Self Reflection, Avatar Reflection

It started as a joke.

One day I decided that my game development was going poorly because I was too attached to my characters. If I messed anything up, like accidentally replacing the sprite rig's head with a hand, then a tiny twinge of regret wormed itself into my head. That twinge could grow and blossom into a fully-fledged loss of the character, until I went back and started changing everything about it so it actually matched what I saw.

Every programmer starts making things with basic blocks. Ugly, placeholder pieces of art that are there just to get the ideas down right. Every artist starts with an idea and tries to draw out the thing in your head to a real form. The schism between the two gets strange sometimes.

I don't want to work with placeholder art forever, and I can't get the personality down right with a bunch of rotating blocks. Thus the joke: mDiyo enters the game! Take my avatar, make it as high quality as the artwork I eventually want, slice it up, and if something weird happens then I hurt 'myself' in the process, slap myself in the knee, and fix the bug. This worked so well that I'm not even mad about 'my' face flipping backwards in a weird way:

Over time I found myself doing what I normally do with characters that I spend with: building them up. In this case it's been great for defining things that may or may not have impact later on down the line. I can find what works (equippable gauntlets over the hands) and what doesn't (armor layering), then fix things up proper when I get to characters that I really want to make.

My end goal is a procedural metroidvania game with multiple characters that both give upgrades and let you actually play the game with them. Mid goals are multiple types of games with unique and interesting mechanics that can support the end goal. I have a lot of notes on mechanics, characters, lock-and-key design structures, and potential puzzles or action sequences to be solved. Drawing up mDiyo-character-specific items here isn't a waste of time; I would need to spend the time figuring out how to relate these concepts to the endpoint. These articles are similar; it's just a lot more out in the open for everyone to read.

Sometimes in the process of making things, I come across a question that needs answered. Some of these questions have obvious answers. For example: "What sort of upgrades exist in Metroid Dread that aren't in my list of upgrades?" Combing through a game takes a bit of time, and to fully understand things it can take 3-4 playthroughs of the game. Other questions have more nebulous answers, like "how do controllable enemies work?". Given enough time and the proper context, these problems can be boiled down to math and have a solution, or they can be rendered into an art and the answer doesn't matter, only the execution.

Occasionally I find a question that demands an answer that doesn't exist. These are usually for ideas that don't exist in any of the references I have. "How do you make more than two playable characters function in a Metroidvania?" is a question that still doesn't have an answer, and this question prompts others like "what happens if I try to combine some of my example characters like Samus and Jason Frudnick?" or "Who is mDiyo's partner?"

That last question is irritating. There are feelings attached to it, feelings that I thought didn't exist because the avatar is not supposed to be something I'm attached to. I'm absolutely sure that it's not related to the thing I made, because this is fine.

It's not the character. The abilities built up for him are well defined and have specific goals for the future. Telekinetic swords are fascinating, armor needs an equipment framework built in code, and having the sheer versatility of a miniature army and a boost in power from magic is a fantastic power set worthy of the fantastic humans that are being worked on. The design looks good, the character's class is a sword-dancing puppeteer, and the lore already supports something like that, so why? Why does the idea of the character that represent me having a partner bother me so much?

The adventuring archetype for the character is a self-made army. Necromancers, puppeteers, beast tamers, and leaders in a rag-tag bunch of mercenaries all fit this idea perfectly. I've even written other characters with this archetype; it's one of the concepts I've been exploring lately and the gameplay style I enjoy the most. Everything fits here, everything should fall into place and all of the content should flow outwards in a fun and exciting way, but it doesn't. The process is maddening. What is so important in that question that it pulls at my heartstrings?! Why, why, WHY?!

These feelings make me uncomfortable. It's the kind of discomfort that wells up deep within your chest, burying itself so deep that merely asking the question brings up a perverse sense of nostalgia from a time that existed last year and before. The feeling is so gut-wrenching that I need to describe it in the abstract, as if it was something else outside of me, despite the fact that it's buried so deep that I'm afraid that it is me.

These feelings have more than a little to work off of. This is the first time in my life where things are actually going right, where everything could come together and work right for once. The perverse sentimentality is from the before time, where fear and mitigation ruled the day.

Let's put this in another context. mDiyo is the pinnacle of Metroidvania design and sympathetic magic. He is genre savvy and capable of replicating ideas through material manipulation, construct creation, essence weaving, and a hand from an outside source beyond his control. This source is known as a 'World Seed' and grants information on a variety of sources of information. Piece by piece, idea by idea, the world is being built around him.

For mDiyo's personal path, he pulls from a number of heroes. All of these heroes are interesting from a do-crazy-sensible-things standpoint:

Samus Aran - Intergalactic bounty hunter and the progenitor of Metroidvanias.
Jason Frudnick - Alternate universe earth genius who happened across a frog, a tank named Sophia, and a scenario that was too ambitious for its own good.
Alisia Deena Rain - A lilliputian that uses her pet dragon to manifest lightning. She sets off to rescue her husband from a cult that successfully summons their god.
Sonic the Hedgehog - A blue creature that has no business being a hedgehog. He's pretty famous for his sidekicks and his speed.
Red - A pokemon battle legend.

Morph Ball, Sophia, a pet dragon, Tails, and pokeballs. We shall swipe all of these and make them real. There are other things, of course, but for the character, it's...

There's that feeling again. The worst part of that is 'we' and 'swipe'. It's almost like I'm trying to create something that's fake, something that couldn't possibly be real, and because this character represents myself then what I'm building here has to be for me. Separating the character from the person doesn't seem to be an option either, as the entire point of putting my own avatar in this setting is to make something that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.

It's different though... more subtle. Like part of the problem is the conflation of the character and the persona, the persona and the writing, and the writing with the real mind behind all of it. I am genuine, honest, and true. I do not like being fake. Despite the sheer amount of things that distance the avatar from me, it still feels like I'm being fake by taking ideas from other people somehow. After all, if I want to take the Morph Ball, why not take the entire Power Suit or Samus herself? Why not just take a whole game and call it my own?

Take a person, make them real, and give myself a partner while overriding free will. Yes... that's it. That is a really nasty feeling that makes me want to laugh like an evil genius from my throne atop the world. Enslave someone and make them do my bidding, because I am the all powerful god of the world that I make and who would stop me from taking what's already mine? There's no way to stop me and everyone already agrees with what I'm doing because the only person that matters here is me. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Mix that feeling with the incessant need for answers and a wistful longing for the amount of time I've spent alone and that explains everything. Too much lost time, too little free will, and too many things that I can't make on my own.

