Simple Mechanics for Compelling Games

Recently there's been a bout of compelling games using very simple mechanics. In particular, I'm going to use the mobile Marvel Puzzlequest game and Battle Chef Brigade as examples, because both create compelling and narratively-dense games using match-3 gameplay!

Using simple gameplay to make compelling games is far from a new idea. Every game does this. An RPG uses basic math. A shooter uses simple moving and shooting.

But what we're seeing these days is something a bit different. The play is more emergent than ever, and the emergent play is more narratively compelling than ever.

Everyone tells stories about that time something cool happened while they were playing a game. The ten-person raid that almost didn't work out. The time you drove a jeep into an exploding alien. When you did five no-scopes in a row. These emergent moments are extremely powerful draws, to the point where many games (like Overwatch) attempt to automatically highlight cool emergent moments.

But you don't need expensive content or complex mechanics to create those emergent moments.

For example, I just had a fight where Storm, The Thing, and Juggernaut fought Spider-Man and two of those Spider-Man variants or clones or whatever they are. It was an epic fight. Storm was about to die, but The Thing stepped in the way, took the blow, and went down himself. Even while unconscious, he shielded Storm as she called down a hailstorm. Finally she went down to a web-swinging kick, and it was just Juggernaut against them. The hailstorm helped take out two of them, but in the end, Juggernaut and the last standing Spider-man were going toe-to-toe. Juggernaut couldn't catch him, and was ready to fall over at any second. In a last, desperate attempt, Juggernaut slammed his helmeted head into Spider-Man and they both went down. A battlefield of fallen heroes. Well, the villains were stopped, and that counts as a victory for the heroes, even if they're all unconscious.

Here's the twist: that whole battle was a damn match-3 contest. There were very few visuals - just some particle effects and a few generic superhero poses flashed up from time to time.

Still, it felt properly epic in my head, and it was probably the best time I've ever had playing a match-3 game. Would it have been better with more graphics? Sure. But putting aside the juice, the fundamental play of the game allowed this story to emerge.

Regardless of anything else, we want our gameplay to allow for that kind of emergent narrative. How do we do that?

Well, first is contextual elements.

In the Marvel game, the context is really easy: the various characters on each side of the fight. We are familiar with most of the characters, or at least their templates, and therefore we can easily picture how things are unfolding. Even the assists have a character attached.

In Battle Chef Brigade, the characters on each side certainly have context, but since you're always playing the MC, that's not really a factor. Instead, it's the ingredients and judges you learn to identify. This takes more time than Marvel's context, because we aren't really familiar with the elements in BCB, but it's the same basic idea.

Context is mostly established at or near the beginning of a match. You know who's fighting, who the judges are, which ingredients are available, etc. Context can change over the course of a fight as well, but the starting context is critical. Here I think BCB does well: the various statistical effects are incorporated into high-context items like fun pots and strange knives. The Marvel game isn't quite as good, since they're just called things like "blue/green boost".

Endings are important, and not just statistically.

In the Marvel game, the end of the battle isn't just a win/lose. There's also how many resources you expended, and how long injured heroes will take to recover. But more than the statistical elements, there's the question of how the victory unrolled. Who gave the final blow? Who fell, when? I don't think that the Marvel game plays this up as much as they could, but it would probably hurt their monetization if they tried to push this any further.

In BCB, the ending also isn't simply win/lose. You are judged by several judges each. This not only gives a final win/lose, but teaches you more about the judges and what you should serve them next time. In addition to that, the dishes themselves are fun. You've created the dishes out of high-context ingredients, and seeing those transform is fun. Put in a lot of eyeball monsters, the final dish is an Eyeball Saute.

How things end is the capstone of your narrative experience. If the arches are in the right spot, the capstone holds everything together and you get a great result. If the arches aren't right, or the capstone isn't placed, the whole thing collapses into rubble.

Although Marvel's game can give us great fights with cool endings, that's not the norm. Normally fights fizzle out without much of an ending. This is made worse by the fact that the difficulty is front-loaded: the ending is almost always the easiest part of the fight, when you have the fewest enemies and the most resources to deal with them.

This isn't universally crappy, though. The statistical results of fighting mean that a battle's conclusion feels real and solid even if the ending was pedestrian. For example, if you win without taking a hit, you don't have to heal anyone and can immediately move forward, and that feels pretty great even if you were a set of level 100 heroes against a set of level 3 baddies.

