example, a non-voxel object taking damage is applied to the whole object because it can only tell that there was an interaction between the damaging object and the hit object, but a voxel object can apply damage to just the surface areas that were hit, creating a hole the size of the damaging object
   3. Surface reactions allow for chains of destruction, which can unveil points of interest and incentivize exploration.
3. Nintendo’s traditional elements of a 3D action platformer are:
   1. Terrain
   2. Gimmicks (gameplay objects)
   3. Enemies
   4. NPCs
   5. Minigames
4. What we may call a “game loop” Nintendo calls a “game cycle”
   1. For platformers their loop alternates between the player’s normal state and a “powered up” state, though they clarified that does not necessarily mean a Fire Flower or other clearly labelled item.
   2. In Bananza, to keep with the spirit of centralizing voxels, they asked themselves how to achieve DK = [normal] and DK+Voxel = [powered up]
   3. When DK is holding a voxel, he gains the ability to:
      1. Swing for extra damage
      2. Throw for a ranged attack
      3. Double jump
      4. Enhanced speed while riding
   4. Bananza has a “small, high frequency game cycle” as players are grabbing and losing their voxel pickups
5. Voxels were not very fun to destroy until the levels were beautiful.
   1. Nintendo coated the levels in non-voxel game objects, but disguised this by making them all destructible. They usually fly away when hit, and cause impacts on voxel surfaces to ensure that the “chain of destruction” loop continues
6. The level tools appeared to be very simple
   1. In-engine level designers could create box volumes of different materials, and carve through them with subtractive boolean cylinders. Collectibles would be placed within the subtracted space.
   2. Unique voxel shapes would be created through a Maya -> Houdini -> Voxel export process.

‘Silent Hill f’: The Challenges of Creating a Melee-Only Horror GameAL Yang

This talk astonished me. The Hong Kong developer Neobards had one week to put together the pitch for this game, and only a month to prototype it. I’ve been in a similar situation before but I landed on my face, so it was amazing to hear how their focus on practicality let them deliver an efficiently produced title that punched above its modest budget. They thoroughly documented the experience before starting, and identified “Danger Points” early on for features that they knew would be difficult, so they could budget x2 or x3 the usual time for those parts. Many cuts were made early on based on cost efficiency, but that let them focus on delivering a higher quality experience than they could have otherwise.

The biggest cost saving choice they made was to avoid developing ranged combat systems. This saved them from having to create a wide range of animations that would have been required to compete with the brand’s main competition. However, this meant that they had to design replacements for the various risk/reward systems that ranged combat provides. Some examples:

• When shooting zombies, the danger rises as the enemy gets closer, but at the same time they become easier to shoot
  • Replacement: They reversed this! All enemies were given ranged attacks so they were more dangerous the further away they are, forcing players into hiding behind cover
• The tension between needing to conserve bullets vs wanting to unload into an enemy feels great
  • Replacement: Melee weapons were given durability, so they functioned like ammo
• Distance is tough to read in over-the-shoulder perspectives, but gun reticles conveniently flatten aiming into a digestible 2D screenspace
  • Replacement: They simplified distances by having melee attacks snap combatants into fixed places, and use long exaggerated animations to make the risk/reward about timing light vs heavy attacks. Heavier attacks leave you vulnerable, but the reward is that they deal substantially more damage and while maintaining weapon durability.

Each of these redesigns flowed from an argument Yang made that all action games lean either toward RPG or fighting game systems. He observed that sports games have dropped their fighting game traits and shifted to more strategic RPG-like systems over the last few years, because that is better for casual audiences. How much will a player learn about the game system after ten hours with an RPG, versus ten hours with a fighting game? Yang posited that after ten hours a developer can accurately predict a player’s growth in an RPG using experience points and stat growths, and the player will understand the mechanics of the system pretty completely. But in a fighting game, players will vary wildly in ability after ten hours depending on the player’s introspection: players become better at fighting games if they can reflect on their own play. Because this is an uncontrollable factor, it is better suited for hardcore games than casual ones.

For Silent Hill f, they knew they would have a large audience of casual players because the story’s script was penned by a popular author, so it needed to be playable for people who were only invested in the story. They leaned away from fighting game mechanics and towards strategic resource management: stamina meters, weapon durabilities, and time. Fighting games prioritize reflexes by requiring players to hit the correct button within tight timing windows, but Silent Hill f rewards patience and waiting for the right moment to execute a generous counter.

A final memorable note: Because horror games are all about high tension, but there is no way for a developer to anticipate when a challenge will be too frustrating for an individual player, many horror-action games will often give the player what Yang calls a “master key” that can be used a limited number of times to bypass break one of the game’s systems. The most obvious example is Resident Evil’s rocket launcher, which has become available earlier and earlier in their games. If a player is stuck in a fight and no longer having fun they can blow past it using the rocket launcher, but the ammunition is very limited so they have to make that choice carefully. This lets the player choose when they need it without feeling bad. It doesn’t just need to be for combat, though. A master key can be created to break any game system. In Silent Hill f they introduced a weapon with unlimited durability during a memorable part of the game.

