Variety of interactions in games
The central part of my game design philosophy is variety of interactions. It means: how many different ways are there to interact with the game world?
While making Supraland I wasn't that conscious about it, it was more of a subtle feeling that I tried to weave in. It worked well enough because I was working alone. But the more people I work with, the more I'm bringing those game design feelings to the surface and become more aware of them, because when you're discussing why a puzzle does not feel good, I need to justify it with good reasoning. So this is me trying to put one of my core concepts into words.
So what's the issue?
A common thing in games is, that your ways to interact are limited to causing damage, jumping, opening doors, pressing buttons, talking, managing your inventory.
That's like the default set for most games and I'm bored when I think about it, because what can I expect from the game after many hours if that's all there is and it's things I know inside out from other games? How can I still be engaged and surprised if I know I'll be killing, opening doors and pressing buttons all the way through?
The opposite of that are point'n'click adventures like Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle. You never know what kind of things you will be doing and using with each other to cause totally different things to happen.
While in a generic open world adventure game nowadays you're roaming the world, picking up loot, killing badguys, evaluating skill tree options and watching cutscenes, in Monkey Island 2 you were trying to get a guy dirty to then steal his clothes from the laundry... and a bunch of other ingredients... in order to create a voodoo doll of him.
In those point'n'click adventures it's always unclear what you're gonna do next while in today's generic adventure games it feels like everything is kinda predictable from start to finish.
Am I saying that oldskool point'n'click adventures are absolutely fantastic? No, not at all unfortunately.
I think it's well justified that the genre has no more mainstream appeal nowadays and is kinda dead. They just pretend to give you freedom of interaction in their game world but they are actually so very limiting. You can actually only do very few things and what you can do is completely on rails. You can only do exactly what the game designer has planned for and not really approach things in a creative way. There is no possible way to deviate from the programmed progression.
The underlying ideas of what you're doing in those games are so much better and interesting, but their pure point'n'click gameplay is so very meh. What I feel I'm chasing is to put those cool ideas into a form of modern gameplay that gives you real freedom on how to interact.
For example in the old adventures you dragged an object from your inventory onto something else in the game world and it would either be correct or not. A purely binary thing.
In Supraland I want you to actually move those objects around, trying to make them interact.
Just try!
In the old games it would just say "that doesn't work" while in my games you're supposed to see and feel exactly why it makes or makes no sense. It can sometimes even lead to solutions that were not intended. But even if it didn't work you should have had fun experimenting with the objects instead of just bruteforcing the binary options in the point'n click games.
A key aspect of my philosophy is that the player can legitimately suspect interesting interactions and combinations of objects everywhere. The acid, the sponge, the carrots, the flies, the balls, the lava, the color machine, people with certain desires walking around... there might be something useful when you use them with each other. That is where the magic is for me. Actually most game objects I just mentioned do interact with each other and some effects might not help you at all right now, but you're not on rails and you can make up weird stuff that no-one else did nonetheless.
Doors and buttons
If a game designer has no idea, they'll put a door in front of you and make you search the key or button.
In point'n'click adventures most of the time you try to trick an NPC which somehow blocks your progress.
It's much more interesting than a closed door if there is someone who doesn't provide you with what you need, because they think you are not from the correct family tree and then it's up to you to find a way to make that person believe you belong to that certain family. From that moment on you see the game world with different eyes.
The satisfaction comes from figuring out your goal on your own and also getting to the solution by yourself. The opposite happens in your generic open world adventure where an on screen marker tells you where to go. Even when it's detective work, you simply switch to your magic viewmode where you then follow a red glowing breadcrumb trail. After eventually finishing that quest I did not really contribute anything myself to the solution and feel empty. The game designers did not plan for me to do something smart at all.
Supraland 1 still had way more of those "activate button to open door" moments. It is ok sometimes, just if you overdo it, it gets really boring. So if you see lame button/key+door action in my games, come complain to me and remind me of my own words!
In Six Inches Under we experimented a lot more with other reasons (than doors) to stop your progress.
Like a guy doesn't let stinking people into town. Suddenly your own smell was a new element in the gameplay that you never thought about before. So the game world was recontextualized for this moment for you to figure out a way to get to that door without stinking.
One of my favourites moments was in Supraland Crash where a guard was waiting for his shift to end at 12:00 and you needed to make him believe it's that time of day to go home. The interaction you needed for this was something you've done many times before, but in this case it had a new context which made it an absolutely unique thing you've never done before or afterwards in that way (I'm not gonna spoil it here!).
And I guess that sums up what I'm after: the games should allow for new and interesting interactions with the world all the time and not just 'open door' or 'kill monster'. It is much harder for us to come up with that stuff as there is no formula to follow. But it's worth it.
Supraworld Development
Meanwhile Supraworld's development is going really well, I'm really happy with everything we're making quality wise and idea wise. The code takes longer to make but it's really clean and future proof. But sadly barely any bit of the game is coherently playable yet, as we're remaking the whole code and lots of fundamentals are still being worked on.
Puzzle design process
We're designing lots of puzzles together all the time and lay them out in the world. Lots of places are planned with their functionalities, but we can only build the environment without the functionalities right now. Designing the puzzles is a very fun process with such surprisingly good results. It's much better than when I was designing the puzzles by myself in Supraland 1. Throwing our ideas back and forth keeps making each puzzle better and better. And I can't think of any buttons that open doors yet. We're always challenging each other to find another way to make the puzzle at hand useful. If you see any "box on button that opens door" in the final game, it's because we really could not think of anything else.
Anyway, the puzzles in my opinion are gonna be much better than previous ones as we're never settling for "ok" puzzles. When I had to do everything by myself I was just too stressed out to spend too much time thinking through everything multiple times and to later severely change things that were not great.
The only part I kept making big changes to was the first hour, because that's clearly the most important one. Many other regions in the game were kinda rushed together and I kept the first draft because it was good enough.
The barrels from SL1 make a return, but they look different:
Supraworld is supposed to have 3 or 4 acts. The current goal is to get act 1 playable. The worldbuilding is mostly there, but the interactions are only like 30% there. When act 1 works we have the possibility to bring this into early access and have everyone involved in the feedback process who is willing to play a very unfinished game over and over again.
I would suspect the actual release is in 2024, but what do I know at this point besides "we're done when it's done" and "things that much longer than I expected".
Under the floor planks:
In a drawer under the bed:
Green carpet:
(If you rightclick the images and open them in a new tab, you see them in full resolution)
-David