"Who is mDiyo's partner?" is the wrong question. The character is an abstract of a real person, and the character itself is not a "who", it's a "what". Let's rephrase the question: "What is mDiyo's partner?"

I've been multiple different people over my lifespan. Trying to resolve the utter garbage life that I've had into something useful and interesting has been what I've been trying to do most of my life. mDiyo was the third incarnation of myself, the one that stuck around when I finally started making the first thing in my life that was worthwhile. Who would have thought that the rapid changing of names, personality fragments, and ideas would settle on a gardevoir with a pickaxe that taught itself how to code?

Let's give mDiyo the rest of my past life. All the pieces, all the fragments, all the bits and weirdness that came with it. If mDiyo deserves a partner at all, then he will have everything that I thought I discarded, brought back together, and reclaimed.

That should answer the question well enough.

Modularity Project Outline

World

Room Template UI Improvement
Once again, but with Templates
Metroidvania and Randomization: Breakdown
Metroidvania and Randomization: Forgetting the Moment

Character

A Stick is not Human
The Fantastic Human
Self Reflection, Avatar Reflection

Tools, Equipment, Upgrades

(Nothing yet)

General

Content Versioning

Reclamation Project - Part 8: A Fatal First Impression (Boho Youyoumu)

This is a two part series focusing on the fan game Boho Youyoumu. Systems analysis can be found here.

In the previous post we focused on analysis and game mechanics. This time, we're focusing on the story itself impressions of the design and game flow, and how the player would expect to see notable encounters throughout their experience.

This time I'd like to walk through the first few minutes of this game. There's a particular story that the design lends itself to and a series of mishaps that is likely to happen the first time anyone plays this game.

A colored map with many of the game mechanics has been created by Ace of Hearts. If you want to follow along with the map instead of playing the game yourself, we're starting right in the center of the map.

First Impressions

There's a bit of story to get started. Yuyuko tosses Youmu off a cliff while explaining that she is hungy one and must retrieve her two swords - Roukanken and Hakurouken - because Yuyuko lost them while she was carving delicious turkey. Just kidding, I have no idea what they're saying and the story matters so little to the gameplay that you could replace the text with nacho cheese and drool with no ill effects.

The entire purpose of this setup is to give the player an "excuse" to adventure. You have some limited exposure to the character, their goals, and how they would approach the situation. It's a bit like getting in character and setting up the scene so you, as the actor behind this character, have the motivation to continue.

The cutscene appears to fade out and back in on actual gameplay. This is sleight of hand; you don't have control until the scene effectively ends after Youmu stops bouncing off the walls careening down a massive pit. The pit itself is uninteresting, but around halfway down you encounter something odd:

This is the first hint that there is something more to this world than meets the eye. It may be bland and empty, but there's things to find and places to explore. It's also the first hint that this is a Metroidvania style game. You will be coming back here at some point just to find out what this is.

We finally get control over the main character at the very bottom of this space. This is the first time the player gets to become Youmu and can experiment with what she can do. What can we glean from this space here?

Not much.

The space itself is a repeating texture that appears just as large as the player character. Closer inspection of the background reveals it too is the same texture. We came from above and can go left or right.

The UI is small and out of the way. We have the character's name, a health bar, EXP, whatever "KRN" is, and a coin counter. The developer decided that these mechanics needed to be visible at all times, so they should be important and central to the gameplay.

What about Youmu herself?

She can do three things: move at a constant rate, jump about halfway up the screen, and shoot bullets the size of her body that abruptly disappear when they get a bit further away than this.

There isn't a whole lot else that we can glean from this area. Other games have trained players to think that going right equals progress, so let's go there.

The very next screen has a few characters that we would recognize from Touhou 7: Yukari, Ran, and Chen. I want to say that Yukari has apparently lost her pudding and needs to take her Shikigami and her Shikigami's Shikigami on a walk to find them.

This room is larger than one screen. The camera naturally pans down and our rivals are heading out. Let's chase!

The setup for this scene leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The player doesn't know it yet, but there's a shop directly past the top right exit. They also have no indication just how important the shop is to the core game loop. Even the most careful player is likely to wander down a corridor, backtrack, get themselves hit a couple times, and die. Without visiting the shop they don't have a save and get booted back to the main menu with nothing apparent gained.

This problem is made much worse by the shop being the only mechanic in the entire game that can provide healing. Just walking in refills your health and saves the game. The shop provides potions to heal with and serves as a central hub around which you explore outward. Without any of this you're left wandering around clueless and the possibility of saving your coins or for the eventual long trip is impossible.

Keep this in mind as we move forward. I'm going to walk through the most likely scenario and how I played the game the first time.

While the story about the Yakumo family chasing pudding is still going on, the player meets their first obstacle: a fairy. This encounter is in an unsafe area and the player doesn't know how it's going to react, so they need to take quick action. The most likely way of dealing with that is the same as what happened 5 seconds earlier: down the hole! They've probably gotten hit in the process and with the other fairies around they need to keep moving and shooting and...

What's this shiny thing? I'm sure we've seen one of these before right at the beginning of the game. Time to fight back!

A bit of investigation does nothing here. Shooting the walls don't do anything, killing all three fairies doesn't do anything either, and there's nothing apparent about the level other than this repeating texture with shiny walls and flat floors.

Investigating the next room has nothing apparent for secrets either. They'll continue along shooting fairies and jumping around for a moment until they reach a point of no return.

Curious players will jump down the pit and spot another one of those glowing orbs. A bit of experimentation later and the secret to this item will reveal itself: some of the walls are not what they appear to be. The reward? A charisma pendant.

With new knowledge in hand, we can find the answer to the first riddle: another hidden wall. Our prize? A health-increasing mushroom!

Act 2: Wait, aren't we in the first act? This only took 3 minutes

Most of the game revolves around exploring an area as far as the player feels comfortable and returning to the shop. I cannot stress enough how badly this idea is communicated to the player. In fact, after the player dies the first time they are going to walk left instead of right at the start and end up here instead.

That is a wall that is just slightly too high for Youmu to jump up. It's a bit infuriating actually; Youmu's jump height at this point in the game is 4 tiles high. The spot she's trying to get up is 5 tiles high, just out of reach.

...this post is unfinished because the game just gets worse from here. You wander around blindly with your health slowly being whittled away, everything looks exactly the same, and honestly I just like analyzing bad games. There's a special kind of fun that can be had from ripping apart a game that is exactly as deep as it looks, and even if I did re-create the entire thing there isn't a whole lot to go off of.

