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Empowering your Players: Patterns

This time on “A Toad Talks Design”, I’m going to discuss one of the most central concepts in a game designer’s toolkit that you can use to empower your players and improve their experience: Patterns. Let’s start off by breaking down what a pattern is, and where we can see them used in video games.

A pattern can be any type of sensory experienced that can be interpreted, memorised, and if necessary repeated. Let me provide an example of a very simple pattern of shape and colour.

Looking at this image, your brain can very quickly process a repeating pattern of red squares and blue circles, but to get to that understanding, your brain must first interpret all the sensory signals available to it. In this case, all the sensory signals are visual, but in a game these signals can also include sound and haptic feedback. Once your brain has interpreted these signals, it can then construct and memorise the pattern by matching consistent and repeating elements. In the example above, your brain would likely have interpreted the signals as “Red + Square” and “Blue + Circle” and constructed the pattern based off those repeating elements. From this point I could confidently say if you were asked to continue this pattern, you would be able to.

“But what has this got to do with video games?”, I hear you ask. Well, let me provide you some quick examples from some popular games before we move on.

Bullet Hell Example – Ikaruga

Image retrieved from Tom Sykes PC Gamer Article https://www.pcgamer.com/breaker-is-a-great-free-bullet-hell-arcade-game-with-a-banging-soundtrack/

  Bullet hell games are very strong visual examples of patterns in video games. These games go as far as using mathematical functions to generate interesting and beautiful patterns that the player has to quickly interpret, memorise, and predict in order to survive.

Action Game Example – Monster Hunter: World

Photo retrieved from https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/01/25/monster-hunter-world-review

One of my all-time favourite games, and an inspiration of mine so of course I have to add it, but not without reason. Monster Hunter: World incorporates patterns into multiple parts of the monster-hunting experience for the player to uncover and be rewarded for learning.

https://monsterhunterworld.wiki.fextralife.com/Ancient+Forest

Monsters in MH:W have distinct behaviour patterns. They roam and protect certain areas, and they eat and sleep in certain areas. The player can take some time to watch and learn each monster’s unique behaviour patterns to better track them in future hunts.

Along with behaviour patterns, monsters in MH:W have attack patterns that the player can learn and exploit to find openings to attack the monsters. I’m going to use one of the franchise favourite monsters as an example: The Zinogre, specifically the Stygian Zinogre variant.

The Stygian Zinogre is a monster that charges up energy into its fur that it can then use to release ferocious attacks. Studying this behaviour is in and of itself a pattern that the player can learn. When the Stygian Zinogre is uncharged, it will attempt to find openings to begin charging up. An attentive player can learn that approximately every three charge up breaks that the monster takes, it will enter the charged state. Thus, the pattern: ~3 charges = state change.

Once in the charged state, the monster’s attack patterns change drastically, and it gains access to powerful new moves. Thankfully through solid design, the creators of the MH:W pre-empt these powerful attacks to the player using sound and visual patterns that the player can learn. For example, when the Stygian Zinogre howls and stands on it’s hind legs it will use it’s strongest move next, but if it simply howls it will use what me and my friends refer to as “The Awoo drop”. You can see these attacks here:

Hopefully now you can see that patterns are used extensively in video games, and you may have begun thinking of patterns in your favourite games that you learnt without realising it. With that in mind, lets move on to breaking down why patterns are important in video games.

Understandable Gameplay

Our brains are wired to work by understanding patterns, so it stands to reason that if we want our games to be learnable that we should include patterns in our games. A game that uses completely random gameplay with no predictable behaviour is a game that can’t be learnt and will frustrate most players.

Rewarding the Player

Have you ever been presented with a riddle or a puzzle and felt joy when you finally figured out how to solve it? You’re not alone. People find it very rewarding when they “crack the code” and solve a problem, and these people include your players.

Players love to find secrets, solve problems, and succeed. But for them to succeed, you must first put a problem in their way, and this problem should have a pattern to solving it. This pattern could be as simple as “Find the key -> Unlock the door”, or a sequence of simple actions that create a more complex pattern like “Step left -> Roll right -> Jump”. Creating these problems with a pattern in mind that the player can learn gives the player the space to feel a sense of achievement when they solve the pattern.

