Probably Designed: Multiplayer with Calm Pewter

Playful Work

— 35 min read

For this week's episode we drifted a bit from the show's MacGuffin and had a slightly different conversation. I spoke with Julian Schumacher, the developer of The Quizard's Domain who goes by Calm Pewter Games. The topic of our conversation was multiplayer–designing and developing multiplayer experiences for player interaction and how player interactivity influences design.

You can find more from Julian/Calm Pewter out in the wild:

Next week we'll be back to our conversations about randomness and chance. We have the first episode of a two-part conversation with Dan DiIorio (Luck Be A Landlord, Maze Mice) and Brian Long (Ballionaire). But for today, enjoy this conversation about people.

Conversation

Julian: So I am Julian, and I'm known maybe to some, not very well known yet, as Calm Pewter or Calm Pewter Games. That's sort of the name I use for whenever I do anything that has to do with video games. Primarily from my work experience, I've done software engineering, some administration stuff, a lot of team and customer management.

And my passion is and always has been in software and in video games in particular. I started when I was six years old, playing around with a StarCraft editor and never looked back. I immediately knew I wanted to make games, like real full games as much as possible. I never considered it as a realistic career opportunity.

For whatever reason, it just didn't appear to be a thing that I could do. You know, it was so far away. These things just come into existence, right? They're magicked into existence by these wizards that existed in another reality or whatever.

Harry: Mm-hmm.

Julian: It never even occurred to me to try to pursue it.

So I just continued making stuff here and there throughout my childhood, teen years, and adulthood, and I didn't really get super serious about it until I worked my way into the Unity engine. And that was around the time I was studying to be a software engineer at university. And I even took some courses in game development.

I squeezed it in wherever I could, even though it wasn't super relevant to my actual major, just because I loved it so much and I couldn't stop doing it and doing stuff around it. And so I ended up making a game as part of my bachelor project as well, and that was The Quizards Domain, which has now been in the works for roughly, I would say, seven or eight years at this point.

Harry: Wow.

Julian: Which is crazy to think about.

But yeah, I did not know back then about the advice of "don't make your dream game first." That's kind of the issue. So I went with something very big and just kept working on that instead of going for the smaller projects where you have actual finish lines and you get to put something out and stuff. You know, you run into the issue with game dev of becoming better and better as you go. And so if you're on one project, by the time you've sort of worked your way into something new, you hate what you did six months ago. So you've got to go back and update that, of course. And it's this everlasting trap. So that's where I've sort of been stuck for a while.

But yeah, I'm actually approaching a finish line with that game, and I don't know if you want to talk about that at all.

Harry: Yeah, so you mentioned that it's like your dream game or that it's big. What about it makes it big? I know it's multiplayer, right? And so I think that that's a huge, in terms of maybe more in terms of programming, but we could also talk about how it impacts game design, of course.

But it seems like it's a big undertaking with regard to the programming side of things, especially. That's always the thing that people are like, "Okay, add another couple years to your development process if you're gonna make it multiplayer." Right? So I would love to hear a little bit about what it is about that game that makes it big or kind of your dream game as well.

Julian: Well, it's not like the dream game maybe in that sense, but it is something that I'm extremely passionate about because for me, gaming has a lot to do with socializing and forming connections with people. Plus I am passionate about education as well. And this sort of combines both of those aspects because it helps you sort of engage with information in interesting ways while also just having a fun time with friends.

And it can be used as a study tool. It can just be a party game. But hopefully it'll generate many fun, memorable moments, either sitting on a couch or through the internet or whatever, where people can just have fun together, do stuff together, and maybe pick up some interesting trivia along the way or anything in between.

Harry: So, to describe the game, 'cause I think we missed that part...

Julian: Oh, you're right. Yeah. The quickest elevator pitch is really Smash Bros meets trivia, or Trivial Pursuit or something like that. So you're fighting your friends for an opportunity to answer questions in order to score points, and the questions are distributed with the answers within different arenas.

And you have characters that you control in those arenas. You knock each other out along the way. You try to keep your friends away from the correct answers and hilarity ensues, hopefully.

Harry: So that's super interesting because I think that that's an uncommon combination of modes of play.

Julian: Yes.

Harry: One being the trivia brain and you know, like searching for facts and articulating yourself about some sort of bit of knowledge. And the other being kind of the visceral arcade smash 'em up.

Julian: Yeah, that's a really good point. So there are aspects of it that wouldn't traditionally go together or that you would think don't complement each other super well, and I sort of saw that as part of the challenge to try and bring those together. But also there are pieces of it that fit incredibly well because one of the things that happens with the questions—so just real quick, you have like one question and you have four possible answers.