Ah well. Let's wrap this project up.

Reclamation Project: Part 9 - The Last Piece, Tinkers' Construct

When I first started on this project, I had set out to analyze and 'reclaim' all of my past. I wanted to re-contextualize everything into the new framework I have, and try to understand how I could have spent so much time buried under myself desperately trying to dig myself out of a hole that could only be described as a garbage-fire that had been both given to me, and fueled by me. I set out to tear things apart, put them back together, and finally have a past that could have normal human emotions.

Nostalgia, anger, fear, and boredom. These are the emotions that I have gained in this time period. These are basic human emotions; any kind of experience that doesn't have these is missing a fundamental part of how the world works, and how people can operate.

There's a deep part of me that wants to continually take things apart and put them back together. It's the designer, the problem solver, and the incremental improver all trying to do something at the same time that really makes me tick.

There's only one thing left to reclaim. That is the greatest thing I have ever done: Tinkers' Construct.

I've spent a lot of time helping out with the design of the new version. It's everything that I had ever wanted to make in the past, at least as far as tools are concerned, but I still wanted to go through the mod and see what was still left to do.

Here's my conclusion:

Tinkers' Construct is a system for producing tools that can be created, maintained, and enhanced over the course of a game. These tools should be modular, personal, and grow alongside the player.

Tools are a means to an end. Building a castle, hunting creepers, and exploring a a world are fantastic experience that were held back by the limitations of the systems in the game they were built in.

The system was built to last across an infinite time scale. It can be adapted and reshaped, but works best in a long-term game.

The system itself is a module in a larger experience. It can be used to enhance each aspect of the game it's in. In the game it was in,the mod tied gameplay, exploration, and progression into a single unifying dynamic that was present from the very beginning.

The ultimate goal of the system is to move itself into the background so that the player can experience everything Minecraft has to offer, mods and base game alike.

If I were to begin again, I would build up a game with similar systems that span across everything, interweaving the progression of each one together in a way that feels intentional, purposeful, exciting, and focus on either dynamic, linear, or expansive gameplay.

It's fairly obvious that I've already started on this. Trying to build a modular human with a baseline that can be expanded into infinity isn't that much different from trying to build a modular tool. Building a modular world has a different set of assumptions, but I keep coming back to the idea that I can make things exciting by adjusting things on the fly. 

 This idea is pervasive; I really, really, really want to build a game that has modularity baked into its core, done on a level that demonstrates such a high level of skill and passion that I can enjoy the game so many times... well.

This is the last thing I am going to reclaim. I have studied enough, tore things apart, and designed enough things that my understanding has a baseline. I would say it's time to move on, but it looks like I've already done that.

Honestly, I can't be bothered to write up much more on this project. All of the interesting bits have been explored already, and working on new designs from my change in perspective is a lot more satisfying than dredging up the past and looking for things I missed. Some fundamental part of my motivation has changed. I believe that's for the best.

This project has served its purpose. It always had a kind of ticking clock built into it. I do very much want to build up new things based on old ideas, but I want to have things set up first.

There are things I want to come back to, but only when I'm ready. Today, it is time to build up the foundation of new things.

Reclamation Project - Part 7: Systems Deconstruction (Boho Youyoumu)

 

某方妖々夢, often romanized as "Boho Youyoumu", is an obscure fan game based loosely on the Touhou franchise. The game follows Youmu - the fifth boss in Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom - as she explores the world of, uh, programmer space.

The author's website was taken down a month ago. You can download a copy of the game on Touhou fan sites. The game is shown off with a half-baked english patch and all of the weirdness that comes with it.

A program that helps with Japanese fangames is Locale Emulator. Many fangames don't run properly if the system language is set to anything other than Japanese. In this case, all it does is fix the title on the window to display properly. It doesn't affect anything if you do use the english patch; without it the window title is garbled, all of the in-game text is unreadable, and if you were already running Japanese locale you wouldn't notice anything at all.

Personal Note

What is it with this game? Is there some kind of perverse sentimentality that keeps bringing me back? Is it the always-excellent Touhou music remixes? Maybe it's the utter amazement at how a world void of any compelling level elements can still hold my attention? Perhaps it's the unique mechanics that I haven't seen anywhere else?

I've played this game to death. Let's just tear it apart.

System Design

First and foremost, this game is a Metroidvania styled platformer. Upgrades and abilities are scattered around the map. The game also has an undercurrent of RPG mechanics such as experience and equipment. Superficially the mechanics resemble Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, but in a Touhou themed package.

You have 4 buttons at the start of the game: Jump, Attack, Dash, and Pause. Any standard controller would be able to play this game with buttons to spare.

•  Movement

The entire map is made on a boxy grid system. The player character and every single enemy except for one boss are the same size: one square tile.

Youmu moves at a constant rate when the controller is held down. There is no accelleration; she turns on a dime and can spastically dance in place. Initially she can jump 4 tiles high, increasing that to 5 tiles with the boot upgrade.

Colliding with enemies, bullets, or traps does not stop movement at all. There is no knockback anywhere in the game for the player, enemies, or traps.

Design Note: Movement is extremely basic at the start of the game. The dash upgrade is a breath of fresh air after all the precise platforming early on the game and the level design accomidates that fact.

•  Combat

Youmu starts out with a large shot weapon. It has a pathetic range and pitiful damage, but can be pressed rapidly to attack everything nearby. You will be spamming this attack on everything; enemies right at the beginning of the game take 4 hits to kill. Shots can be fired in any of the cardinal 8 directions and travel at a fixed speed, meaning that running forward while shooting the shots appear to travel slower compared to the character.

With the limited range and speed of the shot, I constantly find myself getting close to an enemy, shooting them, and watching for return shots. Backtracking is worse: enemies aren't particularly hard to avoid, so early game ends up as a dodge fest.

The enemy's shots travel at the same speed as yours but have no restriction on range. Every enemy that shoots will target you directly. Early enemies only fire a single bullet; enemies later on will throw lots of bullets at you and make dodging everything difficult.

•  Information

Every game that has non-obvious game mechanics

Pausing the game brings up a menu with information about your character. The options are equipment, map, information, and quit. At the start of the game your equipment will be empty, but over time as you find rings or buy items from the shop you'll be able to change them out on the fly.

Note: The english translation can seem like a bad pun at times. Forum posts from the translators indicate that the source material is littered with spelling errors and jokes and they made an effort to clean up some of the errors.

