What We’re Dealing With

Beastieball is a turn-based strategy game with no randomization whatsoever. It also has very little hidden information; players can see every option their opponent has access to, and exactly how much damage it will do. That means the game has to be pretty mathematically tight, because the numbers have an outsized role in the outcome of every game.

But the game also has a huge creative element in its teambuilding. Every player has their own favorite Beasties to use, and that influences their team composition. Beastie matchups are generally very fluid, without strict strengths or weaknesses—they’re more like “colors” in Magic the Gathering than “types” in Pokemon. In many ways, game designing an individual Beastie feels more akin to designing a fighting game character, with unique tools and a unique playstyle that caters to a certain kind of player. And our ultimate goal in balancing the game is to let players feel that they can be successful using ther favorite Beasties, no matter who they may be.

Laid out like this, it sounds pretty daunting to make math that feels tight enough to feel balanced, but loose enough to fit 100+ different character playstyles in it. Maybe even impossible! But somehow it’s been going well for us so far.

Measuring Success

We make use of analytics to track what happens in competitive PvP games. For every match where players have analytics enabled, we track what teams were brought to the game and which one won. And over thousands and thousands of matches, we can observe what trends emerge. Here is a chart!!!

Each dot here represents a Beastie with a certain trait; so Daredillo with the “Self-assured” trait is a separate dot from Daredillo with the “Acrobat” trait, acknowledging their different playstyles are effectively different characters. Higher dots are used more often, and dots further to the right win more often. If we narrowed our data to only include top-level players, especially as the game is out for longer and the meta advances significantly, you’d expect this chart to show more of an upward slope where the Beasties that win more often also are used more often. But what we see isn’t like that, because players generally choose their Beasties by personal preference, and there aren’t any that are predominantly known to be better than others.

What we’re seeing is a “normal distribution.” Beasties that are used more often will trend towards a 50% win rating, partly because they’re statistically playing on both teams of more encounters, but also because they represent the aggregate skill of more players. Whereas Beasties used less often may have data from as few as 1-5 players, and so their statistics are basically just showing us the skill level of their inidivudal coach rather than the Beastie’s inherent strengths.

But those dots we’ve circled in orange are performing outside the curve—across many players and games, they’re clearly losing more than they win. And it’s similar with the dots circled in green: those ones are clearly and consistently winning more often. So this data gives us a strong starting point to figure out what Beasties we want to target with changes, either to buff or nerf. It isn’t strictly binary… dots close to the edge on either side likely need attention, and any change we make try to should account for precisely how far off expectations that Beastie is.

While hard data is comforting and helpful, we can’t rely on it to get the full picture. We’re always keeping tabs on player discussion and feedback as well. Sometimes, a particular strategy may just be unfun to use or play against, even if it isn’t statistically successful or dominant, and we’ll have to consider what we can do to adjust that area of the meta. There are other times where player speculation about a particular Beastie will gain traction even when it’s statistically flat wrong, though. At the end of the day, complaints about game balance are as inevitable as it is for every match to have a loser. So having data helps us keep feelings in check.

Making the Right Adjustments

Once we know what the problem is, the fix is easy. We just double the numbers that are too low and halve the ones that are too big.

Just kidding! This is the hardest part! Partly because there are a lot of constraints that we try to follow with every change we make. Knowing when to follow, push back or compromise on these isn’t a science—it’s an art.

Maintain unique strength

Masahiro Sakurai has a concise video on this topic—but to sum it up for our case, every Beastie and play and trait has some essential unique strength to it and we always try to respect that with changes. So when something is overly strong, we may try to shift its balance by exacerbating its weaknesses. And when something is underpowered, we try to strengthen its most unique elements, rather than giving it additional strengths that outshine its original intent. The goal is to maintain peaks and valleys across the game and make sure every element maintains its unique character, rather than all melting into flat blandness.

(But not too spiky)

Our predisosition to exacerbate strengths and weaknesses means we sometimes accidentally push elements too far, and they can dominate the game. Beastieball is also a game full of unique interactions, and for any drawback we add to any play, players always find some way to mitigate it. So anything that’s “very strong, but with a strong drawback” always winds up needing special attention from us. It can take a couple iterations to find the right maximum power level.

Maintain flavor

Game elements aren’t just code and numbers! We always want to make changes that are consistent with the characters and fiction we’ve established. For example, it may feel balanced to make a powerful support action give the user the “Angry” status, preventing them from using further support actions. But we’ll always resist doing this if it doesn’t make sense for that action to make the user feel angry. Finding adjustments that do make sense within the fiction can be challenging, but often results in more creative and evocative solutions.

Consider accessibility

When a Beastie is underperforming, we’ll look at their statistics with high skill vs low skill players. Sometimes a Beastie is perfectly strong, or even overperforming at high skill levels, but underperforming in general, which indicates that their best tools may be hard to access or that they are more challenging to pilot. We have to treat these cases with a delicate touch. As often as possible, we’ll try and create easier paths for low-skill players follow without actually strengthening them.

Consider the context

We can only measure Beasties’ effectiveness by their relationships to each other. Sometimes a Beastie is over or under performing not because they themselves are strong or weak. For example, one Beastie that overperforms will also raise the win statistics of the Beasties that they are commonly paired with. And the more often a particular Beastie is used, the better the win rates will be for Beasties that play well against them. So sometimes the perfect adjustment for a game element is actually to change something else entirely.

Consider the vibes

Even with all the data at our disposal, sometimes we’ll make a change just because it feels right to us. I have to wonder how often then happens in larger budget projects with more collaborators… but as an early access title that patches frequently, it’s freeing to be able to “try” things and see what happens, with the freedom to take it back if it makes the game less fun.

Putting it together…

One balance change I was quite pleased about was to a move called Set, an iconic passing move which made the ally feel Jazzed, buffing their next attack. It turned out that feeling Jazzed was a REALLY strong status effect, particularly because it could be combined with other strong things, and this play quickly took over the meta. Players wanted us to make Jazzed less effective, or add a debilitating cost to Set so that it was punishing to use.

While this conundrum was on my mind, I went out to play volleyball at a local casual league. I used to play with a group of friends who are, like me, all quite novice and unathletic. But on that week one of our members was out sick, so one of the coaches who runs the league offered to fill the spot on our team. And as an skills exercise, he encouraged us to all play different roles than we were used to, and so made me the setter on the team. I was pretty reluctant about it because I’m just not good at passing, and I was worried about holding the team back, but we went ahead with it. The game starts, and I’m waiting at the net and terrified about the pass I’m surely about to fumble. The first serve goes to the coach, he gets it perfectly and puts up a beautiful pass to me. And with such a perfect pass, better than any I was used to getting, it was like I became a different player. I had the extra time I needed to get to the right place, stop, square up, and put up a set with perfect form.

Now, I know I’m still pretty bad at passing. A great setter is great because they make great plays even under bad conditions. But this experience showed me how much easier it is to do a good job when you’re set up to do it. And when I got home that night I implemented my idea for an adjustment to the play called Set, which required that the ball be hittable for the play to be used, mirroring the way a setter in volleyball is always meant to get the 2nd touch on a ball, not the 1st. It wound up being just the right adjustment, keeping the play just as strong, but requiring players to support their setters a little bit to get the most out of them.

Balance adjustments are fun to do, but daunting, because the work never truly ends. With a meta that’s constantly shifting, and player creativity always discovering unexplored corners of the systems, the game can never be truly balanced forever. But it’s also the area of the game where the conversation between designer and players is most alive, and that’s what makes it so rewarding to come back to every day.

This info is taken directly from our actual style guide which we gave to concept artists when we started working together. Originally I wanted to share the entire style guide, but it’s pretty long and dense and full of spoilers. It might be fun to put the whole thing in an artbook someday… but until then, here’s the details just on Beastie types!

Unlike in other monster games, Beasties do NOT have a strict “type.” Instead they’re measured by their strength or weakness in the categories of Body, Spirit and Mind. Each Beastie’s unique alignment to these 3 categories informs their match-ups in the game, but it also informs their personality and motivations as characters.

There are lots of ways for a designer to take inspiration from the types. There is a careful balance to strike in how much each design should follow these themes vs. contradict them. Ultimately it’s more important for each Beastie to have a vibe that is unique to them rather than conform to a stereotype!

