Dear droqen,
It’s funny! I started writing this post before you wrote Platformer Kigo and had it saved as a draft. Now it feels like a reply: Kafka and his Precursors! This post, then is not so much a reply as a jogging companion. In the second part of your post it looked like you were getting started thinking about your pattern language for platformers.
A Pattern Language
I got to chapter 14 of The Timeless Way of Building, titles “Patterns which can be shared”. It talks about observing a thing, and analyzing it for patterns that can easily be shared. Page 249 includes a description of the process of discovering/defining a pattern. I am going to try to do this with droqen’s recent game “Awake”. Alexander tells us to start with the feeling of something being “right”. When we come across something that feels “right”, or something that “works”, that’s when we should look for patterns. Awake “works” for me, and it is fresh in my mind, so this is where I will start.
Disclaimer: it turns out this is hard (Alexander even says so later on in the chapter :D) so I’m going to keep coming back to this post and editing it.
I am going to start as Alexander does in chapter 14 by seizing on a particular spatial relation (within the space of the game, which is a kind of digital space in the real world).
GRADIENT COERCION
What: The cave has a gradient, a kind of entropy or gravity that draws the player implicitly in a particular direction. This direction lines up with the game’s narrative.
Why: In a game without explicit goals where the player can go this way or that, it is easy for players to end up lost or not know what to do. If the player starts at the centre of a big room, there are instincts pulling them in all direction. Adding a concrete force like gravity or wind means that a player will tend to go in the direction of this force. In Awake, the player starts at the top of the cave, and there is a thing of obvious interest at the bottom. It feels natural to tumble down towards it. Then the player must “work” their way back up. If this gradient was reverse, the player would feel the game pushing them away, rather than inviting them in and setting up a challenge.
Another way to think of this: if the player moved randomly in this room, rather than with purpose, would they end up at the object of interest? In a room with even a gentle gradient, the player will have a tendency in the direction of the gradient.
When/where: This pattern is useful is “open” games, such as open world games, metroidvanias, and walking sims. When you need the player to find a thing but don’t want to point to it explicitly. This pattern is useful for directing traffic and attention. Place the things you want the player to see first “down hill” and the things you want them to see last “up hill”, with respect to the gradient. (actually, Birthplace of Ossian has this too, the whole game is a big 3D funnel sending you to the ending).
Here is a tentative name for this pattern: GRADIENT COERCION. I’ve chosen this name because coercion is “getting someone to do something by use of force” and in this case the force creates a gradient. Maybe I will come back to this one!
AUTHORED VOIDSCAPE
What: A passage into the voidscape. In Awake, the right side of the cave entrance area has no wall; the white background of the inside of the cave spills out into the white background of the UI used to display text. Over the course of the game it becomes clear that the player can go there, and the game continues even after they do.
Why: A videogame has an edge, like a painting. In a 1st person game, if you could clip through the geometry of a level you would find a vast empty void. In Tetris for the gameboy, if you could look to the left or right of the playing field, you would see an endless expanse of madness, tiles or half-tiles mixed together at random. These places have been called “voidscapes”. When making a videogame it seems to be impossible to completely seal off these voidscapes, and since a player naturally sees every oddity as a challenge, if a player happens upon some possible entrance into the voidscape they will try to go there. Often if a player does get out into the voidscape, their game will end abruptly.
This pattern incorporates that void into the fabric of the game, so that a player who does is not left holding a loose thread.
When/Where: This pattern makes sense in games where the player has an explicit avatar that they move through a space. It makes the most sense in games that already feel mysterious, transgressive, or glitch, as it enhances these feelings.
This is wrong, I’m going to come back to it. The system of forces I’ve identified seems to be a conflict between “player wants to explore” and “bugs look like an invitation” but that’s not how it is being used in Awake. The conflict is that the game feels “pointless” and the player, upon finding the lightswitch, is naturally going to think “what have I missed”. When they see that voidscape entrance they might think “hmm, I wonder if I can” OR they immediately tried to jump into the voidscape, which is maybe then resolving a conflict like “how to make something obvious without making it obvious”. Obvious, but easy to miss, like the “purloined letter”.
The thing that felt right was that I was able to think “ah, you tricky droqen, I bet I can walk off the edge here” AND the fact that it felt like the game was “missing” something. Block Fakr had this too, the whole game is saying “there is something more to this game” and then a clever player, eyes ever open to weirdness, notices that you can escape the level geometry.
Maybe the tension is: “how can you put something OUTSIDE your game?” Like, you want there to be a meta layer of the game. The game is about a cave and a light-switch or some coins and skeletons, but you want to add a kind of “escape hatch” to the game as the hidden goal.
