03/20/2025
Hello and welcome.
Today's update will be short. The majority of things I have worked on are on the back-end of things, with a small graphical addition as seen below.
Also! Video updates are now in progress. These are general updates on projects, ideas, and stories I have picked up along the way. You can check it out here.
Lets start with graphical updates—On the advice of my brother during a recent talk about the direction of my game, we now have a titular little guy for the Abyss! He is really tiny, like more tiny than you would expect. I was inspired by Campanella 2's Isabelle design and went with a painstakingly small 8x8 pixel character. His colors are a bit muted, though I think this fits with the current tileset of the game. As it stands, the most identifiable features are the horns on his helmet and a mysterious blue gem set in between them. Say hello!
The aforementioned back-end changes are involved in generating pieces of dungeon on the fly. As you can see in the gif on the right, there are no other blocks to the sides of this chunk. Essentially, chunks would appear as the player moves closer to the edge of the chunk. To obscure the lack of 'level', I would like to have a semi-transparent overlay that fades as the player approaches.
As it stands, the per-chunk-level-gen is broken. The issue at hand involves instantiating and passing the correct data types between relevant functions. The main issue is that I have not yet grasped the core differences between 'PackedScene' and 'Node2D', or how to understand the difference. It is a problem of experience, I am sure, and one that I will not forget once I have had a proper look into it. In the meantime, I will look into the documentation and debug as necessary.
Finally, a word on the marketing side—Making videos is extremely fun. I have only done about 5 videos with just me talking. I can see myself doing many, many more of these as a creative escape. For those interested, I started editing with Lightworks and it was really not to my tastes. After some trial and error, I switched to Da Vinci Resolve, and it has been smooth as butter. More videos to come!
Until next time, see you later!
~ hoofhorn
02/25/2025
I had assumed that the last few entries would be the only few rocky professions in the next few entries.
I have been mistaken before.
At the risk of revealing too much information to internet people, I have recently been humbly laid off from my job. Strangely, this does not bother me as much as I assumed it would. I feel lovingly supported by the people around me, and I don't see myself struggling too much through this experience. In fact, I see this as a fortified opportunity to begin working on newer avenues that suit my real interests. As it turns out, doing social media and web design for a locally owned hotel was not in my best interests—I found myself with much to be desired. This experience serves as a signpost in the path of my career. Its showing me from where I've come, and at the same time, where I want to go next. Knowing this, I'm marching boldly into the next chapter of my own creative development; It is time to dive deeper into my own projects.
Despite the lofty career switch-up, I feel highly motivated to begin extending my online presence. The most recent interest has brought me to YouTube, where I will be uploading gameplay videos and progress developments in the months to come. For those who are interested in gameplay with light commentary, game design notes, jokes, and storytelling, you can find me at hoofhorn on YouTube.
With that all on the way, here is the short list of updates to ALG!
To catch up from the last post, I implemented a level generation script that generates a 4x4 grid of 'level chunks'. This attempt has outlined a few issues that cannot be solved by simply creating more pre-authored level chunks and hoping for a cohesive level experience. Below I have outlined a few possible solutions.
1. Implement destructible terrain
This could solve the problem very quickly, and I suspect that this is the first solution Derek Yu came up with when he began generating random levels. Of course, this would require a 'digging' functionality that the player would have to interact with. The obvious choice would be the usual suspects: bombs, pickaxe, other digging tools, etc. All of which I am uncertain about. In the design docs for this game, I had not thought about the idea of digging through matter, as I had thought of it more as a "discovering" game rather than a "revealing" game. That type of agency tends to support a pushy, destructive type of gameplay, which I find counter to the concepts presented (see this post for context). The player should feel like they are stumbling through the Abyss while cautiously delving into it, not tearing it apart while pillaging everything in sight. For this option, I see perhaps giving the player a single digging perk as a result of helping a digging creature (think giant moles or ants that bestow you their claws or digging limbs in return for a kind delivery of honey or a shapely berry.) This is the only way I can see digging being an option, and it would be a costly one at that.
