Global Game Jam 2014: Squared Interactions

I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about this year's GGJ because I have been so tired lately. Something to do with the Finnish winter perhaps. At least I went there, and even finished a project. I have skipped a few game jams due to various reasons from lack of energy to health problems in the past year and I think the last one I actually went to was last year's GGJ. Once again I had grandeur plans of joining someone else's project to save myself some headache...

Here's the game (webkit browsers recommended)

1. Theme and concept

This year's theme was a phrase: "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." My mind was pretty much screaming to do something artistic, something with a healthy dose of mindfuck if at all possible. I was chatting with some random people about possible concepts and among the more interesting ones was a bureaucracy game in the spirit of Papers Please but it was deemed too content-intensive. In my head the concept was somewhat reminiscent of Brenda Romero's Train - can the player see through all the paperwork what harm will befall the applicants if he follows the rules blindly. Other concepts I thought of were somewhat similar; the general idea was: it would be up to the player to decide what the game is about. The final piece of the brainstorm puzzle came from the diversifiers. 

The diversifiers were published a few days before the jam. Initially I was thinking one of them felt like it didn't belong to a jam: the Bechdel test one. I felt that way because dialogue is very rarely something you want in a jam game. Naturally I chose to pursue this diversifier but not through written dialogue: I wanted to make a game that's an abstraction of a conversation. My inspiration was The Marriage and I also wanted to use nothing but simple boxes for my graphics. I figured the game would have two squares representing two women (originally pink boxes) and one representing a man (blue box). The squares would move based on some rules that allowed the player to guide the conversation. If either pink box ever hit the blue box, the game would end. I wasn't entirely sure what the exact mechanics would be but I felt it was a concept worth pitching.

Pitch we did. Once again I was slightly disappointed at how ordinary most of the concepts were. Platformer, point-and-click, area control... some sounded also a bit too ambitious. There were two other concepts I considered working on instead of my own: a fridge magnet poetry game and a button mashing game that where the idea was to use player inputs throughout the game to produce a song or something like that in the end. We had some plans to form an art game coalition but nothing game out of it ultimately. At this point I was still not sure if I really wanted to even do this jam but I stayed on the site to see what people were up to. I didn't even take out my computer - I just worked inside my head and shared some design ideas with one organizer who I recruited as a co-designer. 

In the final design I actually combined all three of the more artistic game concepts. Unfortunately I didn't find the person who pitched the poetry game idea earlier but I proceeded to assimilate the mechanic anyway. So the final design: the squares would move independently to depict the living nature of a conversation. The player would influence the behavior of the squares by dragging words from a word pool into the topic area. Placing a word would change something: size of a square (ego) or its speed (enthusiasm). Finally I decided that ego-inflating words would also push the other square away. Likewise, ego-reducing words would attract the other square. Enthusiasm was affected by discussion topics - each square liked a random set of topics and disliked the rest. The dynamics I planned were quite a bit more complicated than what you'll see in the outcome but the concepts of ego and enthusiasm are there. 

2. Development

I once again chose to use CraftyJS. I have tried a few other JS game libraries in the past year but there has been no real advantage over Crafty with any of them. Best stick to what I know. I worked with a rather lazy pace on this one. The concept itself was very easy to implement but like always, I managed to create some hard to detect bugs. I had great plans for how the squares would move, including having them connected to each other with a rubber band. Ultimately I didn't feel like dealing with all that math and went for something very simple. Honestly it doesn't matter that much in the outcome. There's really not that much to talk about development this year. I was done in about ten hours which is like twice as much as a project of this scale should have taken. I took the laziest possible path in every turn and my code was really sloppy.

I didn't use any obvious color does for the squares and it's probably very hard  to figure out how the game works or what it's all about. I dropped some hints like the game ending in failure if any word that somehow means a man is chosen. When the game ends through one of the squares touching the third one, the end screen has another hint: "The third party interrupted". The fact that I ticked the "The Ultimate Bechdel Test Survivor" diversifier is another hint for those who actually look at the game's GGJ page.

3. Hindsight

The game turned out very hard to really control so to a casual player it will seem completely random. It was not intended but it doesn't really bother me that much either. In a way it's a meta-commentary about by jam games in general... they are always too hard to get. In a sense the real focus of this project is the word game. When the game ends, the words the player put on the topic area are brough to focus and it can read as a very weird poem. There's a lot of room for creativity because words can be placed freely, and there are a lot of words for each game mechanical meaning. As a mechanic it feels new. It's also a different perspective into game outcomes: the outcome is not the final game state in itself - it's made of the player's input history instead. I think it was crucial to bring the "poem" into focus when the game ends. This draws the player's attention to it, and makes it feel more like their creation.