BODY

• Tend to have stronger bodies, ie. muscles, armor, or just be bigger in general

• Could have exaggerated arms, legs, tail

• Dexterity - good physical self control & able to do impressive ball maneuvers like juggling, spinning, etc.

• Associated more with the colors yellow/orange

• Associated with vitality, healing, energy, exercise, sports, electricity/thunder

• Balanced, consistent moves that don’t have obvious weaknesses or drawbacks

• DnD stats: Strength, Dexterity

• Beasties who are weak in Body power might be smaller or more frail.

• Beasties who are weak in Body defense might have difficulty physically handling the ball, due to frailty or lack of dexterity.

SPIRIT

• AKA “Heart,” these Beasties tend to be passionate, strong willed and determined

• Compassionate, genuine, protects/cares for teammates

• Associated more with the colors pink/red

• Associated with fire, wind, music, voice, feelings, dance

• Could have exaggerated features on their chest/back or have large/beautiful display features (flashy/vivid colours, form over function, etc)

• Powerful moves with drastic costs/consequences

• DnD stats: Constitution, Charisma

• Beasties who are weak in Spirit power might be more apathetic, deceitful, or mean-spirited

• Beasties who are weak in Spirit defense might be similar, or they might be overly emotional

MIND

• Tend to be smart, calculating, clever, logical, cold

• Associated more with the colors blue/violet

• Associated with ice, water, illusion, anxiety, games, math, technology, the supernatural

• Could be tricky, or even prankster-like

• Could have exaggerated eyes, head, features that let them carefully manipulate the ball

• May be more likely to have startle/warning displays (deimatic/aposematic)

• Moves that are weaker but with powerful side effects/debilitating status effects

• DnD stats: Wisdom, Intelligence

• Beasties who are weak in Mind power might be more simple, honest, straightforward or less thoughtful in general.

• Beasties who are weak in Mind defense might be less observant, more instinctive, or especially gullible/trusting

So why did we resist making types that were more strictly defined, like in other monster games? Well, bluntly, everybody already knows about Pokemon types. Coming up with our own set of types, with different matchups, and asking players to memorize those feels like a lot to ask. And anyway, even if you switch around what the types are called and/or how they match up, the game won’t wind up feeling very different from what’s already out there.

Our squishier “type” system does more to highlight each Beastie’s unique position along various spectrums, rather than simply being one thing or the other. This is more in line with our deeper goal to make Beasties feel more like living, autonomous beings. Because each type is broader in definition, it also means there’s way more overlap in what plays different Beasties learn, and that means there are far more opportunities for friendly Beasties to teach new plays to each another, which makes our relationship system feel more lively and interesting. Players who invest deeply in the game systems will be more likely to categorize Beasties though their individual roles and game mechanics, almost more like fighting game or MOBA characters. Altogether, it gives Beastieball a flavor that we’ve never quite seen before!

Still, I can’t deny the fun that types add to this game’s texture. I love media that offers fun and broad categories for their characters (for example, the 4 elements in Avatar: The Last Airbender). I also enjoy how they can be applied outside their original context. You can reason with questions like: what type is your favorite? Or, what type would YOU be? Ultimately, it’s just plain fun to be able to put things into categories, and “types” are a big, big way of doing that.

See you in the next newsletter!

Update and Render

To explain the first and weirdest detail of how the AI is written, I need to briefly explain how games are generally programmed. Essentially, you break every step of the computing process into two main phases - updating the game state, and then rendering that state to the user.

But Beastieball’s “battle” system works like this.

The code which renders and displays all of the clickable buttons that the player uses to select their actions ALSO contains the logic for clicking on them and what that does (advancing the game state, queuing turn-based actions, etc), and it ALSO contains all of the logic that the AI uses to make decisions.

Here’s an example of what the code for these clickable buttons might look like:

Doing the logic for clicking on buttons at the same time as you render them isn’t too-too weird in the grand scheme. It’s nice that you can re-use the on-screen render bounds for box to also detect when the user’s selector is overlapping that box to click on it. But throwing the AI into there as well is not something I’ve even seen someone talk about before.

The AI Decision Tree

The way the AI basically works is: Each step, it will run the game UI render code as if it were going to render the UI to the player, but rendering is disabled so nothing new actually appears onscreen. Instead, at the end of the UI render attempt, the AI has a list of all the clickable areas that were rendered. Then it runs the UI render again, but this time it “clicks” on one of the clickable areas, advancing the game state as if a player had clicked on a button there.

It does this until it has nothing left to click on, then evaluates the “Board Score.” This means assigning a value to how favorable the current game state looks to them. Since each button click also advances the game state, each “run out of clicks” state represents a unique possible outcome for the AI’s turn after all their actions are used. The AI will treat the state as more favorable if, for example, they’re launching an attack that is likely to do more damage, or their team status is healthier.

The AI then goes back to the start of their turn and starts over, repeating this process ad nauseam until it has clicked on everything it could ever click in every situation, and has assigned a score to all possibilities.

From there, the AI goes back to the top one more time, picks out the route that scored the highest, and then clicks on those things in that order, this time actually committing to the choice and playing it out in a way that the player can see. Aside from having the AI hooked up the game’s render loop, all of this procedure is actually fairly standard. If you’re interested in learning more about how AI decision trees work, there are some great entertaining YouTube videos out there on the subject.

Why is it like this

In the context of Beastieball, I think it’s worth noting how every aspect of this procedure makes it super easy to develop new features.

Firstly, the “Board Score” evaluation is a really flexible and powerful tool. AI for different encounters can be given interesting unique behaviour by adjusting how it values certain things. For example, in our Steam demo’s “Boss fight” against Marlin, he wants to teach you about attacking empty lanes, and so intentionally leaves certain lanes open - we achieved this by assigning a negative value to lane defense in his AI.

But the coolest, most “magical” quality of this system is that the AI has full access to everything the player does, automatically, with no extra effort on the part of the programmer(s) or designer(s) (me). This was critical when I was in the early phases of prototyping this game, and was frequently adding, moving or deleting features from the system trying to figure out a good design for turn-based volleyball.

That quality continues to be valuable even as development has progressed. About a week before we first revealed our Steam demo, I made a very big change to the game systems, adding a new “Block” move that any Beastie could do at the net. Simply by adding the button to the player’s interface, the AI also had access to it, and even started using it in unexpectedly optimal ways that helped me quickly test and refine the idea before releasing it.

There are a lot of hidden benefits to testing and balancing the game that were unlocked by having the AI so closely tied to player behaviour, which I’d love to cover in greater detail another time. But suffice to say that the ease of adding new features and move effects and getting to see them played out instantly has been immensely valuable to this project!

See you in the next newsletter.

With 2023 coming to a close, I wanted to take a moment to shout out some exciting games that came out this year! I do try to take the time to play lots of games, as it helps fuel my work with diverse ideas… this year I also helped out jurying the Independent Games Festival (IGF) which exposed me to a TON of cool games I would have otherwise missed. This is not an exhaustive list of every game I liked, or even a proper ranked list or anything… this list also excludes games made by any friends of mine. These are just some really cool games I recommend in no particular order! OK??? OK!!!!

(Also note that all(?) of these games are on sale…. right now!!!)

Thirsty Suitors

In Thirsty Suitors, you play as kind of a garbage-fire college-age skateboard punk with a rocky relationship history who abruptly comes back home after several years and has to deal with the fallout of all her past mistakes. You’ll be skating around town to visit friends, cooking dishes to impress your parents, and hashing out your emotional baggage in turn-based RPG battles. The writing is some of my favorite I’ve seen in a game in a long time, and the animation is also outstanding. It’s outrageously funny and gets really personal as well.

Chants of Sennaar

A game about deciphering language! As you explore and climb a Tower of Babel, you’ll be exposed to different symbols and it’s up to you to use context to slowly piece together what they each mean so you can navigate a foreign world. What’s most remarkable to me is how NOT daunting this game is - it’s very precisely crafted and paced so that every step from bottom to top was a satisfying little puzzle. (That must have been VERY hard to do!!! Games like this are usually very obtuse!!). It also introduces a number of different languages which each express subtle and interesting details about the cultures they represent, from the way the symbols are shaped to the grammar of their sentences. It’s very well thought out and very engrossing to play… I could NOT put it down and wound up 100%ing it in one long session.