2. Highly specialized generation
Spelunky achieved this too, integrating the level generation with destructible terrain to ensure a playable level while also providing pockets of extra challenge and reward in exchange for enterprising play. The level generation algorithm ensures an uninterrupted pathway to the end of a level, meaning the player is not required to spend any resources in completing it. I find this solution smart, both in thematic presentation and in efficiency. It would not take much to implement Derek Yu's solution for a square grid, only a high number of authored level chunks and some parameters to restrict which pieces would fit a specialized algorithm—This would be rather simple. What I think deters me from just recreating that is the degree to which it would make this project resemble it's predecessors. While I am all for citing your references (and acknowledging the giants on which we stand) I cannot see this project as a clone. I don't want to create something that scratches the same itch as it's inspirations.
Not only this, but I also would like to implement level types that are not squarely oriented. As stated previously, I want the level types to have a distinct feel among themselves and from each other. Ie. the first level needs a stair-like level design, meaning that the generation for those levels will be distinct from the others. I see myself writing multiple level generation algorithms (or adapting the same one to accommodate unique implementations) to compensate for each level type. This also requires a high number of authored chunks to work with, meaning I will need to create a decent amount of chunk types for each level to accommodate their unique designs. At present moment, this stands out as the top choice in moving forward.
3. Grid-based entrances and exits
Another solution that could hugely shift the flow would be a grid-based level switching system. Imagine if each level chunk were just one camera-shot and the player transitioned between chunks, similar to Metroid. That would mean that the levels could be generated at run-time, and the levels could be generated based on chance encounters instead of all-at-once at run time. We could extend this concept further and apply it to item and creature generation too, and turn the level progression into a sort of dungeon-crawl experience that builds itself as levels are navigated.
In hind-sight, I am unsure why this idea didn't shine through from the start—It seems to be the most obvious choice for a game about wandering into an unknown and enigmatic hole in the ground. I really like this solution for the reason that it can go on for as long as necessary. It also limits the amount of 'level' the player has access too, meaning that they will have to keep a mental model of levels generated. It also allows for an opportunity to switch level types based on the depth at which they are generated. This idea is giving me premonitions of UFO 50's Divers, in which you dive deeper and deeper in to an unknown world while managing your resources and perceived capability of returning to the surface. This plays nicely with one of the core concepts in Made in Abyss where the delvers suffer degrees of debilitating illness based on how quickly they re-ascend from the depths. This could be a really robust solution, allowing for a pragmatic decision that underlines thematically-inspired gameplay.
All things considered, I think it could be time to make a distinction between the zoomed-out display that we're going for, and the zoomed-in gameplay experience that is key to the project. On one hand, I really want to keep the Campanella 2 perspective where our player is basically a speck on the screen in this vast and inhospitable world. On the other hand, I really want to make level generation that fits a unknowable cave that constantly changes. I think this might be where the marriage of these two ideas creates something new; There is something key about the zooming in-and-out of this game that I intend to follow.
I think that the next design trip to my local café will have the answers I seek. Until then, stay tuned, and check me out on YouTube!
~ hoofhorn
02/02/2025
Hello and welcome back. This last rotation has been incredible and terrifying. I managed to slide a few changes to the world generation in between moving to a new place (!) and getting awfully, incredibly and mercilessly ill. There was a cold going around that continues to ravage my neighbors, friends, and workplace. I am doing better now, but it was touch-and-go for a bit.
On to updates!
While working on the world generation script (with some assistance from Derek Yu's Spelunky) I came up with a few notes on what we're actually looking for in this type of world.
Mainly, I want the player to feel small. This is not just a single-faceted idea, as I'm interested in 'vastness' rather than just scale. See my older post here for a refresher on what I think about scale and player movement. The idea is to make a tiny world that feels large to the player. I've opted to show this in a few ways.