I thought this talk was interesting because my impression from reviews was that Silent Hill f’s combat was divisive. The developers didn’t shy away from regrets they have with aspects of it, but it was clear how much thought went into their decisions, and that the tradeoffs are what allowed them to make a game that, at the end of the day, had players comparing it sincerely with titles of much higher budgets. I think there is much more to learn from those circumstances than from anywhere else.

Misc: From a panel discussion on the State of Level Design, Absurd Ventures level designer Cameron Williams described open-world level design as an “additive process” compared to linear level design. + Many factors of the environment are fixed, such as landmarks, distances, systems, and adjacent gameplay. + Most often, designers have to add gameplay on top of the existing environment with only limited ability to reshape the space. + Often it is easier to cut content than to add it. Space can be carved or obstructed, but more space can’t usually be added without large repercussions on the surrounding spaces. * From a talk on Despelote, Julian Cordero noted that fantasy is easier to create in games than reality. + This harmonized with a recently translated 1989 interview with Shigeru Miyamoto and Shigesato Itoi where the two explain that the earliest videogames involved piloting spaceships because sci-fi physics can be anything, but replicating familiar physics is difficult and it feels bad when it is off. + Despite the difficulty, we have more tools and knowledge for creating “neo-realism” in games than by pushing for graphical fidelity. Despelote uses recordings from improvised conversations to give a uniquely warm feeling of real performances. * The .Hack and Fuga developers CyberConnect2 gave a candid business talk about their initial struggles to switch to self-publishing and had a good explanation for regional pricing. + If a game was sold in the US for $30 in 2018 the conversion rate at the time would price the game at 3,000 yen in Japan. + If a $30 USD game was sold in Japan using the 2026 conversion rate, it would cost 4,500 yen. + Pricing the game at 4,500 yen might be the most accurate exchange for the currency, but Japan’s comparable domestically made games will still be priced at 3,000 yen, and consumers will consider the imported game too expensive compared to everything else they see on the shelf. + While $30 might be worth 4,500 yen, a $30 game* is worth what a $30 game is sold for in the region.

It was a good GDC, full of interesting lessons, greater student access, and good company. But it was also a year where the conference was trying a rebrand, and inserted itself in the organic culture that emerged around the conference itself. Large gatherings at Yerba Buena were disrupted by a village of tents, and all the evening parties were wrapped into a sanctioned list that drove the smaller parties further underground. Even though attendance on the whole has continued to decline, everything was stuffed with too many attendees as everyone was driven into a smaller selection of talks and activities. I had to be at least half an hour early to each of the talks in order to get in line early enough, even for talks that would have only filled half the room in previous years. It was a strange contrast to the rebranding, which tried to present GDC as a “festival” open to more than just developers.

More than once I heard people compare this year’s conference to the identity crisis in the waning years of E3. But for all its problems, I hope GDC doesn’t fall apart. The amount of infrastructure required to create such a large gathering can’t be easily replaced. As Los Angeles game developers above a certain age know, behind the cameras Summer Games Fest is a virtual charade of what E3 was. A host of factors are playing into California fumbling as the global hub for game development, but its loss doesn’t mean something better will rise elsewhere in this decade or the next. Instead, please elect me as the next president of the ESA! (Who even is it that votes on that anyways?)

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After the unfortunate closing of TinyLetter this newsletter has been on pause until I find a suitable replacement service. I’m very grateful for the readers who have reached out with recommendations, and those who have encouraged me to keep writing more. A great deal has happened since I wrote the last letter! So if you will indulge me, how about a quick life update?

In 2024 I was able to celebrate the release of Penny’s Big Breakaway — Evening Star’s debut title. I was Evening Star’s first employee over five years ago, and it has been a long road to get the game out the door. The team built our own 3D engine, created a unique technical pipeline for iterative level creation, and experimented with gameplay conventions to make a truly fresh entry in one of the oldest genres in videogames. I am unbelievably proud of our accomplishments, and any trials we faced were peanuts compared to the gratification of seeing people dig into the game on Twitch, YouTube, and elsewhere. I’ve worked on many titles that never saw the light of day, so having the opportunity to be part of a game all the way through production was very special.

I also had the opportunity to come up with new original titles and pitch them at DICE and GDC in 2023 and 2024. This was a ton of work to juggle while also finishing the studio’s Big Breakaway title, but it was a blast. It gave me a new perspective on the business end of game development, and really transformed the way I think about design. I’ve always tried to keep a material labor focus on my design analyses here, but my understanding of the economics were more abstract before, and now I have a better sense of scale and numbers. I’ve had to do more than a couple breakdowns of other games in an attempt to reverse-engineer their productions, which I can’t share here but in the future I might do some for fun and share those.

We built some incredible prototypes, but unfortunately couldn’t land a publisher either year. I might spend the rest of my life thinking about what I could have done differently, but I know it wasn’t for lack of thoughtfulness or effort. The climate for mid-sized indie titles is dire right now. Many people have offered different perspectives of why this crisis is happening, and I definitely have my own, but I don’t think there is a single fundamental cause. Everyone’s takes are probably right, to some degree, which means that there isn’t a single change that can fix broken parts of the game industry.

