This is the first edition of answering some reader questions! If you have other questions, comment here or or send me a question anywhere else (Analgesic’s Discord, Twitter, Cohost (hantani)). You can also e-mail (ask at analgesic dot productions).
In one of these answers I’ve bolded a question to YOU, the reader! Consider answering!
Questions
How do you create the “Living Element” of your games?
How is dissonance important in your games?
Does this dissonance relate to your personal life?
What narrative and research elements are important to your game-making process?
What are some tools you’ve made for your games?
What’s an inspiring fiction book?
How much iteration is done before finalizing art for a level?
Do you have favorite, inspiring writing about games?
What are your favorite Ys games?
What advice would you give a beginner game developer?
Can you do a kickflip?
Long Answers
its difficult to articulate, but one of my favorite aspects of yalls games is this hard-to-place Living element, as if you are encountering the worlds and stories not in an “objective” or literal way, but instead as filtered through the experience and emotion of a distinct and rich being. im thinking of sephonie’s sentience, the narrator of even the ocean, and the anodyne games’ feeling of being pulled from some mind’s unconscious emotion. is this a deliberate pattern, or do you have a different perspective on what im attempting to describe, and what do you think draws yall to it?
This is a great question! Ability-wise there are two reasons as to why Marina and I excel at this: I'm very attuned to about what sense of place is conveyed in a game level, and Marina is very attuned to the way in which the shapes of a game convey meaning based on the game's verbs. For me this stems from growing up post-NES generation within online digital spaces and the immersive 3D spaces of N64 and beyond. For Marina I reckon it relates to her background as an artist and longer history of childhood game development. And of course there’s overlap in these attunements and they are also compatible.
So we were able to pull off something great with even our first game Anodyne, but it was only through repeated games and self-analysis that I think we've gotten better at more complex ways of doing it consistently. (For example, in Anodyne 1 we partially lucked out that I decided to pick a tile-based Zelda-y game - a format which really helps guide one down the path of leaning on simple aspects of the game, like tile placements, to express stuff). Still, making a long game is not like something with a faster process (for me at least) like writing a song.
Over the years we've grown good at articulating the "Living Element" through the design vocabulary of a game, rather than preferentially through writing or something. Maybe the "Living Element" could be called "worldbuilding direction" - but not in the common understanding like what Dwarves in Middle Earth eat for breakfast. The "Living Element" is that kind of unconscious rulebook for if a decision about a game makes sense or not. Sometimes it's a narrative theme, sometimes it's harder to articulate - it could be something about the world shape, it could be something tied to the physicality of the world as expressed through mechanic. The hard thing about talking about this is that the "Living Element" is like an unarticulated agreement between Marina and I about what the game is, and its unarticulatability is what gives it its potency.
If we were to make a game without thinking about this it would feel very dry and mathematical, I think. “100 enemies in Level 2. You should gain 10 Attack over the first three levels. You need to achieve 500 DPS to…etc.” And there are many games like this, which mirror the dehumanizing way some technological progresses reduce us to statistics.
I guess you could say it's as hard as trying to explain 'what is your relationship?' with a close friend. You can try to use words to articulate what it is, but ultimately it's something far more complex than that, built up over time. And that richness and impossiblity of simple definition is what makes a relationship more than a number!
For example, with Anodyne it's at the core about some strong emotions this character Young is feeling. It's a world about searching out the far corners in a sometimes-hopeless search for meaning. Combined with the gameplay and visual language of the game, this takes form in how we arrange and fill in different areas. So when I chose to put Suburb deeper than Fields, it's because for Young, those thoughts and ideas are deeper - either hidden away, or more deeply rooted. The postgame of that also 'agrees' with this idea.
Or underneath Sephonie is a conceptual backbone to the story about Sephonie's temporal frame of reference, and the trio's, and how that overlaps. Sephonie also, gameplay-wise, has unwritten rules as to how its environments should feel and be. There's also early, discarded decisions and ideas that nevertheless still 'haunt' (in a good way) the game's development. Those give the feeling of being pulled away from reality and into Sephonie’s world… allowing the caves to shift into cities, etc.