First, I added a few delays to jumping and landing. The player has a short wind-up period when executing a jump and when landing. At the start, I made the player immobile when landing. I figured this would reflect a concept of weightiness that the player can identify with right away. The player will only be a handful of pixels on the screen, so one way I can show the scale is by displaying the player character staggering after a jump that would be large for someone that size. After some thought, I decided that it would make more sense to just reduce movement speed on a short fall instead of initiating a total halt. This offers a feeling of depth to the player's vertical movement. Once I have a better-defined world gen system, I will play with how far a fall can be to result in a stagger, halt, or a lethal drop.
This brings me to the second way, which is to play with the shape of the worlds that are generated.
So in Spelunky, every world is comprised of 16 square 'chunks' of level that are organized in 4x4 fashion. While I like this idea in its execution and varied styles of levels, I find myself thinking of the world generation offered by old school rogue-likes, such as Nethack, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and of course, their namesake, Rogue. I always found it fascinating how every level has a unique generation to it, but that never feels same-y. These games tend to use a form of wave function collapse as their generation algorithm, which tends to be better at producing natural feeling variations of content within the same archetype.
I want this type of varied generation in my game but with a few predictable factors for players to latch onto. In the first area, I want the level structure to be rather shallow and long. There will be a few vertical drops into the level, but I still want the player to retain a path back up after descending. I also want the rooftop to remain open, as the player is descending into an actual hole in the planet. The shallow 'Stair-like' structure of the crater should allow for caves to form under the incline of the Abyss. Here, the player will find other challenges and progression events. Illustrations below.
The game loop will have the player exploring nooks and crannies while dodging obstacles and interacting with larger creatures. For reference, the player is just about half the size of a small slime in these pictures. There will be more platforming options than displayed. The sketch is just to give general idea of the flow of movement in the first areas.
With level shape in mind, I plan to sketch out a few other shapes to graphically denote progression between sections of the Abyss. A few other examples I have been thinking of are simple variations on the previous ideas: A long and narrow level type, where the player is displayed walking around the interior perimeter of the Abyss (with background parallax), and a thin and deep level type with a few side rooms for exploration (think Downwell but slower navigation). These sections would be earlier on and later near the end of the journey, respectively.
This update took quite a chunk of time to be put up (as a result of a busy move and illness). Soon, things will settle down enough so that I can move into a "work on it daily" stage. The challenge at this moment is balancing work and life so that I have the time and energy to work on this project on a regular basis. I've been brushing up on tips and practices to achieve this. It seems a bit much at the moment, but I am certain that I can find a way that works. I've been inspired by interviews with Billy Basso on the production of Animal Well. My goal is to work on the project every day, even if for only an hour. Looking into the progression of indie titles in this age, it seems that development comes in a trickle of determined inspiration, rather than chunks of bustling motivation. I digress—The first step is always the first one you take. With that in mind, work is on the horizon.
That is all for now—See you next time!
~ hoofhorn
01/13/25
Big news!! I have found a new place and it is slick! Will be signing soon and moving in this Feb. This is kind of a huge development for me, as I have been rather transient since I arrived home from an exchange in Paris. Things have been touch-and-go for a while and so I have not really had a place that is completely 'mine'. I am really looking forward to building my own little place just for me and my cat, Goblin.
I am also searching for new work! I have been with my current office for around 9 months and it is time for me to move on. I have learned all that I will learn there, and it has started to feel a bit like growing pain. There is no real movement with this employer, and the extent of my job has been exhaustively (!) explored. I am prepared to learn new ideas and meet new minds. Onward to discovery and growth!
Since the last update, I have had a few spare moments to work on ALG. I focused on small technical additions that will add a bit of juicy interactivity later on in the project. First, I added a "swallow" function to slimes. When approaching a slime from the sides (or if unsuspectingly pounced on) the player will be disabled and the slime will absorb the player and continue on with it's gelatinous life. I really wanted to sell the "Welp..." of it so I made the camera detach from the player at the point of death, so the slime just moves away (without the camera) in a rather stoic yet natural way.
