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I keep a small constantly in-flux list of games that I think are both excellent and that I think are particularly valuable for game designers (specifically desi

I keep a small constantly in-flux list of games that I think are both excellent and that I think are particularly valuable for game designers (specifically designers who focus on smaller, single-player indie games) to both play and seriously study. These are games that I think get a lot of things right, have solid core design principles, and importantly, are also so consistently good and so transparently good at what they do that you can just kind of study them and dig into them and find a lot of design lessons the more obsessively you pick them apart. - Shovel Knight: is a wealth of information about solid level design, specifically about how to use and reuse mechanics in interesting ways, and how to make levels accessible using multiple mechanics/strategies. A good resource to use when thinking about how to reuse and adapt mechanics and mash genres together. - Undertale: Games as narrative and using mechanics to reinforce narrative/philosophy. Undertale is a master-class in how to approach meaningful, artistic game design through a technical lens where you're not just saying that your game is art, you're backing that up with smart design choices that effectively communicate and reinforce your theme. - Baba is You: Puzzle design and using systems to build puzzles, how to build puzzles that feel creative and that don't feel like busywork. Baba is You is also really hard, and there's some good lessons here about how having systems that feel playful as well as having ways to branch out and go in different directions and do different puzzles out of order can help alleviate some of the frustration that comes from really difficult puzzles -- also some of the areas where that falls slightly flat. Compare the systemic design in Baba is You and Spelunky and figure out how the design philosophies here overlap. - Spelunky: Systemic design and how to do randomization/generation well. Spelunky does a great job of teaching the difference between breadth of content and depth of content in randomization. I think Spelunky is also a really great example of how making all of your numbers (health, inventory, etc) smaller and can make individual actions feel more impactful and can make each choice feel more meaningful. Compare with Noita, which I think goes in the opposite direction to its detriment, it's a higher-res destructible terrain that somehow feels more samey in part because of the higher granularity of destruction and stats. It is possible that Spelunky 2 should be here instead of 1, but I haven't gotten a chance to play it yet, and I've avoided spoilers so I don't know anything about it (waiting on a Linux/Non-Steam release). - Rayman Legends: Flow state in games, level design as a communicative act with the player. When you play a lot of this game, you start to internalize how the level designers think and what motifs they use while designing levels. After a while, playing the game feels like you're just following a conversation with the level designer, you can start to predict what they're going to throw at you, and when you get into this flow state during daily challenges or endless modes, it's almost like you're dancing with the designer, you learn these "moves" and you're just endlessly executing them and trusting that the designer will act predictably. See if you can figure out how to play through the music levels where the screen gets all screwy (note that these levels are not deaf-accessible). Take a step back and think about how Rayman Legends uses consistency and repeated sections in levels to help mitigate issues like blind/unknown jumps in endless mode. - Terraria: Terraria on its surface shouldn't be good, because it's grindy and has really broad mechanics and a ton of mini-systems that don't seem like they strictly need to be there, and the controls aren't particularly tight, and you basically need a wiki to play it well, and yet Terraria is excellent and it's worth trying to figure out why the game works so well when other games like it don't to the same degree. Terraria has a massive breadth of just... stuff. And it all kind of works because the sheer quantity of content kind of covers up the fact that you're doing random loot drops and that most of the game's systems are optional. It took me a while to start enjoying it, when I first played it I bounced off really hard. But I regularly go back to it because it breaks a lot of rules that I have and yet I still love it, so it's a good reminder that a lot of design isn't set in stone, and it's a good example of how to break design rules well. I mention that Slay the Spire below feels "generous", Terraria is also a game that feels generous: you have a bunch of rare items that are annoying to get, but there are so many of them that you're still constantly finding cool things. Pull out the systems that it has and look at how they interact with each other: most of them are optional, but many of them still have benefits or intertwine with each other in weird ways. Contrast with Starbound: why does Terraria feel like it's bursting at the seams with content vs Starbound feeling kind of samey? Revisit Spelunky and think about randomization again.