Final Profit: A Shop RPG

You’re Queen of the elves, except the elvish kingdom is languishing under the boot of the Bureau of Business, a powerful and shadowy organization of businessmen who control seemingly everything. So you hatch a plan to destroy them by becoming the BEST at business. Hilarity ensues as you fall deeper and deeper into the rabbit-hole of economics, finding new and exciting ways to exploit people and optimize your finances. It’s an ugly-aesthetic RPGMaker game but I’d argue that its cheap veneer only adds to this game’s sublime charm. If you like managing inventories, collecting resources and numbers going up then you will get a LOT out of this game, and a lot of good laughs along with it.

A Highland Song

A story-rich side-scrolling adventure where you play as Moira, a runaway girl on a journey to find her uncle in a distant lighthouse in the Scottlish highlands. Along the way you’ll come across abandoned towns, dim caverns, strange people, ghosts, folklore and most importantly, MAPS! This game is all about getting lost and finding your way through ambiguous directions and sketchy maps that can point out hidden shortcuts or send you even further off the trail. It’s hard to capture what’s really special about this game because it’s succeeding in a way I have a hard time comparing to anything else. For a side-scrolling game it does an exceptional job of capturing the vast feeling of a 3D open-world game, but rich with little stories and discoveries that make every moment a delight. There’s also inexplicably great musical game elements while you sprint through the fields as fauna run alongside you.

Cassette Beasts

A monster-taming open-world turn-based RPG! You find yourself thrown into a strange world under threat by giant glitchy hellbeasts where people can “record” monsters and transform into them! The game has a couple standout features, namely: when your meter’s full, you can fuse any two beasts to create a temporary new super-beast! And, every beast has its own type(s) which have advantages and disadvantages against other type(s), but the way every type interacts is unique and creative - for example, a fire move can melt a plastic-type beast and lower their offense. This game offers satisfying open-ended exploration and cool strategic battles as well. I had my gripes with it, but as someone who has been looking into many different games of this format, this one stands out quite a bit. And for anyone following the development of Beastieball, I strongly recommend this game to enjoy in the meantime!

Games to watch for next year….

I’ve also had the opportunity to see a lot of games that aren’t quite done yet! I recommend you keep an eye on these next year.

Anthology of the Killer - A collection of short story games about a zine artist in a surreal murder-friendly world. They’re weird, witty, incredibly funny, and incredibly well-paced too. There’s a potent creative energy here that harkens to zine culture or, at least to me, the wild world webcomics. 8 out of 9 episodes are actually already available! But with the release of the final episode it will be collected into a single handy anthology experience which might be worth waiting for.

Phonopolis - This is a game by a new team under the umbrella of Amanaita Design, known for titles like Samorost and Machinarium. Phonopolis is an incredibly exciting project full of playful interactive dioramas and character animation. The art direction is just divine.

1000xRESIST - An intense and high-concept walk-and-talk game about a cult of clones in a post-apocalypse underground bunker. A lot of the game revolves around exploring memories and piecing together the history of your cult and the apocalypse that birthed it, and it quickly gets into some heavy and confronting things. It’s as resonant and compelling as some of the best Prestige TV I’ve seen but constructed out of many creative interactive setpieces. The dev team comes from a background in stage performance and that skillset comes through really clearly here.

See ya next year!

I have so many other articles and things I wanted to write up this year that I just couldn’t make the time for. But, I want to thank everyone following my newsletters and everyone who’s sent in a nice comment or reply too. It’s been really fun for me to have a space like this to collect my thoughts and talk more about what’s exciting to me in games lately.

More to come soon! :) Happy new year~

When I was making it at the time, it seemed a totally off-the-wall combination of ideas and genres, but one I was fascinated by and kept falling deeper and deeper into. A seemingly endless design space where every idea would beget even more ideas. I put everything I could into it, thinking it was up to me to explore the space I’d found. I had no idea that later it would become its own genre, let alone one that nowadays gets labelled as crowded and competitive.

Coin Crypt has always been a lesser-known title and in the grand scheme I really can’t take credit for inspiring anything that came after because I’m pretty sure none of those later works were aware of it, LOL. But I always have been proud of it and I think it is a pretty dang cool game. Of all my works it’s still the one I would most readily want to boot up and play again, 10 years later. It’s definitely needlessly opaque, but it’s also full of fun ideas that still stand apart from genre contemporaries.

To commemorate the anniversary, I was interviewed by a blog called Sunken Shrine, which has been exploring the history of the genre and identified Coin Crypt as the earliest entry. Check it out here!

If you’re curious to check the game out, it’s available on Steam!

But in the spirit of recommending roguelike deckbuilders, I’d really like to shout out more recent exceptional games that have both tightened the design and introduced more storytelling into the mix:

Cobalt Core, which features spaceships on a small tactics grid, just came out this month.

Inscryption is a thrilling and gorgeous adventure with many twists and turns.

Although not a roguelike, Signs of the Sojourner is a brilliant take on deckbuilding & card games with emotionally resonant storytelling.

Happy carding!

(This is part of my “Game Musings” newsletter where I write thoughts about game design and development. If you just want news and updates on my projects, you can edit your subscription here.)

It’s a major milestone for sure, but there’s still a long road to having a finished video game. Especially because of the game’s open-ended nature, a lot of what we have feels more like an outline that still needs filling in. In particular, I’m most concerned with doing more work on the story and world-building over the course of the adventure. Typically in these newsletters I try to share what wisdom I’ve accrued from experience… but this time I’d like to be a little more candid and share aspects of this game that are still ongoing challenges for us.

The stories in my games are almost always the focus of the project and something we put a lot of care into. I’ve tackled a lot of different game genres and story presentations. Notably, the second half of Chicory presents several major story threads that can each be experienced in any order. After the success of that experiment, I felt more confident stepping into Beastieball with the plan to have almost all of the game’s events be unordered. I’ve never really loved the storytelling in the open-world games that I’ve played, but I was excited to take the narrative design experience I have and apply it to that problem to see what I could do. But I didn’t anticipate all the ways that I’d be challenged by the process along the way!

For starters - because any given event could be visited at any time, each event often has to be written with very little outside context. In my past games, I always had a clear picture of the journey over the course of the adventure; which parts are happy, which parts are sad, what the protagonist is feeling when they first reach a location and what happens to them there. Wandersong, Chicory and Phantasmaburbia all feature dramatic story reveals followed by sections that reckon with the fallout of those events - and that context shapes how small interactions with every NPC was written, the mood of the music in certain areas, etc. While there is an overarching plot which connects the smaller events of Beastieball, we don’t always know where each step of the story will happen for each player, so we don’t get to have that added direction for every area and character in the story.

The protagonist themself is fully customized and named by the player - and has no formal dialogue of their own, so that the player can project themselves into the story. We want players to express themselves through their Beastie recruit selections, their Beastieball strategies, and the ways that they explore - but what we lose is that there is no central protagonist whose shifting emotions and perspective can guide the story. Instead we put the focus on the characters you meet along the way. Ironically, even though this is by far the largest adventure I’ve worked on, it is necessarily constructed out of the smallest pieces of self-contained stories in different parts of the map.

But the challenge that I least anticipated was how much the storytelling is beholden to the structure of the game itself. Because every piece of the story is small and self-contained in different areas, we have to devote an outsized portion of the wordcount just on instructing the player and pointing them in the right direction so that they know what to do next. I’ve hinted at this challenge in previous newsletters, but it’s exacerbated by having so many small “quests” that don’t relate to each other. In larger linear games, players eventually fall into a pattern where they generally know the direction they’re going in, and the game can explain a little less and start to have more breathing room for flavor. That’s not quite the case in open-world games like Beastieball, and at times as a writer it can be suffocating!

