In the near future, humanity has finally conquered space.
MASA, Mankind’s Aeronautics and Space Administration, launched their orbital lunar space station years ago, and rumors are saying they’re planning on expanding deeper into the solar system.
As a Communications Officer, such loft ambitions are beyond your pay grade. But when you receive a mysterious message from the lunar station one night, all the wonders and dangers of deep space are brought crashing upon you. Can you help the stranded astronaut survive an otherworldly encounter?
WE HAVE A PROBLEM is a text-based sci-fi-horror game consisting of a story-rich world, an intricately constructed atmosphere, and the smothering presence of a creature that we cannot explain.
***This game contains flickering lights and brief loud noises. Options without flicker are available in the ZIP file. Please play responsibly.
To install and run this game, download the zip file WEHAVEAPROBLEM.zip, uncompress it to the location of your choice, then open the file and choose either game.html, game NO FLICKER.html to play without the flickering effect, or game NO CRT.html to play without the CRT effect entirely.
*This is a transcription of a presentation delivered live to the Fundamentals of Game Design class I attended in the Fall of 2022.
For my midterm presentation, I decided to describe two of the games I played this semester, Wingspan and Darkest Dungeon. The games aren’t very similar, but there are some interesting discrepancies when it comes to our course-specific vocabulary.
Wingspan is a card-based engine-building game released in 2019 and released digitally in 2020. The designer of the game was an amateur birdwatcher, so most of the mechanics are appropriately bird themed. The goal of the game is to have the most Victory Points at the end by playing birds, laying eggs, and completing special objectives. The mechanic that allows for the game’s engine-building angle is the birds’ special abilities. When you ‘activate’ an environment, all the birds played in that environment use their special abilities. Late in the game, when you have anywhere up to five birds with their own abilities in a single environment, it’s incredibly easy to build up a massive bank of points. It is this engine-building mechanic that I consider to be the biggest draw to the game, and when combined with the easy-to-learn gameplay flow, it makes Wingspan a game that while being accessible for newcomers, can also entertain an enthusiast for hours.
Darkest Dungeon is a rogue-lite roleplaying game released in 2016. In Darkest Dungeon, the player builds a roster of heroes and embarks on expeditions of procedurally generated dungeons to cleanse their homestead of an eldritch horror that has taken root. Darkest Dungeon’s biggest point of pride is its difficulty, as it explicitly warns you about it before even showing the main menu. In this vein, if a hero meets their end in one of the many battles each dungeon contains, that hero is gone for good. In a defining twist on more typical RPG mechanics, Darkest Dungeon has massive damage roll ranges, and most abilities have an ample chance to completely miss. The game leans into this back-and-forth swing of advantage, and it makes Darkest Dungeon as addicting as it is occasionally frustrating.
The first specific aspect I wanted to discuss in further detail is these games’ orienteering choices. Within a game, there are always dozens of different elements that need to be displayed onscreen at one time, and how these elements are displayed and how they move are incredibly important to a game’s quality. Both Wingspan and Darkest Dungeon excel in this aspect in different ways. Wingspan’s physical release shows all three environments and all your birds at the same time, and the digital release smoothly transitions by moving the ‘camera’ forward and backward through the scenery. As more birds are played in one environment, they’re placed to the right of all other birds, mirroring the game’s development by increasing the player’s horizontal real estate. In Darkest Dungeon all the movement is horizontally focused from left to right, even when it comes to preparing to enter a dungeon, as the camera will shift from the hub town to the right and reveal the dungeon select screen. This choice accents the game’s continuous feeling of progress with continuous left-to-right motion.
I’d also like to discuss each game’s procedural rhetoric, as in, what messages or claims these games instill in the player through the player’s interaction with the game. In Wingspan, it’s essential to plan out your strategy and keep track of how effective it is in practice. Playing birds is necessary, but to play birds you need food and possibly eggs. It’s not uncommon for inexperienced players to find they lack the resources to do what they’d like thanks to poor planning. If the player does not meticulously think forward, they will not be able to play the game effectively. The importance of planning ahead is clearly communicated in Wingspan. In Darkest Dungeon, thanks to the game’s random elements, every battle has a chance to go awry. There’s no such thing as an attack that has a 100% chance of hitting, and it’s impossible to completely avoid all attacks from the enemy. Combined with the unreliability of the game’s large damage rolls, it can seem like a Sisyphean task to take down even one enemy. Through this inconsistency, Darkest Dungeon teaches the player to search for sure options when it comes to tackling obstacles. If you don’t make sure to pursue the reliable option when it comes to solving your problems, the circumstances can and will turn against you.