danShumway 5y ago
An incomplete list of other games that I've played recently or had on my mind recently that I think are good for similar reasons to the list above: - Loop Hero: There's a lot of really smart design in this game, in particular I love the way that it approaches difficulty where players kind of organically shape how difficult they want their run to be. The whole game feels really unique and is worth digging into and exploring, it's closer to an idle game than a roguelike. - Ring of Pain: One of the best "deck-builder-roguelike" games I've personally played in that whole weird genre. Really good difficulty balancing, what I love about Ring of Pain is that the line between being dead and OP is really thin, and you can have great runs that you just lose in two turns because you aren't paying attention. At the same time, the game isn't so intensely hard that it requires you to expend a ton of mental energy constantly thinking 10 moves in advance while you play. Ring of Pain is a good game to deconstruct because it feels "tighter" than many other games in the genre, it's easier to pick out the really solid mechanical choices that it makes. - Slay the Spire: Somewhat rough, and has a lot of flaws, but also has a lot of good stuff. I think Slay the Spire is a good lesson in what it means to make a game that feels "generous", there's so much stuff going on and so many modes and stats and things you can play around with that it overwhelms the flaws. It's a game where as soon as you open it up you feel like you have your money's worth; it's scratching a weird psychological itch in that way. It's also a good example of how a game doesn't need to be perfectly balanced, you can have runs that get so OP that it's absurd, and it doesn't really detract from the game in any way that this can occasionally happen -- I think having some OP builds/outcomes is something designers in single-player games sometimes get too frightened about. Contrast with Ring of Pain or Spelunky though, both of which do a much better job of blurring the line between overpowered and about to die (although there are still OP outcomes you can achieve in both of those games). - Portal: If you've never gotten around to it, Portal is still a masterclass in puzzle accessibility, with the caveat that you can then go to games like Portal 2 and start to see where Valve's philosophy about player signaling in puzzles starts to break down a little bit. Valve has a lot of ingenious tricks to get players to look at important puzzle elements, to signal what's to happen and what mechanics to pay attention to. The problem is that as they lean more and more into those tricks, as a player you start to rely on them. You can get into puzzles near the end of Portal 2 that are solvable purely by looking at what lights are flashing or where subtle lines on the walls are pointing. So you have this really brilliant set of rules (the commentary in Portal goes into those rules in more detail), but there are also weaknesses here because like a dog learning to read human tells, you realize that you don't necessarily need to have a great grasp on the mechanics if you just look around each puzzle and wait for Valve to signal the solution to you. - Breath of the Wild: In my opinion the most creative Zelda game that Nintendo has made since Majora's Mask, and also a better game than Majora's Mask because Majora's Mask is experimental and clumsy, and BotW is experimental and well executed. It isn't the lack of tutorials or the environmental interactions that make Breath of the Wild special, it is the weapons degradation system and the way the world levels up around you and how that encourages a kind of flow to how the player traverses the overworld and interacts with the environment. I think that Breath of the Wild did something really special with that system, and then didn't communicate it well, and a lot of the criticism of the game has come from people not really knowing how to engage with a system that wasn't communicated well and that was meant to be played in a different way than most other open world games. There are intuitions players have about how open world systems work and what they're supposed to do inside of them and about how resource management works, and BotW breaks those tropes and doesn't really tell the player that it is breaking them. It doesn't do a good enough job of teaching the player that hording resources and good weapons is literally unoptimal play that makes it harder to progress in the world. I think the game has some significant flaws, I vaguely predict that if other games take lessons from it and start exploring this idea of having a world that levels up rather than a player that levels up, it'll end up being eventually talked about in the same way that Demon's Souls is talked about: an important game that wasn't really understood when it came out, but that nevertheless pushed gaming in a certain direction and that was later eclipsed by other games that better executed the core ideas without any of the flaws. But short version of all of that, BotW is genius and their biggest mistake was not making the weapons break even faster and more often, and I hope the sequel doubles down on it, bite me. ---- Not going to take the time to write them up more but: - Hollow Knight (good Metroidvania with good lessons about worldbuilding and world-design, particularly around branching paths) - Order of Ecclesaia, Portrait of Ruin, Dawn of Sorrow: mechanically solid games that do a great job of scratching this collector's itch and being generous about throwing a lot of content at you, even just in the variety of enemies and environments. - Crystal Clear (Pokemon Crystal ROMHack): fun deconstruction of Pokemon Crystal into an open world that puts solid effort into making the game actually work as an open world. If you like ROMHacks and you like deconstructing old games, also mess around with Link to the Past randomizers, they're a fun way of showcasing how connected the world is, and it's fun to try and break down what makes LttP work so particularly well as a randomizer. - Oracle of Seasons/Ages: by far the best 2D Zelda games, and a really good example still of how to build worlds that feel interconnected and alive and vibrant and busy while simultaneously keeping that world easy to navigate and reason about. Also, the pixel art is good at being both engaging and (importantly) extremely visually clear and easy to read at a glance. - probably other stuff that I'll be upset I didn't think about later.