(Spoilers) Even the Ocean was conceptualized as a 'staircase world' with a cycle of apocalypse (the water from one step flows to the next, and so on - hence the great falls/great cliffs). Because Humus exists outside of ETO's world, the game's decisions partially act to communicate this storybook-esque tone. But at the same time, Even the Ocean's world as game contains an apocalypse of itself - the gigantic postgame 'old Even the Ocean' world you can explore. That world's spirit lives on in the 'canon' Even the Ocean. So the game has this interesting feeling of seeing glimpses of a world’s final hours, but it’s done subtly through the tone of traversing the world, talking to people, etc. I’m actually always impressed by the understated and dense beauty of Even the Ocean.
For Angeline Era we're trying all sorts of exciting things, and have thought about this Living Element a bit more early/explicitly, but even I'll admit that as usual I've lost some amount of control as to how the overall feel might be. But that’s a good sign, it means that the rules established early on are working their magic, and I’m following my intuition more, and all I can do is to follow my little rule of thumbs with making levels or music and hope that the ground framework we established early on works out!
So when you say "filtered through the experience and emotion of a distinct and rich being", that's almost perfectly correct - the game worlds come about through being filtered through a being that is not just characters, but setting ideas, old ideas and priorities, etc. I think it's easier to achieve this, too, in a small team, where people talk closely and can easily get on the same page without having to be overly guided by big documents. And because we rely on a fairly consistent game element (shrinking into people to get items in Anodyne 2, etc, a plot), even if certain things end up feeling more improvisy, they'll still feel held together just enough to be a coherent experience.
Phew! What a question. I hope that made a little sense, but to be honest even I can't really articulate it all myself…
HISTORICAL DERAILMENT
Put another way, it was the historical conditions of games in the late 90s and 00s that set the stage for our games' worlds. Those two sensibilities work really well together, this recent thread I posted about in some hopes I have for the future of 3D games. This style of game design has largely died off in AAA since the 7th gen (PS3/360/Wii), due to hardware manufacturers 'winning the propaganda war' for dictating how games should be made, as well as the catastrophic damage the Demon Lord Executives of the gambling, mobile, and browser games world did throughout the 2010s. In pursuit of wide audiences and retention, friction has given way to uniform and simple games built in pursuit of success on Twitch. It’s hard to see how deep into it we are, but it’s honestly a industry-wide loss of craft and design knowledge that’s been occurring since the mid 2000s. Perhaps it’s why there’s a reliance on popular game design videos by amateurs or worse, non-developers, instead of more back-and-forth with designers. Instead of a system in which creative energies flow freely, the industry is a semi-paranoid battle royale to be the most popular game of the hour, letting market appeal or vibes (a more intuitive/unconscious version of market appeal expressed in audiovisuals) take too much precedence.
…The point of my derailment being that I don't fundamentally believe that the popular way of making games now is actually what games ought to be striving for: it's a philosophy of creation that mainly serves to concentrate wealth for a few winners. As gamedevs We're Just Whales in the world of game development's Satanic Gacha Game. We sacrifice our creative careers at the altar of ‘popular culture’ and hope that Algorithm Market God sends us monetary blessings by appealing to whatever desire people have at the time. Games today can feel like the human-worker-birthed, AI-like hallucinations manifested by the mandates of nihilistic executives trying to read the tea leaves of some ever shifting Algorithm.
Is the exploration of dissonance between different stylistic registers and forms of gameplay important to your creative process, more generally?
This and the next question was taken from an interview with Acta Ludologica (Vol 6) . My answer there is different but I wanted to answer it again.
Huge jumps in the story’s tone, different gameplay systems, ‘contradictory’ characters – don't those feel truer to real life? I’m not the type to make a game that feels totally dissonant, but I do value when one section of a game feels like it’s contrasting with another part, which serves to bring both sections of the game into focus. For instance, Anodyne 1’s peaceful fields against the dark suburbs, or the interior of someone’s mind in Anodyne 2 against the quiet emptiness of the Blue Vale area. Maybe that’s just contrast and tension, though? It’s hard to tell when it makes sense to describe something as ‘dissonant,’ because sometimes when things don’t really fit together, they gain a kind of logic…
Like meeting random NPCs in a game, it’s like how the world is complex and messy, and it's telling that people say recent news would feel contrived, if it were to be told in a story. It's like the role of 'fiction' and 'nonfiction' has flipped - like there's an expectation for fictional worlds to be logical and correct, because our real world isn't. But maybe it’s important to try and understand our world as logical in its own dissonant/twisted way.