I have no clue what the future is going to look like. New modes and models will emerge somehow, someday, and the people who adapt to them will be the ones that stick around. What I know is this: play is older than mankind, and color television is younger than the president. There will always be games, but the technology and business around them cannot be taken for granted.

Until the next time, keep on having fun <3

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[Let’s pretend this came out in December of 2022]

Poinpy is my 2022 Game Of The Year. As a mobile game available to anyone with a Netflix login, most people could be playing Poinpy within a minute, no matter where they are or what they are doing. Yet I’ve never talked to someone else who’s played Poinpy! No one has even heard of it! Maybe it’s because the name is too hard to pronounce, even though it is so much fun to say. Poinpy! Try it! ˈPoin(p)ē!

Poinpy TrailerPoinpy is a platformer for your phone developed by Ojiro Fumoto with art by @2nd_Error403. It’s Fumoto’s return to the indie scene after a brief stint at Nintendo where he worked on Ring Fit (Nintendo’s best new IP since Splatoon). Poinpy is a mirror image of Fumoto’s first hit, Downwell. In Downwell you descend down a well, and in Poinpy you climb up one. In Downwell you seek ground, and in Poinpy you avoid it as much as you can. In both, your key actions reload when you land. And while both Downwell and Poinpy*’s procedurally generated tunnels give the appearance of infinitely scrolling arcade games, they both have definite endings.

In Poinpy you play as a cute dinosaur with a fruit blending bucket. A hungry beast demands smoothies, and it will incinerate you if you touch the ground without the specific ingredients. So you must ascend a well using careful wall bounces to collect the fruits. Additionally, you gain a jump whenever you land on an enemy or a pot, allowing you to chain together jumps and perform dazzling mid-air acrobatics to collect the floating fruit. As you feed the beast its demands grow more complicated, but the better you play the more permanent upgrades you unlock. This gives it a wonderful arc; in the beginning Poinpy is a puzzle-like challenge to carefully use your slim abilities to collect all the ingredients, but before long your familiarity and tools let you play it as an action game where you blast through enemies instinctively.

Of all the games I have played this year, Poinpy holds the highest esteem from me because it achieves the pinnacle of a genre on its platform without any superfluous waste detracting from its achievement. Poinpy presents players with a challenge that is interesting and that evolves over its runtime. It overflows with comfortable cuteness in its art, music, and game feel. All of this combines to make an experience that is deeply satisfying, and which I will remember fondly into the new year and beyond.

Touch the ground to blend fruit, bounce on enemies to gain jumpsThe platformer genre originated in arcades with Donkey Kong and Mario Bros, but flourished on home consoles during that period in the 80s and 90s when the sensibilities of the arcade experience still carried over to the living room. Arcade games have simple controls, short play sessions, and demanding difficulty. In the same way the first television shows were just people reading radio dramas, the first home console games carried these arcade traits. In time, developers would recognize that home consoles had their own set of virtues: longer play sessions, bespoke set pieces, and complex, standardized controls. But that shift would come after the platformer genre found its home. So while our sensibilities have changed as long as platformers are about slipping and falling the arcade will be in its blood. The arcade would return, however, in a new device that quickly gained ubiquity.

Mobile phones are the new arcade. A physical room of loud strangers has traded with a virtual one. Notifications from dozens of chat apps claw for your attention. You don’t wait in line to play, but you do play while in line. As a result, games with brief bursts of play thrive on the platform. A phone’s limited interface means that controls must be kept as simple as possible. These make mobile games resemble arcade games so closely that Apple even named their subscription service “Apple Arcade.” However, mobile phones have an important feature that arcades did not: the singular player profile. An arcade machine is shared by many players, but a phone has one owner. This allows for phone games to have persistent progression just like a home console.

The reason platformer games thrived on early home consoles more than in arcades was because consoles let you advance through a globe-trotting adventure bit-by-bit. The first Donkey Kong cabinet had only four levels, but on a home console Super Mario Bros. could have 32 levels. It wasn’t technical freedom that allowed for this, but a different reason: the game no longer needed to be shared among a crowd. Save systems soon allowed even more levels to be strung together. This made every victory in a play session another step along a grand journey. The lingering arcade sensibilities of precision and difficulty created engaging challenges, while the affordances of home consoles provided an arc that makes those challenges rewarding. Relatively speaking it was only a short blip of time when home console games had this overlap of styles that birthed the platformer genre. With mobile phones sharing that same mixture of both arcade brevity and console persistence, it seems like platformer titles should have seen a renaissance there; however, that has not been the case.

Platformers have languished on mobile phones because they lack the one trait that is most important to the genre: precision. Touchscreens struggle to offer tight controls. Buttons let you know their properties physically: the resistance of the spring, the click of the confirmation, and the shape of the button itself. All of these elements communicate the state of input, and let you control a character with 0.0167th a second of accuracy. Your finger can slide across a touchscreen frictionlessly, but that input is floaty and imprecise without any bounds. This is trouble for platformers because they are fundamentally games about intuitive physics. We understand how gravity works, so platformers ask us to react quickly and precisely to navigate up and around obstacles. The more precise that navigation can be the more possibilities there are for fun and varied challenges.