BCB punches up the endings a bit better, because rather than constantly bickering with the enemy, it's a race against yourself, a race against the clock. You can feel the ending getting closer and closer, and the tension naturally rises as you move into various phases of play, judging for yourself how much time you can spend in each phase. On the downside, the enemy isn't really in your face as much. Trash-talk, interfering on the hunting grounds, and so on might help to alleviate that distance, but in the end it is an indirect conflict.

There are a variety of potential avenues towards making something like Marvel's game have better endings, and it all involves building mechanics that pace the ending better. Some of those mechanics might be in-match, such as enemies gaining resources or hitting harder as they get injured or lose team mates. Some of those mechanics might be meta elements, such as a penalty for taking overlevel characters into battle against weak enemies. Either way, they're just imaginary, there's no way to tell how well they would work without trying them out. There is a risk of locking the player into overly strict progressions, which would be just as bad as ending on a fizzle.

Midgame Management is another important element.

When you are playing a match-3, there's a lot of focus on the nature of match-3 play. Not only do you want to line up 3s, you'd like to line up 4s and 5s and double 3s and cause chains and so on. If there's no time pressure (like in Marvel's game) hunting for the best move can be as slow and careful as you like. For games with a timer (like BCB), the focus is typically on smaller grids and heuristic approaches.

Both games make "tending" the battlefield critical. In Marvel, enemy heroes get to take a turn, so it's important not to accidentally leave them with a good move. Done well, you can even trick them into destroying their own attack tiles! While there are only a set number of colors, the weights vary: some times you'll need to absolutely set up greens to insure you can stop rocket attacks, while other times you may want to hunt down that fist icon on that yellow tile. By layering effects on top of colors, the fundamental matching stays the same, but the weight of each color or region of the map changes dramatically.

In BCB, you add all the colors yourself, more or less. With a smaller battlefield and self-chosen colors, you'd think it'd be easier to manage. However, they take a Threes approach: blue isn't always blue. When you match some blues, they turn into a bigger blue that only matches with other tier-2 blues. And so on.

Suddenly the smaller battlefield is not "easier" but "more cramped". Every match you make leaves you worrying about how you'll fit in the next ingredient, and whether you can afford to temporarily knock those two tier 4 blues apart so you can make a tier 3 red... or will the pot overflow before you can recombine them?

These are very different approaches, but they both work. One creates midgame management by adding layers of meaning to various tiles or colors, whereas the other creates midgame management by steadily adding in more and more colors as you make matches.

Of course, neither is completely focused on their approach alone. In BCB specific colors do have different weights depending on the judges or the main ingredient, and in Marvel's game you do get special tiles like criticals that pop up from time to time.

Either way, adding depth to the core gameplay is an important part of keeping the player engaged. Both in terms of adding a difficulty curve and in terms of making context pop.

For example, when you are adding in your ingredients in BCB, you're thinking about whether you can get them to congeal correctly... but you're also thinking about them as Things That Exist. "Should I add more eyeball?" is a question that has both statistical and contextual meaning, and your decision will change how you think about your dish.

There are many ways of adding depth, too. For example, in addition to everything else, in Marvel's game, whoever has the best "attack value" with a given color makes an attack when you match that color. This also leaves them on the front line, and they'll take any damage thrown at your team. This makes managing high-power attackers with low health a fun challenge which evolves over the course of the game as health values fluctuate.

Mix-ins are a big part of making simple gameplay support complex contexts.

In Marvel, your heroes (very high context) are given additional context by their powers. As you make matches, you earn points of various colors, and the various heroes have powers that cost points or are affected by specific colors in various ways.

The diversity of powers is enormous. For example, The Thing has a power where he'll step in front of squishier characters and also create protection tokens, only moderately affected by board state. Kraven the Hunter will diminish enemy tiles and steal mana if there's a lot of enemy tiles. Hawkeye can create a critical, or wipe out a row of tiles. Storm and Juggernaut both have a green ability to smash tiles: Juggernaut smashes more tiles, but Storm earns mana from smashed tiles.

These modifications are not technically part of the match-3 game. They're another game layered on top - they affect each other, but are separate kinds of play. The link between the two is quite tight in this case, largely because there's no time pressure, so the player can just sit and think for a bit about the various options.

In BCB, the alternate game mode is much more distinct: you go out into the wilderness and hack apart monsters for ingredients. Since there's a lot of time pressure, the modes only loosely interlock. That way the player can stay focused - trying to stir your food pot while hacking up a wolf would be considerably more stressful and difficult.

