Infinitap Games

Firstly, my apologies. I missed Monday's developer diary, and I'm embarrassingly behind on the forum. I was showing the game at GDC Next, so I've been kind of busy. I will get caught up soon!

Is having a 3D world to explore inherently more engaging than a 2D representation of one? In this video, I discuss my thoughts.


Also, if you are interested, here is my segment on gametrailers. You'll note that I look ridiculous at the beginning because I couldn't decide where I was supposed to look. haha Usually they tell you what to look at before rolling.

Ok before I begin, I completely agree the map in BL:Pre is highly inadequate. lol And I haven't even beaten the game yet.

It is a tough call. In 3d you have 360 degree viewing and so every space naturally feels more immersive and explorable. The freedom and variety and possibility in a 3d environment is a compelling thing because it better replicates real life and how we see the world. But it is not perfect, and it's taken decades for game designers to really get to where we are now. I think you're right, 3d has it's benefits, but it is not the perfect answer (or the only answer).

As you were talking about all this and how NeN mostly moves in one direction from left to right (with a little right to left) and only uses the one stick, I started thinking of other 2d sidescroller type games that i liked, or had a lot of atmosphere. First thing that popped in my head was the early days when I got to try "Out of this world" . Now yes it uses some tricks to give it a cinematic almost 3d feel, but at the time I was unaware of things like that. I just saw it as a game, and the atmosphere and style and gameplay, for me, felt frightening, tense, amazing but dangerous and at times oppressive. It was a strange combination I had not seen in many games.

And it was not just walking from left to right. It had some combat (albeit limited) and platforming and interactive elements. But generally speaking you had a silent protag, it was zoomed out enough their expression was not visible so only body language and cut scenes gave any indication.

I think what I am realizing is that if you wanted to alter the formula a bit with NeN2, is it possibly to design the path/areas to be more than just the single hallway/pathway per area. If say the character walked into a garage, could climb onto the top of a car and then hoist himself up into a loft of storage crates to get to a window that led to an outdoor porch that wrapped arond the back of the house to an entryway into the basement... the route would be more varied and winding and it would take a little bit more player engagement to navigate it, rather then "push stick to right, click on door". The player would feel like theyr'e "doing" more. And depending on the design and layout, you may not really need a map. You just need semi-familiar visual cues the player can use to identify where they are somewhat. (like the entire downstairs of a large mansion has only 2 styles of wall coverings, striped wallpaper and flower edged wallpaper, but the second floor has painted walls and the attic is bare wood). Then players could mentally calculate where they are when they enter a new room via unconventional means (like through an outdoor window or door) fairly quickly, but not entirely precisely. I don't think you need the precision of a map, just knowing what "area" you're in can be enough to get your bearings.

I think 2d can work for horror games, and it has a lot of promise since (to some degrees) you have a much more controlled path (and narrative expectations) with 2d if done right. With 3d you have a lot of player-straying to consider and so need to design things in ways to channel them towards a goal (hello invisible walls!).

part of what killed it for NeN is when you reused assets it was usually the same perspective, size and asset. without variety of camera work and 3d lighting the object only ever looks like.. the same object. and with that hand drawn pen and ink style, objects are fairly easily recognizable and clearly understood. If you look at games where the fidelity is reduced, textures are murky, or shading and distance reduce things to almost analogous blobs, reusing assets is not as much an issue because you can't recognize, memorize, and get bored with seeing something since it's so hard to make out what it truly is.

Take for example this painting



You generally have an idea of what you are looking at, but if you repeated some of what is in there, bushes, trees, portions of the bridge, areas of floor, it would be a lot harder to know with any certainty that it is reused assets. The same for even the shadowy figure.

Now I am not going to promote making the game all out of focus and going with really abstract art, but taking this notion into account, it can help drive some of the art style and assets in a new game and understanding that " ok if we choose style a over b we might afford more mileage of asset reuse".

The problem is that platforming requires a ton of animation support, and I'd rather focus our animation time on things that will increase the scare factor.

As far as object reuse, I'm not sure there is a way around it. We are definitely considering other art styles, but I don't think there is any art style that makes it easy to reuse assets in a way that people won't notice. (Except perhaps making everything blurry and out of focus, but I don't think that'll work for an entire game) We used object scaling to a limited effect on Neverending Nightmares because too much scaling would ruin the line weight and turn things into muddled grey.