And the four answers in these arenas correspond to different spots within the arenas. So they're like, let's say there are four objectives, but you don't know which one is the correct one unless you know the answer. So you don't have sort of one goal that everybody is going for because they know they have to be there.

It's not like King of the Hill where you know there's a big marker and it's obvious that you need to defend this position. There's this extra layer of "where do I even need to go and how certain are you of that?" Because unless you 100% know the answer to something, there is a certain uncertainty to where you're even going and why and what you're doing along the way.

And so you get this incredible amount of permutation just from round to round, not even like throughout a match, but each individual round, which is just like one question, four answers, and then you go through it, you beat each other up until the timer runs out, and then if you're in the correct position, you get a point. And if you're not, then you get knocked out or whatever. And so, there are aspects that come in of sort of social deduction because, let's say you do know the answer 100%, right? So you have an advantage in the sense that you know where to go and where you don't want the others to go. But if you're super obvious about what your intentions are, you could just have people following you even though they didn't know the answer. So you just gave away your advantage, right?

Harry: Right. And if you are bad at the arcadey part of it, then you're actually, but good at the knowing the answer, you actually could just lose because you signaled where you're gonna go and then you lose the arcade part by someone who sees where you're gonna go and then is good at the arcade. Right?

Julian: Well, that's one aspect. Yeah. So, the other side of that is maybe you are good at the, let's say the platform fighting bits, but you don't know a bunch of trivia stuff, at least not in the categories that are being played. So the idea is that this allows people with completely different skill sets to play together, to compete with each other and sort of bring these different strengths to the table.

And there are a lot of inspirations for that. Like, Overwatch or League of Legends, all these hero-based things that truly allow you to play into a particular skill set, right? Like you can play, let's say Mercy, the healer in Overwatch and you don't need to be able to aim in a first-person shooter. Like, imagine that?

Harry: Mm-hmm.

Julian: And I just thought that was fascinating and how it allowed people to just come together and to contribute to a team or to be able to compete with others with a completely different skill set, a different basis.

And so that's one of the things that I try to enforce a lot in the game design as well.

Harry: Yeah, that's super interesting. It's like affordances, right? For different play styles or different kinds of... yeah, it's very interesting.

Julian: And what comes out of those, I mean, you already have this aspect of different environments, different characters, so every match is gonna be different anyway, right? You get into a ton of different permutations because there are all these variables that can change from one match to another.

Then you also have, of course, the ever-present complexity of human nature. So as soon as you have multiplayer games, you just end up with seemingly endless possible combinations because every single second could play out completely differently than it ever has before, in a way. And then you also have this additional layer on top of it, of, you know, which answer is the correct one. So which objective is actually the one that you should be competing for? And there are really different, interesting different things you can do with those different permutations of that core idea where you can just end up with hopefully endless hours of fun, essentially. That's the goal.

Harry: So do players play in the same room together on the same screen, or do they play across the network usually?

Julian: It is fully local player for now. You can use Steam's Remote Play Together feature, but it is definitely the plan to enable full online co-op as well. But the ideal experience will always be you're at least in a voice chat with someone.

Harry: It seems like the vibe would be more like, we're in the living room together and we've got a big screen up and maybe we're, you know, I don't know, just hanging out, having some chips and soda or whatever.

Julian: Exactly.

Harry: And, yeah, and having a good time and laughing about what's happening together in the room.

Julian: Yeah, yeah. Couch co-op is just a huge passion of mine, and I think something that's been underserved for a long time, because it doesn't make the big bucks a lot of the time. But yeah, I love it. But also I want the option, of course, for people to play online and to be able to just sit down on their computer or whatever on their couch and play with someone who's not right in the room with them, because it can be tricky to organize.

So I had the basis for online multiplayer set up very, very early. So it's sort of integrated into the game already. I just had to drop it along the way because in the development process it slowed me down massively to always keep everything networked and working smoothly. So I eventually dropped all of that for a while, while I iterated on "what do I really want this game to be?"

Because it was a tough one to pin down and to really work into the perfect loop, which I think I'm at now. I'm always open to changing it, of course, but yeah, so now the task is gonna be reintegrating a lot of the multiplayer things. You mentioned earlier already, right? Multiplayer adds so much complexity, especially online networking, and that's true.

Like the trope is "never, ever, after the fact, try to bolt on online multiplayer. You've got to plan for it from the start." Luckily, I do have that, like I have the bones for it at least. But yeah, it is gonna be interesting to beat all the challenges that come from that as well.

Harry: Yeah, it's interesting. And so one of the things that I've been talking with folks about here on this podcast, the conversations we've been having have been a lot about more like roguelike deck builders. And in these games, there is this what I feel like is really a sense of bringing almost board game mechanics and board game mechanics are traditionally mechanics that you sit at a table with a group of people and you play and you've got this interaction between folks that like say, you know, like a game night or whatever else.

