Hooks and Player Engagement: Devlog #6

It's That Time of the Week Again

         There aren't many genres more overdone by indie developers than the 2D-platformer. I wouldn't be surprised if you could spend your entire life playing free indie platformers off of itch.io or Steam without ever playing the same game twice. This genre seems to have made its name as the plain white rice of games; for many, it may be the first thing that comes to mind when they think 'video game'.

         Because of this, developers of 2D-platformers have a lot of competition, and that competition is piling up constantly over time. So, if you're going to make plain white rice, it better be damn good rice.  It's not worth making a game that could've just been a super world in Super Mario Maker 2. Players don't want to see repeats of what has been done before, and you probably wouldn't get much fun as a developer out of replicating someone else's work anyway.

         I'm sure at least one individual has read through part of one of these devlogs, seen the word 'platformer', and clicked off. To be honest, I wouldn't blame them. With that being said, Enchanterland is still a platformer. I certainly won't be changing that without substantial pressure from my purely hypothetical publishers. So, I want to use this devlog to talk about what I'm doing to set this project apart from every other developer's first. It will cover my strategies for gaining the attention of players, as well as maintaining it. Without further ado, let's get started.

Gaining Engagement

         Besides being a common trope in first-person shooters, the term 'Hook' also represents anything in a game that is used to attain the interest of the player. A hook could be a visual aspect of the game, such as the art style or amount of detail. It could also be a gameplay mechanic, such as a crafting system or the literal grappling hooks found in shooters. It could also be something about the overall experience, such as the diversity of content or the unlikely combination of genres that had untapped synergies. The term is often referred to more specifically as a written description of one of these qualities within a game. An example of a hook description would be a statement such as "A game about a half-naked man in a cauldron climbing a trash mountain with a hammer over philosophy-podcast-esque background audio." This hook doesn't sound like it would be very popular amongst publishers, but it probably inspired the old game that later inspired Getting Over It. People find inspiration everywhere, I tell you.

What a game this is.

         With today's extremely saturated market of readily-accessible games, essentially all potential players are using quick mental heuristics to decide what to play. That's likely something you know from experience; you don't try out every single game that Steam recommends you, and more than half the executables on itch.io are probably viruses anyway. What I don't think gets mentioned enough, however, is that these intuitions that players get based on the front page of a game are often accurate. We can (sometimes) clearly sense that certain games are probably bitcoin miners in the same way that we can sense that certain games aren't worth playing. I don't need to play a demo of this years Fifa re-release to know that I'm not buying it. When developers put minimal effort into the front page and introduction of their fully published games, its a pretty good sign that they put minimal effort into the rest of the project as well.

         This idea made me re-interpret the true value of a hook. A hook is not just a tool for marketing your game; it's a condition for having a fun game to begin with. If you can't answer the question, "Why should I play this game?" then what does that say about the game? Even if the game does have good qualities that make it worth playing, the inability to say what they are out-loud signifies a problem. Potential players aside entirely, one should find their own games fun. One should also be able to explain what makes their games fun. One should also be able to explain what makes their games uniquely fun. If you can sell passionate players/developers on a project with only a couple sentences, that almost certainly signifies something good about the overall quality level of your game. So, while hooks are absolutely useful for marketing and gaining player engagement, hook-statements should also be used by developers to assure that their games bring something both fun and interesting to the table.

         I don't really care for the common expression 'never judge a book by its cover.'  Sure, I understand that it's a metaphor for people, and we definitely shouldn't judge people entirely on our first impressions of them. But when it comes to books (and games), what am I supposed to do... read the entire book before buying it? Designing the "cover" of a game is part of the game design process. One should put just as much effort into that cover as you should with everything else. I hear a lot of people talk about games that are supposed to "get better later on", but I usually find that the best games tend to start out good and then stay good. This is part of why tutorials are notoriously difficult to design: they not only have to explain entirely newfound information to the player, but they also have to give the player a good first impression of the game and its gameplay loop(s). It's difficult to manufacture a good first-impression on the front page or early levels of a game, but it's also extremely important.

         For Enchanterland, I'm hoping to create hooks and good first impressions through its artstyle, level design, and relative simplicity. I've talked about both the artstyle and my minimalistic design philosophy in different devlogs, so I'll focus on the level design here. The most important level in any platformer is the first one. Doesn't take much imagination to picture that; you likely know the layout of 1-1 in Super Mario Brothers by heart even if you haven't played the game yourself. Part of what I find so great about platformers is that the first levels or areas often function as "silent" tutorials. They often nudge players towards learning things about the game on their own without the use of intrusive text boxes or obnoxious fairies. In this project, I want the first levels to be extremely simple levels that are designed with the intent of teaching the player about the mechanics without the need for many words. A different game that I think back to for doing this extremely well is Celeste, where the "tutorial" is one word and one symbol; the rest of the mechanics just sort of flow from there. I'm hoping that the mechanics in Enchanterland can be implicitly conveyed through a similar medium.