Through all my play logs this semester I’ve learned every choice made by a game’s designers, even the invisible ones, affect a player’s experience. Orienteering choices borrow from cinematography techniques with how they control the player’s eyes, and a lot of the time, procedural rhetoric imbues the player with what they’ll really remember about a game. In any case, when it comes to game design, there’s a lot more thought put into every aspect than it may seem.
I’ve played different kinds of video games for my entire life, and the one aspect of the gaming scene that always fascinates me is the different ways people criticize a game. A person’s choice of criticism can tell you a lot about their likes, wants, and priorities in a gaming experience. The one common criticism that I’ve always understood the least is when a game is criticized for having a short playtime. It’s not unreasonable for someone to not recommend a game because “60 dollars is too expensive for 25 hours of content” or “There just isn’t enough content in the game to make it worth full price.” The point these criticism make, and the one I disagree with, is that the amount of content in a game is proportional to its enjoyment. There are so many factors of a game that can make it enjoyable, memorable, and extraordinary, and above all others, it is these elements that I try to include in my work as much as possible.
One of the foremost parts of a game, the first aspect of a game most players are sure to notice by virtue of its design, is a game’s visual style. While it varies from person to person what kind of visual style they’d be drawn to enjoy, a distinctive visual style offers many more benefits than just visual interest. A distinct art style makes a game unique and memorable, I’d argue more than any other attribute. Additionally, an art style can swiftly communicate a game’s tone, aspects of its story, and what kind of game it’s trying to be. A player won’t have to watch gameplay footage or your game’s trailer in order to get an idea of what your game has to offer, even a single screenshot will be enough to communicate a brief synopsis of your game, hopefully becoming stuck in a potential player’s mind. It’s for these reasons that I try to incorporate a solid sense of style into my work wherever possible. And while it’s true that a lot of my visual style has been inspired by my favorite games, movies, and shows, I’m proud of the things I’ve drawn, with the resulting art style I’ve been left with.
A playtime-related flaw that I absolutely notice and dislike is when a game has an artificially bloated playtime, filled with repetitive tasks, unnecessary backtracking, and a slow story progression. However, what I find much more fascinating is when a game can make you pour hour after hour into it without you actively realizing it. Such is the greatest strength of the rogue-lite, a genre of video game centered around satisfying gameplay loops and replayability. One of my favorite aspects of a rogue-lite is the slow and steady feeling of progress they can give you. You might play a dungeon-based rogue-lite and not get past level 3, but the next time you try, you might get just one or two steps closer. If you don’t get any farther, the gameplay may just be fun enough that you won’t even feel disappointed. Because of my fascination with the way rogue-lites convince their players to sink dozens to hundreds of hours into them, I’m eager to incorporate their core attributes into my work in the future. Of these, here are some that I can identify:
-Treat your players right. The player and the game will spend a lot of time together, and it’s important the player’s opinion of the game stays positive, at least to a certain extent. It’s the game’s responsibility to keep the player invested in their relationship. Don’t punish the player’s curiosities, encourage them. Don’t belittle the player for their failures, but make sure to celebrate their successes. There’s nothing more irritating for me personally when a game decides to turn the player into a punching bag for engaging with it. One of the biggest criticisms of Undertale that I’ve never been able to overlook is how it treats the player. One of the biggest selling points for Undertale is how the story and world change depending on the player’s actions, in particular, whether or not the player kills the monsters that they encounter, but some have complained that this isn’t communicated clearly enough, and are frustrated when the game mocks them for their choices. After all, it’s not a crazy decision to attack the monster in an RPG-like game, but should the player do just that in the game’s opening level, their save file is locked out of the game’s ‘best ending’ and certain characters will call them a murderer.