And I feel like a lot of what these games have done in the last 10 or 15 years especially is really kind of take those types of board game mechanics and bring them into kind of asymmetrical designs, but also single player and solo designs. And I think that I find it to be an interesting kind of tension 'cause my background with these deck builders is mostly Magic the Gathering, and I've always played that as, you know, it's competitive. It's a competitive symmetric game. And so there is this direct interaction with another player that's kind of providing the foil for the narrative of whatever the heck is happening, right?

So, a lot of the design topics we've been talking about have to do with some of this like asynchronous design and progression and how you make things feel fresh in the context of it being single player. But I think for a lot of people and a lot of folks who aren't like gamer gamers, games are about being with people and about interacting with other people.

And so there's a different kind of set of design principles and set of things that you need to do. 'Cause I think that, for example, the programming side of multiplayer is of course super hard, but the game design is also different in that you actually maybe have like a little bit of a looser space in some ways because you're more gonna kind of trigger interactions between people, and hopefully that's the interesting part of it. Right? And I would love to see you talk a little bit about that multiplayer space 'cause I don't think we've talked about it much here yet.

Julian: Oh, sure. I love talking about this stuff. So, yeah, you already hit on it, basically. The idea is what are you trying to achieve with any game, right? What is the core experience you're trying to deliver? And if we're sticking with the roguelike space, I think a lot of it has to do with making you feel clever as the player and if you're...

Harry: And this power fantasy, right?

Julian: Yeah.

You're leveraging sort of individual elements in this little chemistry playbox to make crazy new combinations and become super powerful. At least for a lot of them, I think that's sort of the main draw, right?

Harry: Mm-hmm.

Julian: And you can do that in a multiplayer setting, of course. Like you can have a co-op game, for example, where both players are power tripping to really just boil it down.

Or you can do all kinds of other stuff. But with the sort of game that I'm trying to do, which is this interactive, more party-oriented type of thing, the interaction really is at the core of it. But it's also not, so you could... Okay, hang on. So you could go into this full-on social space, right? If you're saying that the interesting or the important bit that you're trying to deliver is social interaction, you could just have this fun little hangout, maybe have some mini games, and that kind of game exists and it can definitely serve a purpose and be fun, but that's also just one possibility.

And the intersection that really interests me is this sort of design space where people interact, have the ability to compete and to sometimes dominate each other or just demonstrate their skills or whatever, but also enjoy the process together because there's a lot of sort of clever nudging that has to happen, sort of subtle, making things work just right so that the parameters are there that the interesting moments can happen, but it also remains enjoyable for, well, maybe not always everybody, but hopefully for as many people as possible who are in this session.

Harry: And so that's actually an interesting point, though. And one thing I would love to dig into a little bit, but it's very specific to multiplayer, and it happens of course in board games, but it happens especially with online games where there's huge skill gaps. It's this kind of like, this kind of feel bad situation, right?

Where someone just loses because they're just a little bit less skilled with the kind of the physical interaction of the game or the dexterity or whatever it takes to actually play it. Do you have that experience or have you had to kind of balance around these kind of feel bads that happen between players if you're playing a competitive, I mean, 'cause your game is a competitive multiplayer game?

Julian: Yes, competitive and cooperative. There are different ways to play it, but yeah, the core of it, I would say is competitive. And you're right that this sort of the skill gap is a really interesting design problem to try and address. And there are different ways to go about it. And there are some really good examples historically, like, you could introduce a bunch of randomness, for example, right, to lower the overall impact of an individual player's skill. Like, for example, Mario Party. A lot of that is chance-based. You also have the mini games, which sometimes are chance-based and often are skill-based. But even there, the skill component still isn't overbearing, in most cases, I think. And then you have games like Mario Kart, for example, where you have very strong catch-up or rubber banding mechanics.

There are different ways that that's sometimes described, but just this idea that if you're in last place, you get a super powerful boost every time you pick up an item. If you're in first place, you're stuck just chucking bananas essentially.

Harry: Yep.

Julian: And that's sort of an issue I've had with Mario Kart for a long time because I always felt like you were being punished for being first.

Like, it is really cool if you're in the midfield or something and it's exciting and interesting and everybody's battling out. But if you are too far ahead of the other players, it's also just not very interesting, a lot of the time. You're just out there driving in front of everybody and occasionally getting sniped by blue shells or other nonsense.

And I feel like the interactivity completely goes out the window at that point. Right. So I think these are interesting approaches. But also, depending on what you want to deliver, what kind of experience. I mean, you can't always make everybody happy, right? Especially with multiplayer being so complex and bringing in people of different skill levels.