I really liked this dynamic between gameplay and creativity. If I were to do this game again, I would change what the game is about to something less abstract and random in order to give the player more incentive to think about which words to choose. This word mechanic is also excellent soil for all kinds of easter eggs. For example, choosing the word "end" actually ends the game. Similar hidden meanings could be attached to more words which would make the game more delightful to explore. In a sense there would be two layers to the word game instead of one: each word represents a category, but they also occasionally do something else. Whatever the game concept for this control dynamic would be, it definitely needs to be slower than what I did in this jam. Choosing words is a ponderous action, but the squares move constantly and pretty fast too.  

Conclusion

Although I didn't spend even half of the allocated time, I'd call this GGJ a success. The game I made is not much to talk about, but as an experiment it was successful. In a way this game is truer to the GGJ spirit than any of my previous games (well, excluding this) because I really tried something different with no fear of failing. It's hard to break free of doing games with familiar mechanics. Especially in your first game jams, you probably want to really make a game that's fun to play instead of some crazy experiment. Familiar mechanics are easy to implement, and they have been proven to work. Experimental mechanics might be easy to implement like in this case, but making a functional game with them is another story. It is however worth trying.

As a final note: it's not always necessary to tire yourself out using every minute you humanly can in game jam. It's perfectly okay to have a shorter project and get more sleep. After all, most game jam games are done for their creators and will be forgotten by everyone else anyway. Just do whatever you want. 

Nier

I do not usually write all that much about game plots. Yet I find myself compelled to write my thoughts about Nier's story. I totally dismissed this game at the time it came out because on the surface it looked like a very mediocre action rpg, and I wasn't such a big fan of Square-Enix at that time either. Much more recently I picked the name up from this article after deeming the list quite credible since it featured Valkyria Chronicles (a marvelous game I have played) and Trails in the Sky plus Radiant Historia (games I was planning to play at the time anyway - I have now started Trails in the Sky). Nier's description promised interesting story and dialogue - both valid reasons to play games for me.

So let's get a few thing out of the way: as a game Nier is not very interesting. Its battle system is a poor imitation of games like God of War and among all the spells in the game I ended up using mostly three. The game is also ridiculously easy on normal difficulty and very frustrating on hard because encounters with normal enemies last a better half of an eternity. Boss fights are quite cool so there's that and the game is at least quite tightly packed. Gameplay is not very inspiring, but it also doesn't get in the way. The game also features a magnificent soundtrack that manages to pour a lot of emotion into different environments. Finally: this post will contain spoilers that will most likely destroy the entire experience for you. There is a reason the writers want you to experience the latter half of the game twice to get the whole picture.

So if you think you will ever be playing this game, do yourself a favor and don't read this post. Let's just say that the game comes with my full recommendations - I hope that's enough for you to pick it up.


1. It is all about the characters (again)

One goal for the creators of Nier was to create a more adult RPG story. Surprisingly they have succeeded in their goal, although the attire of Kainé might suggest otherwise...

I mean we talked about this, right? Kainé is prancing around in her underwear pretty much literally - even other characters in the game comment on this. It does seem quite contradictory to the game's goal but actually, because of the game's sometimes rather strange sense of humor, I am going to put this one down as parody. Kainé is nothing like your typical female companion. This is one angry woman, and has a mouth fouler than any other character in games as far as I recall. I bet her voice actress has had a blast - I also thought she sounded kinda familiar and was absolutely flabbergasted to find out I had previously heard her as Serah in FFXIII(-2) - talk about contrast! Kainé also has a whole lot of resemblance with Annah from possibly the most applauded RPG story ever written: Planescape Torment.

I took Kainé here as an example because the game is pretty much driven by its three defining characters: the protagonist, Kainé and Grimoire Weiss. There is a great sense of bonding between this odd group of rather strong personalities. Most importantly, the game doesn't fail to capitalize on this. Most of the dialogue serves only one purpose: to portray the dynamics of this group to the player. The game wants you to like its characters and care about them. It certainly doesn't hurt that it has some of the best dialogue that's been written for games. I am actually just going to place it in the hall of fame in the company of the likes of Planescape: Torment and Persona 3/4. One important lesson to learn from Nier is that these characters comment on pretty much everything, That is actually the best reason to do sidequests in Nier: to hear Weiss complaing about the pointlessness of the effort.