-Unlockables can complement player progression. You can’t be a great rogue-lite without a good unlockable system. Some have more than one! The reason for this is simple. As a player progresses through a rogue-lite, they’ll typically be chasing one giant goal at the end of the game, be it escaping a dungeon, reviving their dead relative, or slaying an eldritch horror, but these goals are very difficult, and it will take a long time for the player to gather the skill and the resources to conquer all the game’s obstacles and reach that final checkpoint. An easy way to subtly string them along other than their ultimate goal is to feed them unlockables that function as a secondary motivation, a second area where the player can make progress. Whether it’s with a currency that can purchase or upgrade weapons, relics that offer unique effects on gameplay, or cosmetic changes that don’t affect the gameplay at all, adding secondary goals the player can accomplish on the way to their primary goals is an ingenious and effective way to keep them engaged. Some of my favorite examples of this include Hades and Enter the Gungeon. In Hades, the player can unlock different weapons that change up the hack-and-slash gameplay significantly, while Enter the Gungeon’s main draw is its huge assortment of guns and items the player can unlock and find in their adventures, leading to a truly unique run every time the game is played.
-Above all else, a solid understanding of how to make your gameplay fun and cohesive is required. It makes me sad when I find a game that checks all the boxes I appreciate the most in a game — style, pacing, layered sense of progression — yet fails when it comes to its core gameplay loop. There can be balance issues, where the game’s numbers just don’t feel right, control issues, where the way the player navigates the gamespace is flawed, or visual issues, an especially crippling affliction to an action game, where the place an enemy appears on screen doesn’t line up with where the game’s code sees the enemy as standing. All of these are flaws that can negatively affect gameplay enjoyment, but all of these aspects can affect gameplay positively as well. It’s easy for me to point out flaws that can exist in a game that I should avoid as a designer, as I have years of experience playing games with a somewhat critical eye, but it’s much harder to positively identify aspects of gameplay that I can incorporate in my work in the future. I believe that the ability to create satisfying gameplay requires experience above all other metrics, and I’m very excited to get more experience under my belt.
I could list a dozen examples of gameplay I’ve found fun, but a lot of it would come down to personal preference, so instead, I’ll take a look at how one game creates engaging gameplay while it expands on the game’s core structure. Role-playing games, games where players take control of characters, are often quite simple. The player has one or more characters that have an amount of health or health points, and their characters battle with enemies that also have health or health points. The goal of each battle is to reduce the enemy’s health to zero before your characters’ health reaches zero. It is the game designers’ challenge then to make those simple encounters into engaging memorable spectacles, but how exactly do they do that? Some of it calls back to my prior sections of this post, with style. What do the characters look like? Are they discernible from each other, each one unique? It’s essential to make sure the characters are more than just number values to the player. This can also be done with writing. What are the character’s motivations, and why are they on this adventure? Writing is one the most fascinating angles of this part of game design because while it can make gameplay all the more engaging, it usually takes place completely separate from the gameplay itself. Does the music contribute to the battle’s atmosphere? Another aspect of this type of gameplay is orienteering, which I go more in-depth about within my Midterm Presentation. Basically, where are the different visual elements displayed on the screen, and how do they move around? A game that nails almost all of these aspects, one of my personal favorites, is Darkest Dungeon. With its gothic style, the characters easily stand out from the enemies. The music is intense and gripping, evolving as the battle progresses. The orienteering, while simple, perfectly complements the back-and-forth swing of the battle. The one aspect Darkest Dungeon fails in is its writing, but I’d call it less of a failure and more of an absence. The characters of Darkest are meant to be expendable, so none of them are given unique backstories or deep personalities the player can get invested in. All of these elements have to be juggled to coexist during gameplay, and this is only for the relatively simple example of role-playing games. Trying to imagine all the aspects that need attention in something as chaotic as an action game makes my head spin.
Before anything else, a game should be fun. But what exactly makes a game fun? After all, the aspects I’ve listed in this statement are just my personal likes and inspirations that I’ve taken from games. Someone else’s list could be entirely different. What can be fun varies from person to person. However, to circle back to my opening statements, I don’t think that more content is fun. I’ve had times where I’ve bought a game, only to play it for a couple of hours, or else a multiplayer game I’ve only played once with other people. Those games were fun, and I made valuable memories with them that I enjoy thinking of to this day. My goal as a game designer is to create that moment for someone else, where they play a game I’ve worked on, and recall it later, thinking “that was fun”.
