I recently had a game idea that I like, it has gamefeel aspects and natural beauty aspects, and is conceptually contained – though as you will see very easily spills into some complexity that needs to be wrangled. I like the general idea of it, but there are a lot of holes in the design that breed that complexity I want to avoid. And just generally it feels a little like the gamefeel and themes are too separate.
maybe this whole turbulent mess of “gamefeel” “embodiment” “immersion-but-not-really” is worth caring about because it’s all focused on what the player is actually doing. GAMEFEEL matters because it is literally real, whereas videogame physics are just a virtual simulation; narrative is just an interesting story; graphics are just pictures you can look at on a screen.
-Droqen (What’s actually happening? Videogames are REAL.)
Droqen talks about ’emersion’ and the reality of what the player does while interacting with a game, and that reality being the interesting part. In my game idea, the reality is still just an afterthought. I want to try to iterate on my game idea to simplify it and fix the separation between gamefeel and theme, and so it seemed like a good case study for this lens of ’emersion’, about what is REAL.
So, here we go:
gravity game is about the water cycle, and about how all its dynamics are consequences of simple phsyics: gravity and a handful of different types of matter that is influenced by gravity.
your main interaction with the simulation is that you can add (random amounts of) matter to it, and you can move around to add matter to different locations
also it only simulates as you move, and there is some friction to your movement that you have to learn and master
you start with nothing, you just add more and more matter, seeing each aspect of the system build up in turn:
you see randomized matter drops make a planet with mountains and oceans
you see how gravity makes an atmosphere, and how it is denser closer to the planet surface,
more matter makes a sun that radiates heat
and how heat travels from the sun to the planet,
and how water is evaporated into the air by the heat,
and how pressure difference created by heat/evaporated water creates a wind,
and how wind carries water in the air towards the mountains,
and how water is pushed into up in altitude to lower pressure/lower temp,
how it forms rain drops and drops through the higher pressure zones it previously inhabited as particles
how it flows down the watershed into the ocean
and repeats
the game is done when you see this cycle, when you do the friction dance to complete it twice or something
questions:
- how to limit matter to just a sun and a planet? matter drops can be tied to friction movement, and friction movement can limit and direct where matter drops go
- somehow you need to know that this is what you are looking for, not sure how best to hint that
- friction movement is unspecified and ‘could be anything’ which feels tacked on. how to tie it in with the simulation? to make it feel like you are really doing the simulation? will having built the planet and the sun be enough? will tying simulation to movement help? or will it all feel like a fake narrative?
- there are a lot of subtle dynamics that need to be highlighted and shown to the player. how? revealing animations? movement puzzles for each dynamic might make the gamefeel more related to everything, but still….how does that work? maybe gravity fields that you construct influence your movement in some overcomeable way?
- other thoughts are to abstract all the dynamics into a shorter sequence of ‘soft rules’ that evoke all these dynamics, so its not such a complex system. i mean the simulation will have to be faked to some degree anyway, and haiku games asks how far we can fake it
- i feel like haikus get around all this complexity by in a way focusing on a single real thing that is somehow affected by the thing (the water cycle, in this case). but it might be tricky to have that single thing evoke the beauty of everything being due to gravity. maybe ultimately that beauty is not something suited for haiku game framework?
interested to hear your thoughts
Another thought related to that last question: ultimately this gravity->water cycle is not a poetic space to play in. it is a very specific idea that is trying to be communicated, and that is probably where the complexity sneaks in.
This is interesting! The power of haikus resides in that they are poetry, and poetry doesn’t need explanaition. They leave the space for you to fill it with your own worldview and understanding. But this is not the case, it’s a cientific thing! You are explaining a concept!
Unless you use the cycle as a metaphor of something. Jorge Drexler is a musician+doctor that makes songs about cientific theories but using them to tell a thing about human nature, like feelings or such.
The thing droqen pointed out down here is a good starting point to think about that. If that’s what you want the player to feel, then the haiku is actually about the inevitability of things, or the power of nature to thrive no matter what?
Is part of the haiku that this result is inevitable? It’s interesting to give the player agency to set such a huge system in motion, but expect it to always turn out in one particular way — i.e. the player “creates matter” – all the matter that ever exists in this world? every mountain and ocean? – and yet it always turns out the same water cycle.
Is that what you want the player to feel? The beauty of this thing that results regardless of their intent or lack thereof.
These comments are great – I so often get caught up thinking about how to communicate a specific idea that I have a feeling about, instead of focusing on the feeling and maybe using the idea as an example in the presentation of the feeling. The feeling is what is REAL. I will let this idea simmer for a bit…