Make Games

Polish is one of the foremost things on my mind right now (and I don’t mean the language!). This is a Good Thing(tm), because I couldn’t spend this much time thinking about it if we weren’t nearing the end of our game’s development. I know, I can hardly believe it myself!

From my experience, it’s the beginning and end stages of development where you see the greatest returns on investment. In the beginning, you’re laying down large swathes of code and you see the game progress very quickly. In the end, you’re making a lot of tiny adjustments that have profound effects because they ripple across the (hopefully well-laid) infrastructure that you’ve built your game on top of. Even something as simple as a beam of wood that the player can walk behind adds a lot to the way the game feels at this stage, whereas earlier in the development it might go unnoticed amid larger flaws. I love getting to this point, because I love putting little details into my work. In fact, the “Moss” part of my company’s name “Mossmouth” is an allusion to that concept of fine detail.

If you look closely at, say, any recent Mario game, you’ll really see how important polish is to the overall experience. It seems like everything in those games - from the menu buttons to the poofs of dust that appear when something lands on the ground - has a personality and reacts in a very fun way, with a wiggle or a cute sound effect. Likewise, the controls are very responsive and fine-tuned. As players, we may not spend too much time marveling at each of these little details, but nonetheless, we feel the impact and come to love these games in large part because of it. As developers, we should most definitely marvel at them, because it’s our business (and our passion).

The original Spelunky was in development for 2 years (on and off), and the version we’re working on right now has been in development for another 2 years. Throughout that span of time Spelunky’s design has flowed naturally, leaving us enough resources to learn the Xbox 360 and also work on refinements that will take us to that next level. With regards to polish, Microsoft has given us some great suggestions, and definitely deserve credit for their help. There’s a good lesson here: seek help and feedback and especially criticism from every direction if you hope to do your best work.

When Spelunky is finally released on XBLA (To Be Announced!), will we have succeeded in crafting something that feels as good as the amazing games we’ve been inspired by as children and as adults? That’s our goal, but I’ll leave it to you to decide how we did! In the mean time, we’ll keep on polishing until we think we’re there. It shouldn’t be too long now…

At this year’s Game Developers Conference, I gave a 30-minute talk with my friend Andy Hull about Spelunky and how it went from being a freeware PC game to the XBLA project that we’re both working on right now. Overall, I think the talk went quite well (whew)! You can find footage of the talk somewhere on GDC Vault, but unfortunately, you have to be a registered member of something or another to view it, so I provided the slides here, with some extra commentary.

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After the first few releases of Spelunky, there was one player who began nagging me constantly to make the game easier.  “Derek, I hate your fuckin’ game,” he said.  “Because it’s the first roguelike/platformer implementation I’ve ever seen, which is totally awesome.  But from this game it seems you suck at difficulty.”  I thought about it, but I really felt that the game’s challenge was one of the things that made it work.  No challenge, no tension, no mastery… no fun.  I tried to explain my thinking to this guy, but he wouldn’t have any of it.  “Feeling cheated and insulted by a game is not fun, unless a person is brainwashed or mentally handicapped.”

I considered ignoring him, but I really did want him to enjoy the game.  He was annoying but also very passionate, writing short novels describing how much bile was in his throat as he kept playing… and dying.  I felt like he might have a good point about the difficulty level of Spelunky, but I couldn’t see how to fix it without diluting the things that made the game compelling.

Instead, I fixed bugs that other players were finding and released new versions of the game.  Interestingly enough, I noticed that while The Angry Player(tm) was getting more and more angry, he was also making progress in Spelunky, getting to the later levels and eventually beating the game.  This convinced me that the difficulty was not the problem in-and-of-itself, and that I was right to not include an easy mode in the game (since obviously it would have become an unnecessary crutch for players like him).  This was a game that you could get better at, even if you weren’t a great video game player.

In the end, the various bug-fixes and improvements I made to the game’s controls DID make the game easier… but in a good way.  So in some sense, The Angry Player was right: the game was too hard.  But not for the reasons that he or I assumed.

What I got out of this experience was that player feedback is very valuable, but cannot always be taken at face value.  I’ve come to think about it as almost a doctor/patient-type relationship: the player may approach you with symptoms (“My head hurts!” or “Your game’s too hard!”) and it’s up to you to figure out what the real problems are.  Simply treating the outward symptoms may alleviate them temporarily, but won’t necessarily address the underlying, and more fundamental, problems.  I call these types of solutions (e.g. adding an easy mode) “band-aids”.

Taking the doctor analogy further, it’s interesting to think about how doctors actually take care of patients: they ask the patients how they feel and try to eliminate potential illnesses.  Eventually, they’re left with just one possible problem.  In game development, there’s perhaps an inclination to want players to be more specific with their feedback, but like patients, players are often most in tune with how they feel about the problem rather than the problem itself.  With The Angry Player, I probably should have asked him more questions to zero in on what was wrong, rather than spending so much time trying to convince him why I was right.