In the bigger picture… The best stories are always built on surprises. If you already know what’s going to happen, there’s no suspense or excitement pulling you forward. But games are the opposite; if you don’t know where to go next or what to do, it quickly gets frustrating and boring as you go in circles without a clear purpose in mind. An open-world game where the player can do things in any order therefore needs to establish clear goals for the player in every direction, and at its heart needs to fall into some type of repetitive structure or pattern the player can learn to recognize, ie. “defeat the big boss in each area.” While there are many cool surprises in store in Beastieball, larger structural necessities like these are always exerting force against us.

Every story always comes with its own challenges, of course. And to some extent, it’s true that if the process for anything is easy, then you’re not really doing anything ambitious. But there are also a lot of hidden compromises that come with the decisions we made about this game early on, and we are at the point where we need to accept those compromises and move forward with the best version we can create. There are many amazing things about this game which will only be possible because of those compromises, too. Ultimately we have to find a path and plan that leverages the game’s potential strengths the most, rather than spotlighting its weaknesses. This project has done a lot to show me my limits as a creator, but I’m still loving the challenge and optimistic that at the end of our struggles we’ll produce something truly excellent.

Wish us luck!!!

It’s also a design topic that’s often invisible to players, because when the game isn’t presenting info to you, you don’t know that you don’t know it. What information is and isn’t visible to a player fundamentally shapes their experience of that game… in a certain light, all game design comes down to this subject in some way or another.

I had to dig deep into this trench as part of the design process for Beastieball!

Beastieball’s design lineage is mostly from JRPGs, like Pokemon, which are generally very “squishy,” creating lots of space for minor statistical variations that make every player’s experience feel unique. One of the simple ways that surfaces is in damage calculation. In most RPGs, like Final Fantasy, Pokemon, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, or heck, even Dark Souls… dealing damage can feel a bit like a slot machine, where the player inputs an attack, and then finds out how much damage their attack resulted in. Often there’s a bit of randomness added in, so that the same character hitting the same enemy over and over produces varying amounts of damage with each swing.

This way of revealing the damage dealt is another form of hidden information, and one which contributes to the fun of those games. In Pokemon, for example, you’ll learn to intuit how much damage your attacks will do, being able to predict for example that your super-effective fire attack will probably take down the opposing grass-type in one hit. In high-skill Pokemon competitions, players compete with a vast amount of knowledge and intuition, being able to identify almost exactly how much damage any interaction between any two Pokemon will have - indeed, this ability to accurately foresee the outcome of any given attack is often what makes the difference between victory and defeat. Not to mention all the various “surprise” events that can occur which players also have to account for, like critical hits.

While understanding that this huge space of hidden information is part of what makes these games enjoyable, I really wanted to go in a different direction with Beastieball. Surprise is fun, but it’s also opaque; it’s frustrating when you lose to something you simply couldn’t see coming, like an unexpected critical hit, or a mysterious interaction with an enemy ability you haven’t seen before. More hidden information also means players spend more of their early experience with the game feeling lost and confused, not yet knowing how or why things are happening, and more than anything I wanted Beastieball to be accessible to new players.

This speaks to a trend I’ve observed with a lot of recent high-profile, designer-friendly games like Slay the Spire or Into the Breach. In the above Breach screenshot, while the player is selecting their actions for their turn, they can already see red arrows indicating exactly what every enemy will do; the two bugs highlighted in red will attack a player unit, and two new enemies are about to come up from underground on the right side of the board. Players are allowed to strategize their actions however they want already knowing exactly what their opponent will do. It creates a satisfying, crunchy space almost more akin to a puzzle game than a strategy game.

Of course, these games are brilliantly and carefully designed to exclude just the right amount of info, too; for example, you don’t know WHAT enemies are going to pop out of the ground, nor is it obvious that the opponent insect attacks will also light the forest under your feet on fire. Tell the player too much and the game feels disorienting with info, or perhaps hyper-linear, leaving no space for surprise, discovery or creativity.

Unlike Slay the Spire or Into the Breach, Beastieball needed to support player vs. player as well as single-player encounters (a totally separate rabbit hole for other articles…). This meant that we couldn’t outright tell the player what their opponent was going to do, because part of the fundamental design is that their opponent might be another player who is deciding their next action at the same time. But I did go out of my way to reveal as much as I could, down to revealing exactly how much damage any given attack will do before the player commits to it - and being able to see how much damage opponents can do to them, too.

Beastieball is still full of hidden information, though, most especially in the form of opponent actions. For example, while you might see your attack will do 100 damage when it lands, what you might not know is that your opponent is about to boost their defenses right before the attack connects, or put up a shield, negating the predicted damage. Players are allowed to see what all of their opponent’s options are, but they don’t know which one they’ll select, and this gap of knowledge leaves enough space for a universe of mind games that makes the game enriching and surprising.

A seredipitous result of this is how different single-player and multiplayer feel in Beastieball. For an average player, the game’s depth of options usually means it’s a challenge to find the “best” choice, and that makes for fun encounters that feel almost puzzle-like from turn to turn. But the opponent AI is quite logical, which means it’s usually quite predictable, effectively negating the existence of any hidden information. Opportunistic players can take advantage of that to claw a victory out even when they’re quite underpowered - I expect to see speedrunners crack the story mode wide open someday. Opponent players are a totally different beast, though - they can act intentionally unpredictably, creating surprising and chaotic matches where victory and defeat often come down to figuring out not what’s on the board, but what’s going on in your opponent’s head.

As with everything, there’s no “correct” way to design hidden information. It’s a problem with as many unique shapes as there are games. But I certainly had fun challenging myself to explore it further with this game.

I’ve been holding a lot of thoughts about this game close to my chest for a long time. So many that it’s a bit daunting to actually sit down and try to unpack it all for a newsletter now! But, I think it’s time I talked a little bit about what inspired its unique turn-based volleyball system design. Many details really won’t make sense to dive into until the full game is available, and others still won’t all fit into one brief newsletter. This is a topic I’m passionate about and I expect I’ll return to it in future newsletters.

Why Turn-Based?

I’ve wanted to make a game about “building a team” for a LONG time; it’s a seed that I’d been cultiviating for nearly 10 years, slowly working out the practical details of how to build the game I was dreaming of.

One of the fundamental themes of “building a team” comes from learning about and deeply understanding each of the team members so that you can get the most out of their potential as individuals and in combination. Player’s success in my dream game had to be based on them forming this kind of understandning.

In any typical sports or action game, success is based on player reflexes, and you always overcome challenges by “getting good” and mastering the action, physics or controls better. Even in games that combine action elements with RPG elements, like Dark Souls, or active-turn-based RPGs like Superstar Saga or Super Mario RPG, there’s a sort of friction; after losing to a difficult boss, you’re often caught between trying again with your current equipment and just playing a bit better, or backing off and grinding for a bit to get a statistical edge. These games are hugely popular and engaging, but I came to understand that in my game I wanted none of this friction. Success and failure had to come down to your understanding of your team, and how well you strategized around them. And so the game had to be turn-based!

I had figured out this much, but was stuck there in my thinking for a long time, because I couldn’t decide what turn-based thing I wanted the team to do. Obviously there are lots of turn-based war and battle games out there and it would have been easy enough to make another one of those, but I wanted to challenge myself to explore new directions, if only to make something more creatively stimulating for me.

I couldn’t figure it out until I saw the anime Haikyuu in 2020, which pretty much wrapped together all the themes of teamwork and personality chemistry that I’d been trying to synthesize in my head. And perhaps most importantly, it showed me that volleyball is an inherently turn-based sport, with each side equally trading control of the ball. Suddenly my idea for a team-building RPG was starting to make sense.

Mind Games

At this point I had an explosion of ideas and I was rapidly prototyping game designs. There were hundreds of decisions made about Beastieball around this time and I’d like to examine more of them in future articles, but for now I want to highlight one innovation that became a key feature for this game.

It started from thinking about what the essense of strategy is in the context of sports. Obviously there is the larger game plan; each player on a sports team has a specialty, ie. one player might be the designated point scorer and one might be there to play defense or disrupt the opponents. But in the micro, reflex, moment-to-moment decision making, it all comes down to mind games. If you can anticipate the very next thing your opponent will do, then you can move to block that choice and get an advantage; like making a block in volleyball, or intercepting a pass in basketball or soccer. High-level sports is not just about who is faster or stronger, but how effective you are at misdrecting your opponent and being able to move in a way they can’t anticipate or react to. I would say fighting games are best known for isolating and elevating this aspect of competitive games. I was interested in finding a way to make this part of the very DNA of Beastieball, giving players an opportunity to call out what their opponent will do, or misdirect them, to gain a statistical advantage.