Trapped inside a dark cabin, a shadowy figure sitting across from you invites you to join him in a card game. The rules are simple, but the stakes are enormous. Your very life is on the line, and with seemingly no way out, your only choice is to play the game.
if the player loses, their fate is decided… Inscryption. Steam, Developer Digital. 2021.
Inscryption is a roguelite deck-building video game developed by Daniel Mullins Games and published by Devolver Digital. Inscryption is an odd beast, since its gameplay is segmented into three similar yet distinct phases, or acts. In the first act, the game’s deck-based form of play is introduced, from which the rest of the game will build off. The player starts with a base deck of creatures, with which they can place on any of a row of four slots. The opposing player can play creatures too, though their moves are telegraphed by an additional row of slots, highlighting what they plan to do next. Each creature has an attack stat and a health stat, and at the end of one’s turn, all their creatures on the board will attack, either lowering the health stat of the opposing creature, or attacking the foe directly, and tipping the weighing scale, which decides the winner. The goal of the game is to tip the scale by a difference of five points.
a top-down angle of the card game Inscryption. Steam, Developer Digital. 2021.
This unique scoring system pushes the player to think out how and when they place their cards more so than other deck-based games. The scoring system also combines with the game’s roguelite elements to favor the player’s personal style. Will you build a hyper aggressive deck where it’s not uncommon to claim a fabled one-turn-kill? Or will you focus on equipping your creatures with powerful defensive abilities to be able to weather any attack from your foe?
the peltsman can provide the player useful items Inscryption. Steam, Developer Digital. 2021.the player can choose what events they encounter Inscryption. Steam, Developer Digital. 2021.
It’s the game’s gothic personality that really makes it stand out. When the player eventually loses in Inscryption, which it is impossible not to on the first go, the shadowy figure across the table says that he plans to end your life, and by taking your picture with an enchanted camera, he traps the player character in a card. A new character then appears at the table, and the player must start their deck from scratch. The game’s commitment to this ghoulish tone is consistent throughout the first act. The bulk of this opening stretch of gameplay is spent seated across from a figure that is completely hidden to you. The cards are played in low lighting, and most of the cabin is in shadow, making it feel like the entire world is contained on the table between the two of you. Additionally, the game’s low-poly art style leaves the nitty gritty details to the player’s imagination, an advantage A massive boon the game features is its great sense of timing. While the cards are placed and move on the board in a realistic way, every movement is snappy, making the game flow excellently, especially when compared to other card-based video games I’ve played that feel like a slog sometimes.
the game’s first boss, though it’s just the shadowy figure with a mask. Inscryption. Steam, Developer Digital. 2019.
If the player chooses to, they can stand up and explore the interior of the cabin in which they are trapped, which features a couple miniature puzzles that reward the player with powerful new items and cards, some of which that are essential to progressing the game. Some of the cards that the player comes across in their game actually speak and offer advice for how to defeat the shadowy figure once and for all. By following their orders and uncovering the secrets in the cabin, the player finds their own roll of film, and after defeating the shadowy figure in a climactic battle, they take a picture of him using his own camera, ending the first act of the game.
Personally, when I decided to play Inscryption, I didn’t know how much this game really had to offer. All the advertisements I saw for the game had shown gameplay from the first act, and they’d all focused on the game’s horror aspects. What the game offered me next, and what I had not expected at all, was a bank of video logs by a card-collecting enthusiast named Luke Carder. These vlogs begin to tell the story of how Carder finds a mysterious card pointing him to the location of a buried computer disc which appears to be the very game of Inscryption that I’d been playing for hours, and it is the continuously evloving story of Inscryption that remains one of its most fascinating aspects for the whole playthrough.
Luke Carder records a vlog Inscryption. Steam, Developer Digital. 2021.Carder finds the Inscryption game Inscryption. Steam, Developer Digital. 2021.
