Why King Machine?

On March 13, 2011, in King Machine, projects, by bateleur

In the announcement post for King Machine I promised a big, long waffly post about the game and my plans for it. So here it is…

Machines Want To Be 3DKing Machine logo

In the past I have actively avoided developing games with true 3D gameplay because with relatively few exceptions the games I enjoy playing the most have all been essentially 2D even when employing 3D graphics. So when I was learning Unity 3 I spent a lot of time thinking about which kinds of gameplay really worked well in 3D. Exploration games are good – and I love the idea of doing a really good 3D maze game – but that doesn't make a good first project because there's a huge amount of art and level design to do and not much game design or programming. Racing games and first person shooters aren't really my thing (and arguably aren't 3D anyway, but I'll try not to get too sidetracked).

It was when I started thinking about the third dimension as a way of not getting things tangled up that I ended up thinking about connecting things and wires and machines. This wasn't much to do with game design at first. Some of my PhD work involved automated layout of wiring for digital circuits… it gets pretty nightmarish in 2D! But then I remembered the old 2D versions of King Machine had similar problems. Not surprising really, since 2D spaces are just difficult generally. If you like fiction that makes you think I recommend A.K.Dewdney's 'The Planiverse' for some great discussion on this topic.

Machines seem like they naturally want to be 3D. So I had my project… sort of.

Too Big To Be Small

There was one big problem. For some time I've been working as a freelance programmer, working on games projects for as much of my time as I could get away with. Like most designers in a similar position I've been trying to gradually transition to full time games work. Generally this is all good, but it does place a strict constraint on my projects: any big project must be commercial. King Machine has, historically, been my favourite example of the kind of game I personally love but which could never possibly be commercial because it's just too geeky and inaccessible.

It was a conversation with my sister Josie which changed my perspective. I'd lent her my copy of Logicomix (because it's excellent – you should read it) and while we were chatting about it I offered to explain to her some stuff related to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. I tend to feel that the way mathematics is approached in academia makes ideas much less accessible than they could be and that most concepts can be explained to anyone reasonably bright provided you don't mind sacrificing a little bit of the rigor expected of actual proofs.

Later it occurred to me that this same attitude is something I should apply to games. King Machine is a huge amount of fun. So, as a game designer, I should be able to take the game and present it in a way that makes it comprehensible and accessible to a much wider audience. A combination of good user inferface design, gradual introduction of concepts and comprehensive help resources should be enough to get pretty much anyone playing and enjoying the game.

Finding the Core Gameplay

The first step in making a complex game as accessible as possible is to decide what it's really about. At first King Machine seemed pretty easy in this respect, since I knew I wanted it to be about building machines. The problem with that is that building machines isn't a goal as such, it's a means to an end. This begs the question of what that end should be. Of course I could make the game a pure sandbox, but that feels lazy to me. I want to let players play in a sandbox style if they choose to, but for some players that's just not satisfying.

Machine-based play is ridiculously versatile, so as I began to make notes about possible goals and play styles the list just got longer and longer and picking the right option started to look a bit hopeless…

…until I realised I was looking at the problem the wrong way. Instead of picking one goal I could pick all of them. The danger is that doing this sorts of thing inhibits the player from learning, but I don't think that needs to be the case. If each level gives the player a new kind of task and then provides them with the support they need to discover the solution that should keep each experience fresh whilst gradually teaching them what they can do with their machines.

That just left difficulty levels. The word "accessible" has a bad reputation in certain quarters these days because it's seen as a euphemism for "easy". I don't think that's right, but certainly the two can be related in the sense that it is difficult to find ways to present hard challenges without causing bad play experiences for some players. In the case of King Machine the approach I feel most inclined to adopt is optional challenges on the same levels as compulsory problems. That way the player can give some thought to anything they can see but doesn't need to feel as though they're stuck. Also, having seen a challenge, the player can always come back later if they have a flash of inspiration or simply learn a new trick which they think might help.

Was That Waffly Enough?

Hmm… I still have over a dozen more things I wanted to talk about. Maybe trying to fit all this into one blog post isn't such a great idea? The rest can wait for now, I'm off to do some more programming!

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3 Responses to “Why King Machine?”

  1. Mo says:

    A combination of good user inferface design, gradual introduction of concepts and comprehensive help resources should be enough to get pretty much anyone playing and enjoying the game.

    That certainly sounds plausible, but I'm not sure it's necessarily true. Although if the game is indeed huge fun to play, that'll help carry people over any humps in the learning process!

  2. bateleur says:

    True, I suppose if someone were to make a sufficiently hard puzzle game it might be the case that no amount of tutorial assistance would get them into it. Although SpaceChem works… or at least I assume it does given the press coverage it's had!

  3. Paladin says:

    Minecraft proved that a game may gather millions of users without any form of ingame tutorial, just because it doesn't look complicated at first glance while quickly showing a huge open-ended system. IMHO a friendly UI is more important than the other points, and is what drives me into acquiring a piece of software after the first trial, videogame or else.

    Ubuntu/Gnome did that for Linux, and while GNU is as complex as it always was, while some coryright/patented stuff (like encrypted DVD or mp3 playing) isn't preinstalled, it didn't prevent the OS to become more popular to the masses – thanks to a specific UI. (Currently another "Unity" than the one you're concerned with threatens to undo all that good work, but that's another topic.)

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