This was the basis for the lane-based targetting system. Rather than targetting an opponent, you hit the ball across a lane or row of the field, and the attack is received by the first Beastie standing in the ball’s path. Beastie’s field position has an impact on their power and defense, too; Beasties at the net do boosted damage but take extra damage, too. Altogether it adds just a tiny bit of complexity and ambiguity, enough to create space for mind games.

While you prepare you offense, the opponent always has the chance to take a defensive action which is revealed right before the attack lands. This creates opportunities for the opponent to swap out who is on the field, or reposition their board to change the outcome of the attack. Similarly, as the attacker, you’re trying to anticipate what the opponent might do to defend, and often it ends up being “better” to pick a “worse” attacking lane that your opponent is less likely to predict and defend against.

The sports-like format of the game is limiting in some ways, because the pace of the game is so tightly constrained; exactly ONE attack is made every turn, no more, no less. This is different from other strategy games where you might have some turns where you stall out and build resources, and other turns where you attack from multiple fronts simultaeously. I tried to lean into this weird property of the game and turn it into a strength, by making every attack interaction have a bit of build-up and surprise factor to it.

This is probably enough from me for now. If you haven’t played the demo on Steam and are curious to learn more about the specifics of the sport systems, we made this helpful explainer video that shows a little bit more of it.

I’ll see you in the next newsletter!

This week it’s time to talk about Bildit, the final starter we finished! This one took us on a wild ride… hold on to your butts!

Greg: This first drawing was done by Tia Rohrer in reaction to an early prompt for what eventually would become Servace - a “high energy net attacker”! It was Alexis’ idea to potentially use a Bilby for that prompt as an uncommon hopping/jumping animal that might leap and spike the ball. 

Tia: As I was looking through some of the established prompts on our list of ideas for Beasties, I saw how much this one didn’t have an exact feeling down besides energetic. I wanted to give a sort of spunky, go-getter feel from something that appears so small! It was a fun concept, and it’s super cool to see where it went next.

Greg: Later on Twarda asked if she could pick up the idea. She wanted to combine Bilbies with Aardvarks to highlight their digging abilities! These designs were really charming but didn’t have that energetic personality we were looking for…

Twarda: I really enjoyed the simplicity of the concept Tia did and I was eager to try out the attacker-theme. However soon I realized the blueish fur colour of bilbies is just too cool and we agreed to move on with it as a starter.

Greg: At this point we had ideas for an amphibious (pink) Spirit starter and a bird (yellow) Body starter, but no (blue) Mind starter - which we’d been thinking should be a mammal to round out the starter roster. These sketches fit the box perfectly, so we decided to rethink them as a 3-stage Mind starter!

Greg: With the other starters being themed around musicals and sports, we needed a strong theme for this one too. We thought making them “nerdy” would be a good way to distinguish them, but it was hard to find a visually inspiring theme in that category.

Alexis: I really tried to come up with some kind of interesting math-based inspiration, but I don’t think I’m enough of a math enthusiast to pull that off right now. Plus it felt like something that could be really really cool, but it would be cool in a sort of subtle way; which didn’t quite feel right for a starter Beastie.

Greg: We landed on gaming - ie. Chess and card games, as a visual theme.

Greg: These were Twarda’s first ideas based on the “chess” theme. We imagined the bilby as a little pawn! Naturally they’d become a bishop/knight and a queen/king as they matured, which all felt like a strong visual direction to build on.

Twarda: On top of that, we also had some ideas how they would use their ears as a startle display, or to communicate with their kind. First drafts sprouted a timid, but smug, little guy with flashy ears. Their closed eyes emphasize their focus on listening to their surroundings.

Greg: Because the pawn theme felt like it wasn’t giving us enough, we mixed in some other ideas. We thought about styling them as an Entomologist - a studier of insects. We imagined they would live in a hierarchical underground society similar to an ant colony, and we gave them ear patterns that were meant to mimic moth wings, while also suggesting card suits (with the diamonds). The ear patterns were always either red or black, signifying the card suit theme further. At this point, at the time, we felt the design was complete.

Greg: …But after a lot of reflection much later on we decided to revisit it. The Chess theme hadn’t been sitting right with us, for the simple reason that bilbies are an Australian species that are endangered (or in the case of one bilby species, extinct) due to colonization. So it didn’t feel right to have a bilby creature whose theme evoked European royalty, even vaguely! We went back to the drawing board with the chess/gaming themes discarded.

Greg: We looked for ways to make them “nerdier” - give them glasses-looking patterns around their eyes, and change their focus to be on drawing and note-taking. We thought they might use their ear as a pen to catalog information. That’s also why we had the ears made much bigger, so they could reach the ground to scratch notes in the dirt.

Twarda: I explored various brush-like and pen-like options, but none of them either looked plausible or made sense. At one point Bildit was wearing an unfold-able turban made out of its ears!

Alexis: Visually, I love these so much! I think the dip-pen ears are SO cool. But I couldn’t picture how they would actually use them in a practical way, and more importantly, I was starting to realize a bigger issue. We were theming these creatures around research, and visually communicating that theme with writing implements, implying that they have a written language of some sort. What would that language be? What do they write on, and where do they keep it? What do they write about? How long have they had a written language? Are they the only beastie who records things in this way? Why? It felt like it raised a ton of questions, and took this creature in a direction that didn’t really fit within the realm of what beasties are.

Greg: It still didn’t sit quite right. We had spent a long time trying to combine bilbies with themes that simply didn’t mesh with them.

Alexis: We wanted to find a direction that celebrated the strengths of bilbies, and by this point I REALLY wanted to come to Twarda with a clear direction forward. She did so much great design work on these; the only reason they weren’t working was because of our prompts.

Alexis: I went off and did some sketches around the theme of digging, tunneling and construction, based on the shapes and colours Twarda had been using.

Greg: Twarda sent us this idea back after playing with Alexis’ design ideas. A strong new personality was starting to emerge with its nervous/anxious/overthinking energy that set it apart from the other 2 starters. The “digging” theme was harder to convey visually, but it was a much more natural fit. After going through so many iterations, it was hard to know if we were actually getting anywhere with it - but these drawings were exciting to us and felt like they could be the one!

Alexis: We also, importantly, had a clear idea for how their theming and story would play out as they grow!

Greg: I think it’s safe to say that Bildit was the most difficult Beastie for us to design so far. 

When you look at a final design, it’s easy to imagine that it simply popped out of the ether looking like that. But the reality is always much slower and harder and more difficult. On this journey creating Beastieball, I’ve been shocked by how many times we had concept drawings that looked great to me, only to throw them out and work our way to something even better. But, seeing so many folks falling in love with Bildit after we finally got to reveal them was hugely cathartic - and it definitely made all this thought and iteration feel like it was worth it. 

Thanks for reading!

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Unlike the other starters, Kichik was mostly designed just by Alexis, our Beastie director and animator. Alexis always has a hand in every design, but many are driven just by her - like this one, which was a bit special for her.

Alexis: I had always planned to do some sort of strong-legged flightless bird beastie, though I wasn’t sure exactly what their theme was going to be, other than the vague direction of ‘strong legs, kicks ball, big feet’. I started trying to cartoon an emu chick, figuring out what to emphasize, and thinking about how it would move and hit a ball. I kind of love the big-floppy-wings version, but it felt like they were getting in the way of their legs, and making them feel very duck-like.

Greg: The game starts by having the player choose their first Beastie from a set of 3 - this is something Pokemon does too, and it’s frankly good game design that we couldn’t improve on. You want players to choose their own Beasties so that they feel a personal connection to them; and 3 is the perfect number of choices (just enough to have a “favorite”, but just few enough to not be paralyzing). So before even a single design was done, we knew we needed 3 “starter” Beasties at some point. Once I saw these sketches, they seemed like a natural choice as a “starter Beastie” since they perfectly encapsulate the “sports + animals” theme of the entire game - most designs get a lot more loose with that premise. 