I felt that this first 'death' really sells the narrative direction of the game—you are, well, a little guy. When you are in the presence of anything larger than you, then you are a little guy in danger. When you are eaten, the world carries on without a second of reprieve. You are a part of something much larger and your presence doesn't really make an impact the the scheme of things... Rain World did this beautifully. The way that your slugcat just drags along when a lizard chomps them, dragging their kill while running to the nest... The way the camera does basically nothing about it; Like there's no juice. But there doesn't have to be, because that's the nature of the world there. That's the kind of feeling I want present in this experience.
Among these less-is-more additions, I added a few small features to player movement. Namely, a coyote-time jump, and camera panning for up and down. I have also added a variable jump to the player (for testing purposes at this point) and a few random variable jumps for slimes.
I am starting to see the boundaries in front of the project more clearly now. Between ideation, visions of gameplay, narrative beats, and flashy realizations, I am starting to plot the course of the next few iterations. I can see two pieces being key in the next pass: World generation and art.
for these two areas, I am relatively comfortable with implementing my own style (with key notes from other developers and artists.) I already know that the Campanella 2 styled minimal pixel motif is a huge inspiration. I was talking with a friend about the way Isabelle runs with her little 1-pixel hair piece flowing as she goes, and I could not agree with that simplicity more. The main challenge here lies in the difficulty of any pixelized style; There needs to be an appropriate level of detail communicated via motion. The challenge will be to create a stylized set of sprites that give an impression of the character when they are only comprised of 40-64 pixels in total. My plan is to download and build Aseprite (thank you Aseprite devs!!) and learn their tooling for the purposes of this project. My first few projects using their tool will be character sprites. For environments, will use free resources in a similar resolution for now.
The world generation is a bit more realized.
I have written a simple world generation script that produces a scene packed with other 'authored level' scenes. My plan is to create a number of authored level scenes (as 'chunks' of level) and to sample them in a semi-random way such that a basic 'level' can be produced with a click. The algorithm I follow is heavily inspired by Derek Yu's Spelunky level gen script, as from his book titled the same name. After I can produce levels from pre-made level chunks, I can begin playing around with generating other content, like level width/height, start positions, ending positions, enemies, etc. I intend to build level chunks that are nonsymmetrical, and allow for a bit of secret-hiding!
Finally, a small note on game-feel and graphical representation. I must talk about Paradox Interactive's Teleglitch. This game has a crazy cool and tragically overlooked way of handling player perspective between rooms. I can't quite make out how it works, but it's like there are 3d shapes representing the field of view for the player. When the player's view is obscured, there seems to be a 3d shadow object projected closer to the player's perspective than to the gameplay, as if you are looking at the action through a little shadow-box diorama. I just feel that this puts a ton of life into the game, and pops the experience into a magical and critically sought 2.5d space. What better way to make your visuals stand out by accenting them with a whole new dimension? It is so neat and I can never get it out of my head, so I am going to figure out how to put it into my game :)
All in all, I see myself tackling world gen first, then some graphics, and regrouping after that.
But for now, next up: Procedurally Generated Content!
That is all for now. See you next time!
~ hoofhorn
12/26/2024
This month has been busy.
Work has taken a huge chunk of time, what with holidays and some personal things. Currently looking for a new place but that will come in time... On to new things!
So I haven't had time to do any development on ALG. But I do have a few designs that flesh out some of the world a bit more. Some are ludo-mechanical concepts for creatures, others are big-idea narrative concepts that tie to worldbuilding. Please observe! (And please mind the sketch quality—the copy machine wasn't cooperating today.)
You can see the basics that I've outlined above here. Basically, I was really interested in executing a procedurally generated platforming adventure styled game. Think of Campanella 2 or Spelunky, which both feature a hyper-charged gameplay experience with procedurally generated content. Are you thinking of them yet?
OK, now think of what would happen if the gameplay loop integrated seamlessly within the setting of a critical player-centered narrative. Are you following?
