Monthly Blog Post: Apr 2022

So, I kind of felt bad for making March’s blog post super short. This time, I’m going to make things a bit longer. It was still written in one day, though. Maybe I’ll properly schedule time for May’s post, since I’ll be out of school? IDK.

Gameplay Loops

Recently, I saw a tweet by Tanya X. Short that reminded me of something that’s been on my mind for a while now: gameplay loops aren’t always useful for game design.

Okay, so, what is a gameplay loop? Basically, it’s a repeated series of actions a player will take while playing the game.

Take bowling, for instance. Bowling’s “gameplay loop” is simple: you pick up a ball, throw it at pins, and you throw the ball again if you fail to knock them all down at once. Repeat for nine frames and the special bonus frame at the end, and you have a game of bowling.

There’s a lot more rules and nuance to the game, of course, but I think this “loop” captures the essence of bowling pretty well. Bowling’s repetitive nature makes it a good candidate for game loop analysis, but even this game isn’t perfectly encapsulated by the loop. For example: the last frame of the game plays a little differently than the first nine. This isn’t a dealbreaker for our loop analysis, but it does offer an important insight: some elements of a game don’t operate based on loops.

Besides that, I think there’s another drawback to gameplay loops: the abstraction of content. I could say that “Super Mario Bros. is a game where you start a level, get to the end, and repeat until you win or lose the game.” This statement is true, but it fails to consider the contents of the levels themselves. What is the general idea of each level? What challenges do they present to the player? How does the player react to those challenges? The answers to all of those questions are, for the most part, dependent on what level you enter.

Granted, there are similarities between levels (like the fourth level of each world being a castle level,) and I could have created a better loop model that takes those commonalities into account. Even so, the abstracting of the game into a loop necessitates the erasure of any detail that isn’t sufficiently repeated.

TL;DR: I think loops are useful tools, but abstract a lot of things. As such, they sometimes aren’t the right framework to design and analyze games with.

Thinky Collective Project

I’m still working on N Step Steve: Part 2. But I think I’d like to take the time to discuss a different game that I’m supervising. Well, two, actually.

In The early 1900s, the surrealists invented a game/technique called exquisite corpse. The idea is to create a drawing by having each participant create a portion of the drawing.

I’m in a puzzle game oriented Discord server, and we have a tradition of making games in a similar manner. There’s a seed project with one level in it, and each additional person adds another level to the game, then passes it on to the next person. We’ve published the resulting games under the Thinky Collective moniker.

So, I volunteered to manage the next Thinky Collective project, which is now the current project. And it has a little over 50 participants, which is the most a Thinky Collective project has ever had (to my knowledge.) There’s actually two separate games/branches for the sake of completing things faster, but it’s still a lot of people to get through.

I’ll have a lot more to say once the project is done, but it’s definitely been stressful and challenging for me to do this. I don’t regret taking this on, but after this project, I probably won’t do something like this again for a while.

Once this is over, though, we’ll all get to enjoy the final product(s), and that’s always nice! It will totally be worth it.

Cool Links

Tandis is a cool game about transforming shapes in 3D.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is a re-imagining of The Stanley Parable (2013). I had a great time with it!

The Stanley Parable

Actually, I’d like to talk more about The Stanley Parable. I played the 2013 release when I was young. In fact, It was one of the first Indie games I ever played (excluding Flash games.) TSP had a huge influence on my conception of narrative games, and I made a reference to its iconic “two doors” moment in one of my games before:

Come to think of it, I have yet to make a narrative game that really plays with the concept of “a huge amount of paths and endings.” I suppose I’ll get around to making such a game, eventually…

The End

Alright, I guess that’s another blog post done! For me, this upcoming week is Finals Week, so I‘ll be pretty busy. Until it stops being Finals Week, and then I will be pretty not busy.

Until next month!