Alexis: These were all done (I think?) before we’d brought other concept artists on board, so I was very much still figuring out what constituted a beastie! It’s hard to know when a design is done at the best of times, and harder when you don’t have much to compare it to. These are still rough drawings, but even considering that, they look a little underbaked in hindsight!

Alexis: I had originally been going for sort of a kids’ soccer team outfit, with a shorts-like body shape and a vertical stripe along the side. The feather on the head is a nod to a theme that appears in their grown-up form, which… To be frank, doesn’t really come across, even if you know what that form is haha! I felt like it wasn’t quite finished, but wasn’t sure where to go with it, so I stopped looking at it for a while and focused on other designs.

Alexis: Once we had Axolati finished and Bildit started, I had a good basis for comparison! …..aaaaand it was pretty clear right away that Kichik needed stronger shapes, simpler and more decisive details, and a clearer indication of their theming! And maybe a little more colour.

Greg: Making the stripes yellow here was my idea! We had established a color theme of blue, pink and yellow for the key types in the game (Mind, Spirit, Body) and I wanted to highlight Kichik’s focus with the colors more. Alexis has a tendency to make every creature brown or gray because she prefers naturalistic colors, whereas I’m all about oversaturated neons. Somewhere between our preferences is a happy medium.

Alexis: I liked the personality of the original design, so I tried to iterate on the shapes and proportions while keeping that feeling the same. I made the shorts a lot more obvious, moved their leg detail down so it didn’t break up the shorts’ silhouette, brought the wings back in a simpler form, and simplified their head feathers to match the scale and shape of the wing feathers. Feet got a lot bigger, and generally speaking I tried to make them look just a tiny bit more grown-up, as the previous version felt very babylike alongside the others.

Greg: Because they’re a starter, many decisions are made specifically to make them stand out next to the other 2 creatures. So with Axolati being such a perfect round circle, we decided to make Kichik more square-like and the last one more triangular. It helped us hone in on what made each one unique - squaring off Kichik’s shapes made them feel more strong and solid.

Alexis: I definitely have a tendency to lean towards more organic animal shapes and colours when designing a creature. This game is giving me a lot of opportunities to recognize that, and to try to push myself towards stronger shape language and bolder decisions!

Greg: It’s amazing how, even with a simple design, there are so many subtle considerations!

See you next time, where we’ll talk about designing everyone’s favorite blue bilby, Bildit!

Every Beastie takes a ton of thought and iteration to design! Today we wanna show you our process designing Axolati, the spirit-focused starter Beastie. As this was one of our earliest designs, we learned a lot along the way about how we wanted to approach designing Beasties in general.

Greg: When we first recruited concept artists we had a long list of one-line Beastie ideas to throw at them. One which was special to me was “Musical frog! Handles the ball with its legs only?!” I didn’t really have a clear idea of what I wanted but I knew it had to be a frog.

Tia: I thought a bit about Flamenco and the strong poses associated with it, along with ballet. For more “vocal” like designs, I couldn’t choose between something that was excited and chirping happily like a frog, or a dramatic Opera singer, or one that sings so sweetly like an angel!

For the Tadpole, or stage 1, I had thought about it not having much vocal skill built up yet, but still liked musical things and dancing. So why not an energetic little guy that loves to bounce around, and maybe sounds like a maraca when it shakes? There’s also a few “unconfident” little tadpole concepts here to reflect the vocals not being built up enough yet, or overcoming its shyness to sing.

Greg: I fell in love with these sketches. Had it just been up to me, one of these frogs would have been put straight into the game as-is. But I had a lot to learn from this process. When making Chicory, we had made 100+ different animal characters, and I thought Beastieball would be like doing that again but with some extra color and animation. But in this game every creature has the potential to be someone’s “main character” and we realized we needed to put in a lot more effort to communicate strong themes for each one.

Alexis: Tia’s poses and designs are always bursting with charm! I loved a lot about these, but they all felt like they were missing specificity; they are all very appealing frog designs, but felt like they were relying too strongly on posing to communicate the secondary theme; which is understandable, since we hadn’t given Tia a particularly specific secondary theme! It’s a tricky balance to get right, even with a more firm starting direction. We want the Beasties to feel like natural creatures, but not just like cartoon animals; we also want the additional themes to be visible, but not so obvious that they make the Beastie look like they couldn’t have evolved naturally into that shape.

Greg: There are a ton more sketches that were done here as we chased something we all liked. We honed in on the strong “dancer” poses and tried out a ton of ideas in that direction. This is just one example of how weird it got on like, iteration #6.

Tia: When in doubt, throw some shapes down to figure things out. This one scares me a bit… But at least it would’ve had a strong silhouette! I actually am afraid of frogs and toads, but looking up images of them was an okay thing for me to do. Trying to find weird ways to stylize a frog can be pretty hard when they’re already so simple! 

Alexis: I had no idea you were afraid of frogs and toads!!! It was around this point that I felt like we definitely needed to come up with a stronger core theme before we continued iterating. This is my first time directing, so maybe someone more experienced would’ve recognised this sooner!

Greg: We all got burnt out on frogs and it went into hibernation for a while. But I later came back and put together a pitch of 3 designs based on sketches Tia had already done - altogether it would be an entirely new 3-stage Beastie with a singing theme. If it went well, I was hoping we could make them into a starter Beastie - a crucial milestone for us, because at this point we hadn’t nailed down any of those yet. At this point we also added Harlow to the mix on this design.

Tia: I was sooooo thankful and super excited to work with Harlow on this Beastie together. I was rather jammed up with this concept, and she really took it in a whole new direction and elevated the concept as a whole.

Greg: The “final” stage (which we don’t want to spoil yet) was the first one we completed. Its design went through its own lifespan of iterations building up from ideas Tia had first put down. Harlow piloted it, with the rest of us throwing in suggestions and sketches. Finally Tia and Harlow came up with their ultimate form together!

Greg: From there it was time to go back and re-think the first stage. Using some of Tia’s earliest drawings as a base, Harlow tried out a variety of ideas! We were still playing with species at this point - with “frog” as a starting point, it still felt on theme to branch out into tadpoles, axolotls, etc. Beastie designs are rarely inspired by just 1 animal.

Harlow: Tia is a tough act to follow! Now that we knew what we wanted Axolati to become, the next step was to find the key shape language that would bring out the creature’s personality, allowing all but the most necessary details to fall out of focus. A lot of the “evolution lines” in Beastieball are created with a general narrative/emotional arc in mind, so my experimentation here had a lot to do with trying to find that perfect “point A”. 

Tia: 3’s face still makes me laugh. It’s so happy and energetic! I absolutely adored the amount of personality that was pumped into all of these!

Harlow: 6a and 6b were, at the time, my favorite contenders. In retrospect it’s impossible to imagine an Axolati that is so shy and reserved, but the “stage crew/theatre tech” look felt so cute to me.

Greg: It was getting to the point where every drawing was fabulous and we were having a harder and harder time picking between them. The “singing” theme proved to be way stronger inspiration - for this variation we wanted to highlight that theme moreso with the character design details. Harlow did an awesome job integrating it! This was the final set of variations we tried out before saying the D design here was the one.

Harlow: When finding the final set of ‘accessories’ I wanted to find the right blend of cohesion and anticipation of what Axolati will become! Each of these final four concepts have a little of both, but D wound up being the best mix. I can’t say too much yet, but I’m proud of the little ways we tie this line together, while allowing each form to feel like their own.

Alexis: I did a little tie-down sketch, adjusting the proportions alongside the other (still WIP!) starters. It was important that they felt like they belonged in a group together, and like they were roughly the same ‘age’. Looking back, Kichik feels very out of place here! But we’ll get to that design later. 

Greg: The last step is coming up with the character poses.

Harlow: In my experience, the pose step is either the most fun or the most fraught. Making utilitarian poses kind of requires a familiarity with both the personality of the beastie and the physics of their body. Axolati was one of the easiest pose pages. (not only because they’re just a funny little ball!) Finding ways to express depth and chubbiness on such a simple shape is a fun exercise, and I spent so much of my drawing time grinning ear to ear.