I'm really interested in storytelling through gameplay. When you want to build something with impact, ludonarrative is the moon to shoot for. I use Crypt of the Necrodancer as an example of this because it executes on it's narrative and gameplay elements in such a killer way—It's hard not to see the harmonies running between design and narrative when you're sucked into the rhythm (puns intended).
One way I've played with implementing this is in procedurally generated quests. The player will find creatures in the Abyss that can be interacted with in ways that are more complex than just worldly navigation. The idea is this: You help the creature in some way (eg. bring it food, pull a thorn out of it, bring it something that it lost, etc.) and this prompts the creature to offer it's own assistance in return.
Here's where it gets interesting. Stick with me.
The player is not from the Abyss—This is not their native territory. Nor are they adapted to this strange environment. By contrast, the creatures here are not adapted to the Abyss per se, each are literally a constituent piece of the Abyss, which is in itself an interconnected organism. The creatures are not bound by their own will, but the will of the Abyss (much like how a blood cell would be granted it's own agency within the larger container of your body—Agency is relative within the larger context of the ecosystem and this defines the willpower of the pieces within the system. Ie. short of mutation or evolution, pieces are dependent on executing the "will" of their container organism.
Not only this, but the Abyss contains awareness. It acknowledges your actions in the grand scheme of things, and in observing your assistive action, it will grant you with assistance in return.
The Abyss will grant you (via it's creatures) a piece of them, which will aid you in navigating the Abyss. For example, lets say you help a chimera creature with the body of a lion, wings of an eagle, and a snake-tail (how you would help such a deadly beast is beyond me at this point, but you get the idea). The Abyss sees it fit to grant you lion paws as a part of a fair trade, which allow you to escape danger by grappling onto walls. Trade for trade, assistance for assistance.
I've thought of the idea that this action would deprive the player of other actions as a result (in this example, you lose your human hands for lions paws, meaning your manual dexterity reflects that as well, ie. you can no longer hold items). This seems like a unique opportunity for risk vs. reward management—Give the player a gift that takes something else from them and suddenly every decision demands more focus. You can open up a player's awareness by giving them something new and useful in exchange for something they rely on. And that also opens up avenues for new types of play, which pushes around players that tend to look for "winning strategies". Basically, this is how designers make you pay attention while pushing your clicky little buttons ( •̀ .̫ •́ )✧
More on deeper narrative structure—I love the idea of the whole experience culminating to a single cathartic event (think less of a narrative climax and more of a transformative exchange that completes the game). I really enjoy the way that cosmic horror tales end, where the story concludes just as the reader figures out that inkling oddity that's been bothering them the whole time. It's a succinct way to tell a story, which reflects an intense story tempo. This, I think, is a good way to focus attention on what you're really trying to say with your work. Tell a fresh story and keep it running until it concludes—otherwise you run the risk of losing those who feed solely on narrative experiences.
I think that type of story structure lends itself nicely to a roguelike game, where the player will find themself running through the story countless times before getting the full picture. You want to keep the content cohesive enough to bely a unified experience, but you also want those nuggets of gold where a player notices something interesting and asks themself questions—and then try answering them for themself through their gameplay!
I surmise that the story will ask the player a few questions about what it means to be who you are, and what that means when you change beyond recognition. The notes mention a part where the player is met with a judgement of how unified with the Abyss they have become (or how much the creatures have changed them). At which point, the player will be denied further access if they are still considered "too human". This sticks out in my mind as a core piece of the experience, that change is a force bestowed to those who truly see and willingly intervene in their environment. As a result of exercising intentional willpower, one is forever altered by the environment in turn.
The Abyss asks the question "Are you willing never to return from whence you came?" in a way that means more than just "Can you return to the place you came from?" What it really means is that you will become something new when you stray too far from your home, your comfort zone, your safe place. The Abyss doesn't ask you if you can return—it asks if you will be welcomed there as you are, after irrevocably changing into something new.