 

The game has an auto-mapping feature. The map only shows up when you look for it in the pause menu, but it can be useful to see where you've been and potential new pathways to explore. Level borders are marked by bright rectangles and the outline of every single room you've been in is brighter than the room itself. You can easily spot where you have and haven't been.

Let's take a closer look at the UI:

1. Health -  The amount of health you have is consistent with the size of the bar. Endgame health can cover the entire top area just short of the EXP/KRN bar.
2. Experience, Karma - Experience increases as you kill enemies.
•. Karma also increases as you kill wisps, not other enemies.
3. Coins - Used in the shop
4: Level - Increases when your experience bar maxes out
5: Strength - Every point of strength reduces the amount of hits that enemies take by one.
6: Charisma - Each point gives Youmu one more slot to equip rings or other items
7: Readout - Displays information about items or the manual.

•  Health, Strength, and Damage

Youmu's health is bog standard.  She starts out with 1200 health. Upgrades increase the amount of health she has to a maximum of 4200. Equipment pushes this to a maximum of 5600. Enemies do a fixed amount of damage and when Youmu runs out of health she explodes in a flash of light.

Youmu's health can be regained by drinking potions or visiting the shop.

The enemy damage range over the course of the game is 120-620. Youmu's health tends to increase about the same amount as enemy damage, meaning that you'll be dead in 10 hits no matter where you go. The exception is backtracking to old areas, which are less deadly than normal but not significantly enough to make tanking damage something you'd be okay with.

Enemy health takes the paradigm and flips it on its head. Each area has a "level" that determines how much health an enemy has. Area 1's enemy level is 4; enemies will take 4 hits to kill at base stats. The enemies don't simply have 4 health however... they have 4x the amount of health that the player deals at 0 Karma.

The effect makes trying to calculate how much health an enemy has on an absolute level difficult. Enemy level 4 ranges from 136 to 52 health. The player would never see these values, they would only see that an enemy dies in 4, 3, 2, or 1 hits depending on how much strength they have.

Bosses are the exception to this rule: they have a fixed health pool and take damage based on the player's damage number.

Damage formula: Strength Level + 3 + (previous value)

Design Notes

Having the player only regain lost hit points at shops is brutal. Potions help with that quite a bit, and for most of the game you'll be spending a lot of coins on potions. Still... no health pickups, no regeneration, no rest stops, and no other ways of increasing your current health means you'll be going to the shop a lot.

Enemy health that is tied directly to your strength stat instead of indirectly tickles my brain in a way that other systems don't. It's an obvious change moving from 4 hits to 3 early on in the game and a very nice find when you do happen across a strength upgrade.

• Karma

Karma acts as a damage modifier on Youmu both from damage received and damage dealt. At maximum Karma Youmu will do half the amount of damage as normal while taking twice as much. The amount is proportional: 50 Karma will increase the amount of hits that it takes to kill enemies by 50% and Youmu will take 50% more damage.

Karma is gained when Youmu kills wisps at a rate of 5 per wisp. The gauge maxes out at 100.

Karma can be reduced by potions purchased from the shop. Karma Potions lower the amount of Karma you have by 50 at the cost of 1/4 of your maximum health. Due to a quirk in the way the game handles health, having negative health doesn't kill you. You only die if you're hit by an attack.

Design Note: Karma is completely underutilized throughout the game. It's very easy to not realize what's going on from the one spot in the early game that has multiple wisps and make the rest of the game much harder. There is one point at the end of the game that needs full Karma, and the best place to farm Karma is the first room with 5 spirits in it.

• Experience and Loot

Experience is gained every time an enemy is killed. Enemies give experience based on the zone they are in

Leveling up gives a strength point or a charisma point every other level, starting with charisma at level 2. Health is not gained by leveling up; only upgrades or equipment can improve Youmu's maximum health.

Experience Formula: [(previous value) * 2] - [(previous value) / 5].
Round both values and end result down. One point seems to get lost every level and integer rounding is the only way to explain that

Note: An experience chart and enemy values are listed at the end of the post

• Charisma, Equipment, and the Shop

Charisma points are the currency for equipping items. 10 points are recieved from leveling up and 10 more points are recieved from upgrades scattered around the world, for a total of 20. Items need a certain amount of charisma to equip and

The shop is your safe haven and reprieve from the dangers of the world.

Shop Contents:

Small Potion - 100 coins
- restores 1/3 of maximum health
Large Potion - 500 coins
- restores 2/3 of maximum health
Karma Potion - 200 coins
- lowers karma by 50 and damages the player by 1/4
Shop Warp 1 - 200 coins
- returns to the last visited shop
Shop Warp 2 - 500 coins
- returns to any visited shop, picked from a list
Resurrection Elixir - 2000 coins
- restores the player's health to maximum when they hit 0
Sword of Kirisame - 30000 coins (C3)
- lets the player attack bullets
Power Ring - 2000 coins (C2)
- increases strength by 1
Vital Ring - 1000 coins (C1)
- increases health by 400

Other equipment can be found out in the world

Hakuroken (C4)
- Youmu's short sword. The first one you pick up
Roukanen (C5)
- Youmu's long sword. Both can be used simultaneously
Dream Ring (C3)
- Doubles the amount of coins that enemies drop
Dream Ring II (C3)
- Doubles the amount of experience that enemies drop
Shield Ring (C7)
- Cuts damage taken to Youmu by half
Vital Ring II (C2)
- Adds 1200 maximum health
Power Ring II (C3)
- Adds 2 strength

Designer Notes

The shop saves your game on entry. If you buy something, make sure you go back in. This whole problem could have been avoided if the shop saved on entry and exit.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the combination of both swords makes or breaks this game. Using both of them together marks a huge upgrade over your damage in the past, effectively doubling the damage you deal at close range and adding a risk/reward element to the way you play the game. Unfortunately, by the time you get both of them, you've been working with a limited range shot and the short sword exclusively.

Doubling the amount of experience reduces the grinding if that's the sort of thing you're into. The game can be completed without grinding and most of it will be done early on, so this item seems unnecessary.

Doubling the amount of coins you recieve makes the rest of the game after that point completely pointless for grinding. Just rush through as fast as possible.

The kirisame sword is the best item in the entire game bar none. Unfortunately the cost is so high that anyone who actually wants it will not have it until the very end of the game and won't have the time to build up the skill needed to attack bullets vs dodging them.

• Upgrades

 There are 5 types of pickups in the world

Level Elements

I'd like to leave a few notes about the system-related elements here. The next post extensively covers level design and gameplay experience. 