         Now, to set apart Enchanterland from the bajillion other platformers available online, that's where the second part of my Frankensteined genre-mashup comes in. While combat-centered platformers do exist, games that are platformers tend to put platforming first and combat second. For this project, however, I'm combining mario-esque level layouts with combat mechanics and enemy AI more representative of classic NES beat-em'-ups.  That, as far as I'm aware, hasn't been done; at least not to this extent. Frankensteining together game genres doesn't always work well, but we never figure out what combinations work and which don't until we actually make those combinations. I, for one, think this genre mashup has a lot of potential. While this may be a stretch, I also hope that other developers that I don't know about had a similar idea and are designing their own parallel games right now. Hopefully not the exact same idea, though. That would be a problem.

I love River City Ransom on the NES in particular, especially with how these characters look.

Maintaining Engagement

         Triple-A companies tend to be really good at the 'getting sales' part of game design, but they aren't always spot on with the 'making a good game' part of it. When you gain the attention of players through the effective use of hooks, you also have to prove to the players that your hooks weren't just red herrings. Ensuring a consistent level of quality throughout a game looks different depending on what genre the game is in, but there is still some consistency with the strategies used by many developers.

         When players spend their time playing a game, they generally want some kind of personal payoff from it. I consider this payoff to consist of any Intrinsic Rewards given to the player for engaging with content. The key word here is intrinsic; explicit in-game rewards are more of a medium for eliciting payoff and aren't really a part of it themselves. For instance, the feeling of accomplishment for completing a game is an intrinsic reward, because its not a quantifiable aspect of the game itself. The sense of discovery a player might get for exploring Hyrule in Breath of the Wild is also an intrinsic reward. On the contrary, Extrinsic Rewards consist of the more tangible in-game rewards a player might get for accomplishing something. When you open a chest after completing an enemy camp in Breath of the Wild, the typically worthless item you get out of it technically does count as an extrinsic reward. Extrinsic rewards are valuable to games since they usually contribute to larger-scale intrinsic rewards, such as the feelings of power a player might get from having powerful items. The different rewards players receive throughout a game make up the payoff, which is essentially what all players are playing for in one way or another.

        These kinds of rewards truly do exist in all categories of games. The pieces of furniture players get from the Nook stores in the Animal Crossing series are all extrinsic rewards, while the feelings of completion players get for completing their museum or finishing their house are intrinsic rewards. Understanding what players are supposed to get out of your game is essential to maintaining their engagement and building a committed player base. This is the part of games that can't be advertised with hooks, since players will typically only get gratification out of a game from actually playing it. However, it is still a necessary component of quality products. Psychological gratification is really the only reason anyone plays any sort of game whatsoever. Therefore, developers have to also be able to recognize their games' sources of this enjoyment so that they can more easily fine-tune the aspects that promote them; not all too different from the 'follow the fun' strategy of game design. It's difficult to imagine someone making game that constantly throws you into rough situations and never elicits any sense of accomplishment or gratification whatsoever. Luckily, you don't have to; that's what Thousand Millimeter Climb is for.

         The extrinsic rewards in Enchanterland will likely be few and far between, but that should, if done correctly, make them much more valuable than they often are in other games. The early Resident Evil games used a strategy like this. In those games, ammunition for your gun was rare, and inventory space was extremely limited. This ultimately contributes to the sense of powerlessness and fear that ironically make the games more enjoyable than they would be otherwise. However, it also makes finding new items seem more rewarding, since every individual bullet becomes a precious one. This is pretty much the exact opposite of arrows in Skyrim, which you should've known was going to be brought up again at some point one way or another. Turns out that showering players with more and more items makes each individual one less and less intrinsically valuable. For whatever items I decide to reward players with in Enchanterland, I think the ones with tangible uses should be very powerful and very spread apart, which should contribute to the payoff in the long-term.

I respect this game's minimalistic inventory, but I'll probably never find the stomach to actually play any of the games in the series myself.

It is No Longer That Time of the Week Again

         I should still be releasing the short tech-demo for this project by the end of the week. Again, when the demo gets in your hands (or your desktop), feel free to post any feedback in the comments of one of these logs. There won't be too much to give feedback on, but I want to justify the existence of this itch page while also proving that I'm not just an amateur writer pretending to be a game developer. Besides, feedback at any and every stage of the process of development is very important and reminds me that I don't always have to work in a vacuum. If you're brave enough to risk downloading any files from this forsaken site, consider at least giving the demo a try. With that being said, I will leave you to do that thing you're procrastinating at the moment. Cheers!