In an RPG you sometimes think of these sorts of things as the other play loop. Like, you explore a dungeon, fight random monsters, get treasure, level up - and each of these are distinct elements.

However, in these simpler games we're seeing, the mix-ins are literally mixed in. They weave in and out of the normal play loop. It'd be like if you leveled up mid-fight and had to choose exactly what bonuses to take before the fight continued. In a classic RPG this would be a bit weird, because the battle system is engineered to keep your whole focus the whole time, so bopping off to do something else for a moment would break your groove.

But with these simpler games, you can wander in and out of the main play without really losing too much focus, since a glance at the board will remind you of where you stand. Moreover, this wandering can be used to radically increase the context of the play and provide additional story beats. When Storm summons hail, it's Storm summoning hail. It's not just a statistical effect: your board and play state is now coated in Storm's story beat. Similarly, killing an eye monster and bringing it back to throw in your pot adds a ton more context to your pot, much more than if you just had a giant stack of eyes on a shelf to throw in.

...

I used match-3 games as an example, but I think this can be done with any kind of gameplay. You can even dissect existing complex gameplay as two or three kinds of simple gameplay mixed in - running and gunning is [running] and [gunning]. RPG battles are [initiative] and [math]. It's a fun thought, although I'm not convinced it's a good universal framework.

But it can be fun to analyze that stuff with this new eye. If your game is [initiative] and [math] mixed together, can you use the lessons learned here to punch up the context, the ending, the midgame management, and the mixin? It might be really interesting to try to create an RPG that's been re-engineered from scratch to focus on in-battle emergent narratives.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. What do you think?

Designing Inhabitant-Centric Games

This is an example game design for a person-centric base-building game. Sort of like Rimworld, except the people are the focus and their stories feel more solid, like in The Sims. See the previous post for details of the why and how.

One thing we need to do is abstract jobs more than Rimworld and other base-building games do. If jobs are simulated in the same space and time as the home, then duties won't be very isolated. This means it's difficult to control the way duties work and the events they cause, and it also makes the duty time 'permeable' - people can swing in and out as they see fit. Those are all bad things.

Therefore, our first goal is to create workspaces separate from our home spaces. The two obvious approaches are out-map and in-map jobs.

Out-map jobs are simply duties that take characters out of the densely simulated home area and off to somewhere else. For example, a farmer leaves to tend the fields, which are not part of the same map. Or a superhero leaves to patrol the city, which is obviously not inside the secret base. These remote areas can still be managed by the player - setting up exactly how many of what fields are where, or what the patrol route is - but they're not simulated in the same space and the workers are not available to the people still at home. Of course, out-map jobs are also good in that you can change the remote conditions without needing to change the local conditions, or visa-versa.

In-map jobs are when the worker is still in the home space, but not being simulated as part of the home experience. This could be something like a woodshop - the worker is technically still on the map, but they aren't wandering around or chatting or worrying about whether they need to go to the bathroom. In a superhero setting, this could be researchers or radio support or training - anything that can be done locally and allows us to lock them into a set pattern for the day. The difficulty with this approach is that it doesn't naturally give a schedule - you can train whenever, you can research whenever, etc. That makes it a little harder to create scheduling frission between different jobs.

Obviously jobs aren't the only thing that matter in our design, but with this in mind, we know that a big part of our design will be outside the map, or at least abstracted within the map.

Within our densely-simulated space, we need to design carefully. The purpose of this space is to help build personal stories both in gameplay and in the player's mind. Most of the base-building games that are popular these days are meter-by-meter designs. This has many advantages, allowing the player to express themselves freely while also locking the player into topological challenges presented by both the initial setup and the player's own previous base-building choices. It's a good way to create opportunities for the player to freely create a base with a lot of unusual elements both incidental and purposeful in an attempt to optimize performance.

But that's a base-centric approach. If we plan to be people-centric, we need our bases to support story and context, both with game mechanics and in the player's mind.

What can do that?

Well, if we want to create context, then we have to make the inhabitants relate to the space with context. That is, the people in the world have to want to use the space in specific ways that produce familiar or memorable stories.

In The Sims, examples of this would be the bathroom. There are rules about exclusivity in the bathroom - it's usually one person at a time, but perhaps family can use it at the same time. You can create different kinds of bathrooms to give the player funny stories about how the bathroom works - for example, sticking a window in it facing the living room. The exclusivity rules are in-game rules that are familiar to the player and create good context, while the funny design alternatives are mostly in the player's head, but still create good context.