Your Player is in Control

Part of the reward for the player learning your game’s patterns is that they gain the ability to exploit your game for their own benefit. Unless the exploit is affecting a competitive multiplayer experience, or drastically shortcuts the game so that players no longer need to participate, then discovering exploitative gameplay is par for the course for gamers and enriches their gameplay as they feel they have outsmarted the game and the developers.

Pattern Recognition as a Skill

For some part of the gamer playerbase, the sense of upskilling is important, whereby they learn a new skill that makes them a better player and perhaps makes them more proficient than other players. Pattern recognition itself is a skill that players can learn by being exposed to patterns, and when a player learns a new pattern in your game, they will feel more proficient at your game and as a player.

Recommendations for Implementing Patterns

Hopefully I have convinced you of the importance of patterns in your gameplay. With all of that out of the way, I’d like to present some of my own recommendations for implementing patterns that are based off common mistakes.

Combat Patterns - Windups

With the growth of the Soulsbourne genre and roguelike games, understanding how combat patterns work is important for anyone planning on developing these games. The most common mistake I have seen regarding these games is the lack of windups for combat animations. The more powerful the attack, the more important it is to wind up the attack first. For context, the average reaction time for a person reacting to a  visual stimulus is 0.25 – 0.3s. If you then factor in the movement speed of the player and any animations the player has to undertake, you’re looking at one second or more before the player can move out of the danger area of an attack.

Enjoy my crude drawing of a basic attack animation cycle, and feel free to scroll up and watch the Stygian Zinogre videos for a game example of attack windups.

Pre-empting Pattern Changes – Random is Cheating

Let’s refer back to my earlier image of a pattern:

We decided earlier from looking at this that if we were to continue the sequence the next shape should be a red square, right? Now what if I told you the pattern actually continued like this:

How could you ever have predicted that the next shape would be a green triangle? Where did it come from? That’s the exact sentiment that occurs from players when patterns they have learned suddenly change without any warning. Really, it feels like the player has been cheated. Updating patterns isn’t bad, but it needs to be handled appropriately. To achieve this, the player should be given something that changes their expectation of the pattern. Let’s look at two examples of how to achieve that:

In this pattern, the outside red box describes the state that the pattern is in. If this were a creature, perhaps it was in it’s default state. The player can read from the state that the pattern would start with a red square and end with a red square.

In this pattern, the state has changed to a green state. If this were a creature, perhaps it is now in a hyper-aggressive state. The player can learn that when it is in this state, despite 80% of the pattern being the same, it will end in a completely different way than it would if the creature were in the default state.

This example follows a methodology that is more suited to attack combinations, but the core idea is that the player is introduced to something that changes their expectation before it happens. This idea should be a fundamental idea for how to handle implementing something new into an existing pattern.

Conclusion

This has been a pretty long one, so I appreciate if you made it to the end!

Patterns in games are a fundamental tool for any game designer for increasing the playability and enjoyment of their games. I hope this has helped you to think about how you want to implement patterns in your games, and I’d love to hear where you’ve been impressed by patterns in your favourite titles!

 Now, Frog Time!  Poison Dart Frog!

These poisonous frogs from Central and South America come in many beautiful patterns. The yellow ones remind of the Yellow Flibbit from the Nintendo 64 game Banjo and Kazooie!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_dart_frog

https://banjokazooie.fandom.com/wiki/Yellow_Flibbits

[prophecytoad]

Game Jam Post-Mortem -- The Making of Zoolich

Earlier this year as a part of Brackey’s Game Jam, myself and a few of my talented friends took on the task of creating a game in a week. Now, you might be thinking, “That’s not a lot of time!” and you’d be right! But there in lays the fun. These game jams are about inspiring new ideas, pushing your skillset, and honing your abilities, and the time pressure makes it easier to really analyse yourself and where your skillset could improve. With that in mind, this post will about what I specifically managed to achieve, and what I could’ve done better. If you would like to try it out here is the link: https://prophecytoad.itch.io/zoolich 

What went right

I put a monster amount of energy into this game jam. Being the most available team member with the most rounded skillset (I do design, programming, and art), I filled a lot of shoes.