Tia: When I first saw these, I gasped super audibly. The personality.. The strength and joy of this little Beastie… It all was shining through in such a spectacular way. It’s so cute! The Spike pose and Cheer fills me with joy. Every iteration that came from this collaboration was so cool, and something I certainly couldn’t have imagined at the end!! It was a lot of fun to see it come to life.

Alexis: I love these so much. The most important thing we try to do when posing Beasties is to communicate something about their personality with every pose, and Harlow totally achieved that here.

Alexis: We ended up making this Spike into the Cheer pose because it was soo cheerful, and coming up with a headbutt Spike instead. For the in-game drawings, I tried to keep all the charm of these, but for gameplay clarity I rotated them a little to match the angle of the idle.

Greg: I also want to call out the name Axolati, which I proposed at around this time. The “joke” probably isn’t very obvious, but it’s “axolotl” + “so-la-ti”... a solfege reference for our little singing friend. 

Harlow: I had no idea that was the reason behind the name until now. 0_0

Thanks for joining us! This was a journey that we took over months… hopefully it gives you some idea of just how much thought and effort we put into each concept. Axolati was the first starter design we finished. Next week we’ll look at Kichik, the one we finished next!

The simple fact is, players always need to know what to do next. If they don’t have some guidance towards their current goal, the game quickly becomes frustrating. Quest logs fulfill this need automatically.

So in games that don’t have quest logs… you wind up writing a LOT of hints into the game text. This was absolutely true in Chicory; I’d estimate than about 1/3rd or more of all the text in the game was gameplay instruction and quest hints. A quest-giving character can’t just tell you what they want; they have to remind you what they wanted every time you talk to them. And if you do a partial step, they have to recognize that and then give you the next partial hint. For every step of every quest, for every character. And then when you finish the quest, a clear resolution and “thank you for doing that!” so you know you’ve completed it. I put a lot of effort in to weave all this information naturally into each character’s story and unique voice, but beneath every conversation there’s always this rigid structure.

There are definitely times where I bemoaned these limitations. Characters can never “just say something” - I had to think about what impression it will give the player, and whether they will mistake any passing comment as an actionable item. But, there’s also huge benefits to this in the long run, since players are actively engaged in all the text because it also contains all the info they need to beat the game. Even if flavor is only doled out between practical information, at least you know players are receiving it.

Quest logs provide a tool for helping the player sort what’s relevant, so the writing has a lot more freedom. It doesn’t have nearly as much responsibility to relate to or connect with other elements of the game… so often it winds up becomes a lot more “book-like.” Indeed, it makes a lot more sense for games to be made this way when the teams are larger and writers aren’t working directly with the rest of the team; quest logs help paper over the little inconsistencies that can fall into the project from that kind of environment.

When done really well, the existence of “writing” and “quests” as two separate “systems” in the game actually can create really fun opportunities for new storytelling. For example, imagine an NPC who says “I heard Bob say something really rude about your friend,” and then you get a new side quest pop up: “Teach Bob a lesson.” That kind of little joke/interaction gives you a satisfying bit of characterization. In a log-less game like Chicory, I’d have to heavy-handedly make the protagonist respond by saying “I better go teach that guy a lesson…” and instead of being a little joke it would just be kind of boring and straightforward.

There’s so much to get into! I find myself wanting to keep saying more about this but let’s leave it there. The important thing to remember is that no solution fits every project. Every decision you make as a creator always offers benefits as well as costs; the more aware you are of them, the better you can decide what solution best fits your goals.

This is a new format for the newsletter, but I thought it would be fun once in a while to talk about big game releases or interesting things I’ve been playing. I don’t often get to candidly share my thoughts on games… every game that releases is momentous and I generally like to focus on promoting things I think are cool. But, it’s also fun to talk candidly, and I can get a lot more nuanced here than on Twitter. (lol).

So anyway Tears of the Kingdom is a bizarre thing.

Firstly I’m struck by the technical achievement of it all. It boggles my mind that the game works so smoothly. Every individual part of its system is something that has been done somewhere before - building physics machines, rewinding simulations, crafting weapons… but I’ve never seen all of those things done all at once and in such a sprawling, open-world game where everything can interact. For example, it’s crazy that every single physics object can be rewound individually - but even cazier that they continue to interact with correct physics while they’re rewinding and create new interactions. Gluing wheels and planks together, playing it all forward and backward, while having your player character climbing all over it at any angle, and it all works seamlessly and feels the way you expect it… I don’t think I can put into words how impressive it is. It terrifies me to think that they might not even have done anything that “smart,” per se, and instead just had to work crazy hard and methodically test SO MUCH to get it this stable.

The flip side is just how finnicky and janky the game is, overall - I can’t avoid mentioning this. It’s not a flaw, but an inevitable outcome of a game that works the way Tears of the Kingdom does. The player is given so much freedom and so much fine-tune control to do so many things at so many times that you can’t help but spend a lot of time experimenting and building ideas that don’t end up working. Nothing is as simple as bombing a cracked wall or hitting a switch… solving even the most basic puzzle takes some amount of thinking and labor to put together a solution. I adore that they took the game in this direction and trusted players with something so overwrought, but it’s undoubtedly a weird choice that will be a turn-off for many that enjoy what Zelda usually offers.

But, ultimately, I think a lot of what works in this game is only possible because it’s Zelda. If I imagine someone making a game like this from scratch in a new IP, I think players would have way less patience for it and would bounce off the steep learning curve and strange open-ended structure. But here, the familiar world of Zelda is a perfect canvas that this strange and beautiful thing is built on top of. I think that’s part of what gives you a hidden joy to fly over (and skip) a vast stretch of the world with your hand-crafted airplane, or to catapult a Korok across a canyon… these places and people are familiar, and that makes it extra fun to hold so many crowbars that can pry it open and pull it apart.

(I’d be really curious how this game feels to someone who’s never played a Zelda game before.)

It takes huge confidence and boldness to make something like this with an established and beloved world. I respect and admire every decision they made here. And I’m excited to keep playing it!!!!

(This is part of my “Game Musings” newsletter where I write thoughts about game design and development. If you just want news and updates on my projects, you can edit your subscription here.)

When I talk about “quest logs” I’m talking about a game menu that maintains a clear record of all your current objectives and “quests” - the player’s active to-do list. Often this will keep a record of past finished quests too. On paper, this seems like a straightforwardly good idea. Having a quest log means players always know what they need to do, and they know where to go to find that information if they forget, like for example if they haven’t played the game in a couple weeks. Having info organized like this can be especially indispensible for larger games with many overlapping tasks.

The hidden downside of these logs are that they tokenize every interaction playrs can have with the story. For example, imagine meeting a character in a town who mentions offhandedly that their cat is missing and they’ve been feeling sad about it. Details like that can help enrich the world by giving you the feeling that other character have their own lives and problems going on alongside your own. But a player might naturally wonder whether that information was just for flavor, or whether it’s a problem that they are meant to solve - a quest to find the missing cat. A quest log system makes this completely unambiguous; if you suddenly get a popup saying “New Quest: Find the missing cat,” then you know now that it’s a problem to solve, and if the game has a quest log but doesn’t log this as a quest, then you know that it wasn’t meant to be a task for you.

If something is a task for the player, then they naturally will pay more attention to it. The unfortunate other side to this is, if something is “just flavor” and isn’t actually tied to any task or reward for the player then they’ll tend to ignore it. It’s very easy to get into a mode where you’re simply clicking through all the dialogue and interactions you can have with townspeople to see what actually lands in your Quest log as a to-do item, and then focusing on that in order to progress through the game. (I’ve done this in pretty much every game with a quest log).

Amgiuity is “worse” for the player in the sense that they don’t always clearly know what they’re supposed to be doing, but “better” in that it actually forces them to pay more attention to the story of the game, and make their own inferences about what’s important. If there’s a missing cat the player can find, but they aren’t explicitly told that, then they get to have the thrill of finding that out organically, and the satisfaction of remembering that townsperson who said her cat was missing. But of course, it could be bad if it wasn’t really intended to be a quest, but a player wrongfully assumes that it is, and gets frustrated looking for a cat they’ll never find. Or perhaps worse, they *have* to find a missing cat to beat the game, but they missed the hidden cue about it when they talked to that one townsperson and now they’ll never figure out what they need to do without looking it up…

All games have a hierarchy of what’s important and what isn’t, whether that hierarchy is exposed to the player or not. Athough I love the convenience of always knowing what my tasks are, I value games that allow space for ambiguity. Ultimately it makes for a more believable world, full of potential surprises and depths that you can uncover only through your own judgement and curiosity.