But I do think if it's important to you that many people with different skill sets or levels can play together, that there are things you can do to sort of limit the impact of the skill gap or to make it more accessible. And one interesting example of that that I actually recently stumbled on in my game is, I always was extremely careful with introducing more complexity, especially in the actual mechanics.

So what you can do with the characters, right? Because as soon as you have more options, there's more to learn and generally the skill ceiling will go up. And sometimes also the skill floor, depending on how it's designed. So what I mean is, it becomes harder to pick up and also harder to master, which means you end up generally with bigger skill gaps and then it's just generally not as easy to approach.

So I stayed away for a long time from some classic platform fighter elements, for example. So platform fighters just, like Smash Brothers, Brawlhalla, that kind of genre. And one example is the percentage system where as you take hits, your percentage goes up, and that essentially means the higher it is, the stronger the knockbacks on you become.

So ultimately the objective in these games is almost always to knock opponents out of the arena, out of the ring somewhere.

Harry: Mm-hmm. So, it's like an amplifier then, it's a win-more, kind of a mechanic.

Julian: In a way, yes, but it's also a tension-building mechanic. So we can dive deep into just that alone because I think it's just such a brilliant mechanic. But particularly to keep it to the skill gap thing for a moment, I stayed away from that particular thing for a long time.

One, because the core objective isn't knocking people out of their arena, it's keeping them away from certain areas within an arena, right? In my game. And the other one is just, it's another thing to keep track of and to organize and in something like Smash Bros for example, there are different combos that you can do depending on how damaged someone is, because maybe at the beginning they're not very damaged yet, they don't get knocked back very far.

And you can do certain chains of attacks and they won't be knocked out of reach while you're doing that. But as they get a higher percentage, it doesn't just act as a sort of win-more, it also acts as a challenge to the player who's attacking because they now need to consider differently what their attacks are gonna do with the other player and where they're gonna end up, right?

And so there's all of this extra complexity that just comes in there naturally from the system, or that can at least come in and can be leveraged by experienced players to just juggle opponents endlessly.

So one thing I then discovered is the core aspect that makes it so tricky is that you have these different combos that can arise from the different knockback levels, right?

And a quick fix or an interesting little approach that I tried is to just make the knockback always be crazy and to keep combo potential generally to a minimum. And so what you end up with is you get the satisfaction of watching the number or the damage state or whatever increase with every hit.

So there's a little reward every time you do land a hit, it doesn't become inconsequential because they can just walk back a second later to where they were. You also get the big knockback effects, which is just, it's always fun to punt someone across the arena and they bounce off the walls and stuff. That's cool. But you don't end up with this problem of super high complexity because there's just too much chaos thrown in. And that's where we come back to the whole thing about randomness or unpredictability in this case, it's not truly random because there are physics behind it, but it becomes almost impossible to skillfully predict what happens if the effect is just so over the top right?

And there's just not really much you can do to follow up. So there's not a lot of strategy involved in how you manage the damage state, but it is a satisfying element. It can be part of it and actually serves in a way to lower the complexity and to close the skill gap. And there are other interesting aspects to that, but that in particular just was such an eye-opening moment for me because it essentially means that more mechanics doesn't necessarily have to mean more complexity or higher skill gap.

Harry: Right. And I think that there's this other bit too where if you are playing with more than two people, then it's always going to be, there's always this additional bit where if there is a big skill gap and there's someone who's a really strong player, they're going to have to suffer being ganged up on by the other players in some sort of way, right?

So it's like, there's this interesting bit where as soon as you go away from head-to-head competition where the skill is really direct and the balance of power is direct, you get kind of these alliances of convenience in a game with three or more players where everyone is for themselves.

Which of course kind of impacts the skill gap. And I guess probably the chaos as well in terms of how things go. 'Cause then of course everyone actually is playing for themselves, so they are alliances of convenience because maybe there's someone who you need to focus on in order to progress the game.

But those only last as long as they're useful.

Julian: Exactly. So one fun thing you can do to reinforce that, for example, is to make it super obvious who's in the lead at any given moment, right? And maybe even make it more apparent, like, let's say they get, I don't know, some glow effect or something, and the glow intensifies as they gain a bigger lead as the gap expands.

And so you're more and more poked to actually go and gang up on this player, for example. And I love that sort of mechanic as well. And I remember, again with StarCraft, I'm not sure if it was in StarCraft in particular, but in RTSs in general, there was sometimes this mechanic where you could, in the middle of a match, just say, "Okay, I'm gonna offer an alliance to player three," and then our units will no longer attack each other and damage each other and you can just gang up on the other player.

And then as soon as it is no longer convenient, as you said, you just dissolve the alliance or you choose to win together, that's also sometimes an option. So yeah, I love that extra layer of social interaction that comes from that in particular as well.