The next act takes the form of a top-down RPG, more akin to Pokémon than the horror game Inscryption had been performing as prior. The player character is tasked with defeating the four Scrybes of Inscryption, each one commanding a different aspect, and with it, a different mechanic that fundamentally expounds upon how the game is played. Leshy, the Scrybe of Beasts, and our shadowy figure from the first act, has a sacrificial mechanic where weaker creatures must be sacrificed in order to play stronger ones. Grimora, the Scrybe of the Dead, has a mechanic where everytime a creature dies, the player receives one bone token, which they can spend to play certain creatures. Both Leshy and Grimora’s mechanics were introduced in the first act, but the other scrybes have entirely new ones. Magnificus, the Scrybe of the Magicks, holds creatures that can only be played if a creature brandishing a Mox is on his field. P03, the Scrybe of Technology, introduces a mechanic where the player has a certain amount of energy each turn to play robotic creatures. It’s all but stated that the three Scrybes other than Leshy were the talking cards that helped the player in Act 1, and that Leshy had used his camera to take control of the game before the player defeated him.
the rpg overworld Inscryption. Steam, Developer Digital. 2021.the same card game in the rpg Inscryption. Steam, Developer Digital. 2021.
After defeating all four Scrybes, P03 reveals that he wants to be in control this time, and in the third act, with gameplay very similar to the first, he traps the player in is factory and demands they help him bring about The Great Transcendence. Expanding on the base game from Acts 1 and 2, Act 3 adds another card row to the board, from four to five. Additionally, while the player could choose their own mechanic to focus their deck on in Act 2, in Act 3, their forced to play by P03’s rules, as all cards have an energy value that can only be met after a few turns have passed. While the gameplay is still very similar, the game mostly abandons its horror elements, instead focusing on the game’s plot, as the other three Scrybes ask once again for your help to stop P03’s plan. The Great Transcendence is revealed to be a mass upload of thousands of copies of Inscryption to the internet, but as the player defeats P03 in a final boss battle, his plot is averted. However, Grimora hints at a great evil that is contained deep within the game’s files and executes a command to delete all the game’s files.
P03’s home turf Inscryption. Steam, Developer Digital. 2021.the scrybes scheme against P03 Inscryption. Steam, Developer Digital. 2021.
In one final sequence, the player faces off against all the remaining Scrybes, though there’s little risk of losing. Grimora, Magnificus, and Leshy are slowly deleted, and in a final cutscene, it’s revealed that Luke Carder was killed by the publishers of the fictional Inscryption game, with the supposed evils remaining unrevealed.
one last game with Leshy Inscryption. Steam, Developer Digital. 2021.
The game’s wild variance of gameplay and story is a massive plus, especially how each act expands on the base gameplay system introduced in the opening chapter. However, the story, while subtle in the first act, takes center stage from Act 2 onwards, as Luke Carder’s vlogs take several minutes to watch in full. On another note, the game makes a rather bizarre choice when it comes to the player character. Starting in Act 2, Carder’s voice can occasionally be heard commenting on the gameplay, basically confirming that all the player’s gameplay is, has been, and will be, in-universe gameplay recorded by Luke Carder. In my opinion, this subtracts from the player’s presence within the game. The choices the player makes in each moment lose a little of their value, as in the game’s story, they’re not choices made by the player, they’re choices made by Luke Carder. Carder’s comments are very uncommon, so the effect is mostly invisible.
Thankfully, during the concluding sequence, Carder is mostly silent, letting the player comprehend the game’s events and focus on their final few matches. The last duels with each of the Scrybes are almost heart-wrenching. Grimora pontificates on the beauty of death even in the face of it, Magnificus challenges the player in a humorous Yu-Gi-Oh parody, and Leshy laments that he just wants to play more rounds with you. The weighing scale is deleted, but Leshy says it doesn’t matter, as it’s fun enough to play the game without keeping score. This moment reveals what the game had been preaching practically the entire time. No matter what variations the gameplay featured, or how the card game was presented, it was fun, and even when the game was horror-heavy, I really wished I could’ve played more. It’s a shame that a story-heavy game like this has less replay value than other roguelites, but a free update released after the game came out added a game mode featuring an endless deck-building adventure that the player could make as difficult as they wanted.