None of the characters are quite normal. Well, the protagonist maybe but even he is very set on rescuing his daughter. Then there's Kainé and a floating, talking, sarcastic book. Finally we have a boy whose gaze petrifies living things (spoiler: he gets weirder than that). Most of the chatter also takes place during gameplay while the player is making their way towards the next objective. This is something that was already mentioned in my last post. It is a technique that I simply would like to see a lot more. The only complaint I have is placing some key dialogue into boss fights. It works on the first playthough just fine, but on the second there is a high risk of actually killing the boss before the dialogue ends. Which means the player will just run around in circles until talking is definitely done. It doesn't help that there is much more dialogue during boss fights on the second time around.

2. And now with the spoilers

On the surface Nier is about a man facing monsters called shades while desperately trying to rescue his daughter from a deadly sickness. Aided by his weird companions, he eventually encounters Shadowlord, and finally defeats him. This is most of the experience you will get on your first playthrough of Nier. The game does hint at various things and drops a lot of unanswered questions but doesn't really reveal its hand until the very last dungeon in the game. So far so boring. After the true nature of shades has been revealed and the game completed, the player is encouraged to start the game from halfway through to experience another level of the story. On this second playthough, the game contains more dialogue and additional scenes that let the player experience the story with the knowledge they received at the very end.

This is pretty much where the game just pulls the rug right out. Although the knowledge of what is truly going on is shocking in its own right, the game really pushes boundaries by encouraging the player to experience it again with all-new eyes. This is mostly achieved by allowing the player to hear the words of Tyrann - the shade that has possessed Kainé and is giving her strength. Furthermore, because Tyrann understands what the shades are saying, their words are now also shown to the player. Even on the first playthrough there is a point where the protagonist seems to be too far gone. Although he goes on about how it is important to help people it is made rather clear that when it comes to choosing between his daughter and the lives of an entire village, he could not care less about innocent lives.

On the second round of the game, the player is very explicitly shown that the protagonist's heroic actions against shades are in truth sheer mass murder of sentient beings. On the first time through the player is implied this when the full truth is revealed. However, it is an entirely different matter to know in retrospect that you have been murdering innocents than it is to fight them with full knowledge of what is truly going on. When you swing a sword at what you as the player know to be nothing but small children, the chilling effect is quite overwhelming. You will do it, because you are willing to see how far the tragedy reaches - but you will not be happy about it. This power of portraying tragedy is unique to games. Much like the shocking revelation in Brenda Romero's Train, you are forced to face the fact that you are not the good guy.

In a sense this is not the protagonist's tragedy though, because he remains oblivious to the plight of his victims. Instead it is Kainé we should really be looking at. The fact that the second round is called "Kainé's story" does hint that we are experiencing the events from her point of view. This leads me to believe that Kainé can also hear what Tyrann is saying and also what the shades are saying. Therefore she is fully content with murdering them. After all, Tyrann did not just possess her, they struck a bargain: Kainé will be allowed to control her body as long as she keeps brutally murdering shades and pretty much anything else. Although Tyrann is portrayed as the murderer, it is Kainé who chooses to take on his bloodlust in exchange for a chance at revenge. Furthermore we don't see her fighting reluctantly - it is more the opposite. While the protagonist thinks he is slaying monsters, Kainé knows the truth from the start.

It is delightful to see that the writers have not chickened out. There is no redeeming factor at the end - you have simply climbed a mountain of corpses to reunite one man with his daughter. None of the monsters were truly your enemies but rather just bystanders in the rivalry between the protagonist and the Shadowlord.

3. Artistic finishing touch

One last thing to talk about in Nier is its fourth ending. Although it does feel a bit tacked on, this ending is one of the most powerful ones in gaming history. Once again it is also something that only games can really do. There is a choice for the player in the very end of the third round (a bit excessive, including this in the second one would have been enough in my opinion), and one of them is the rather usual "sacrifice yourself" choice - only Nier does it with much more flavor. The option is not just for the protagonist to die: it is for him to be fully erased from existence - history included. What happens in the ending is the interesting part: the game will literally erase your character by removing every saved game associated with that character. Upon choosing the option, the game starts erasing your items from your inventory, one by one. Every tab in your menu gets cleared item by item until only a black screen remains.