(10 Continued) How does this relate back to personal experiences, and ways of relating to social norms? Do you find that these kinds of discrepancies or dyssynchronies carry over from lived experience to some extent?
Growing up in the Midwest American suburbs was a confusing experience. With non-dominant culture around me (Chinese language, Asian food, other minority friends), but also living in the midst of AMERICA with its Wal-marts and Active Threat drills, this made life feel very shape-shifter-y in terms of what I should become… athlete, doctor, programmer, accountant, engineer, therapist, volunteer… Or what friends to hang around - musicians, science nerds, gamers, art kids, popular athletes, business folk, theatre kids. Maybe this is common for everyone. I’d actually love to hear about how it is growing up for readers who aren’t POC and had more experience with family/community traditions.
I probably appeared like a ‘science kid who fit in’ from the outside. But mostly I did it since it was an easy script to follow - I think my ‘core’ was more interested in music, games, etc. Anyways, adult life is like my high school experience, in the sense that if I were to stubbornly insist that everyone should adapt to me there would be little grounds to relate to people. Instead it’s felt better to be open to meeting whoever and enjoy what common ground we do share, even if these experiences with different people from different circles never add up to one consistent, resonant identity for myself. It just seems to be the way of the world today - being able to understand different people. And as for being selfish, there’s my “Art” I can rely on (like these posts. Ha ha!)
One friend might be raving about a hit game, another is just sharing cooking recipes, someone else is showing me Christmas lights. What’s interesting too, is that if I was really into something a year ago, I might forget about it but the friend I saw a year ago remembers it. When they bring it up, there’s then a dissonance with my current self that is interesting. Everyone’s changing!
But back to ‘dissonance’ in growing up…
Neither my mom (a Taiwanese 1.5-gen immigrant who only rarely visited Taiwan) or dad (a mixed Irish/Japanese American) seemed to me to be particularly ‘situated’ within America’s fabric as other families, although nowadays they have admirably eked out their own friend circles. As a kid I felt weirdness with our tiny extended family and the relative smallness trying to follow American traditions like having barbeques or celebrating Thanksgiving. It’s not that they were bad, but it’s more like there was an air of make-believe or roleplay to doing these things.
Then, seeing, on media, big barbeques or multigenerational dinners, and you're like 'Ah, I Wish That Were Me.' Maybe this is the seed of my lack of interest in romanticized media situations…
Every one of the hundreds of Asian friends or people I knew growing up had different family and living environments that felt unique in their own way of trying to fit into America, which made me wary of easy-to-digest narratives about being “Asian.” Knowing “everyone is different in many ways” might be why I like stories or settings where that reality of my experience is reflected.
Still, I did feel pride in Mitsuwa visits or Lollicup bubble tea. And it’s true “Asians” share stuff in common when we look at a certain abstraction of historical forces (immigration movements, etc). But that doesn’t imply a uniformity of people. The urge to find common ground is natural and healthy but it’s good to balance it with a certain realism that people are so different.
Maybe this is Life in America or even the world today. What do you the reader think? How do you feel about how the ways of fitting into society during childhood and as an adult? (Or if you’re in school, how do you feel now?)
On one hand it can feel good to indulge in the illusion of a media that idealizes some sense of shared community a group of people have. But more often I want a dissonant realism in my media - one that shows how messy and uneven things can be. Recently I’ve thought about The Curse and how its characters suffer from trying to live as these unrealistic ideals (eco-savior, artist, alpha male). If they could just accept their lives and flaws as messy humans - like those distorted funhouse mirror images present throughout the show - maybe they’d be happier and able to work through things. Instead of a fate like (gestures at the ending). Games should feel less like a rulebook on socialization or idealization of society and more like a caricaturing mirror. A half of a whole that a player completes with their experience.
Short Answers
In the big bucket of sorta-related concepts of world-building, lore, plot, themes or messages, characters, setting, analogues to real life or history, etc., do any of those elements tend to be more important to your (game-making or story-writing) process than others? e.g., in terms of being fruitful starting places, or useful anchors, etc.
