Noble Steed WIP Night June 2024

Hello everyone, my name is Sam Lovell, and I’m one of the three people that is developing Antictizen Red. A third person shooter with slowmotion and fast combat. Here’s what that looks like in action

(there was a short clip of Anticitizen: Red gameplay here, for the purpose of this blog imagine it’s the coolest and sickest gameplay clip you’ve ever seen)

Now, I know you’re thinking ‘woah that’s sick’ and ‘this looks fun’ and ‘hey I know that one and have already wishlisted it on steam’. But as the last person knows, it didn’t always start that way. 

When we first started getting other people to play it, we had an issue. A big one. 

People were not getting past the first level. They were getting confused about stuff I thought was obvious, getting lost in rooms that there was only really one way to go through and then dying at the first enemy encounter and turning off the game. 

This was the heart of our issue, Sweatiness.

Now, sweatiness isn’t necessarily difficulty, it looks like it, it probably feels like it. But it’s only a part of it. Sweatiness is an issue of cognitive load. Or, simply put. How much stuff you have on the screen, how many options you have to complete your goal and how many mechanics you have at your disposal. How big is the player’s obstacle, and how many tools do they have to overcome it?

Sweatiness isn’t even necessarily bad.  People want options, more mechanics. You want your last levels to be sweaty. But no one is getting to your last levels if your first levels are too much.

When I was first designing the game, I kept thinking about what I wanted in a game, I wanted choice. The biggest issue is that you are the best player of the game you create. Of course you would be. So you know all the right choices. You know what makes it fun. A first time player doesn’t.

“So, the fix is. Limit choice at the start. Slow your roll. Don’t let your players shoot themselves in the foot, because its your fault for giving them the loaded gun. If there’s a hard difficulty model?  Lock it.  A really easy difficulty mode?  Lock it. An arena mode? Lock it. Maps too sprawling? Lock them. Overly complicated mechanics? Slow it down. Enemies with harder abilities? Save them for later.

With locking things until later, we also fixed a massive issue with our tutorial. Before, it talked a lot. No one wants to open a game just so you can spend 15 minutes getting talked to about stuff you dont understand yet. Unless Hideo Kojima’s name is on the box. Locking stuff let us only give out pertinent information. Our tutorial went from a solid 15 minutes to about 3 minutes, Death Stranding could never.

Now, the idea of “locking” something sounds terrible to players. It sounds like you’re limiting the way they can play, until you, the creator, deems it appropriate. And yes, you are doing that, but the issue isn’t one of mechanics, its one of framing.

Its not things that are locked. Its that you can now unlock things for playing well. That arena mode that we had that everyone thought was really hard? Its still hard. But you have to unlock it by getting high scores in the campaign. The hardest difficulty. You have to earn it. You even have to earn the easiest difficulty now. People LOVE unlocking stuff. It feels good, even though we are essentially limiting players.

So now we have a solution to sweatiness, how do you know when you need to use it? Testing. Now, you can really only test a new player experience once per person. So you’re eventually going to run out of friends. Which is why events like this one are perfect. 

Generally you want someone who you can gather who is “okay” at the genre you’re doing. If you give it to people who have no interest in the genre and don’t enjoy it, you’re gonna sand away all the interesting elements you have in the pursuit of mass appeal. If you assemble a crack squad of locked in, 90 cranking experts, you’re gonna alienate people who might be interested, but just don’t have the time to dedicate to the cognitive load you’ve presented them with. It’s a fine balance, and one that even the pros havent nailed. But at a certain point, you will strike the balance, where you can drip feed the tools to your players without restricting or overloading them.

If you have issues similar to what we’ve had. And nothing else seems to be working. It might be an issue of sweatiness, it might be time to lock stuff for later

Thank you for your time everyone