Max Nichols' Game Design blog
For years I’ve thought about how games about exploration or immersion in a place work.
This is one of my five most important pillars:
“Player attention is on the game world”
The most beautiful, luscious worlds are squandered by games with systems and mechanics that draw attention away from them.
Unicorn Overlord and Metaphor have me musing–
Combining these makes me feel TRANSPORTED to a big new game world:
– Maximalist ui
– Maximalist music
– En media res opening
– Multiscan environments
– Complex systems (slowly ramped)
– Unfamiliar controls
– Culture Shock
– Novelty
After 9 years–fully half of my adult life–I was let go from Bungie this morning, along with MANY other amazing folks.
Getting to work on a game like this, where I made and helped make experiences that are enjoyed by millions of people, was a huge privilege.
But I don’t want to leave this off with a simple “it was a privilege, thank you Bungie”.
How the goals goals and approaches in the #Zelda series change over time is a favorite topic of mine!
I think that through a certain lens Kat (quoted below) is right, but there are interesting distinctions to be made between different eras of the Zelda franchise.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a towering achievement, a game that raised the bar far above all that had come before.
In 1998, 3D games were not new: 3D games with first-person, top-down, and side-scrolling viewpoints had already arrived, as had third-person platformers. But nobody had yet made a third-person game with both strong camera control and melee combat, especially not in a vast, immersive world. There was no blueprint, and design pitfalls awaited any team that tried.
Ocarina of Time solved that puzzle decisively. It was a model for making third-person 3D action games that were approachable and ambitious. It broke new ground in camera control, melee combat, level design, and world design. It achieved a high standard for readability and approachability; nothing like it had ever been made before, and it set a high-water mark that wouldn’t be surpassed for years.
“How do games intrinsically motivate players to explore” is a favorite #GameDesign topic of mine.
Many of the games that do this achieve it partially by evoking a sense of awe while exploring their worlds.
Let’s talk about how that works in games.
Occasionally I post some mostly coherent Twitter threads on game design. Some of them are worth saving here. – Max As a player, I often…
Sacred Realms is a Zelda retrospective podcast, where hosts Matthew and Lyndon Willoughly discuss the Zelda series as they replay all the games. I’m a frequent guest on the podcast, offering my perspective as both a game designer who and a Zelda fan.
I appeared in a couple A Link to the Past episodes. We discussed topics like verticality in dungeon design, and 2D vs 3D gameplay. We paid special attention to the infamous block-dropping puzzle in the Ice Palace – and I discussed why it is so difficult and why I suspect the Zelda team considered it a failure.
The core question is: how do you make sure that the player sees what they need to see?
Lots of strategies. “Detective vision” is one that works in some cases that are otherwise hard to solve for.
Occasionally I post some social media threads on game design. Some of them are worth saving here. – Max So Dragonspine Mountain in Genshin Impact…
Sacred Realms is a Zelda retrospective podcast, where hosts Matthew and Lyndon Willoughly discuss the Zelda series as they replay all the games. I’m a frequent guest on the podcast, offering my perspective as both a game designer who and a Zelda fan.
I appeared in a couple Skyward Sword episodes, where we delved into topics like dungeon design, and contrasted Skyward Sword with Breath of the Wild.
The theme of this class is “World Design”, a subset of Game Design. The goal of this document is to explain what that means!
“World Design” is nebulously defined. Some companies have “World Designer” as a job title, but they don’t necessarily describe the same job. I’ve seen it used to describe traditional mission or level design work, designing vast non-linear spaces in open world games, and even the design of systems or UI related to the game world. So we will use a very broad definition in this class.
If Game Design is…
GameDesign rambles-
I love moments of “recontextualization” in game worlds.
This is part of why exploring in Zelda or Metroidvania games feels good, why you keep coming back to stages in Pokemon Snap… and why live-service games can struggle to give those feelings.
One of my favorite story archetypes is the “world as a mystery”. I love it when there’s a big unknown about the setting’s mechanics or history that deeply impacts the story + characters. And the story is then structured like a mystery novel.
I love that excitement of learning a setting’s history and, as we learn more, it re-contextualizes everything we thought we knew about that world. Of course, major revelations about the world must coincide with major character moments for maximum impact!
Let’s talk about high vs low granularity in game design, which has always been one of my favorite topics. From Wikipedia: “Granularity refers to the extent to which a material or system is composed of distinguishable pieces”.
In the context of game design, many things can be either high or low granularity, such as:
I recorded a truncated podcast version of one of my articles, Ocarina’s Image: Fundamental Challenges of 3D, for the Zelda Universe Podcast.
Fifteen years after Ocarina of Time, the Zelda team finally retired its time-worn solutions to the problems of 3D. They shifted their philosophy, drew from the inspiration for the first Legend of Zelda, and rebuilt the beating heart of the franchise from first principles.
Previously we examined the challenges of building the first 3D Zelda, and the tradeoffs that Ocarina made to maintain approachability. These compromises attempted to balance two unsolved problems: decreased readability, and greatly increased complexity. In this final article, we’ll see how Breath of the Wild found new solutions to those problems.
Ocarina of Time was a seminal masterpiece. It was a model for how to make a third-person, 3D adventure game that was approachable and ambitious.…
“I wanted something that players could get so lost in, it would take them a whole year to finish.” – Shigeru Miyamoto, 1992 ¹…
Preface (3/23/2015): This survey was originally published almost a year ago, at my small Zelda site, Zeldadata.com. The audience was Zelda fans, not game devs!…