For story-writing I like to think about relationships between things - like person-to-person (imagine the three scientists in Sephonie) or person-to-entity (e.g. Even the Ocean's Jane and the distant Whiteforge city), or people-to-the-past (my short story Aloesian Mode and the characters' diving into layers of history/sound). I feel like this kind of stuff can more easily fit in as occasional NPCs, situations, lore, etc, or a story told through briefer interactions or places. Along that line of thinking I like thinking about groups of people throughout time - so either like, Asian people I grew up around, or a group of people a thousand years ago, or miners 100 years ago, etc. Who were they interacting with, how did they interact amongst themselves? Etc. Sometimes it feels like there’s something that happened to these groups that could (with some recontextualizing or rethinking) resonate with people nowadays. I feel like it’s easier to imagine exciting settings that way. This also maybe lets the narrative elements feel a bit more loose and adaptable to whatever form the game ends up being.
Overall though I feel like I don’t have that much experience with story-writing, so it’s hard to make good conclusions so far.
Besides Autocuber and the event author tool, are there any other interesting/useful tools you’ve made for your games? What’s your process like for making them? Also I was wondering how Autocuber’s collisions work. Is it several BoxColliders, MeshCollider(s), or something custom?
Making an editor for Even the Ocean taught me that making your own editor is a mistake unless you're a dedicated programmer (which I am not.) The editor was cool as you could edit and save levels with the game open, but it had a ton of maintenance and stuff to implement.
The Angeline Era Autocuber and Event Authoring tool are the biggest tools I've made, but the Event Authoring tool was preceded by roughly four generations of cutscene scripting tools (since Even the Ocean), refined with each game until I got so fed up after the tedious process of Sephonie's cutscenes that I decided to add a better frontend UI to it.
Most of our games have really tiny tools: e.g. I have scripts that convert a raw text dialogue format into .xml which my games can use, there was a tool for helping me place Metacoins in Anodyne 2.
What I love the most about using Unity for games is that the inspector is easy to hackily make into quick tools for testing stuff in-game or automating simple tasks (e.g. in Angeline Era, I have tools that automatically generate camera triggers, or that sort enemies into folders, etc.)
Overall, I don't have that much experience to make good suggestions for tools, since I make them for myself or Marina. I guess with game design tools I always ask myself: how much context-switching will this tool prevent and will it take too much time to implement? For "art tools" - usually we consider if the visual opportunities the tool brings are worth it. Marina usually makes these requests and they pretty much always are worth doing. (E.g. custom lighting hacks, UV and vertex color hacks for the Autocuber).
For details on Autocuber collisions, see the comments in this post.
Hi there! I'm a book lover so I gotta ask this: what's a fiction book that inspired you in your game development journey?
Hm… I find myself still thinking about my 2022 encounter with Kenzaburo Oe's The Game of Contemporaneity (同時代ゲーム, 1979) which I mention in this essay. I've only read and partially understood like 10% of it in Japanese? and have mostly read about it, but the book's structure as a loose recollection of historical myth still appeals to me and informs the way I want to approach having my game worlds built as a mural of moments rather than a linear set of beats, which feel more compatible with the confusing world we seem to live in.
But more fundamental than that is Yoshie Hotta's Judgment (1963) (you can read my 2015 review here)which I encountered in 2015 deep in some bookstacks. It's unfortunately hard to come by, but it investigates the relationship of people on both sides of WW2 within Japan and the relation of countries. I think there are some decent book reviews out there too. Reading it was really inspiring for me wanting to push towards loftier heights with my writing and goals with games - wanting a game to not be an escape from the real world but a way of enriching our engagement with it. In 2014 I had been getting more interested in social justice stuff (slowly leaving my college bubble), and Judgment helped put some other pieces together with how I fit into the world. Coincidentally Hayao Miyazaki is also a fan of Hotta’s work.
Hmm, how much do you and Marina sketch out levels’ color palettes before putting it down for good? Like do you get the shape down and then apply colors until it looks right? Do you have color moods in mind before you block them out? Do you make 2d color sketches of areas and then apply that color to the models? Actually, I’m not experienced modeling landscapes or levels at all, and I am curious about the whole process. I thought of colors with you because your games are particularly somber and colors are an aspect of that that is easier to quantify.
