QuoteThese out of reach places usually just lead to a little side room with a HP/MP/Heart increase item. It reminds me of the Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild. Mechanically, it's not an interesting reward, the point is that it's an acknowledgement that you took the time to explore.

How do these things make you feel? I'm curious if this, in the moment, feels good or bad... here is definitely an acknowledgement of like a problem-solution pair, which differs from a lot of the other content in this post

QuoteCircle of the Moon opens with your character walking really slow. On your way to the item that lets you run, you pass a lot of places that are slightly out of reach, or blocked by something you can't interact with yet.

QuoteInitially, you're dropped into a fairly linear area with some side rooms, some of which you can't progress in without further upgrades. After the first boss, the game opens up massively, and you can discover many new areas, but also many places you can't reach.

This is a pretty common pattern in Metroidvanias... I guess I'll call it UNREACHABLE PLACES for now.

I think it is there to create a feeling of an 'open world', but if that's the case why are they unreachable? These unreachable places serve many purposes... We will need many more patterns than just one.

The funny thing is we're starting from a solution, and need to reverse engineer the problem it is solving.

SOLUTION: The player discovers obstacles which cannot be overcome yet.

SEEMINGLY BRANCHING PATHS

PROBLEM: Exploring a vast world is fun. But (for some reason) if you can go anywhere you want, [it's bad.] (maybe you can lose a sense of purpose too easily?)

SOLUTION: On a screen we can have multiple paths (why have multiple paths? for now let's defer their value to another pattern) where, upon close inspection, only one of them is actually traversable.

(Hmm.)

This definitely opens up new pattern space... what is the value of branching paths? I think these need higher-order patterns in order to understand them, since a branching path is really a relationship between larger pieces of the game.

QuoteI often get disappointed when I realize that a "Metroidvania" has a hidden linear structure like this. Exploring a vast world is fun. But once you realize that this vast world is carefully designed to just guide you through a set sequence of action game levels, that sometimes breaks the feeling of exploration for me. I was okay with it this time though, maybe because I recognized the pattern early enough to not feel let down.

1st draft of PATTERN: NONLINEAR EXPLORATION

PROBLEM: Exploring a vast world is fun. But once you understand the vast world, if its structure is not interesting (linear), it can break the fun feeling of exploration

SOLUTION: Once a vast world is understood, its structure should not appear linear

-

Justification: I've often wondered, what is the value of a non-linear world when someone still only ever experiences it linearly? How do you know if you've designed a world that's satisfyingly non-linear? It's funny that the joy of exploring a non-linear world is something you don't experience until you've completed the game... or at least understood a large part of it. The value of a non-linear world is purely retrospective.

re: sylvie's
- Circle of the Moon
- and part two


I can relate strongly to the above response after attempting to deeply examine a game's design.

QuoteI couldn't get into Hollow Knight. How much of these feelings come from the map design and combat design and degree of non-linearity and level of guidance?  Probably not a lot. It's all about how your mood intersects with the game's vibes.

It can feel futile to study game design when so much of it only comes alive in its intersection with a player's person-state, something which is impossible to pin down. But there is so much in Sylvie's examination of Circle of the Moon (and Castlevanias at large) which can be distilled into patterns or seeds for patterns, which I have written about before on this forum. I think they're very valuable as ways of looking at problems.

I'll sum up here what a 'pattern' is as "a precisely-defined problem & a precisely-defined description which captures all viable answers to the problem". I guess the word 'pattern' is quite bad, but it is the word that I have associated with this particular relationship.

Part of coming up with patterns is finding little places where 'incomplete' or 'bad' patterns seem to repeat themselves. I need to go cook, but I will come back and analyze Sylvie's analysis to try and make game design feel less futile.

As we talk about the movie afterwards and revisit the songs I like this movie more! I kinda want to watch it again.

Ingredients

2 tbsp olive oil
300g celery, sliced, with tough strings removed
1 garlic clove, peeled
200g potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
500ml vegetable stock
100ml milk
crusty bread, to serve
Method
STEP 1
Heat the oil in a large saucepan over a medium heat, tip in the celery, garlic and potatoes and coat in the oil. Add a splash of water and a big pinch of salt and cook, stirring regularly for 15 mins, adding a little more water if the veg begins to stick.
STEP 2
Pour in the vegetable stock and bring to the boil, then turn the heat down and simmer for 20 mins further, until the potatoes are falling apart and the celery is soft. Use a stick blender to purée the soup, then pour in the milk and blitz again. Season to taste. Serve with crusty bread.