Consequently, the platform games that have found success on phones reduce their physics from two dimensions down to one. Temple Run, Flappy Bird, Mario Run, and Canabalt all push you forward automatically. You are not controlling left and right and up and down, just one or the other, usually with just a tap or swipe. This is not a dig at those games – they maximize a single input with enviable depth – but all of them have controls that are even more minimal than the arcade games that they are based on. Games that go in the opposite direction and try to emulate buttons on the touchscreen always suffer from input mistakes, like moving left when you meant to go right or missing the jump button. Even the platformer games that have exceptionally good virtual buttons, like the classic Sonic ports or Fumoto’s own Downwell, still suffer from the momentary second guessing that each input brings. Without clearly defined ridges around the buttons I always ask myself “Are my fingers in the right place?” before taking an action.

Drag to flingHere is Poinpy’s first step above its predecessors. Unlike Downwell, Poinpy’s controls are native to the touchscreen format and are elegantly designed to be played with a single hand (or finger!). Jumping is handled through a slingshot style drag that will be familiar to anyone who has played Angry Birds or Desert Golf. Press and hold down anywhere on the screen, pull back to set the jump direction, and then release to launch. The cross-cultural success of Angry Birds showed how intuitive this input is. You can start the drag anywhere, which keeps your eyes on the game and away from your thumbs. The fling can go in 360 degrees, allowing you to take full advantage of the 2D space. Poinpy enters slow-motion while you aim, which gives you enough time to be precise within that wide possibility space while maintaining a delicious time pressure. You can tell exactly where your character will launch before you commit to it thanks to a projected trajectory, but it will only show some of the route. The rest has to be imagined, and that is where the depth comes in.

One of the pleasures of the platformer genre is that with practice, your jump trajectory becomes internalized. Poinpy offers the same pleasure in the distance beyond the projected path. Because you want to stay in the air as long as possible, the further you can bounce your character around with each jump the better you will score. The fling is finely tuned between what it shows and what it does not, and how quickly you can act. Your score suffers if you stay within the handicaps of the projected path and the slow motion. These niceties make it easy to play competently, but Poinpy always pushes you to play better through complex motions and faster actions. Learn the physics to bounce off more enemies and walls with each jump, and turn those calculations into second nature so you can release your fling before wasting a millimeter of falling.

Tap to slamThere is one other action Poinpy has – the ground slam. Tap on the screen and the character will pause for a tiny fraction of a second before slamming straight down. If you slam onto a pot or an enemy you’ll bounce back up to just below where you started the slam. This action is easy to do, but you have to remember what is directly below you to avoid breaking your jump combo. This includes remembering things that are off-screen, which are the most rewarding things to slam onto because it bounces you back to your original height as well as awarding you an additional jump. The speed of the slam contrasts with the arc of the fling, which rises and falls with gravity. The fling is full of grace, strategy, and anticipation, while the slam is punchy and determined. The contrast creates incredible pacing. Whiiiip foooooo BLAM bwoooing fwoop pwaaaaaang BLAM!

As you grow in proficiency with the flings and slams the targets you aim for increase in complexity. First they are stationary, then they are moving from left to right, then moving in mid-air, hopping in an arc, and so on. This evolution emerges naturally, as do all the other elements of the game’s various progression systems.

Level up to unlock more abilitiesThe overall goal in Poinpy is to feed the monster enough smoothies to unlock new areas. The more fruit in a smoothie the more points it doles, and once you have enough points then the level transitions into a new setting. Poinpy is run based; whenever you die you restart from the beginning with the score at zero. If you manage to unlock an area, though, it enters into the random rotation of areas on subsequent runs. Each area challenges specific play styles; the water level is about timing jumps, the fire level is about introducing a fireball state, and the palace is about using wall bouncing to get around overhangs. When a new area is unlocked, a set of puzzle challenges unlock as well. These puzzles use hand crafted scenarios to teach advanced techniques and are elegantly stashed to the side of the title screen, where you return after each run. The room is empty to begin with, but as you level up you gain the ability to climb the empty room to reach a secret throne hidden above and out of sight. This setup masterfully makes you feel smart for discovering it without actually being hidden at all. It makes you say “Ah-ha!” and then it rewards with more opportunities to feel clever in the puzzles themselves.

Reaching a new area is exciting and motivating, but the primary gameplay evolution occurs through a pair of parallel progression systems: the player level and ‘seeds,’ the in-game currency. After each run, your smoothie score is pumped through a leveling meter. When you reach a new level, you unlock either a permanent upgrade to your number of jumps or equipment slots, or a big bag of seeds. The additional jumps allow you to travel through the air for longer without hitting the ground, making it easier to collect fruits and reach higher scores. The equipment slot allows you to apply a modifier that changes your character or the level. These modifiers are purchased using seeds. A cheeky gachapon machine dispenses three random modifiers, of which you can only keep one. This provides the thrill of randomness without the dissatisfaction of a bad roll. You don’t know what you will get, or even what is possible, but you get to keep your favorite! This leveling system is another part of Poinpy that is mobile native: recognizing the best pleasure of gacha without the predatory aspects.