The game is broken up into seven loading areas. All of the areas are roughly the same size, with the exception of area 1 which you visit two new sections of it. Backtracking through areas is largely not required unless you're going into a coin dungeon and need to exit the way you came in.

Every level in the game looks exactly the same to begin with as it ends. This is terrible from a player experience for obvious reasons. For the analyst, however, taking things apart is a lot easier. There are no weird hitboxes, hidden mechanics, or fancy animations that obscure all of the information we're trying to use. What you see is what you get; everything is as simple as can be.

The visual style of the game is exactly what you see here: completely bland. Normally that's indicative of a programmer making a game that with poor level design skills. In this case, the creator seems to a handle on system design, level design, programming, and maybe music. Empty levels may just be a design choice to finish the game on the premise that the author just didn't want to do anything with it.

• Rooms

Rooms are a self-contained section of the game. The camera is locked to the bounds of the room and on entry all of the enemies spawn. Youmu can kill all of the enemies in a room, walk out, immediately walk back in, and the enemies will respawn

• Hidden Walls

Hidden walls are the signature gimmick of the game. They're scattered around the entire map. The idea of hidden walls can be frustrating, but the actual locations of the walls are all associated with puzzles that involve traversing a single room or hidden items. A few of them are found by accident and a couple would only be found with a map.

Designer Note: Hidden walls are indistinguishable from regular walls. I'd like to see a hint of some kind instead of "magically walk through here because the collider is missing".

• Disappearing Blocks

These blocks disappear when Youmu steps on them. They have a very short lifespan - 0.75 seconds - and are a single tile in size. There are only two rooms with disappearing blocks in the game: the first one is over a large pit that requires resetting the room to traverse, the second is a long series of blocks over damage traps.

Data Values

Damage formula: Strength Level + 3 + (previous value)
Damage Chart:
1:34
2:39
3:45
4:52
5:60
6:69
7:79
8:91
9:105
10:121
11:134
12:148
13:163
14:179
15:196
16:214
17:233
18:253
19:274
20:296

Experience Formula: [(previous value) * 2] - [(previous value) / 5]. Round both values and end result down
EXP Chart

1:180
2:323
3:583
4:1049
5:1889
6:3401
7:6122
8:11019
9:19835
10:35704
11:64268
12:115683
13:208229
14:374813
15:674663
16:1214394
17:2185910
18:3934638
19:7082349

 

Special areas: Increase Lv by 1

[Area 1: Stone]
Lv:4
Damage:120
XP:1
Coins:2-3

[Area 2: Forest]
Lv:6
Damage:220
XP:3
Coins:4-5

[Area 1.1: Stone Pass]
Lv:7
Damage:270
XP:5
Coins:4-7

[Area 3: Tech]
Lv:8
Damage:320
XP:10
Coins:5-9

Trap Damage:370

[Area 4: Mountain]
Lv:10
Damage:320
XP:34
Coins:10-20
SpCoins:

[Area 1.2: Stone Dash]
Lv:10
Damage:320
XP:34
Coins:10-20

[Area 5: Red Cave]
Lv:12
Damage:520
XP:110
Coins:14-21

Giant Kedama
Lv:12 (x2)
Damage:570
XP:187
Coins:

[Area 6: Green Ice]
Lv:14
Damage:620
XP:357
Coins:20-30

[Special Reimu Yukkuri]
Lv:15 (x2)
Damage:670
XP:642
Coins:24-37

[Spirits] (Depends on area?)
Lv:5
Damage:170
XP:1
Coins:4-6
Karma:50

[Letty]
Hp:3,135
Damage:220
XP:12
Coins:16
Drop:HP upgrade

[Chen]
HP:5,490
Damage:320
XP:40
Coins:35
Drop:HP upgrade

[Alice]
HP:9,600
Damage:420
XP:136
Coins:52
Drop:HP upgrade

[Prisimriver Sisters]
HP:12,705 x3
Damage:470
XP:244 x3
Coins:50 x3
Drop: None

[Yukkuri]
HP:29,385
Damage:620
XP:1428
Coins:118
Drop:Key

[Reimu]
HP:54,105
Damage:720
XP:2735
Coins:144
Drop:None

[Area 7: Secret Bubbles]

Kedama/Fairy/Yukkuri
Lv:16
Damage:720
XP:1156
Coins:28-43

Giant Kedama/Giant Yukkuri
Lv:16 (x2)
Damage:770
XP:2082
Coins:33

Trap Damage:770

[Sakuya]
HP:300,000
Damage:2000
XP:26984
Coins:290

The Fantastic Human

Games used to be simple. Score a certain number of points, use a variety of tricks to get those points, and all of your natural ability can shine through. This is still how sports works, and most board games can be boiled down to a few pieces, a few rules, and a wonderful social experience with your friends.

Video Games are a bit different. Computers have grown so powerful that they can hold a myriad of information that people would have a huge problem with. They're wonderful tools that can do things that we are really bad at, like storing the entire calculated length of pi. If you can put a number to an idea, a computer can store - and copy - the idea billions of times.

Most video games are still stuck on the same ideas that any analogue game would handle. We can do better than that... and by we, I mean myself and the computer working in concert. Let's make a human in a fantastic setting from the ground up.

A couple terms we'll need before moving forward:

Human: A digital approximation of the real world experience that our fleshy meatsuits are having.
- Most video games do this so badly that we can replace every human with a stick.

Invariant: A function, quantity, or property which remains unchanged when a specified transformation is applied.
- On a design level, this is a fundamental statement that is always the same. Sometimes it's arbitrary, more often it's because we need a foundational idea and/or restriction to build on.

With that out of the way, here's a human.

This guy has all of the traits that platforming characters have. Well defined graphics, awesome physics, a hitbox tied to a health pool, and it spontaneously explodes when you get to zero health. Perfect, done, ship it.

Something's wrong. I can feel it all the way deep into the back of my head. It's design sense - that feeling that you get when there's a perfect walkway and someone just happened to 'misplace' a brick because "only god is perfect". Some people call this OCD, but the feeling you're getting is cringe and out-of-order, not obsession.

The part that's wrong is obvious: A stick can't be a human no matter what you do. Unlike most video game characters this human violates the most basic principle of humans. Even if it walks like a human, speaks flawless English, and has an internal simulation that can spray blood everywhere, it still looks like a stick.

Instead of a random inanimate object that could be anything, let's make something real. How about my own avatar?