Bedrooms are similar: is it one person's room? A big bed for the parents? A crowded row of beds for a bunkroom? There are in-game rules about the effects of these things, but even more important is how the player has expectations for these things and feels a heavy sense of context depending on how it's built and the people living in it.

Public spaces like living rooms are equally high-context. These are gathering places where people get together. Sometimes in passing, sometimes to cooperatively do something (eating, watching TV, etc), sometimes to do different things in the same area at the same time (one person cooking, one person dancing). Public spaces are further leveraged by scheduled events such as parties and family dinners. All of the various ways people can gather have context, and the space itself enables those contexts while simultaneously creating additional context in all the ways it doesn't quite fit. For example, if your party can't easily get food, you get more context: hungry guests moving into the kitchen instead of staying in a completely open space, now standing clumped together.

All that said, The Sims still uses a meter-by-meter construction system. Well, there are some differences.

The Sims construction focuses on walls to a great extent. Most base-building games have walls that are one tile thick: meter thick walls! But The Sims has paper-thin walls, and this allows the player to carve up map quite densely and with ease. This packs far more useable space into the same size map. This may sound unimportant, but it's critical. Not only can you fit more, larger characters onto the player's screen at one time, but the characters are also substantially closer together, allowing them to interact more regularly and freely. For example, someone in the kitchen can easily chat with someone in the living room, whereas if the walls were a meter thick, that would feel more like shouting range.

These seem like small details, but when it comes to creating human context, human details like that matter.

The Sims also has complex standing positions. Rather than "one tile per person", people in The Sims can stand in arbitrary places and in arbitrary groups. Although I don't think The Sims uses proximity as a reflection of intimacy, this is an obvious use: people who stand closely are more intimate than ones that stand meters apart. Similarly, people who sit on a couch together are in a different social situation than people sitting on random chairs.

In short, a dense space that can be used by people standing in a wide variety of configurations. A dense space with variable publicness and utility.

Combined with our off-map jobs, this clearly reflects a focus on someone's home, rather than the more widely-scoped mixed spaces of most base-building games.

Classically base-building games have avoided being solely about someone's home. Statistically, the other aspects of the base are more interesting. But statistically interesting is not what we're interested in. Topologically interesting, yes. But we're simplifying the statistical aspect, and a very easy way to do that is to chop off all the job-related base-building stuff.

From here, deciding a genre is probably critical, since 'home' has a different meaning depending on the genre.

If we set it in the modern era, it'll be very Simslike, because we've basically reverse engineered the core features of that game.

A superhero genre would work well. A team tower or secret base would be our home. Our characters could have night patrols, daytime rescue missions, media reachouts, school, day jobs, investigations - those would be off-site. On-site abstracted jobs could involve training, radio support, research, crafting, etc. This would no doubt be an interesting setup, but there is a weakness in that superhero bases tend to be attacked. This isn't as bad as in most base-building games, because 90% of your assets are locked into your inhabitants, not your facility. Rebuilding or moving is cheap enough. But players would still focus on defenses, and that may be hard to make feel just interesting enough without taking over the game entirely.

A fantasy setting could go rural or adventurous. A rural setting would allow people to go off map for things like farming, crafting, etc. It would also allow for interesting long-term setups, since sending children away for years would not be uncommon. However, I'm not sure that the feel of rural fantasy life would make much of an impact on the player.

An adventuring setting could be fun, though. You could run a guildhouse. It would have a lot of similarities with the superhero idea, but missions would often take several days, and managing funds would probably be more important. The medieval lifestyle simplifies the living space considerably, and characters would be far more likely to have to spend their leisure time together instead of separately watching TV or whatever.

A sci fi setting might be fun. You could create a Mars base or something, with dome bubbles for inhabitable areas. Within each dome, only thin walls would be used for weight and air permeability, allowing for very dense space. The lifestyle of science fiction might not have much impact on the player, but sci fi is more flexible than fantasy, so it's possible to just make their lifestyles more familiar even if it doesn't really make too much sense in the setting.

Well, you could also do something like Firefly, where it's aboard a space ship. The problem with this is that space ships often have very heavy, environmentally-sealed areas. In addition, there's not really any "off map" to go to, meaning that our job management might be hard.

A fantasy sailing ship might be fun, too. Job management might be hard due to the lack of 'off map', but I think it could be managed.

There are a lot of possibilities. I don't really feel the need to push further down any given road right now, though. I'll just let my brain rest a bit.