Harry: You mentioned co-op as being a way to play. I find co-op to be really interesting because I think that you know, when I was a kid, I am a little bit older, so like in the eighties and nineties, nothing was ever co-op.

It wasn't something that like you saw in games very often. And then I think that more and more in the last 15 plus years, there's been a lot more co-op with regard to board games and kind of bigger online games. I think it's really interesting and really cool.

I played The Crew for the first time last year, which, you know, I've played so much hearts and spades and bridge and all these kinds of games in my life.

And then playing this version of a trick-taking game where it was co-op was just kind of like, I don't know, it felt like kind of a revelation because the mechanics were still just as good, but they were different. Like they were motivated differently. And I would love to hear how this fits into this whole kind of multiplayer ecosystem for you and some of your thoughts on that.

Julian: Definitely. Okay. So co-op is, I think, a fascinating topic and like you, I have this long experience of wishing that games were playable in co-op, looking specifically for co-op experiences that I could play with my brothers or my friends or something. And I think we're just now starting to see, sort of, at least the indie space, catch on to the potential of co-op for really cool and interesting design spaces.

Harry: But even the new Elden Ring is co-op, and that's a huge, huge game. That's a big AAA game and that's co-op, which is interesting and great.

Julian: I think the interesting part in particular there is that it's designed for co-op, right? It's not an optional game mode. It's not something that you can tack onto the single player. 'Cause you have things like, let's say Mario Galaxy, which had this little assist mode where one person could wave around the little star cursor and it was a completely different experience.

And again, this was something that maybe allowed you to play along, like to have your kid play along a little bit or something. Something like that, right? To have just asymmetrical skill levels contributing in a way. But I'm fascinated in particular by the co-op first design, Elden Ring, for example. There are some AAA or big budget titles that embrace this. But I've mostly seen the really, really interesting attempts at trying new stuff with this in the indie space. And there are examples of co-op party games as well, like, Overcooked for example, right?

There are ones that lean very, very heavily into the social aspects of the co-op play, which is, let's say... sorry, I'm blanking.

What is the name of the...

Harry: Lethal Company?

Julian: Yes. Thank you.

Harry: Yeah. And there's a couple other additional ones. I think that Lethal Company is such a funny, interesting, multiplayer study because it's co-op, but it's also kind of like slapstick horror, and it was also built by one developer, and it's very clearly just like a bunch of assets just slammed together,

Julian: Yes, but it's so clever about it.

Harry: But it's so good. Yeah. And everything about it fits. Like the jankiness of all that stuff is a feature, it's part of the aesthetic of the game, and it works really, really well for what the game is doing.

But so much of the fun in that game is just people being jump scared, and then everyone gets wiped out and it's funny.

Julian: Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's just this level of absurdity that really serves to, and I think, again, this works so well because it's a multiplayer and specifically a co-op experience. You're not in a mindset to be competing. You're in a mindset of "you're in this really bizarre situation together and you can do all this really strange stuff that has no immediate gameplay effect," right?

Like you can, I think there's a specific hotkey just for dancing, and there's nothing to my knowledge that this does other than have a fun little animation playing. And this kind of stuff fascinates me most of all because it doesn't serve to interact with the game systems in any way. It's purely between the players, but the players' experience is your core target that you're designing for, right? You want to have the experience be interesting and fun. And for that, you want interactions to happen. And the interactions don't always have to have a specific purpose with the other game systems.

They can just be there for the sake of the interaction. And I think Lethal Company does this super well where it just has things that aren't explicitly stated as goals that can happen and are interesting, or you just can do really basic things in really roundabout ways. Like, for example, looking at an instruction manual has you picking the thing up as a physical object, holding it in front of your face and just parsing it through, and the other players see you like holding the damn thing up to your face. And all of this is stuff, you don't have to do this, it's all additional complexity while you're developing. But if you do, then you have all these interesting situations that come out of it. And I think of that as sort of emergent social design in a way. Like we talk about a lot in the game dev space about emergent game systems, emergent gameplay, all that kind of stuff.

And it's interesting in single player games for sure. But what fascinates me is emergent stuff in multiplayer games. And to go back to my Smash Brothers roots, because I love that game series. One thing that would often happen there is you would get specific things that players can do, specific movements or whatever that signify something to other players playing this game, and it would be completely meaningless to someone who's not sort of in the loop, who hasn't played it for a bit and is aware of this thing. So one really dumb example is just ducking. You can, like, let's say you just knocked someone out, right? And then you run to the edge and you just duck a bunch of times and it's kind of like teabagging in Halo or something, right?

It's this completely nonsensical motion. It doesn't actually mean or do anything.