This human is highly stylized. it has eyes, legs, hands, and wears clothes. It's not quite what we would imagine as a human, but that's not the goal here. We're trying to build something close enough to a human that it can't be confused with the stick.

The avatar is drawn like this because it's part of an animation framework that lets each piece be rotated, stretched, and manipulated independently. I did this for stylistic reasons to begin with, but the idea lends itself towards the cornerstone of this design.

Invariant 1: Humans can be divided into zones called Body Parts

Let's set up a few basic rules on top of this:
- Humans have six zones: left leg, right leg, left arm, right arm, head, torso
- Each part has its own pool of hit points
- The human is killed or otherwise incapacitated when their torso runs out of hit points.

This gives us a lot of fine-grained control over a standard health pool. A standard video game hero will run around smacking everything until everything explodes into a puff of smoke, or they do the same. With this setup, we can damage just the legs or arms.

An absolutely hilarious thing that happens in a lot of video games is that you can run out a character's hit points by throwing tiny pebbles at their big toe over and over until they collapse. This chip damage is supposed to build up over time and break the character's body. Any fighting game worth its salt will give the character a block that reduces knockback, but may still incur chip damage.

If our character were to block continuously with a shield, then the damage they would incur would be absorbed into their arm. Chip damage that would normally wipe out the character instead breaks their arm.

Any game that has equipment either picks an arm for a shield, or has the hilarious effect of equipping two shields for no good reason. No game that I have seen would ever have a two-handed shield. Here though? We could hold the shield in both hands and have twice as much health to go through before our critical torso is exposed.

Locational damage in most games boils down to a critical hit system. Shooting someone in the head grants double damage or shooting them in an exposed arm bypasses any armor stats. Damage that hits a zone tied to behavior takes that idea and turns it into a risk-assessment problem. For example: "Knee-high acid is dangerous because it burns my character's legs until they can't run anymore. I need to carry a grappling hook in case I have to get out of the acid or my heart will get hurt."

Bats swoop down on your head, trying to knock you unconscious. Loss of control, lying prone, and having your torso exposed is a massive problem. It means almost certain death. A savvy player will put extra protection on their head, and a skilled player will use the character's blocking ability to hit their arms instead of the head.

Enemies that constantly target your legs from both sides are dangerous because you can limp around on one leg, but two broken legs mean you're not going anywhere. Backstabbing enemies are nasty not because they do extra damage, but because they bypass your guard and go directly for the heart.

The main advantage this gives the design is a sort of gradient between one hit point and zero hit points. A character with a broken arm will be unable to fight, but a character with a broken skull may as well be dead if they're adventuring by themselves.

"Congratulations! Your Stick has evolved into Stick Figure!"

 

We've moved from a stick to a stickman. Let's put some flesh on those bones.

Magic systems are ubiquitous throughout gaming. The systems are usually simple: cast your fancy magic attacks from a pool of blue mana until you're depleted. Some games will throw in an extra stat like stamina or technique points, and a few will let you use hit points directly.

The mDiyo character wants to cast magic from 'life essence'. Most media is nebulous about this. Is it your spirit? Lifespan? Are you overweight most of the time because the best spells require your fat reserves?

Invariant 2: Each body part has four fantastic resource pools.

Some of our more fantastic spellcasters will realize that these pools represent the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Others will think they're talking about the fundamental essences of breath, spark, form, and life. mDiyo sees these and doesn't care; he want to cast magic from his life essence, his body, or wherever the heck it comes from.

Let's break down what each of these resource pools actually do.

Red is meat. These are the physical characteristics associated with a body part, or the amount of damage that it can take. Meat is directly tied to your health pool and having red energy is what causes their hit points to regenerate. Maximum red energy is the same as maximum health points, so more is always better.

Yellow is the stand-in resource for a hunger system. Most games merely have a meter that depletes over time, but Mabinogi takes this a step further and gives a lot of physical attacks a stamina requirement. Getting hungry makes the maximum amount of stamina you have deplete over time, and eating food will regain both some of the stamina resource and its maximum. Stamina regenerates slowly, and can be helped along by resting. Sleeping should set it to maximum - as long as you eat, of course.

Blue is breath, and its physical counterpart is oxygen. In any breathable space this should regenerate fairly quickly. Using blue energy as a resource for casting spells should allow for a lot of low-power, repeatable spells. Think something like an energy shot from an arm cannon or an aura that requires breathing techniques to function.

Green is the stand-in resource for what most games call 'mana'. Its physical counterpart should be hormones like adrenaline, or less tangible ideas such as prana, chi, midichlorians, or magicules. It can also be a measure of how awake the player is; running out of spirit means you get tired, grumpy, and stressed. 

We can even compare green to chakras. Let's call it a physical manifestation of a divine energy unit and can use that to manifest the most fantastic ideas. Enhanced speed, superhuman punches, casting fireballs, or using Pokemon attacks are derived from this resource.

Most games have mana as blue. Most games also have their oxygen meter as blue or white. Almost no game has the two mechanics working together, and I would be very surprised if any of them would try to combine "cast magic from oxygen" and "I am hungry".

That just leaves one question: Why separate these resources into separate body parts? We don't have to, but having them does open up the design space for some interesting interactions.

Let's say that mDiyo wants to take a trip underwater. His lungs are stored in the chest, so normally he'd be able to spend about a minute underwater. Recently he visited a witch that taught him a special technique called 'deep breathing' to pull more breath out of his body and into his lungs. This technique can be performed as many time as he has body parts, so when the time expires he performs the technique and moves blue resource from his head into his lungs. Now he can spend two minutes underwater. Or six. Depends on how many times it's used.

"Congratulations! Your Stick Figure has evolved into Meat Golem!"

My design sense is still tingling. The mDiyo character may have some physical aspects that represent a body, but it's still lacking something... this version of the character isn't much better than an automaton or a meat golem. We need one more layer to make this design truly shine.

Invariant 3: Each body part has a set of attributes that can be manipulated via growth or status effects

This is the point where we start losing people. You can only keep so much information in your head at a time, and most people don't think on more than one level at once, so for the sake of keeping things manageable this needs to be consistent all the way through the design. The computer can keep track of everything; players will keep track of the effects, and maybe some of the numbers if they're into the metagame.

For consistency's sake, we'll give every body part exactly the same set of attributes. Let's also both arms into one class, so we don't need to worry too much about a missing left hand in our calculations. The same applies to legs. Let's also say that legs generally affect how a character moves, arms affect how a character interacts, head affects everything active that is neither of those, and the torso, heart, or body affects concepts that are innate to a character.