The gachapon dispenses powerful modifiersThese modifiers provide the greatest source of evolution over Poinpy’s playthrough. Because they are unlocked semi-randomly they push you to explore different playstyles. Eventually you have the experience and tools to define your personalized kit. Good at slams? Increase the number of pots! Narrowly missing fruit? Have them suck in at the start of a slam! Many modifiers synergize with others, and figuring out the combos is a rewarding puzzle that feels like sneaky cheating. By the end of the game I had constructed an invincible dinosaur that blasted through areas like superman. Working up to it, each run felt like a step forward thanks to the leveling meter. The steady stream of new modifiers provided novelty around each corner, and clicking them together gave me a sense of clever ownership over the game. This novelty may have worn out, though, if the game didn’t have an ending to work towards.

Poinpy can be played infinitely, but if it was only an infinite game then it would have lost my interest. Unlocking new things only feels satisfying if those new things are pushing you towards something tangible. Progress needs a destination, and without spoiling it, Poinpy delivers with a final area to reach and surpass. Games without end states inevitably leave a taste of guilt, no matter how good they are. Any Animal Crossing player knows this bitterness well – our time with the game can be full of happy, worthwhile memories, but once you move on with your life to something new it feels bad to leave a game world ‘undone.’ This happens even for multiplayer games, like this year’s fantastic Splatoon 3. I can say a million good things about that game, but when I think about Splatoon 3 I would be lying if I didn’t mention the guilt I feel for not playing it literally right now. I know in my gut I didn’t finish my time with Splatoon 3, but no one ever can. I have no such reservation with Poinpy. I may have had more fun in moments playing Splatoon 3 than I have with any other game this year, but when I reflect on the totality of a game’s experience Poinpy’s ending lets me sit then and forever in perfect satisfaction.

Except, Poinpy’s ending plays a subtle trick. I began to sense it as I approached the final area. I had slipped and died just short of my ultimate goal, and as I watched the leveling meter fill up with my spoils and tick to level 18, I felt a sense of dread. I unlocked the last equipment slot, and realized I could have reached the ending before hitting this level. I didn’t need the equipment slot. I could have beaten the game earlier, without all the powers that were bending the game in my favor. I didn’t need them, I was a better player now. But you can’t unwind a level. That number only goes up. Whatever level I am when I beat the game, that will be how good I am. I couldn’t unrealize the fantastic and horrible truth. I don’t want that number high, I want it low. Poinpy isn’t basketball. It’s golf.

I knew with certainty then that after the credits rolled Poinpy would show me my level. It would say nothing about it. Poinpy would make no judgment. No suggestion. It would never have to. Like the hidden puzzle room or the modifier combos, it trusted me to make my own discovery and push myself to take a new challenge. We hate someone telling us we could do better, but it’s beautiful to say to ourselves “I know I can do better.” I’ve beaten Poinpy now, after slipping and falling and hitting the level cap. It was thrilling – when I started the game each failure felt like a gentle step forward, but when I was finishing it I could see each failure stacked side by side on that level bar. The drama amplified. When I finished, I knew I could have done so much better. I was ready to restart the game as soon as I finished it. Poinpy is a game that can be played infinitely, but it has a definite ending. That definite ending, as the deft combination of all its systems, produces the best of all feelings: total satisfaction for what I have done, and welcome arms to come back and try again. The rewarding journey of a home console experience, and the daring depth of the arcade.

That rewarding journey exemplifies the home console experience, and that daring promise of a worthwhile return epitomizes the arcade style. With this ending Poinpy succeeds in taking the platformer back to its roots in the overlap between arcades and home consoles. Reflecting on the games I played this year, I could have called out the ones that gave me the greatest instants of excitement or the ones that pushed and experimented the most, but in my opinion Game of the Year is for the whole game. I didn’t have the space to touch on the art, music, or haptics of Poinpy, but everything is harmonious with the core mission of crafting a comfortable and satisfying experience. Through the controls and progression systems it represents a maturation of Fumoto’s style of design, and exemplifies the genre on its platform like nothing else. I feel very glad to have played it, and I hope it continues to get the recognition it deserves!

Footnotes:

*Poinpy is so neglected online that there isn’t even any record of the game’s credits anywhere. I had to open the game to double check that I wrote artist @2nd_Error403’s name correctly!

Special thanks to Milena Correa and Kevin Wong for their input in editing this piece!