Metamorphosis is a big concept to me, and I can see the inspiration for this story in my own life. At present moment, I am in love with the idea of finding a way to translate this into a gameplay experience for others to enjoy. If I can cause any one person to feel a shred of what this idea means to me, I will be forever humbled, reduced to a divine worm at the feet of the viewer. I once said that I like to make games to express myself, and this feeling is exactly that. You are welcome to these thoughts.
That's it for now :) see you next time!
~ hoofhorn
11/25/24
Development is on.
In between sketching, bouncing ideas around, looking for inspiration, and planning for scope, prototyping is happening! Below are a couple of gifs that show the type of movement we're going for.
I really put emphasis on intentional jumping - There is a short delay when queuing a jump, as well as a short delay when landing. This is directly related to the discussion points on scale and size-on-screen from last week's entry. Scale here is communicated by the size of the character and the amount of time it takes to complete the jump in full. The jump is restrictive in nature, and prevents the player from changing course mid-arc. The result is a weighty, decisive jump that asks the user to evaluate jumping as a decision to be taken, rather than a catch-all movement option or escape strategy.
(If you find yourself saying "that just looks like moving squares", you are correct. But until we get some sprites drawn and animated, use your imagination!)
In other words, by restricting the user's control during jumps, we create a more impactful "verb" to add to the ALG dictionary. You can see a few other games that push this decision-motivated jump model to make players slow down and assess before taking the perceived correct action. eg. Jump King
These are the types of decisions I find most interesting in platforming. There are relatively few unique ways to move the character around the screen, and they take a short but significant piece of time to perform. They also leave you vulnerable if you don't preform them gracefully, or with clear intention. Once you add fail states, stationary or mobile, one must begin planning their course in navigating a stage consciously. Then you add obstacles and it feels like a game takes shape immediately. From there, you can add any number of environmental mechanics to the mix and it will re-shuffle the complexity of navigation just like that. Platformers tend to hit the sweet spot when the player can find the limit to their "verbs" and test them in a variety of situations.
Speaking of obstacles, I added the first creature to the game: it's a slime!
These, I have written as the essential 'decomposers' of the abyss and it's ecosystem. Physically, they are microscopic, gelatinous creatures that collect into colonies to find sources of dead matter to recycle into more basic components. As a result of this "collective" drive, they form large masses of thick, rubbery goop, ie. slimes.
I really want this project to have an interactive, self-driving ecosystem that the player can directly impact and experience. However, with no real regard for mechanical scope, this remains a narrative sentiment - the creatures are connected as interrelated and dependent species which maintain the ecosystem of the abyss. There are more creatures I have written in, but we will reveal those in time. The important part for now is that the ecosystem is large, interconnected, diverse, dangerous, and mystical.
While playing with the 'eaters' (I'm calling them vomit eaters, more on that later), I found that they could really launch the player character if it jumped with the player on top! This gave me a great idea for level exploration - The player will be descending into the abyss (Spelunky-style), and since their small size prevents them from climbing back up, I found it fitting that the slimes live in the upper layers of the abyss (allowing the player to climb, and experiment with returning to previous levels, too).
However, this leads to another fun mechanic derived from Made In Abyss itself.
One of the most interesting narrative points in this series is the "Curse of the Abyss", which is a curse that affects those who delve into the depths and ascend too quickly, similar to something like decompression sickness in deep sea divers. Instead of the gasses in your blood sublimating, though, one would experience a range of mild to devastating side effects, from harmless to existential to fatal in nature.
I thought it would be fascinating to apply this concept to a game about delving deep into a cavern. The intrigue comes from having to make decisions about whether ascending would be worth undertaking, given the current circumstance. I also love the idea of pacing the gameplay using restrictions to backtracking - imagine Spelunky styled levels, and you can go back up to previous stages, but if you ascend too far, you get dizzy and the screen starts to spin slowly. Maybe you come up from a few levels and start hallucinating creatures all around you - There are a lot of really fun stories to tell with concepts like this, and will be relatively simple to implement with the only factor being "distance ascended". Plus, it wouldn't be too difficult to come up with more nasty side effects that the player must anticipate - maybe they are randomized, leading to some interesting rogue-styled emergency?