Each invariant has a set of rules built on top of it. Here's mine:

Strength (Red)
- Head: Intelligence
- Arms: Dexterity
- Legs: Jump Height
- Body: Carry Weight

Speed (Yellow)
- Head: Time Awareness
- Arms: Attack Rate
- Legs: Run Speed
- Body: Resource pool regeneration

Affinity (Blue)
- Head: Spellcasting
- Hand: Tools
- Legs: Movement Adaptations, Vehicles
- Body: Armor

Potential (Green)
- Head: Social Interaction, Fate
- Hands: Mysticality, Luck
- Legs: Athletics, Dancing
- Body: Physical Enhancement, Chi

One of the goals in this design is to try and take familiar game concepts, and re-mix them in a way that creates an extensible system to layer on other things. The design should be flexible enough that we can drop it in any game and robust enough that it stands up to the harshest scrutiny and the most obtuse system imaginable. Anything that can stand up to the utter design mess that is all of gaming will have an usual layout full of familiar ideas that end up in odd places. My particular focus is on some sort of RPG-esque metroidvania, so it runs the full gamut of ideas.

Each one of the pools has a particular concept tied to it. Most people wouldn't think about mixing intelligence with carry weight, and good luck trying to define what mysticality is. Let's go through each of these in turn before we try manipulating them.

Strength: A measure of the body's ability to push things around or otherwise manipulate the world around you. Raw strength itself can be measured as a stat. In specific body parts, it's a measure of how much force can be put into a task. High dexterity measures the speed and precision of handiwork, and is often associated with archery. A person with high intelligence will be able to connect patterns and recall information to solve a problem a lot easier than someone with low intelligence. The others are self-explanatory.

Speed: A measure of the body's ability to do things quickly. Some games will separate how fast a player can move and how fast they can attack; we can put these into the legs and hands respectively. The body itself has natural processes going on all the time, and generally tries to replenish its pools of fantastic resources as fast as it can. Anything that would affect regeneration should target the body's speed stat directly.

The odd one here is time awareness. How does that fit into speed? Well, if you've played a game where time manipulation is a mechanic at all, then I would say that someone is manipulating the person's head to move faster than the surrounding area. This carries over into all aspects, moving the player 'faster' while everything around them slows down, or even stops.

Affinity: A measure of the character's ability to understand something. This can happen through training, natural gifts, or experience. Anyone wandering around and leveling up is increasing their affinity stat, and all of the associated increases boost how well their natural strength works with tools or their natural intelligence works with spellcasting.

Potential: A measure of the character's limits in a category, both ceiling and floor. These are softer skills and more nebulous ideas. They may have varied effects that have little bearing on how the character actually does things, like luck changing the world around them or being able to manipulate fate directly.

The only way for a character to go beyond their limits is to increase their potential. A character with no limits has effectively unlimited potential.

Attributes are all well and good for calculating statistics, but we can do one better. Let's manipulate them. I cast Haste!

This is the fun part. Status effects need to target a body part to have any effect. Casting haste on a player's legs will let them run faster, while targeting their hands will have them stabbing things at lightning speeds. Targeting the body will accellerate natural processes, making the player regenerate health quicker at the expense of getting hungry faster. Hasting their head will increase their perception of time, slowing everything down around them.

A character on a long excursion may want to slow down their body processes. A monk of sufficient training may slow down their body to a stunning degree and have increased their regeneration to get back to 'normal'. Putting a character in stasis can cause all of their

The design broadens the Haste spell into a single idea. We target a resource and a body part, then decide whether we want to increase or decrease it. Give it a name, spread it around a bit, and we have some basic status effects.

Boost/Break: Targets strength
Haste/Slow: Targets speed
Enhance/Erode: Targets affinity
Shine/Dull: Targets potential

Status effects in other games tend to have the same problem as one hitpoint explosions do. The character is affected for a certain amount of time, something nasty happens, and it's at full potency the entire time you're afflicted. This is a relic of turn-based RPGs where everything is bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet with pretty animations. These ideas transfer poorly into games like platformers, with the exception of damage-over-time mechanics.

If we can target specific body parts, and body parts are associated with behaviors, then our effects can affect the behaviors instead of the stats. Doing something in real time has a very different effect from a turn-based game, so we need to be careful with this. The overall goal is still to make a human, after all.

Let's throw mDiyo off a cliff. BWAHAHAHAHAHA, er, this is bad. We could have his legs take a lot of damage for doing something like that, and if he falls far enough that's appropriate. If he falls three meters there's a good chance he'll be bruised a bit, the jolt will send shockwaves through his body, and he'll have to walk off the effects... but walk off he will. Instead of doing a bunch of damage to him, let's paralyze him for a few seconds instead.

Paralysis:
Stun (Can't move at all) -> Addle (Confused movements) -> Slow (50% move speed) -> Recovery (75% move speed) -> Not Afflicted

This is a layered status effect. Each one of them has a timer and an expiration. The most potent level stops the entire character from working, effectively leaving your character completely vulnerable to whatever comes along. Falling off of a cliff does have its downsides, after all.

The second layer is movements that make no sense. If mDiyo fell on his butt, then he can probably get up during this time period, but good luck doing much else with your legs. Attacking or using your noggin' should be fine though.

The third and fourth layers are movement speed reductions. These are the points where you 'walk it off'. Each of these effects can take progressively more time. Stun might only last a second, addle a couple more, but the slow and recovery could be an agonizing 5 seconds and 10 seconds overall time.

This whole setup is a punishment to the player for not being good enough at covering their mistakes. It's visceral: You can feel deep in your guts that you've made a mistake by jumping off a cliff. The landing was botched, recovery was poor, there was no double jump, and now you get to suffer the consequences. It's also not so punishing that you could spontaneously explode into meaty chunks. Worst case scenario: your character fell so far that both of their legs are broken and now you get to sit there and regenerate, drink a potion, or the game designer was particularly evil and put spiders at the bottom of a ravine.

 

"Congratulations! Your Meat Golem has evolved into Fantastic Human!"

 

This system should encourage players to experiment with the character while still bringing the consequences of being a human into the mix. It's a bit hard to keep track of everything, but if we keep things consistent then players can pick it up easily enough. Most importantly, this design should go a long way towards making a character feel like they're more than a stick.