There’s a lot more I could say about this, including how we approached this problem in Chicory (a sprawling, sidequest-filled, open-ended game with no formal quest log…) but I think I’ve already rambled enough in this one.

(This is part of my “Game Musings” newsletter where I write thoughts about game design and development. If you just want news and updates on my projects, you can edit your subscription here.)

When making open-ended exploration titles, my intuition was simply to build lots of space filled with things to do, and present it all to player equally and let them decide how to approach it. The thinking was to inundate the player with options, so that they’d feel empowered and free.

But this actually had the opposite effect and made players feel totally lost, and ultimately, bored. Because if everything is equally important, then nothing is actually important. And without clear guidance on what they should be doing next, players quickly lose interest. Even when the answer was “you can do lots of things - just poke around and you’ll find fun stuff,” it’s just not a satisfying answer.

What I found works very well is to set very, very clear goals for the player with very, very clear steps toward progress. Make sure the player ALWAYS knows what the next step is, and/or has easy access to find out.

It turns out that in open-world experiences, it’s not actually fun for things to be completely open. What is fun is to know what you’re supposed to do, and then having the choice of doing it or doing something else instead. Players who want to explore and “break the system” know what to avoid, and get the satisfiying feeling of playing outside the intended bounds of the game (even when they actually aren’t). And when players want an easy, direct checklist of things to do to move towards progress, the game offers that as well. I’ve found that when games offer both of these “modes” of experience, they are way more satisfying for way more people—because, it turns out, just about everybody feels both of these needs at different times, and when they have the freedom to switch how they’re approaching the game they’ll tend to stick with it longer and not get exhausted as easily.

There’s a lot more I can say about this topic, but I will leave it here for now. Open-world style games are really, really fun to play and really, really hard to make—I’m excited to share more thoughts on them in the future.

(This is part of my “Game Musings” newsletter where I write thoughts about game design and development. If you just want news and updates on my projects, you can edit your subscription here.)

I find the process extremely useful because the process of figuring out what the game is always goes hand in hand with figuring out how I want to make it. I care a lot about keeping my work process fun and creative - and ultimately, no universal game editor or level editor will ever be as powerful for building your specific project as one which you make yourself.

For example, this was the Chicory level editor. Although the levels were pretty simple in that game, it still added a lot of character to the game that they were created in this custom, toy-like editor. I used the same system for “painting” levels that players used to “paint” in the game, so there’s a certain harmony of shapes in what players can create and how the world is shaped. Practically speaking, this also kept everything aligned to the same grid so that player drawings are always naturally aligned with the level geometry. It took a fair bit of time to set this up at first, but in the long term it made it so fast and easy to create more content for the game that it definitely sped things up overall.

Another hidden benefit is that working this way skips the process of building your game. (Ie. the time it takes for the game to actually start after you hit “play” from the game editor you’re using). Being able to flip back and forth between editing and playing the game instantaneously without restarting is a HUGE advantage for time and just general mentality/flow. When playtesting the game with a friend in-person, if they ran into an issue, I could just lean over, open up the editor right in front of them, fix the issue, then put them back in the game - all within seconds.

The joy I get from building editors definitely grew a lot after I first played Super Mario Maker, which replicates this experience for building 2D Mario levels. It opened my eyes to how fun it could be to make games, and I’ve held that in my mind ever since.

(This is part of my “Game Musings” newsletter where I write thoughts about game design and development. If you just want news and updates on my projects, you can edit your subscription here.)

“Crunchiness” emerges when games use smaller or fewer numbers, have fewer pieces in general, and have a more limited set of interactions. “Squishiness” describes the opposite, when games have broader possibilities, with lots of fluidity and amorphousness. For example, you could think about a complex strategy game like X-COM or Starcraft, with lots of moving creatures and structures and stats and numbers to keep track of (squishy), as opposed to Chess, which all takes place on a tiny 8x8 grid and every piece dies in just one hit (crunchy).

Early in my career, I internalized that “crunchy” games were strictly better, and that the way to improve a game design was to cut down on elements and make the numbers smaller until I found the purest, simplest expression of that game idea. With experience I’ve come to feel that neither is better, but both offer useful pathways to refine a game. Crunchy games tend to be more concise and satisfying, whereas squishiness lends itself to experiences that are open-ended and surprising. I’m also starting to feel that in general, squishier games actually have more mass appeal than crunchy games. That’s one way to characterize why expansive, squishy, open-world titles like Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild wound up being such standout successes for long-running franchises that had previously been much crunchier.

The flipside to this is that squishier games are much, much harder to make. This works against some intuition; you’d expect it to be easier to work in game genres that organically create tons of squishy permutations and interactions (roguelikes, card games, fighting games, open world games…) because there’s so many cool things that can happen, that even if there isn’t designed intention behind every interaction, players are sure to find something fun in there. But when a game is full of ideas that aren’t thought through, it tends to produce a lot of mediocrity, which colors players’ perception of the experience, even if there are really cool ideas in there too. Lots of “noise” in a game can drown out the underlying structure and make it harder for players to keep track of what they’re supposed to pay attention to or what the point is.

I think squishy games tend to succeed when designers put an enormously greater amount of intention and thought into them, so that what parses as “squishiness” in the final game is actually a superstructure of tiny, crunchy design decisions. I think this has some parallels with my previous post on how I always aim to have the smallest wordcount I can. Even when something is jam-packed full of ideas, it’s most worthwhile when all those ideas are fully thought through.

There is a fine balance here, because to make something that feels squishy you actually need there to be undesigned space where things can interact unpredictably. Crafting larger games like this always falls into a difficult conversation of “what do I actually design, and what do I leave open?” Ultimately there’s no true right answer, which is what makes it such a difficult problem. Often you can only arrive at your game’s answer through a slow process of addition, subtraction and testing. But when something in my game feels too linear, simple or predictable then I know it probably needs more squishiness… and when it’s all feeling samey, murky, or amorphous then I start looking for ways to crunch it down.

(This is part of my “Game Musings” newsletter where I write thoughts about game design and development. If you just want news and updates on my projects, you can edit your subscription here.)

CUT OUT AS MANY WORDS AS POSSIBLE FROM YOUR GAME!

Given that my projects tend to be sprawling, over-written adventure games I think this advice comes as a surprise to people who ask me for it. But I promise that all my games could have been a lot wordier, and a lot worse for it.

Whenever I write a conversation or scene for a game, I probably spend the most time going over it and finding every little thing I can remove while retaining the original intention or message. For example, normal conversations will be full of small polite-isms and connecting phrases like “Thanks,” “Oh, also…” and that sort of thing. Removing those might feel unnatural at first, but once they’re gone you’ll be surprised that you don’t notice them missing. I don’t just remove useless turns of phrase - any time I can find a way to communicate even a very complicated idea in fewer words, I will do it.

This is a good rule of thumb for writing in general, because it helps you express your point more clearly. But I think it’s especially critical for (non-VN) games, where people have the expectation of interaction. Every line of text you add increases the time players spend waiting and adds another moment where they have to press A to advance. Players can get exhausted of story very quickly… and if your game is giving them words that don’t feel necessary, they’ll start ignoring them. Once a player starts clicking through conversations without reading them, you’ve basically lost their trust, and all the work you put into your game’s text becomes worthless.

I examine every word in my games from this perspective, questioning if it needs to be there and what it contributes. And if I’m trying to get across a big idea in a scene that I can’t communicate succinctly, I’ll find a way to split it into multiple scenes and spread it out over a longer stretch of the game. My goal is always to leave players with the impression that every bit of text in my games matters, and that they should be paying attention to it. Otherwise, why bother having it?

(This is part of my “Game Musings” newsletter where I write thoughts about games in general, design and development. If you just want news and updates on games, you can edit your subscription here.)