Originally posted on Medium
Hi, I’m Melos Han-Tani, composer, teacher, and co-developer of narrative platformer, Even the Ocean. If you liked this essay, you can follow me on Twitter. I’m currently working on a lo-fi 3rd-person adventure, All Our Asias. (2023 Melos: it released in 2018. Also I stopped teaching in 2019)
Recently, a tweet about games and difficulty got traction.
I’m glad this tweet got visibility, because we did a lot of that when making Even the Ocean — and it means we were thinking in the right direction. If you’re not familiar with Even the Ocean, it’s a narrative platformer where your health is a two-way energy bar. Obstacles in the environment change its balance, which affect your movement physics. Filling up the bar too much results in death. Here’s a trailer.
Even the Ocean addressed difficulty in a few ways:
Game Modes — letting you play only the story, or platforming-heavy levels
Accessibility Options — letting you turn off damage, movement, and more
Level Design — level design is focused on play and intuiting your way through levels by adjusting the energy bar, rather than pure difficulty
“I’m here for the story.”
Enter our Game Mode Selection.
Even the Ocean is a platforming game that smoothly transitions between more JRPG-like town exploration, and more platforming-heavy Power Plant areas. You receive a mission from the central Whiteforge City, make your way out to an area (such as a beach resort), and enter the local Power Plant in order to fix something and advance the plot.
Even the Ocean features a “Story” mode. In it, you can skip the platforming-heavy sections of the game. So upon entering a Power Plant, instead of having to play the level, the game warps you to the final room of the Power Plant.
We added this because what if you want to replay the game but don’t feel like doing the platforming? Sometimes you only want to experience a slice of the game on subsequent playthroughs. I’m sure we all have sections of games we would loathe to replay (hello, Dark Souls’ Blighttown). Some JRPG re-releases have done this with letting you skip random battles. Indeed, in certain games, these features may give a player an incomplete experience, but in some games, they may reduce boring padding (I’m looking at you, Dragon Quest 11!). But, even in the case of an incomplete experience, is there a problem? A player, who may otherwise not have the time or dexterity to play the game — still gets something out of an experience, even if it isn’t the ‘ideal’ the designer imagined. I’ve been playing Prey (2017) on Easy mode, and while the space station feels less tense than it would on Normal, I’ve been able to enjoy exploration more.
“I want to play with the settings and I’m okay if that breaks things”
Additionally, Even the Ocean features a number of gameplay and speedrun options. You can break the game with these (flying out of bounds) if desired, but we’re okay with that. Finishing the game even unlocks an in-game warp menu and a ‘triple speed’ option.
Some of these help with technology accessibility — like the Low Quality mode helping players with low-end computers. Others are more visual/hearing-accessibility related — removing screen flashes, shakes, 3D effects, or SFX captions.
Let’s run through the others. These are difficulty-related, but also dexterity-accessibility-related.
Float Movement: what if someone didn’t grow up playing tons of platformers? In this mode, gravity is turned off and you only use the arrow keys to navigate, allowing you to enjoy the levels.
No Dying: Even if the energy bar fills up with too much Light or Dark energy, you won’t die! Good for players who want to play with energy effects but are worried about slip-ups and dying.
Milder Energy: Everything does half-damage.
Pass-through Gates: The game has rooms where you need to open some gates by reaching a button in a certain part of the room, but this option lets you skip them.
No-hold Shield Lock: allows you to hold fewer keys down while playing, good if you’re not used to games with lots of inputs (though Even the Ocean has relatively few — just jump, shield, move, sit, and pause.)
Cloud Indicator: Indicates when you’re above a ‘cloud’ platform (which you can hold down and press jump, in order to jump down through)
We even added “Helper Blocks”, which add extra blocks to the Power Plants in order to make certain rooms easier.
I’m here for challenge
While I’d like to mention that stories can be challenging too — and that 99% of games don’t come close to presenting challenging stories. Anyways, Even the Ocean does distinguish between the traditional story vs. ‘gameplay’ dichotomy. Thus we offered a “Gauntlet” mode, where you only play the Power Plant levels. Instead of entering the game world, you are dropped into a room with portals to each of the Power Plants. Clearing enough levels opens the next set of levels, much like old-school platforming games.
Some games feature this partially as a “Boss Rush” mode.
I’m here to take photos
What if you want to walk around the game and take photos?
What if you want to research the final level of Even the Ocean without replaying the game?
What if you lost your save file?
“Warp Mode” answers all of that.
A unique thing about Even the Ocean — present in some other games (like Torin’s Passage, a point and click adventure), is the Warp Mode, which lets you pick a point in the story to start back up at. You don’t need to clear the game to unlock it. You choose the levels you’ve cleared, and the game warps you to the point in the story right after clearing that part of the game.
Moreover, our game features a “sitting” option (seen in the header photo for this essay), where you can sit down in an environment and gently pan the camera around. This is sort of Even the Ocean’s ‘lite-photo-mode.’
I’m here for a second & harder playthrough
Even the Ocean doesn’t feature a ‘hard mode,’ though it’s something we considered after release (it won’t happen, sorry!)
However, you can deliberately play the game in a harder way — perhaps you can only play the game at extreme levels of dark energy? Or you can’t let yourself hit any obstacles unless necessary?
That leads me to the game’s level design, as another form of difficulty adjustment: the rooms in the game are designed to have multiple paths and account for playstyles. That is, there is no ‘right’ way to make it through many rooms.
Take this example. If you want to avoid the purple energy, you can take the high route. If you’d like to shift your alignment to purple to run faster for later rooms, you can take the bottom routes.
While many of Even the Ocean’s rooms are traditionally “easy,” we believe they’re also layered and complex in nontraditional ways. In fact, we’d love to see platformers that riff on this style of level design, instead of platformers with extreme difficulty such as Super Meat Boy.
That about does it — I hope this has convinced you to give Even the Ocean a try if you’re curious about these ideas!
You can buy it on Steam or Itch if so.