Harry: Right.

Julian: But what I mean is you just have this interaction and everybody who's aware of it immediately knows what it means, right? And there's this little extra thing that just happened because, just because the player is able to crouch in the game and, there are other things like raising and lowering a shield really quick or just like, in Battlerite, for example, that's a game that's sort of top down and you can turn 360 degrees to aim all of your attacks. And so something you would get there in the lead up to matches is players just spinning around in circles really fast for no reason whatsoever other than it looks kind of fun and it's kind of fun to do.

Harry: And it's like the, it's these affordances that you have as a player, right? You have access to eight buttons or whatever, and they each do something different and they look a certain way. So you just, it's like you're scratching at the door or trying to communicate through the wall with a, like, by tapping your pen on the wall or something.

Julian: Yes, exactly. And it's all the same sort of basic principle, I think as what we were talking about earlier with roguelikes and making you feel clever for doing interesting things with basic elements, right? It's all the same things. You have this very limited set of things that you can do, but there's something else you would like to do. How can you approximate that? Maybe, you know, you can taunt an opponent by crouching down a bunch of times, and that kind of thing. It all has to do with player expression to some degree, right? Same with, you choose, instead of doing the safe attack every time, let's say it's a little jab, right?

It comes out really quick. It inflicts some damage. Basically, you can do it for free because it doesn't leave you open to counter attack. But that's not interesting. It's way cooler to do like the flashy special move and blah, blah, blah. Or you have to like really juggle an opponent around and it's really cool if you manage to pull off this crazy combo.

And that's where all this sort of identity and players expressing themselves and what they like to do or want to do or are able to do with a limited set of things that they have at their disposal. And I find that fascinating.

Harry: So I've got a question 'cause I've thought about not as deeply as you, 'cause I haven't gotten as far into development, but I have thought about this space off and on for years, because I've thought a little bit about, you know, how social games might work in like, location-based games and the one thing I always, I think about these games as social spaces and I wonder what's the, how much activity do you need to provide for the player?

So if you look at, say something like a roguelike deck builder, you have to provide all the activity. Right? And it's not just that, it's like you have to provide the mechanics of a card game, and then you have to provide a meta progression so people feel like they're getting more out of it, or it's changing over time.

And that's kind of like a substitute for this social element, this element of other people's skill progressing who you're playing with or against, or a metagame. We had this conversation about this and like, there's always this traditional, 'cause my, again, my experience with collectible card games is Magic the Gathering, which is a competitive symmetric game.

But there's also this other element where there's always cards coming in and out of the sets. And there's a meta game element that actually has to do with information cascades and who heard about what deck and how much that deck's gonna show up at the tournament. And so what's the alpha deck to that deck?

And then, like how this whole thing works together. But that's all social and it's really interesting 'cause that's all kind of induced by the environment and that comes from other players that doesn't exist in a single player game.

Julian: If you really want to go down the rabbit hole, all the stuff you just mentioned, some of that is based in data, right? Like you can see deck type A wins more against deck type B or whatever, or you can infer that one is designed to sort of make the other less powerful or whatever.

But a lot of that just comes down to perception and then to word of mouth, because like, "Oh, everybody knows this deck is totally way too powerful, so everybody's playing this deck now." And, yeah, maybe that's true, or maybe it's complete nonsense, but everybody believes it. So it becomes a thing in the community. And then designing around that in a sort of live multiplayer environment, like, having certain win rates, for example, for let's say you have different characters that can be played like in something like League of Legends or a MOBA of any kind. And there's this perception that some players, or some characters are super overpowered and some are very underpowered, and sometimes that's true.

Sometimes they really do need tweaks or reworks. But a lot of the time you'll see sort of this interesting thing where a character is just not played a lot and it has sort of a bad win rate compared to the others. It gets a new skin that's really fancy and cool, and suddenly the win rate goes up.

Why is that? Nothing has changed about the character.

Harry: Right. That's funny. It just 'cause people play it more or they're just, I don't know. The thing with the magic tournaments is, this classic rock paper scissors type of thing. And it will be the case that, they release a card and the potentially, like, the card is at the high power level, and it works with an existing archetype.

So that deck actually probably is better. But then when everyone knows that they all show up at the tournament, there might be a deck that's objectively worse, but it's got a good matchup against that deck. And so in the rock paper scissors, there often will be a terrible. And then we're kind of off on a tangent now, but this is where my brain goes, but there often will be a terrible deck that can win the rock paper scissors against a field if it's 70% one deck, because it's just, you're just tuned to beat that thing.

Right? So it's an interesting kind of like metagame, but that's all social and that's all about people sharing information and then following trends and this and that. And that's all kind of like, that's all meta game that's manufactured by people and I think it's super interesting, going back to the question, what's the minimum amount of activity that you need to give players in order for them to introduce this additional complexity?