Although the effect sounds like at technicality, it once again has a lot more meaning to the player. It tears down the wall between the player and their character, effectively implying that the character is even being erased from the player's "memory". Nothing remains on your hard drive, the character is just gone. It can also be considered as some kind of solace because it allows you to erase that extension of yourself who you used to commit mass murder. All evidence is gone, but of course in your mind the memory is very likely to remain. This ending is pretty much the perfect way to put a game like Nier to rest. What the ending is saying is that the experience was so strong that you will never need to go back to it. This describes Nier perfectly.

Still, I have to complain about this ending because it does seem a bit like an afterthought. The choice is kinda just tacked on. Unless I seriously missed something, nothing during the game hints at such a choice might come around. Much like the final boss in Final Fantasy IX, it just pops right at you when you thought the game was done. I still think it is a great thing to have, but I cannot give it full points because of its disconnectedness.

Conclusion

I don't know if this piece was actually useful for anyone. If you read it and have not played the game, I have pretty much now ruined the experience for you. If you had played the game, you probably know all that. Still, I do enjoy reading similar pieces by other people, so there's that. I also think it is important to highlight the awesomeness of Nier because it breaks free of a lot of stereotypes - a very strong feat indeed in the JRPG genre. The gameplay is still crappy, but the story simply would not have worked so well in any other medium. For an RPG it's not actually that long or huge, I think you can get the whole experience in about twenty hours (that is, two rounds of the second half). It's also an important reminder that artistic games with a lot to say are not always made by indies.

Journey

My ability to put off playing certain games is sometimes amazing. Considering how much I liked Flower and Flow, it is pretty much a miracle that I took this long to play Journey. I actually intended to play it as soon as it was published but ultimately I just didn't. There is this thing with me and artistic experiences - including games, movies and music - that I really do very often enjoy them a lot, but still never seem to find "the right time" to do so. We didn't come here for my self-reflection though - we had enough of that a few posts back - so let's talk about Journey.

I spend a lot of time talking about game mechanics and different systems in games. It might feel that there is not much space for such discussion in Journey. However, Journey is a spectacular example of one particular design principle: consistency. In part, its unwavering consistency is what allows the rest of the experience to exist. This consistency is created by theming every action in the game world similarly: pieces of cloth that are clearly distinct from anything else. Their significance to the player is clearly shown by including one such piece on the player character model. They do a variety of things in the game but because of their consistent design the player does not need any tutorials to figure them out. The familiar design theme of these gameplay elements is an invitation to interact and see what happens. As a journey, the game is ultimately about moving forward. The reason this sensation is so marvelously achieved is precisely this: the player does not need to scratch their head searching for interactive elements.

Journey is entirely about movement through enchanting landscapes. Although visual design is also a large part of its appeal, the sensation of different forms of movement is at least equally important. The player gets to frequently fly though the air and slide down sand dunes; they also get to drift in a stream of sand and to fight against a chilling wind. The atmosphere in the game shifts through both visual cues and gameplay. The biting chill of a snowstorm towards the end of the game is possibly the most powerful experience of weather in any game I have played. Although the player is simply moving through spaces, the continuous discovery of new landscapes and new forms of movement keeps the game fresh. By creating powerful emotion through gameplay mechanics, Journey is a central game in the "games as art" debate - to be truly recognized as an art form, games need to be artistic through what they have that other art forms do not: gameplay.

A post about Journey would feel rather inadequate without mentioning its multiplayer component. The mechanic bears some similarities with Demon's/Dark Souls because the player has no control over meeting other players. They will simply occasionally bump into others during their journey. What makes these encounters spectacular is that they serve no actual purpose in the game - it can be finished entirely without any help. Other players are there simply as traveling companions - and they are silent. Meeting others is just another piece of the Journey experience, sharing some of the digital miles with a stranger. It is a mere chance encounter of two travelers headed for the same destination. Although entirely meaningles and even void of communication, these encounters invoke similar experiences as chance encounters do in real life. The entire encounter is defined by its unpredictable nature.

Journey is a magical journey through mysterious landscapes but at the same time it is very much like a real journey. The game does not get in the way of the journey because of its transparent nature. Instead, the various gameplay elements enhance the game's artistic impression. In some ways it is the equivalent of The Straight Story - a surprisingly ordinary film about one man's journey - only Journey is about the player's journey. Instead of creating atmosphere through words, Journey creates it through actions. The person traveling through landscapes and meeting strangers is you. Games that truly create the experience of being on a journey are few and far between. A lot of times the experience drowns in a mound of side quests and endless action/puzzles - all of which distract the player from feeling the journey.

I recommend playing Journey and preferably doing so in one sitting as to not distract yourself from the experience. It is a short game - about the length of a movie - so this is entirely doable.