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Long time no see! When spring rolled around I got caught up in wedding season (so many BEAUTIFUL grooms and brides finally tied the knot this year <3 <3 <3 !!!!) and now that everyone has escaped the danger zone I’ve been relaxing this week with our old arch nemesis: COVID. It has been the […]

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Another month is here! The world sure does keep on spinning, doesn’t it? In addition to everything going on, you know, out there in the world, I have been extremely busy making things big and small. They are either private or NDA projects, so not well suited to a public blog. It has been very […]

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I pay my rent by mailing a check every month. Being the first month of a new year, January is a risky time; I almost always write the wrong year out of habit. This year was an exception! I have naturalized seamlessly into 2022, and saved myself a check. Could this be like the groundhog […]

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Happy New Year! I am typing this from chilly Colorado, where I have been staying with my family for the holidays. The air is apocalyptically dry, and a burst of wind tore through with such force that a car alarm started. Our Christmas tree, naked and discarded in the lawn until the recycling service starts […]

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If I could ask Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka, Toshihiko Nakago, or Kazuaki Morita about any one single thing, it would be: Goomba. I do not know if these four original developers of Super Mario Bros. have thought about the Goomba’s origin much in these last 35 years, but it has been consuming me over the […]

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Whoa, it’s the end of October. I started this as a New Years resolution back in January, and I guess there are only two more of these left before the end of the year! I haven’t decided yet whether I will continue this in 2022, so let me know what, if anything, you’d like to […]

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A bit of a break from the usual this month. I spent September preparing for a big trip, and then going on said trip, so this was actually written in August. No videogames this time, but I hope you still enjoy this very simmered take on a topic everyone has moved on from, and next […]

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Summer is coming to a close! I’m bidding adieu to my beloved long days of sunlight. In my imagination, summer is the chance to be the most productive. Yet this month I only really played a single game: The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (Switch). It just released worldwide last month after being region-locked for six […]

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It’s still July, right? Not only have I missed my self-imposed deadline for the first time, but I have missed it by a whole week. It has been more challenging to write anything recently, partially due to travel, but mostly because every day online the games industry brings more heartbreak. The stories out of Activision-Blizzard […]

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We’ve come halfway through the year! My local farmers market has continued running throughout the pandemic, but this month it seems to have exploded to be the busiest it has ever been. I wish to be the same — I am ready to burst with life! I flew back home to see my family and […]

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A very short catch up this month; I am flying out to visit my parents tomorrow, now that we have all been vaccinated. I have been able to spend more time this month in much needed social company, and I hope you all are able to as well. A funny side effect of this is […]

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Sometime near the start of April I needed to research some top-down combat implementations on the GameBoy. This initial quest sparked a tangential curiosity, which would consume most of my month. I started by playing the Japanese release only Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru, or “For Frog The Bell Tolls“ for the GameBoy. I then followed that up with The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening for the GameBoy and GameBoy Color. After that I dipped my toes in The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, also for the GameBoy Color. All three games seem to share the same game engine, and their stark differences inspired me to find out more about how they came about, and who made them.

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It’s frankly laughable that I started my research into GameBoy-era combat systems with For Frog The Bell Tolls. While the game could be described as a classic RPG where a pair of princes adventure across distant lands to rescue a princess damsel, the most notable feature of the game is that it is an RPG with no battles at all.

Well, there are battles, but they are deterministic in outcome. When the player touches an enemy, the two collapse into a cartoon fisticuff dust cloud. As the two combatants exchange unseen blows, their health depletes. The player loses a heart, then the monster loses a heart, then the player loses a heart, etc, until one person dies. There is no input, no action, no dice rolls. As soon as the battle begins, the victor is certain.

To progress through the game, the player has to acquire equipment that improves their fighting ability. For example, the player can find additional health, or they can get a weapon that deals more damage. This is typical RPG fare, but by removing the chance and skill from battles, they have turned the battles into the same “lock and key” sequences that have always existed outside of RPG battle systems. At one point there was an evil tree blocking my way, and I realized that the developers knew definitively that I could not pass through until I had located an additional heart and collected enough money to buy a saw weapon. Every single encounter is transparently part of a grand fetch quest. And I loved it.

Without skill or chance, there is no pressure in any fight. I cannot be good nor bad at the game. Although antithetical to the laws of “good game design,” this was shockingly relaxing to play. All ambiguity and pretense was discarded. Battles lose all drama, sure, but they also pass by in the snap of a second. Fetch quests are often derided because of their tedium, but For Frog The Bell Tolls revealed to me that it is the slow battles that cause that tedium.

As someone who likes to approach studying games by looking at “fun friction,” this approach startled me, and I had to know how it came about. In an interview translated on Shmuplations, programmer Yasuhiko Fuji recounts that the battle system was completely remade three times. He was still in college while working on the game, and was not confident in his design abilities. Ultimately, he decided that the best approach would be to simplify the combat system. What we can learn from this is that the shipped combat system was not what was originally planned. In fact, to my eyes the combat seems “simplified” to the point of being a cut feature. I find this genuinely impressive. Combat systems are the core feature for most RPGs, and most games do not ship with their core feature cut! For Frog The Bell Tolls is a wonderful game, and playing it was unlike anything I have played before. I came to this game looking for combat mechanics, and I left with the lesson that hey, maybe you don’t need them.