I started off the game jam by ideating with my team on how we wanted to tackle the theme, which was “The end is a new beginning”. We decided pretty quickly that we didn’t want to do any version of a rougelike because that seemed like the obvious choice, and would be a lot of work to achieve in a week. We eventually decided we would take a light narrative approach where our main character was what remained of a powerful lich. The player’s task as the lich would be to solve puzzles to get back to their original and ultra-powerful lich body. The problem though, is that whenever the lich dies (by colliding with an enemy) they would become the form of the creature that killed them and inherit their abilities. So our justification then would be that when the lich “died” (the end) they would get a new form (new beginning). We were very happy with this and set off to work.

I began this jam by whipping up some design documentation for my team members to work with. Necessary art assets, game objects and behaviours, interactions, level designs, etc. As fast as I could I laid the groundwork for my team members and organised tasks by priority so that even if we missed the deadline, we would have all of the core pieces in place for the submission.

Over the entire week, I helped with concept art, gameplay programming, UI programming, level implementation, and sound curation and implementation. I was BUSY. But at the end of the jam when we submitted, I was proud of what my team and I had created.

To sum up what I am most happy with about this jam, was that I showed to myself that I had learned enough about game development over the last two years that I could make any small game that I could think of, and that should focus on more complicated games to learn more skills (Looking at you Lumayn).

What I could’ve done better

I’m not perfect (unfortunately). Due to my intense scrambling to fill so many shoes, I inevitably make some mistakes, which we found out after submission because we didn’t have much time towards the end for testing. Sometime in the final hours before submission, I changed some physics values while bugfixing. The problem here, is that I was so focused on fixing the bug so I could move on to the next task that I didn’t realise I had broken the interactions with obstacles, and now the player could just walk through them. The most annoying part is that the fix would take seconds, but you are not allowed to make any updates to the submission after the jam is over until the jam results were in otherwise you could be disqualified. What I learned from this, is that no matter how pressured for time I am, I should make sure to properly thinking through what I’m about to do so that I don’t create any more problems.

Canvas scaling sucks, either that or I’m terrible at it… It’s probably just me. I’ve never really sat down and worked out canvas scaling so that the UI can fit multiple resolutions. I understand the concept of it, but UI tends to be something I implement later as I’m not a graphic designer (shout out to all the talented graphic designers out there). With some experimenting I can get it to work, but I should have a better understanding of it so that I can implement it quicker. Before the next jam, I’d like to fill this skill gap once and for all and become a titan of UI implementation.

In Conclusion

I think my team and I did an incredible job in such a short amount of time. I think the current skills gaps I have can be easily fixed, and I look forward to pushing myself towards new skills in future!

 This time on Frog TV: The Purple Harlequinn Toad!

Photo retrieved from https://frogoftheweek.wordpress.com/2016/04/10/fotw3/ 

[prophecytoad]

Development Update - Lumayn

If you’re here reading this, thank you for taking your time for this little blog of mine. This week on the agenda I’m going to be talking about how the development of my current project has been going, what I’m working on now, and where development will go next.

Before we begin, I’d like to announce that the project now has a name: Lumayn! This word was originally something that I thought I had come up with when I used it for the name of a continent in a DnD campaign that I have been running. I thought to myself, “Why not use it for the game name?”. So, I went about googling to see whether the name was in use and it wasn’t! But, what I also learnt was that it is already a word in use in the Somali language and translates to “lost”. Serendipity smiled on me when I chose this word; it’s the perfect word for my DnD campaign AND for this game!

Now, lets get into the breakdown.

The Problem Space

Like all things, Lumayn began as a concept. I thought to myself about some of my favourite games that I played growing up: Pokemon, Digimon, Monster Hunter, and what drew me to those game types, and what inevitably pushed me away from them. The draw of those games was simple: The games featured really cool monsters and you get to interact with them; I loved finding monsters whose designs I found fascinating. No game is perfect though. For Pokemon specifically, it was things such as: being able to draw a parallel between the core mechanic and animal captivity, too many designs which results in some awful and lazy designs, and a lack of focus on the interacts with the monsters specifically that led find it difficult to play the games past early iterations.To fix the issues I have with the monster genre, I wanted to come up with an idea that focused more on the monsters themselves, their personalities, your relationship with them, and interacting with them. 