Like if you look at Lethal Company for example, it would be pretty boring single player, right? You just go, you go pick up a bolt and you take it back to the ship and you probably don't have time, you go get another bolt maybe?

And like, that's a very simple kind of boring activity. You're just walking into a room and trying to grab something and walking back out. And I think it's a really interesting question. It's like how simple can the activity be if you can provide the right environment?

Julian: Well, I'm gonna say the core of Lethal Company isn't in the collection or even in the horror monster things. I'm gonna say that the core of Lethal Company is designed around the interactions. Everything else is just a wrapper or just icing maybe, or whatever. But what seems to be the core is actually just the adjunct and the core is the player interactivity.

Harry: It's almost like you just design bottlenecks to kind of force interactivity, to kind of cause players to interact with one another and then let that happen or whatever.

Julian: Yeah, that's actually a good point. So for example, having something like locked doors and you need more than one person to work together to open the door, or let's say, there are different roles within a team and you need these different roles to work together. These are all really good conceits to get people to cooperate and to meet up in a specific spot and do things at the same time.

But then you can also play with that aspect, right? Like, forcing them to split up again once they've gotten used to helping each other out. Let's say one has an important item like a flashlight the other one doesn't have, now they need to split up. What does the guy without the flashlight do or the person without the flashlight, you know?

And then you get into all that interesting thing as well, like, group dynamics and all that stuff. One thing I was gonna touch on actually with regards to this whole, where do the core gameplay elements and the social elements sort of intersect and how they feed into each other is, one thing we touched on earlier with my game in particular with the trivia stuff being sort of disjunct from the fighting arcade-y party game thing.

So I touched on how the trivia stuff ends up giving you uncertain objectives, right? And how social aspects come in there because your intent and reading other people's intent becomes important. And it turns out fighting games and platform fighters, in particular I feel have a lot of this built in.

Like you try to bait out opponents, you try to mislead them, you sort of train opponents to anticipate you doing a certain thing several times and then suddenly you do the other thing to fool them. And it's all mind games. It always has been. And so those aspects actually play beautifully with one another.

And that's not something I designed for that just sort of happened. It was a happy little accident. And that, I think is the really interesting thing where you can not just have a core activity that's kind of basic and boring or whatever, or you don't just design purely for the interactivity or purely for the systems, and then the interactivity sort of happens, but where you sort of land in this golden middle where both sort of areas feed into each other really beautifully.

And I think that's something that we're gonna see more and more being explored in the coming months, years, I guess, especially as I said in the indie space.

Harry: Yeah, it's super interesting. It's super interesting. I'm kind of like, I'm kind of fixated on this idea now of these funnels. I just was thinking about like battle royale, how battle royales have these funnels by tightening a circle or, or you've got like some time-based goals and those are kind of these funnels and that in the multiplayer context, you can have just a really simple goal and then you just kind of have to squeeze the players into a smaller and smaller space in some sort of way.

Right. Whether it be a race, it sounds like with your game for instance, there's this competition of being in the right place towards the end of the, you have to, you have to be where the solution is at the end of the timer. And that's the same kind of thing.

You're kind of, you've got this funnel that's pushing them towards one of these goals and forcing them to interact. And then anything that they do that's an interaction is actually, is in a player expression, in some sort of way and gives them that feeling that they're doing something interesting or unique in the game, which is very cool.

Julian: Exactly. And in competitive games. So we are going back and forth between competitive and cooperative, but I do think there's a lot of overlap because we're sort of focusing on how do you really engage in, or how do you get players to engage with each other, rather.

And I think a lot of it has to do with, or for many people at least, it has to do with feeling clever or feeling agency in some way within a group.

And like having others observe you doing things well or doing things that are novel or funny in some way, right? And so I think this component of observation is really interesting in that context, but also the thing that you keep going back to the funnel, I think that's a really interesting perspective on it.

And also, constraints, right? Because that was sort of the thing that I was alluding to with both the roguelike elements and also players finding ways to express themselves with basic elements, basic gameplay elements. It's all this sort of creativity within constrained systems, right? You have a limited subset of things that you can do.

Let's see if you can really stretch that and really come up with some interesting things that no one else has thought of, you know?

Harry: I really want to get a speed runner.

Julian: Mm.

Harry: And talk to a speed runner. I'm so deeply fascinated with this. 'Cause your game is a system, right? It allows the things that you're supposed to do, but then it also, because it's got its own physics, it allows things that you didn't intend.

And there's all these forms of player expression that have to do with exploring your system in ways that were not intended. I think what a great feeling as a designer to have someone care about your game enough to find all the weird edges and kind of find all the weird edge cases.