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Except that in my case, I did actually need them. So I moved onto the next game, Link’s Awakening, which I had always heard was the follow-up to For Frog The Bells Toll by the same team. This, it turns out, is not true. If the credits are to be believed, then only the composer worked on both titles. What is true is that both games appear to share the same game engine. The software appears to have the same collision systems and movement, and both utilize a technique for shifting from top-down rooms to side-scrolling rooms. And who were the people utilizing and building on top of the technology from For Frog The Bell Tolls? At the helm was Takashi Tezuka, who wanted to bring his previous title, “A Link To The Past” to handheld.

I would argue that Link’s Awakening is an improvement from what came before. Perhaps because of the smaller platform and less executive oversight, the narrative has greater personality compared to previous Zeldas. Random weirdness in the narrative coexists harmoniously with deeply considered and elegantly constrained design. The smaller screen forces an economy of level design that leads to the densest gameplay per pixel in a Zelda game. Without the technology for scrolling, each screen has to have something interesting to do in it. For Frog The Bell Tolls also had a quirky story, but its serviceable map layout reveals, by contrast, the skill of the Zelda team’s planners. This game benefits from the team’s experience of making A Link To The Past, but gets to utilize ideas too weird for such a high profile title. Further, its development was likely made possible by constructing atop an existing game engine rather than starting from scratch.

The people who made that engine weren’t around for Link’s Awakening. Where were they, then? Fuji, the programmer whose interview I referenced earlier, went on to work on Super Metroid instead. In fact, most of the staff did — Yoshio Sakamoto went from scenario writer to director, graphic designer Masahiko Mashimo continued making background art, both character designer Tomoyoshi Yamane and director Toru Osawa shifted to object design. (Don’t worry about Osawa’s downgrade, though, he then directed Ocarina of Time). There are certainly more parallels to be seen between For Frog The Bell Tolls and Link’s Awakening than there is with Super Metroid, but videogames are mysterious like that.

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I had so much fun playing Link’s Awakening that I immediately fired up the next handheld Zelda game: Oracle of Ages. This game is one of a pair made by Capcom, the other being Oracle of Seasons. Both of them use Link’s Awakening as a base — not just building off the game engine, but also repurposing many art graphics. Played back to back, these visual similarities really emphasize the differences in level design, and unfortunately the first impression is not favorable.

The Oracle games utilize enhanced scrolling technology that allows for rooms to be larger than a single screen. While this opens up many possibilities for level design, the feature is not used with much restraint. Rooms are large, open, and empty. While Link’s Awakening has every square tile carefully considered, Oracle of Ages baffled me with blocks and level features scattered around at random. In early dungeons I wasted an hour pushing on objects, searching for secrets, because I could discern no other reason for those objects to be there. The inconsistent utility and larger spaces made it more exhausting to travel from one space to the next. Unlike the previous two games, I did not pick it back up after I put it down.

Despite my play experience, I am still fascinated by the result of a new staff. Capcom making an entry in Nintendo’s flagship series was a big deal! While inexperienced with designing the game elements — especially compared to the veterans on Link’s Awakening — giving Capcom’s staff the chance to build this experience would yield incredible future returns. The director, Hidemaro Fujibayashi, would lead Capcom’s The Minish Cap, which is a Zelda game I like quite a bit. He would also go on to direct Breath of the Wild, a game you may have heard of, and that Nintendo seems pretty pleased with. The other planners on the Oracle games would go on to be the lead designers on Devil May Cry 5 and The Last Guardian. That’s pretty incredible!

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So what are we supposed to do with all this information? I have strayed very far from my quest to learn more about top-down GameBoy combat systems. But I found something much more interesting. I found deeply divergent design approaches that begged for explanation. All of them were born from circumstance, but specifically the circumstance of the people who made them. For Frog The Bell Tolls was made by young new developers with great technical savvy. Link’s Awakening used that base as a platform for veterans to toy around with their after hours ideas. Oracle of Ages/Seasons was loaned that platform to bring in more new voices, one of whom would become instrumental to Nintendo’s 2017 turnaround. I’ve got a new theory that Takashi Tezuka’s games prioritize density, while Hidemaro Fujibayashi encourages vastness. More than anything, though, I am hungry to learn more about the history of individual contributions on every game I play, to better understand what makes them all so different.

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Along this same subject, I came across a documentary called Star Wars Within a Minute. It had been mentioned within a podcast, and thankfully is easily accessible on YouTube and Disney+. This documentary takes a 48 second scene from Revenge of the Sith and goes through every single department that had a hand in it. This means producers, concept artists, previs artists, costume designers, caterers, post production staff, accountants, everything. They interview representatives from each department, but the complete credits are shown as they go through each. The documentary is ostensibly a fluff piece meant to demonstrate how impressive the scale of the film is, but it still manages to humanize the vast amount of work on all films. I do not know the caterer’s life story, but I now know better the kinds of handprints left on any blockbuster.

