The past few few weeks after I got back home from PAX East have been quite busy for me. Today, I finally have some free time on my hands, so have decided to write about a few topics that have been on my mind for quite some time now.
PAX East Feedback
While I did write up a post-mortem on my experience showing the game with the Indie MINIBOOTH at PAX East, that post focused primarily on the logistics side of things, and I didn’t talk too much about the feedback I received regarding game design.
The build of the game I presented at PAX contained the first two hub worlds, and also had the new edge-detection shader applied.
Art Style
Visually, the game was in a much better place. At GDC, a lot of the feedback I received was that the game looked too much like a generic first-person puzzle game. At PAX East, however, several people commented on the art style being very distinct.
A lot of people did say it reminded them of Antichamber, mostly due to the edge-detection and very geometrical architecture. And while I do intend for the look of Relativity to be much more different than Antichamber, this was a good sign for me – at least people had stopped comparing it to Portal, which was a problem I had for most of development up until then.
Design
The most useful feedback I received from PAX East was regarding the pacing of the game. Because there is so much going on at the convention, you really have to work extra hard to grab and maintain people’s attention.
Since there are so many people playtesting the game, any problems you have get amplified tenfold. You want people to see as much cool stuff of your game as quickly as possible, and walk away with a positive impression. This means that the pacing at the beginning is very important.
One thing I learned is I needed to vary the concepts of the puzzles at the beginning. For example, one of the skills in Relativity that is really important, and which I need the player to learn early on, is that they can lift up boxes and place them on platforms above their heads.
After players learns they can press triggers to open doors, and place boxes on appropriate squares to open doors, I immediately have a puzzle to teach players about lifting boxes. In the build at PAX, this puzzle required the player to perform this skill three times in a row. Right after this, I had another puzzle that required the player to perform this skill once.
The reasoning behind the second puzzle was that some players were not as perceptive, and would still manage to get through the first puzzle without realizing what they had done, so this served as a small re-enforcement of the concept.
However, at a setting like PAX East, where people form impressions about your game very quickly, people were like “oh, I see, all the puzzles are just about lifting boxes to higher platforms. I get it. Gonna go check out something else now” and proceed to walk away.
Of course, the game is not about lifting boxes to higher platforms. That was simply a technique I needed players to learn so that they could tackle the more interesting puzzles later on. But having two puzzles in a row utilizing the same technique, right at the beginning of the game, resulted in giving people the wrong impression.
What I should have done instead, was have a puzzle with another concept in between the two box-lifting puzzles. This way, players would see a range of different puzzle mechanics, but still get the re-enforcement of the box-lifting technique. There’s no reason why the ‘review-concept’ puzzle needs to happen right after the ‘concept-introduction’ puzzle.
Another area that was causing problems was a puzzle I had added a week before PAX East. Basically, one of the more advanced puzzles later in the game requires the player to stand on a box to accomplish something. During playtest sessions, I noticed that a lot of players would struggle with this puzzle because they didn’t know they could stand on boxes.
I decided therefore that I needed a puzzle which isolated the concept of standing on boxes. I added one into the game, thinking it had solved the problem with the other puzzle. However, at PAX East, a lot of people ended up struggling with this puzzle. I realized then that the puzzle should have been broken up into two parts.
And so, here’s a simplified version of the puzzle order in the build I showed at PAX East:
Box Lifting Puzzle #1 –> Box Lifting Puzzle #2 –> Multiple Gravity Interaction Puzzle #1 –> Multiple Gravity Interaction Puzzle #2 –> Standing on box Puzzle
And here’s the sequence of puzzles in the current version:
Box Lifting Puzzle #1 –> Standing on Box Puzzle #1 –> Box Lifting Puzzle #2 –> Multiple Gravity –> Interaction Puzzle #1 –> Multiple Gravity Interaction Puzzle #2 –> Standing on box Puzzle #2
I’ve only done a few playtest sessions since then, but already I can see that it’s much better. Of course, puzzle order isn’t the whole picture with regards to pacing. There’s also a lot of things like teasing the player (showing them something cool but currently inaccessible through a window), rewarding the player by opening new areas when a puzzle is solved, etc. All these play a significant role in getting the pacing right in a game.
A game that does this really well is Antichamber. For example, check out this Let’s Play video of that game with Total Biscuit. Every moment is carefully planned to show you something new and unexpected. You start the game, it says jump, you jump, you fall. WTF? You walk forward, turn right, go down the stairs, and end up in the same hallway. Go up the stairs, end up at the same place. Turn around, and the world is different. It’s hitting one beat right after another, without any lag time in between.
I spoke to Alexander Bruce about this while at PAX East, and he described Antichamber as a “convention-friendly unconventional game”. This doesn’t mean he catered to a convention audience. Instead, it means he used the convention environment to create really strong pacing for the game. Everything is designed carefully to engage the player right away, and to strike the right tone for what the game is.
If you’re making a weird, unconventional puzzle game, and you can grab the attention of players at a convention and keep them engaged, then you’re really onto something.