QuoteIt's the unique ludonarrative experiences we have with [videogames] that make them worthwhile, not the fact that we've spent hundreds of hours playing.

Quotetrick you into thinking you're having fun

Use a different word from fun here

Quote.. and not actually doing anything fulfilling.

Ok, better

That's just gambler's fallacy for cultural artifacts.

QuoteAll the more satisfying because of the work that went into them

I really fucking hate this perspective. The work that goes into something is not what makes it valuable, and nobody should think this way! It's what you get out of it, and you should work on things that you get something out of, and we should strive to make games that accurately signal that working on them is valuable.

Fantasy is valuable. Happiness and joy are valuable. Comfort is valuable. Inspiration is valuable. Anything you value is valuable. But . . . burning time is a fucked metric for that.

Learning how a roguelike works is approaching a greater understanding & appreciation of the whole. "Difficulty creates motivation" says a slide around the 10-minute mark of the video, but . . . no, difficulty is what signals that that understanding is valued/necessary.

In the lingo of Christopher Alexander, "Difficulty creates motivation" makes an awful pattern because it doesn't map accurately to the problem space. There are difficult games that aren't motivating, and motivating games that aren't difficult. We need a more precise pattern than this.

QuoteImagine how much worse Factorio would be if you just build blue science [labs?] the moment you research them.

The achievement would barely matter at all and you would lose investment almost immediately.

But by first making you set up an oil outpost, a refinery, a steel mill which is probably gonna need to be supplied by a train, and a bunch of other stuff, simply pressing a button to make an item becomes this awesome culmination of 15 hours' work

The 15 hours mean nothing on their own! This lens is like saying the twist at the end of a movie gets meaning from being "the awesome culmination of 60 minutes of runtime." It's missing the fact that what is contained within that time, the experiences of the appreciator, are what give the thing meaning...

QuotePlayers love delayed gratification.

Eeeehhh this seems like a pretty terrible way of looking at it! He goes on to talk about the value of multiple delayed gratification things paying off all at the same time. This seems like the most backwards way of looking at it... even if it's literally the forwards way of looking at it.

The payoff is a whole thing which must be understood in pieces before it has any meaning. It takes time to receive the pieces of data necessary to appreciate the thing in a way that is gratifying. Spending more time than necessary is not avoidable, but is generally a bad thing,

Sometimes the signal and signified get messed up and delayed gratification is seen as a measure of a good reward.

QuoteAnimal Crossing requires you to collect money, farm for critters, and upgrade your town. [..] Even though most people are playing for the dress up and designy elements. [..] If the game simply gave you all the items right off the bat, you'd lack a sense of personal investment in your creations and most people would just make their dream house and quit the game after an hour.

I need a name for this perspective and to better understand my beef with it. It is intrinsically motivating to work creatively with what is available to you...

I enjoyed the premise of this film but I was sort of dreading this thing that it seems mainline animated Disney movies all do, where they strip away the fantasy for the sake of a well-meaning and even evocative, but painfully artless, statement on the human condition and life and love and so on.

A weird aside:

I received a book of psalms and something-elses from a stranger on the street the other day and I flipped through its pages and I noticed the same sort of rug pull happening in that text: here is a scenario, here is a message, and the scenario no longer matters. It was an empty vessel.

Quote11 "Which of you fathers, if your son asks for[a] a fish, will give him a snake instead? 12 Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"

link

Encanto followed this basic structure but more beautifully and for 1 1/2 hours rather than three or four lines of simple text:

It sets up a relatable character with a relatable problem, and spins a beautiful fantastic tale. The fantasy-world is built on soft and flexible logic; when the problem is resolved it does not follow from the logic of the world, but from something about the human experience. We return to the soft and flexible logic, to tie up loose ends in a way that seems true to the message.

I'd like to revisit this through the lens of patterns but it's Christmas Eve and I want to get to sleep early and wake up at a good time and hang out with the family :)

(The tone I use above is judgemental because I found the film's fantasy to be a bit flat. But... I think it's interesting to observe patterns like this; I'd like to understand what it accomplishes and how to recreate it. I'd like to understand better what it is that made it not sing for me. And I did like a lot about the movie. There was just... something...)