As many modders and game designers are compelled to do, playing a game can often lead to an involuntary act of analysis of the mechanics and design decisions. David Rosen, the game designer most notable for Lugaru: The Rabbit's Foot and its sequel Overgrowth has embarked on a design video tour of other independent games. In each of his videos, he brings to light many of the subtle design features that may go unnoticed by most. For his latest design tour video, David chose to dissect Aquaria:
Other games critiqued on the design tour include Gish, Knytt Stories and World of Goo. Head to the Wolfire blog to watch them all.
Wow that was very well done. Good work.
David,
Thank you for the break down of the games features, design, and tools. While I agreed with some things that were mentioned there was a lot of focus put on details of the game not being properly mentioned by the developers. The Jelly fish costume tells you what it does in the costume selection when you click on it, this is quite common in most RPGs and was in no way hard to figure out. Each item tells you what it does and this is quite important when it comes to the cooking, like when you're experimenting with foods and create a poison loaf. I enjoyed experimenting and liked that the developers didn't make the mistake of only allowing items of value whether it be poison foods, costumes for the sake of variety, or neat abilities that while they don't make/break the game are fun to figure out on your own. Today's games baby gamers and hold their hand far too long and give away most of the game in the first level.
Anything worth knowing was explained, anything not explained was left for the user to figure out on their own like older generation of games did it. Though the new generation may not appreciate this which is unfortunate.
Aquaria takes the best of games like Metroid, Castlevania: SotN, and a bit of Ecco the dolphin (including the dark themes from all 3 games) and creates a new and interesting world. It's a shame more developers aren't being as creative and giving gamers a chance to play the game without the hand holding.
Aquaria is easily the best game of 2008 and the only thing it lacked was a challenge but compared to todays games is still far more challenging.
So again I may disagree with you, but with games for the last 10+ years getting more and more simplified/dumbed-down for the sake of pleasing a wider and impatient audience, I can see where you're coming from. I'm just glad not everyone sees it the same.
Some good points, Tatsur0.
I agree that today there's too much hand holding. It's probably something to do with wanting to keep gamers playing the game as much as possible and as comfortably as possible. However, this doesn't always need to be the case.
Letting the player figure out things for themselves can bring a sense of self-accomplishment, which can add to the satisfaction of playing the game. Also, discovering cool features on your own and realising future gameplay possibilities as the consequence can be very exciting - a neat way to introduce new game features.
What I absolutely hate with a passion is when a game forces you to watch a tutorial which teaches you the extreme basics. I'm talking about how to press the 'w' key, the 'a' key, the 's' key, the 'ctrl' key. If the game expects to the player to not even know how to use a keyboard then how the hell does it expect you to play the game at all? It's completely absurd.
I've noticed some absence of hand holding in today's games which I think are due to a lack of detail and mindfulness given towards the player rather than a design decision.
Oops, I didn't notice the jellyfish description! The first two costumes I found had no effects, so I just assumed that all the descriptions were flavor text. So whose fault is that? The traditional approach is to say that it is the player's fault. I should have been paying close attention to all of the nested text boxes in the inventory screen.
However, the modern approach to design that drives viral mega-hits like Portal, Braid and World of Goo is to take responsibility for all misunderstandings like that. As a designer, if the player doesn't understand something, it is my fault, and I should change the design to make it more clear.
I don't mean to say that Aquaria is a bad game: it's not! It has a great setting and great presentation, and a lot of thought was put into the design. However, in my own observation of other gamers trying Aquaria for the first time, I saw that most of them cannot proceed far enough into the game to see its depth. I only have time to talk about a couple of the more important points in these design tours, and that experiment showed that accessibility was a vital topic. I also wanted to talk about the story and voice acting, but most people don't make it far enough to experience them!
Another good tour David. Aquaria is a game that I must now check out.
And thanks for posting the tours on moddb, as well. Valuable lessons can be learned from these - *nudge nudge*, modders!
Cheers
Great video David.
I do enjoy design deconstructions and evaluations. Even the highest regarded games can be made improved and more accessible. I hope you make more of these.
I wonder if your suggestions will spur a patch to be made correcting some of the things or at least including the control listings.
I did enjoy the Aquaria demo, I never bought the full game because of the lack of direction. I love open games that encourage exploration, but there needs to be subtle direction if you want it (there may have been I just dont remember it)