Sylvie's Thoughts on Circle of the Moon

[droqen]

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

With this, I've realized and concluded there is no purpose to thinking about game design.

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

I 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.

[droqen]

I 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.

[droqen]

Circle 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.

Initially, 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.

[droqen]

These 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