What do you think?

The Sims vs Rimworld

There's a new genre hiding in plain sight. A genre about people.

Base building games are including more and more "personal simulations" about the people in those bases. For example, in Rimworld each member of your crew is simulated in great detail. Not only their stats and skills, but also their moods, personalities, traits, and so on.

But it's difficult to feel the "story" of these people. Despite getting sad over losing their dog, or having a bad case of the plague, or dating someone, the character stories don't really have a strong impact on the player.

This is because those events are framed in terms of how they affect the facility rather than how they affect the person.

If someone loses a pet and goes into a long mourning slump, the player has to try and keep them from going berserk or spending days just wandering around. It doesn't even really feel like "the story of that person", it just feels like one of the cogs in your machine is wobbly.

Because it is.

A base building game like Rimworld is about building bases. It's about creating an ever-more-complex self-sufficient machine. The inhabitants, no matter how diligently simulated, are cogs in that machine.

In contrast, consider The Sims.

It's a different setting, but The Sims has most of the same kind of setup as Rimworld when it comes to people. Each sim has specific traits and skills and goals, they tend to have specific jobs, things can go wrong - it's very similar to Rimworld in that regard.

But the house they live in is not a complex machine.

Although you can build your house with astonishing attention to detail, it is not self-sufficient and doesn't need to be. As long as there's some source of money, everything else is optional, and there's no real need to optimize your performance.

The role of "day job" is less about optimally making money and more about providing a scaffold for life experiences - it shapes both the character that goes to work and everyone they share the house with. If things go wrong or get delayed, the house will not collapse just because the day job person is being suboptimal.

Compare this to Rimworld, where it's very likely that half your base will catch sleeping sickness and then whoever is awake will get too moody and start lighting things on fire, at which point a crowd of monsters will attack. Rimworld is about creating a base that can survive all these bumps in the road, even if they pile up. So anything that goes wrong is a bump to your base, even if on paper it's the story of how Anna is depressed and Bob is sick.

The Sims is just the opposite. If something in the house goes wrong, like a sink exploding, the player will naturally contextualize it as part of Anna's crappy day rather than a systemic setback. Even death isn't a sign that the house is doing badly, it's a sign that someone's particular story has come to an end. That may be very upsetting, but it's contextualized as that person dying, not your overall facility degrading.

I think nearly all of the difference in this contextualization is simply because the 'facility' in The Sims is not a high-stress facility. You don't have to worry about droughts or animal attacks or hurricanes. It's pretty easy to establish a baseline habitability, and then everything else is just improving things more or having fun with side tasks.

The lifestyle options for Sims characters are all side options. Some are very dense, some are not, but they are all optional. They provide a stable, steadily-progressing scaffold for the characters' life stories while also providing a steady diet of life events. For example, gardening: you don't have to garden, but if you choose to, it's a steady task that moves forward day after day. Your garden will never be attacked, and even if your whole garden was destroyed, your sims would not die: the baseline habitability would not degrade that far.

If we want to make a game that focuses on the lives of the characters, it's critical that their support system is straightforward and robust, so that setbacks can be judged as affecting the characters rather than the support system. Similarly, the progression system needs to be character-centric rather than facility-centric.

As an example, Rimworld's research system unlocks construction options for the whole base once someone researches how to build it. A character-centric approach would be to allow only that character to build it.

In addition to being character-centric, a character's chosen lifestyle/career/hobby needs to provide a stable, steadily-advancing scaffold, needs to exert pressure on their life and the life of those around them, needs to provide small random events and schedule burps, and needs to respond to a character's own personality/pressure/situation outside of the lifestyle.

For example, rather than the farming system Rimworld currently has (identical to other games such as Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft), we would instead have the farmer work fields on a schedule. The more fields, the more hours of the day are required, and time spikes at harvest and planting. The result is a nice, predictable, slowly-changing curve as to how much time they have to work and how much time is available for other pursuits. Their early-morning schedule would bump up nicely against someone who gets up later - for example, a researcher or carpenter.

In theory, the fully-simulated fields work this way. But in practice, there are too many variables. For example, just walking from point A to point B can take a lot of extra time. Also, the characters aren't great at schedules, and frequently get distracted by their overwhelming need to pick up a meal halfway across the map or whatever.

By reducing the simulation fidelity, we can allow for a more 'readable' character lifestyle. This will help the player to 'feel' the character's life, personality, needs, and so on.

And I think that is where a genre is hiding.

Right in there.