Final art comes about through two parallel processes. The first is the level design - and I do have certain emotional beats, situations, ambiences, spaces I have in mind with making the initial level. Second is marina's development of Art direction.
Marina's process has changed from game to game, I think? If I had to describe it as looking from the outside, I'd say her process is to iterate and experiment a lot on the art direction until finding a visual toolkit that can solve most of the visual challenges of the game. This relies on knowing the game mechanics, camera angle, etc, of course, and takes time depending on the game.
With that toolkit, her final art for levels comes pretty fast, I feel? Often with a polish pass. The idea is to set yourself up for success by establishing a direction instead of fumbling in the dark with every new asset.
really appreciate ur thoughtful posts about aspects of game design that make me see not just games, but the world, a lil bit differently. do u have other people's stuff u like to read that makes u feel that way?
Thank you! Some blogs I liked over the years are listed on my old blog's page: https://melodicambient.neocities.org/about.html Most of the writing are by other game designers. It's not listed on there but when I was younger (circa Anodyne 1/early ETO) I used to enjoy reading the reviews at ActionButton.net. Other than that I like reading tweets by other game designers on Twitter, or Backloggd reviews - it's fun to find a good reviewer and see what else they like, or to look up a game and get a sense for what people thought of the game. People are very open to just pouring out their emotions on Backloggd in an unrestrained way, I think it's a really important resource.
Overall, I would say that in terms of purely written material, the way that the way I see games/the world is informed both by the thoughts of these other designers/critics talking about games, sometimes extremely in a very formalistic manner (as in really about the nitty-gritty of game design), combined with all of the interesting thinking that goes on in academic writing, papers, novels, etc. Reading the latter you realize how deep and broad the world goes, and see what obscure corners really drive people, so I want to strive for that essence in my game-making.
I've developed an interest in the Ys series due to you talking about it a good bit, so I was wondering what your recommended games/versions of games (since there seems to be like 2 or 3 versions of each game) were?
Yes!! An Ys question!! Someone ask me a Trails question next, quick! So, while I am a big Ys fan I am not that deep of a fan (yet) to have played multiple versions of any installment. Check out this website for more Ys info: https://www.digitalemelas.com/index_ys.php
I suggest 1, Oath in Felghana (3 Remake), or Napishtim. Oath is my personal favorite, but Napishtim arguably has the better setting. 1 is just a good starting point, and it's a brilliant length of adventure.. like 2-4 hours or so? It's a game size that we don't see explored enough now. Gets straight to the point, feels like reading a short tale out of a grand compilation. Only played the PC Remaster though. 4R/7/8/9/10 are fun and have some nice aspects (usually story) but combat/level design are kinda boring.
I'll also shout out Ys 5, plays really poorly, but the fact you walk around the whole world felt like a precursor to legendary TRAILS IN THE SKY… so there's a big sense of memorability in that.
I was wondering : What advice would you give to a beginner that wants to make games ?
Try to find what gives you joy in the process! Above all else if you can't enjoy the process then there's no point in making stuff. When you’re in a difficult spot making a game, you'll need to remember what gives you joy otherwise you'll burn out or get stuck… To figure this out, try to play other people's games - made by one or two people - and think about what it is that brought that person joy when they were making the game.
View game design videos/essays as an analysis of whatever games they are talking about, not universal instructions on how to make games. There's no game design advice that universally applies in all game contexts, and by following videos too closely you can get stuck trying to follow a game design that worked for Super Mario even though you're making a different game. I have seen many other developers over the years develop, as beginners, design philosophies based on videos, which unproductively constrained their design process. Game Design is NOT a factory-like manufacturing process - it's a dynamic and changing process of problem-solving, planning, improvisation - and any game that turned out good is likely because that development team had their own unique "game design problems" that they strove to find a working solution to.
Illustrator Sloane Hong from X (formerly Twitter) asks: can you do a kickflip?
Although I purchased a skateboard as a kid, I did not manage to even ollie. That being said, skateboarding is a really interesting sport.
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thank you very much for your nourishing answer to my somewhat intimidating question!
I should really have asked Marina about art direction, huh. ^_^;