Combining all of the rules together, we have this set of rules:
- Humans have six zones known as body parts: left leg, right leg, left arm, right arm, head, torso.
- Each part has its own resource pool with a physical aspect and a resource counterpart. These pools are hit points (regeneration), oxygen (breath), hunger (stamina), and vital spirit (mana).
- Each part is tied to a set of behaviors that define a human. Legs for running, arms for attacking, head for seeing and interaction, body for passive effects
- Behaviors are measured with the attributes strength, speed, affinity, and potential. Changes to these behaviors are called Status Effects
- Each body part keeps track of its own status and can be manipulated independently
- The human is killed or otherwise incapacitated when their torso runs out of hit points.

Whenever you have an idea like this, you need to have an entire game built up around it. As of right now I have very little. Writing this post has brought a lot of the ideas I've been thinking about together into one place and now I need to get it into this:

An idea is only the start of something. Like Sivers says, ideas are just a multiplier on execution. You need multiple ideas all working on concert to get things rolling, and getting multiple layers of ideas to work in concert is something else entirely. It's a good thing I have very little to do or I would despair at the difficulty of this task.

If there's one thing I am good at, it's layered design. Now I just need to get this to work.

A Stick is not Human

Video Games have built up a set of tropes and ideas over time that have arisen out of necessity and tradition. A lot of these ideas come out of older games, where it's hard to keep track of a lot of moving parts at once.

Occasionally I like to wander down to the bowels of the internet and see what it has in store. You can find items that are the stuff of legends on the dark web, or find yourself wondering why Elsa and Spiderman are singing the Family Finger Song. Me, I like to go to the dark place that hardly anyone would ever admit to: Japanese Hentai Games. I'm not looking to get my rocks off, it's the other side of hentai that I'm interested in. Yes, the absolutely depraved side.

This side of gaming is fascinating. There are games that take power fantasies and flip them on their head, subvert them in weird ways, or simply put the player on the receiving end of the plot. You can play as villains, side characters, legendary heroes, ordinary monsters, or even the table. Many of the traditions in gaming just don't seem to apply here... and the ones that do are the absolute foundational, cream of the crop tropes that make the game happen in the first place.

There's something to be said about the quality of these games. Almost universally, the games are either garbage heaps of bad design and fetish fuel, so specialized that the rest of the game languishes, or "If this wasn't a hentai then this would be the best game I've ever played?!". Mediocrity is not something that happens when these authors are either extremely passionate in their ideas or trying to sell to that crowd.

Why do I keep playing these games? In a word: humanity

Most video games with human characters don't really have humans in their games. If you can swap out the character with a ball and the game mechanics make just as much sense, then you're not really playing a human. That's a big reason why a lot of games in the 90's did fairly well with their animal mascots: Sonic the Hedgehog isn't a human, he's a blue fairy hedgehog thing that turns into a ball and runs like a madman. Who needs human flesh when you're made out of pure attitude?

I'm sure this is why survival games struck a chord within the gaming community as well. It's why Minecraft can justify having a 'survival' mode even though the only real survival aspect is that the main character needs is food. Getting hungry means you need something to keep going, right?

If I were to point at a game style that shows off this idea of 'humanity', then I would have to point at Dark Souls. Your character is squishy, running at a reasonably athletic pace, uses their own skills and abilities to move forward, and you as the player need to learn how the game is played before you move on. There's a special kind of harmony between the bone-crunching death of the character and your own resolve to improve yourself.

I'd like to play more games like this. Sort of. It's not the difficulty of the game that really speaks to me, it's the relatability of playing with a character that isn't just a toy. Humans have consequences for their actions. We make a lot of little We. They end up hurting ourselves or pushing their bodies too far. Even when we do that, our bodies take a couple of days to heal up and then we can do it all over again.

Some video games try to replicate that idea with the limited amount of tools they have. Have you fallen too far? Take a point of damage. Jump in lava? Well, you can move just like the air, but your life counter is going to go down rapidly. You exist in an RPG? Status effect! You now act at random. These games try to bring back some of the aspects of human biology that exist, but it's done in a way that has been oversimplified, extruded into a paste, and then smeared on the player.

Chip damage bothers me on so many levels. It's hard to justify a character blocking hit after hit, blow after blow, perfectly taking everything in the most robust stance, then suddenly exploding into meaty chunks because their health points went from 1 to 0. Likewise, the fall damage in Minecraft is infuriating. Why can I explode into an array of item drops just because I dropped from the sky a little too high? 

Sure, some games prevent you from dying due to this chip damage, but if the hero walks through acid I would expect them to have a real bad time walking instead of being able to jump up 50 feet onto the ceiling. This is part of why superheroes are such fun; superman can defy physics because he is superman.

"Well well well. If it isn't the consequences of my own actions."

 

A common argument against this idea is that "this isn't fun". That's true, but it's the wrong argument. Stealth sections in first person shooters aren't fun because the type of experience you're having is a bombastic jaunt through enemy lines as a one-man-army blasting through everything in your way. Likewise, any game that relies entirely on stealth will be a lot less satisfying if you can just barrel through every stage with brute force. These games have a particular focus, and when that focus deviates into a gameplay style that is not complementary to its vision, the entire game suffers.

Dark Souls is the perfect counterargument to this. We can describe it as "a different type of fun", but it's really the entire game having this brutal, punishing, and overbearing experience that grinds you down and chews you up until you finally get through the boss that was in your way and now YOU are the grindmaster. The entire aesthetic and gameplay experience leans into this idea so hard that, if you enjoy this kind of thing, you won't even notice that you're not 'supposed to' be having fun.

Let's do something a little different. I want an experience where the fundamental aspect of what and where a person is, is the thing that matters most. We can keep a lot of the basic mechanics that have been built up over decades of playtesting, and then layer a few new things on top of those. I don't want to punish the player with death... only with the consequences of their own actions.

Super Metroid is definitely shaping the idea here. At the beginning of the game you move around like a kind of odd floating tank. Leaving out all of the upgrades that you get, there are a lot of mechanics that make Samus not annoying, not irritating, not clunky, but some combination of these at a lot of small levels. The best players make everything look easy, when in fact the game is doing everything it possibly can at any given time to make the way Samus moves mediocre. Not hardcore, not crazypants, and not irritating. Just... kind of bad. It's hard to describe exactly, and should be even harder to replicate without copying the entire game.

On the flipside, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the best example of bringing humanity into an existing world. Open-world exploration, crafting, weapon durability, and a defined goal come together to make something that feels both like something that's been done so many times and still shines in its absolute quality of an experience. Despite being a Hylian from another world, that incarnation of link is one of the most human characters in all of gaming.

A man's gotta eat, after all.