Oh, and the vomit part! This came from a conversation I had about the series - that the paths on the upper levels of the abyss would be littered with piles of vomit because delvers would constantly be diving and returning with goods and artefacts - They would suffer the ascension sickness and litter the paths with spew... that is, unless there were creatures that decomposed it... So imagine that: Microscopic slimes that feast on animal bile as their preferred source of nutrients, laden with partially broken down food in a moist, warm package. Sounds like deep sea superorganisms but I think what I'm really going for is like siphonophore with a complicated set of zooids in one super-colony.
Basically, an introduction to the ecosystem that isn't so scary, but opens up the doors to stranger, more interesting creatures.
I had some notes to show, but they aren't really more than sketches, so I will just get to implementing them and come back to it in the next entry. Until then!
~ hoofhorn
11/17/2024
This week I spent a lot of time thinking of the scale of game environments and characters.
There seems to be a general consensus that there is a 'magic ratio' whereby a player character is an ideal size in relation to the environment, screen-space, enemies, objects, etc.. I find the Metroid series strikes a great balance, specifically their GBA titles.
Zero Mission does an amazing job of making the player command presence on the screen while also giving an impression of scale. Samus takes up a relatively small piece of the screen, which allows for a informed platforming, combat, navigation, and exploration. What's more, she moves rather quickly across the screen. However, even when you cannot see what's coming next, the map informs when there is still space around you. These two features make the experience of moving around the world and interfacing with the environments manageable, while giving the player a strong impression of how big/small everything is. This is a significant upgrade from previous titles (if you've played Metroid 2, you'll know what I mean).
Fusion did this awesome thing with scripted events and boss encounters where the pacing slowed to a crawl for a few moments, allowing you to take in the whole scene without too many things happening at once.
As an example, the Nightmare encounter paints the picture for these types of scene perfectly. It was not a mechanically intense fight, though there were at least three main phases in this 5 - 10 minute fight. The first phase was just dodging lasers shot directly from in front of you. Then, it would float up and down while firing lasers. On phase three, it just floated slowly towards the player for a set amount of time, then chased the player with a heavy drift, allowing you to slip around it and prepare for the next vulnerable moment. It was simple.
Despite this, the fight sticks in my mind as the most intense, memorable experience in the game (which already has a ton of narratively charged moments). The reason it was so gripping is because the fight was intentionally paced and fought in an arena that was really only two screens tall - Do the math: that's only 380px of verticality. The real appeal was that you were forced to vault around the tiny arena to dodge this massive, lumbering beast, and this thing was HEAVY.
The main squeeze in this fight is your mastery over the flow of jumping and returning fire. The balance between attack and defense - where you must know the right jump for the right position and how to follow-up right after. It's a dance. See below for reference on the fight.
With these ideas in mind, it seems pretty clear that the scale of the player has a lot of leeway, but only when the player has a grasp of tools and mechanics necessary to meet challenges of scale and representation. If we take the scale idea one step further, we reach Environmental Station Alpha, which is a sort of spiritual successor to Metroid Fusion.
The concept of scale is completely revamped again, as the player is shrunken down to a fraction of the size for our characters on GBA.
The constraints on a pc are less restrictive, and so we can warp the scale even further. This is key if we want to get an idea of really "being" that small (or that large) in an environment that's much different than our own. I argue that there is a critical "feeling" piece that conveys this information, and that's what we're searching for in developing ALG.
The player character in ESA is the exact definition of "little guy" - by the way. Thinking on this, I found myself wondering how small you can really make a character on screen before the semblance of true scale wears off. UFO 50's Campanella 2 inspired me to find out how far you really can stretch that idea, and now I find myself thinking to other games that warp sizes into hyperbole.
