It 2 design notes

A couple of players asked me about my creative process, so decided to get into it a bit here. Consider this a companion piece to the It 2 dev log, which goes into more technical detail.

Thematically, the game came together fairly quickly. I chose "It" as source material mostly because I liked the joke of inverting the "clown in the storm drain" trope by having all seven kids poking their heads out of the storm drain and alarming passers by. I started skimming TV Tropes for joke and gameplay ideas, and I hit on the idea of, if It feeds on people's fear, other monsters might feed on other emotions such as awkwardness. The new monster had to have a pronoun for a name -- in my headcanon there are a whole slew of these creatures that each have different pronoun names and feed on different emotions. And of course the game takes place in the aftermath of a breakup, with the quest of recovering It's record collection, because I think the idea of putting Lovecraftian horrors mundane situations is funny. It's a gag I've done before, e.g. in SPAXRIS.

Gameplay was a bit harder to come by. My game design process is to take a game idea that seems like it'll work, start implementing it, then while I'm implementing it I usually have a better idea and start doing that instead. Usually this keeps happening, and usually the ideas are related enough that the work so far isn't wasted. This process works for me most of the time! To start off, though, I need what seems like a good idea. (Although honestly I don't know if this is a psychological barrier or, like, if I started making a dull game idea, would it also lead to a better idea I could pivot to?)

I ended up thinking about gameplay for most of October, mostly because I was really excited about PiCoSteveMo. I've got the personal constraint that I always try to follow, of not including combat in my games. (I've got ethical reasons for this, but also, the world doesn't need more combat-oriented games, because we have so many of them. It's been done so much. It's boring.) I wanted to do an open world puzzle game, like Look Who's The Shining Two. I started putting together a set of complementary abilities for the seven protagonists, and a set of puzzle mechanics that they might interact well with. I've got a couple pages of notes for ideas like this:

• Kid who does origami
  • Build paper boats for travel
  • Build fortune telling thing??
  • Weakness: being perceived??
• Kid with slingshot
  • Break walls
  • Drop ladders
  • Put out lamps?
  • Distract mobs?
• Shibari Kid
  • Can tie knots
  • Passage down to next level
  • Tie off passage -- create barrier?
  • Tie up boat??
  • Weakness: touching water

Kid with bicycle, kid who smokes, kid who is very tall, you get it. I had an idea for an analog sokoban where you're pushing around balloons that aren't tied to a grid, with realistic physics. I had an idea for a game where you're managing water pressure levels by snapping together tiles like in Pipe Dream. The design problem I kept coming back to was how to let the player control seven protagonists without navigation becoming a chore, making them select and move around seven characters individually. I ended up pulling a movement mechanic from the Frog Fraction Hat DLC, where two characters navigate a tile-based digging minigame together. 

The group follows whoever's in the lead, and gravity affects the entire group, which can take various shapes based on who's moved where. I prototyped the idea with seven characters and it felt much different from two, much more interesting, so I decided to run with it -- still not totally sure what these characters would actually be doing other than moving around the space. (The similarities to Snakebird are obvious but unintentional. One player described this game as on the continuum between Snakebird and Lost Vikings, which I think is apt.)

The process I've hit on for level design is to implement a game feature, then add some level design to the map that tutorializes or takes advantage of that feature, then repeat. This has the advantage that areas are naturally themed by mechanic. I built the top half of the map in roughly the order that you collect the protagonists, and I added each protagonist's special ability in roughly the order that I thought of them.

Thinking about the kind of puzzle gameplay I was envisioning, I knew I needed a way to reset the game state. In a combat-driven game, there are a lot of examples to pull from, but typically the world resets to a checkpoint when you lose a fight. This game has no death, no lose state, and I needed to make sure you couldn't get stuck. I had to address the same issue in Look Who's The Shining Two, with the "rewind yourself" and "rewind the world" whiskeys, and similarly to that game, I wanted these abilities to have puzzle solving function and not just a utility function. But I knew I had to give you the "reset room" and "return to checkpoint" abilities first, and soon, because the puzzle design before you got them had to be very constrained to prevent soft locks. After that, character abilities could be flow more loosely and freely.

After designing the part of the game where you collect all the protagonists, I wasn't sure how to proceed. In my previous Zelda-inspired open world games, Gordy and the Monster Moon, and Look Who's The Shining Two, you have a lot of leeway in the order you collect new abilities, and you collect new abilities over the course of the entire game. This game, possibly because of the nature of the abilities or possibly because the size of your group constrains movement a lot, I had a very hard time coming up with a level design that would support collecting your little guys in any order, and I had a hard time imagining how to design areas that supported differently sized groups or different subsets of abilities. 

Maybe I could've done it with some more thought and iteration, but in practice I ended up with a first half of the game where you're collecting guys, and then a second half of the game, where the puzzles get tougher and demand splitting up your group, interaction between abilities, etc. I think it worked out fine, but it's not the game I set out intending to make. Based on playtests,  people didn't seem to feel railroaded by the fixed order of things you have to do in the first half of the game.

Before I set out designing the second half of the game, I solidified a few loose mechanics I'd established already -- pushing around and popping balloons, and poking your head out of storm drains -- into the formal structure of the game, the doors that only open once you've popped a certain number of balloons, and unlocking the ending when you've reached a certain number of storm drains.

I started making a list of the kinds of puzzles and ability combinations I was missing based on playtester feedback, and building them out. I also started expanding my thoughts about level design past pure puzzles and more in terms of what kind of experiences make going on an adventure interesting, like climbing a sheer cliff by digging barely beneath its surface, or digging into a stalactite of dirt suspended from the ceiling, peering out and seeing nothingness in all directions, and taking a leap of faith anyway, or finding a toilet at the bottom of an underground reservoir and choosing to flush yourself down it. Exploring the sewers beneath your town should feel like an adventure.

Once the game was playable start to finish I started running more playtests. I think the process of running a proper playtest is more widely understood now than it was ten or twenty years ago, but the short version is you have to sit a player down, you ask them for a running monologue about everything they're thinking and feeling -- some people are better at this than others -- and you tell them to ask questions, but that you can't answer any of them until the end. Then you sit back, shut up, and take notes. You don't explain what's going on if they seem stuck or confused, you just suffer. Players out in the wild won't have you explaining how to play over their shoulder. Your game needs to stand on its own.

I suppose I should talk about art somewhere in here. My pixel art is much much better than it was a few years ago, and I can tell you it's not because I've practiced a lot. It comes almost entirely from adopting the following process:

• Look up reference art for your subject. Add "pixel art" for easy mode.
• Just keep stirring the pixels around until it looks good.

In Pico-8 you have a fixed, well-chosen palette, so you don't need to worry that much about color. You're also mostly working with 8x8 tiles so getting roughly the right shape and then trying various tweaks almost at random until it looks good is extremely doable. There just aren't that many things you can try.

I had started writing the dialog early on -- I enjoy writing dialog trees, so it's a fun motivational bit of work for me. I had written almost all the dialog in the game halfway through development and I spent the second half polishing it, tweaking word choices, improving jokes, removing jokes that weren't good enough to justify the space they took up. I only hit on the final twist when it came to write the dialog tree for the ending and I realized I didn't really have an ending. I took a couple days to think about it and ended up with an idea that seemed in-character for everyone, funny and horrifying at the same time.

The secret ending came very late. I had a bunch of unexpected room on the cartridge for additional art and I chose to spend it here. Not to spoil it, but it seemed like a satisfying reward for popping every balloon, and like a silly, simple way to subvert the original work that would make people happy to find.