I think it's super, super interesting, but it kind of feels like it's the same sort of thing, right? You're providing the physics and then you're giving the players the opportunity to express themselves with the interactions and the systems that they have. And that's also a lot of, I think, what people enjoy about having a certain, like a build identity in a deck builder or a run identity.

I think Axo talked about that a lot actually.

Julian: Speed running is the ultimate expression of mastery, right? You're intentionally breaking systems often, and really stretching the limits in order to just deliver the absolute peak experience that can be achieved. And I find that also very fascinating. One thing that also I thought was interesting, you mentioned with a funnel concept like battle royale for example.

That's a really good example. I think there are gradients to how you design these spaces and these game objectives to sort of force interactions and to funnel players together, more or less, right? Because you don't have to do it. You can just lock everybody in a two by two room and say, "Now you're forced to be with each other, do stuff."

You know? And I'm sure there are cool experiences that can be achieved there. You can also start with a bigger field and then shrink it down to sort of have the interactions come from that. But you do also have things like Minecraft, for example. Right? And I mean, a lot of people go into something like Minecraft together, they spawn together and then they do stuff together.

But there are also these massive social servers where people just spawn in on their own completely, you know, disjunct from anybody else, and they just do their own thing. And then they eventually maybe stumble over each other. And there's some sort of joy that comes from just knowing that the possibility is there, that you will meet somebody even if you're most of the time doing your own thing.

And I find that fascinating. I think it also has to do with the sort of observational component. Just the potential to be observed is already like a boost in some way to some people. And I remember, playing a lot of MMO RPGs just solo for years. And I kept trying to analyze myself, why I enjoyed this and why I was doing this.

Because I never actually went out and tried to find parties and guilds, to really engage with and build up community within a particular game or anything. But I just love the idea of running around in this world where there are other people and you're all sort of doing stuff together, but not necessarily together, together, you know?

And yeah, I think again, a lot of that has to do with the potential for interaction, the potential for observation, and for your actions to matter in some greater way than they do if you're just, you know, sitting alone in your basement and doing stuff.

Harry: Yeah, I guess it gets into that idea. I mean, there's the kind of the direct multiplayer, you've got a battle royale, you've got the space compressing, for instance, or you've got people doing couch co-op or competitive couch multiplayer. But then there's this mingle player idea, right? Where it's not even that you're actually interacting directly with other players, but you're kind of interacting with the evidence that other players exist or there's some sort of trace or something that's left from someone else.

And there's something, there is something really interesting about that I think from a player's perspective, even just the classic Fromsoft thing where there's messages that other players put into the world that don't affect your game or they might affect, they might give you a hint actually or something.

Julian: Or they might kill you.

Harry: Or they might kill you. Yeah. They might be a complete troll or whatever, but they're not actually directly interacting with the mechanics of your play through. And then lots of other games have traces of different, like there was this game I saw recently that was, I saw a video for this demo, I can't remember what it was called.

Blood Thief I think. And the game is designed around speed running. Like it's made to go really fast. And you're just running through these 3D dungeons with like kind of old school 3D graphics. But you can always see the trace of players that are a little bit faster than you.

Julian: Oh, I think I may know what you're talking about. I remember pieces of this in, I believe it was Shadow of Mordor, the Lord of the Rings game or, Assassin's Creed also had this, maybe just one or the other, I'm not sure anymore.

But I do remember sort of one of these open world games having dead players show up on your map that you could avenge, or loot something from a more powerful enemy that supposedly killed that player or something.

I love the term "mingle player," by the way. I hadn't heard that before. That's great.

And it sort of has that same feeling to it, right? Like it may be more comparable to the bloodstains in the Fromsoft games than to the messages, but there's a similar flavor and then you have the evolution of that, which is the Strand game, right?

The Kojima, like, I don't know what we're gonna be calling it, but, you know, Death Stranding has this whole other aspect to it, asynchronous multiplayer in a way where the things you do in your PlayStation affect the PlayStation of others and vice versa. And some of it is sort of intentional, right?

There's this cooperative element to that as well. Like, let's say you go out of your way to build a shortcut somewhere, and that's not for you, that's for everybody else who will come this way and appreciate that you did that. And you do that because it makes you feel nice because you know you're gonna be helping someone and they're gonna have a better time of it.

And I just, I sort of love the idea that, yeah, you just do these things without an immediate payoff. You don't do them to get someone high fiving you or giving you a thumbs up emote, or anything of the sort. There is no juicy, "Yay you did this." It's really just, you know it's gonna benefit people in the future.

And that's why you do it. And I think that's so powerful and so relevant.

Thanks to Julian for joining, and Alex Epton for providing the music!

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