I suppose the real test for scale is in how the player actually feels when they play the game. Even now, I can imagine how "heavy" or how "light" each character feels while playing them. Then there's the difference in what the characters actually do that gives a sense of mass and scale. This is what really tips the player off, communicating the sense of scale through action, rather than description. Part of the "feel" of it is in how fast they move on the screen, how quickly the frames change, the positioning of those frames, how the other game objects react to them, etc..
To illustrate the point really clearly, watch any% speedruns of Resident Evil 4 (2005). For the most part, Leon (the protagonist) feels incredibly heavy and slow (mostly due to the tank controls, and the narrow turning angle - staples in horror game controls).
But when you see how quickly he moves with a speed glitch, it breaks the whole illusion - You can just zip past everything. It makes Leon feel so weightless, and in a metaphoric sense, almost seems to lighten the whole experience. This really opens my eyes to how much information can really be packed into a character's movement on screen. It's a delicate balance.
Another example: ESA illustrates feelings of "lack of mass" in that your character can feel "floaty" if the player is moved around too much or too quickly (ie. taking a hit from an enemy tosses the player up to two character lengths backwards, even when the enemy isn't moving quickly, which gives a sense that the character doesn't have a lot of mass.)
Basically, the sense of scale is influenced not only by the size of the character on screen, but also it's size in relation to other objects and creatures, as well as how physical forces move the character and other objects. So now we're talking about a player's subjective experience in relation to a real, objective observation. This is a key feature of why game development is so challenging.
BUT this is also why game design is so exciting - You get to shape the experience by relating to the player, which requires you to think outside of yourself (and really, outside of the box). This is a key reason why I find human-computer interactivity so fascinating. Sure, we craft experiences that others will interface with directly, and those experiences will impact people in a real way. But it's not the representation of the experience (the game) that does this - It's the way those ideas are communicated to the user that really make that impact. What I'm saying is this; It isn't the game that influences you, it's in how you perceive the game.
In other words, it's the conversation between creator and viewer (which is mediated by ideas) that create these impactful experiences. I borrow from Marshall McLuhan's rhetoric in The Medium is the Massage here. It's worth your time to investigate these ideas, if nothing else, but to broaden understanding of media literacy and the digital age. And that's your homework for today!
~ hoofhorn
11/04/2024
Here it is. This is the development space I will be using to document my personal projects, thoughts, and ideas through the foreseeable future. First, an introduction.
Hello, I'm hoofhorn. I am a games designer, developer, artist, and goblinoid alchemist. Among my projects, one will find themes of exploration, loneliness, vulnerability, growth, trade, desperation, and emotionality. It is not uncommon for me to transmute my own feelings into game experiences, as I find it helpful in synthesizing the experience into something which others can see and feel. Below are some of my notable projects and prototypes. You can find them all at hoofhorn.itch.io.
I will be posting updates to my current running projects here - this is a perfect time to mention what I am calling "abyss little guys", which is the nickname that represents the next project. Basically, this game's big appeal is to blend the feeling of platforming in a tiny world (similar to Derek Yu and co.'s UFO 50 title, Campanella 2) with the thematic and cinematic style of the recent hit anime series Made in Abyss.
Here's the main thing:
Games about being a little guy... are peak.
Rain world, Hollow Knight, ANIMAL WELL, Vagante, Cave Blazers, Micro Mages, Bread & Fred, Cave Story, Nidhogg, Peglin, Rift Wizard, Spelunky, Celeste, Towerfall, etc. etc. etc.
A core piece of each of these huge games I've been playing is that you play as a tiny little guy in a big world with big challenges. You don't always know what's going on in the world, and by virtue of certain key features, including clever procedurally generated content, intelligent world building, intuitive design, and masterful animation - you may never be given the opportunity to really discover what does go on in those worlds. Because, well... you're just a little guy.
That's what's so interesting about these games - you never know everything about what's happening, but you're always learning more.
This is the design philosophy I've decided to follow. This is going to inform the direction of the projects I create (and has informed the decisions of project prior).
Check back soon for updates - I will be on a weekly schedule for now on all things hoofhorn.
Goodbye for now!
~ hoofhorn
10/30/2024
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