danShumway 5y ago

An incomplete list of other games that I've played recently or had on my mind recently that I think are good for similar reasons to the list above: - Loop Hero: There's a lot of really smart design in this game, in particular I love the way that it approaches difficulty where players kind of organically shape how difficult they want their run to be. The whole game feels really unique and is worth digging into and exploring, it's closer to an idle game than a roguelike. - Ring of Pain: One of the best "deck-builder-roguelike" games I've personally played in that whole weird genre. Really good difficulty balancing, what I love about Ring of Pain is that the line between being dead and OP is really thin, and you can have great runs that you just lose in two turns because you aren't paying attention. At the same time, the game isn't so intensely hard that it requires you to expend a ton of mental energy constantly thinking 10 moves in advance while you play. Ring of Pain is a good game to deconstruct because it feels "tighter" than many other games in the genre, it's easier to pick out the really solid mechanical choices that it makes. - Slay the Spire: Somewhat rough, and has a lot of flaws, but also has a lot of good stuff. I think Slay the Spire is a good lesson in what it means to make a game that feels "generous", there's so much stuff going on and so many modes and stats and things you can play around with that it overwhelms the flaws. It's a game where as soon as you open it up you feel like you have your money's worth; it's scratching a weird psychological itch in that way. It's also a good example of how a game doesn't need to be perfectly balanced, you can have runs that get so OP that it's absurd, and it doesn't really detract from the game in any way that this can occasionally happen -- I think having some OP builds/outcomes is something designers in single-player games sometimes get too frightened about. Contrast with Ring of Pain or Spelunky though, both of which do a much better job of blurring the line between overpowered and about to die (although there are still OP outcomes you can achieve in both of those games). - Portal: If you've never gotten around to it, Portal is still a masterclass in puzzle accessibility, with the caveat that you can then go to games like Portal 2 and start to see where Valve's philosophy about player signaling in puzzles starts to break down a little bit. Valve has a lot of ingenious tricks to get players to look at important puzzle elements, to signal what's to happen and what mechanics to pay attention to. The problem is that as they lean more and more into those tricks, as a player you start to rely on them. You can get into puzzles near the end of Portal 2 that are solvable purely by looking at what lights are flashing or where subtle lines on the walls are pointing. So you have this really brilliant set of rules (the commentary in Portal goes into those rules in more detail), but there are also weaknesses here because like a dog learning to read human tells, you realize that you don't necessarily need to have a great grasp on the mechanics if you just look around each puzzle and wait for Valve to signal the solution to you. - Breath of the Wild: In my opinion the most creative Zelda game that Nintendo has made since Majora's Mask, and also a better game than Majora's Mask because Majora's Mask is experimental and clumsy, and BotW is experimental and well executed. It isn't the lack of tutorials or the environmental interactions that make Breath of the Wild special, it is the weapons degradation system and the way the world levels up around you and how that encourages a kind of flow to how the player traverses the overworld and interacts with the environment. I think that Breath of the Wild did something really special with that system, and then didn't communicate it well, and a lot of the criticism of the game has come from people not really knowing how to engage with a system that wasn't communicated well and that was meant to be played in a different way than most other open world games. There are intuitions players have about how open world systems work and what they're supposed to do inside of them and about how resource management works, and BotW breaks those tropes and doesn't really tell the player that it is breaking them. It doesn't do a good enough job of teaching the player that hording resources and good weapons is literally unoptimal play that makes it harder to progress in the world. I think the game has some significant flaws, I vaguely predict that if other games take lessons from it and start exploring this idea of having a world that levels up rather than a player that levels up, it'll end up being eventually talked about in the same way that Demon's Souls is talked about: an important game that wasn't really understood when it came out, but that nevertheless pushed gaming in a certain direction and that was later eclipsed by other games that better executed the core ideas without any of the flaws. But short version of all of that, BotW is genius and their biggest mistake was not making the weapons break even faster and more often, and I hope the sequel doubles down on it, bite me. ---- Not going to take the time to write them up more but: - Hollow Knight (good Metroidvania with good lessons about worldbuilding and world-design, particularly around branching paths) - Order of Ecclesaia, Portrait of Ruin, Dawn of Sorrow: mechanically solid games that do a great job of scratching this collector's itch and being generous about throwing a lot of content at you, even just in the variety of enemies and environments. - Crystal Clear (Pokemon Crystal ROMHack): fun deconstruction of Pokemon Crystal into an open world that puts solid effort into making the game actually work as an open world. If you like ROMHacks and you like deconstructing old games, also mess around with Link to the Past randomizers, they're a fun way of showcasing how connected the world is, and it's fun to try and break down what makes LttP work so particularly well as a randomizer. - Oracle of Seasons/Ages: by far the best 2D Zelda games, and a really good example still of how to build worlds that feel interconnected and alive and vibrant and busy while simultaneously keeping that world easy to navigate and reason about. Also, the pixel art is good at being both engaging and (importantly) extremely visually clear and easy to read at a glance. - probably other stuff that I'll be upset I didn't think about later.