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Case Study: David Aja’s Hawkeye Films are made by hundreds of people, but even more intimate mediums like comic books can benefit from this kind of documentary work. My absolute favorite new YouTube series has been Elsa Charretier’s comic art case studies. In them, she breaks down the visual language within a single page or panel, and uses her professional expertise to explain step by step how the studied artist arrived at their conclusions. She often redraws panels in order to show how different decisions lead to different effects. Her case studies are valuable lessons in negative space and pacing, but they also serve to highlight what makes these master artists unique. By replicating the thought process of these artists, she demystifies the technical aspects of image making while also showing how there can be several approaches to each problem. Plainly seeing the list of information that must be communicated coupled with the creative solutions makes the contributions of the artist obvious.

For people outside of comic book circles it may seem strange to need to declare that the artists are important contributors. Unfortunately, the western comics industry can often treat artists as interchangeable assets. Coverage tends to prioritize writers, as series are organized around writers, and artists are often subbed out during on-going stories. Within critical circles, analysis usually focuses on writing as well. Critics are themselves writers, so they are adept at talking about the literary elements. A comic’s plot, character motivations, dialogue, all these are well covered. I’ve seen many artists online bemoan the lack of discussion of their craft. Comics are at least fifty percent art, but when critics are themselves critiqued for having a blindspot when it comes to writing about the craft of image making, the response I see is a sincere plea for examples of how to even critique visuals. In Elsa’s videos I see a perfect lesson.

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The lineage of Japanese animators, from Animetudes Perhaps the most extreme form of this kind of analysis can be found in animation, particularly in anime. It’s colloquially called “sakuga,” and it has come to refer to the practice of accrediting individual shots to their artists. The original scope of the term refers to a cut of animation that is distinctly higher quality than the surrounding cuts, behaving kind of like a solo during a music performance. Those in the know recognize these soloists, and the artists gain some niche celebrity. Because this is the internet age, the scope of “sakuga” quickly exploded, and now any and every cut of animation can be sakuga, leading to a sizable fan community that researches as many individual artists as they can. This research even extends beyond key animators, and includes background artists, compositors, and more.

I am usually adverse to non-professionals making confident assertions about the behind the scenes of any piece of media, but sakuga strikes me as different. For one, the lack of NDAs means that the artists themselves participate in the discussions and can set things straight when cuts are miscredited. Secondly, the goal of these fans is not IP focused. Fan culture usually champions specific IP, but sakuga fans follow the individual creators to whatever shows they take them to, regardless of genre. Their goals are refreshingly non-commercial. They don’t root for a sports team, they chart every player in the league. They just want to learn about the talents and growth of individuals. They want to see how the visual grammar of animation evolves over time, and how it is shaped by human hands.

While sakuga discussions are non-commercial in the sports team sense, they are definitely not apolitical. The goal of sakuga analysis is to expand the spotlight beyond the typical director auteurs. A beloved show is made up from the contributions of so many people, and by highlighting each of them and placing them in a context that is both historical and personal, it gives power to voices that have otherwise been marginalized. But with new attention comes unavoidable realities. When you have a name and a face to the specific, tangible contributions that make up the stuff you love, it empowers their voices when they say “we’re barely scraping by.” Animation is undergoing a crisis. There are more shows being produced than there are resources to make them — human and monetary. The demand is high, and there is a bubble that appears on the cusp of bursting. Thanks to the fan communities that dig into the shows’ credits and honors people for their individual contributions, a complete outsider like me can understand what this ongoing crisis means for the real people suffering under it.

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Despite witnessing exploitation that would make a games executive blush, I am envious of this moment in comics and anime. There are horrifying injustices in those fields. Yet I look on to these critical analysis and research pieces for the crafts with longing, because games still seem so far from them. Yes, I am envious because I would love for my own work to someday be treated with such scrutiny and respect. (Anyone who says otherwise is lying!) But even more than that, I would love to be able to trace the individual contributions of people as they flitter through the games industry because there is so much to learn from! Were I to take any room in For Frog The Bell Tolls, Link’s Awakening, and Oracle of Ages I would find three dramatically different solutions to some of the same game design problems. Who did the layouts for those rooms? What led them to those conclusions? How did the outcomes of these games inform the next titles they worked on? As someone who works in the field, I can’t help but be transfixed by these questions.

Games are very secretive about how things come together behind the curtain. But I would hope that anyone who has worked on one knows that there is no job in it where the people are completely replaceable. Games are about finding solutions to made up problems, but no two people will land on the same solution. I get a little discouraged when I see fans clamor for sequels to games where the teams have totally dissolved, because the magic that made the originals is not in the IP, but in the chemistry of the team. We all want to know what makes one game click and another flop; or worse, never materialize. I believe we would have a better understanding if we could develop the vocabulary to express the quirks of the individual contributors. I have been inspired by many things this month to look closer at the credits of everything I play, and hopefully I will continue to learn things.

– Esteban

Links:
Shmuplations Interview: https://shmuplations.com/yasuhikofujii/
Elsa Charretier’s Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Peu6lw0nido
Star Wars Within A Minute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgS3pt0yMvs
Animetudes: https://animetudes.com/the-history-of-the-kanada-school/
​Sakuga Blog: https://blog.sakugabooru.com/​

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