I'd like to do an art style where we could have a big rock and a small rock that are from the same drawing. That might get us a little more mileage with object reuse, but I'm not sure how well that would work. I guess we'll have to see what art style we end up with...

I think a 3D world probably helps in some ways, but there are definitely plenty of 2D exploration games with more complex level designs. Think about the twists and turns of Lone Survivor, or the verticality of Super Metroid. Some sort of map does become more important with games like this. But that can be handled either by finding maps within the world, or having the character draw a map as they go along.

I really wanted to avoid doing a map just because it seems very "game-y" but I suppose it's always a possibility. I felt like we had similar layouts to Lone Survivor with the exception that we didn't have doorways on the same wall the camera was looking at. It was difficult to design the layout to only use doors on 3 walls, but I think we overcame it. Did you feel like the world navigation in Lone Survivor was better/more complex than Neverending Nightmares? Can you point to any particular thing they did that made it feel better (other than have a map)?

Thanks!

I don't know how well it would fit in with the theme, but if you did anything like maps, maybe it could be part of the environment? Like an emergency exit map hung up on the wall somewhere that you could examine. That way it would feel a little more like an organic part of the environment.

Well, Lone Survivor was pretty different from Neverending Nightmares since it didn't have levels, but more one big world. As you go, you're able to access more of the world, while opening up shortcuts to keep it from being too overwhelming. There are often multiple paths to places, and sometimes old paths close and new ones open as you find key items, run into large monsters, etc. There is a lot of backtracking, but it's kept tense since there are monsters you have to avoid. (Though actually I ended up killing most of them, not realizing that was bad for your sanity. I think it would improve my sanity to put a bullet through their brains.)

I felt like it was pretty realistic finding the maps in Lone Survivor. It could have been even more immersive by showing the protagonist making notes on the map to show objectives, locked doors, etc. I don't think this would have worked as well in NeN since you wouldn't really find a good map in a dream. Plus, the levels sometimes shifted around. The layout here was really too simplistic to need a map, though.

I could also imagine a game character making a map as he goes along. Show him sketching out the layout, marking the walls in new rooms, etc. This could be something the player has to do, like in Etrian Odyssey IV, or it could be something the game itself takes care of.

If the game is a nightmare and you want to keep with some of the themes you've used, just have the player carry a piece of broken glass or metal or razor and carve lines into their arm/chest and draw a map on themselves. Problem solved.

Or use the old school tactic of leaving yourself breadcrumbs by having the player place various bloody handprints wherever the player wants to "mark" where they have been. Open hand, closed fist, 2 fingers, 3 fingers, etc etc. lol. The more often they "mark" the walls the better the ability to track movement but also the more blood they'd lose and so the weaker/blurrier their vision.

This wouldn't work for extremely large complex maze like nightmares, but if you split each nightmare down similar to NeN a couple different bloody hand symbols would make it fairly easy to mark your path once you got a system in your head.

I don't know how well it would fit in with the theme, but if you did anything like maps, maybe it could be part of the environment? Like an emergency exit map hung up on the wall somewhere that you could examine. That way it would feel a little more like an organic part of the environment.

I like this idea and was actually considering something like it. It was done well in Penumbra as well as The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (although it was in the terrible evil miner section :-/ ). It doesn't fit with some of our settings, but it might work for others. It is an interesting idea that fits in with our closer look mechanics.

Balancing the nightmare aspects and the realistic world is a challenging one. I am kind of tempted to make everything structured around a hub world like Amnesia, but it limits the crazy nightmare stuff we can do, so I don't think I'll probably go down that route.

Leaving breadcrumbs is a really good idea! Perhaps it is because I'm stuck in my ways, but I want to keep the controls as simple as possible, and that seems like an additional complication. I'm thinking the controls for the next game will be significantly more complicated (it is hard to get less complicated than Neverending Nightmares), so I am hesitant to add anything else, but I guess we'll see how it feels once I add in all the new features. It is definitely an idea worth considering further once we have a better feel for what the new game is.