Lumayn Concept

Lumayn is a 3D monster adventure game where the player’s interactions with their partner matters. You partner has their own personality, and how you treat them will affect how they treat you back. The player will work with their partner to learn abilities, evolve, fight powerful enemies, and restore their town.

Your relationship

The way you treat your partner will change how they react to your assistance. In combat, you will be able to suggest actions and provide help, however, if your partner does not respect you because of how you have treated them, they may ignore you entirely and refuse assistance.

Whiteboxing

I began development of the prototype by focusing on developing a sufficiently sophisticated AI for demonstration purposes. Using basic capsules in Unity, I used the Unity Navmesh system to develop a follow system

I then whiteboxed a basic start area, and what would be a combat arena. When the player collides with an enemy, they and their partner would be transported to participate in an intense fight with one or more enemies

Working on the AI

The AI that runs the monsters in Lumayn will be an extremely important part of the experience. Each monster will have a unique personality based on many different factors that change how they behave.

Monsters will have different likes and dislikes. For example, some monsters will like hot areas filled with lava and stone, while other will like forests filled with trees. In each of these areas, monsters will respond to stimuli like flowers, berries, and pretty stones depending on what they like.

Another facet of their personality will be how they choose to fight while in combat. For example, some monsters will be aggressive, taking the first move wherever they can, while some monsters will be passive and wait to react.

A basic version of the combat AI has been implemented, as well as the personality generator.

Making things prettier

Your partner can now walk around with you and fight on their own in combat, so it was time to make the prototype look a little prettier in order to better demonstrate the style of the game.

I took some time to experiment with various free assets to update the game visually. While I am happy for the time being with the way it looks, there will be a lot of work later to improve the visuals.

Modelling

Currently I am working on modelling and animating one of the monster ideas. Animations will make an immeasurable difference in the believability of the monsters and their personalities.

This is the current iteration of a creature species known as “Rex”. They are an adolescent level monster with an affinity for starting fires.

Next up

Future development will involve giving the demo more personality. Better artwork, models, level design, and interactions. There’s a lot of work to do to give the players a visual interesting game where they can fall in love with their monster partner!

Here’s a peak at a design for the starting area!

Last Up

As always, here’s a cool frog. An internet classic, the Black Rain Frog!

Image retrieved from https://www.boredpanda.com/unusual-frogs-toads/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic

See you next time!

[prophecytoad]

My journey so far

My journey as a game dev started later than most. At the age of 26 I decided I would get serious about my dream of work in game development, and so during work breaks and after I got home I followed online courses to learn how to program and watched YouTube tutorials about the Unity game engine (Shoutout to Brackeys for creating content that made starting with the engine easy). Along with this, I applied to the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) to undertake a Bachelor of Games and Interactive Environments. As of writing this blog, I made these decisions three years ago and have done much since.

Blackjacky and Phaser 3

The first game engine I touched was the Phaser 3 game engine that used JavaScript as its scripting language. I learnt how to use this engine by following a course on Codecademy. Blackjacky was a version of the card game Blackjack that I wrote after completing the course.

Duck Ranger

After finding out about the Unity game engine and its popularity amongst the indie community, I immediately sought to move over and begun working on a 2D platformer called Duck Ranger; A game where you play as a masculine duck that solves puzzles and punches enemies using the power of his massive duck beard.

Whilst working on this project, I began my studies at QUT and switched my focus away from development. This project is on indefinite delay, but working on it helped me immensely before beginning my studies.

Some of the cute pixel art animations I made while working on Duck Ranger

Pond Protector

The first small project I made for an assignment at QUT, Pond Protector is a simple single-screen strafe shooter where you play as a frog protecting its pond from mosquitos and other animals that want to dirty the water. A fun and simple project that was the first time I proved to myself that I could make something that felt complete, no matter how small.

Unnamed RPG

I spent my first Summer break working on this game that I never named. I wanted to code some typical RPG mechanics to push my development skills further before my second year. I absolutely loved working on this project and will definitely return to it if given the opportunity.

The Other Me

My first ever Game Jam submission for The GMTK Game Jam in 2021. Our team of three, named “Pangolin’s in Pyjamas”, which included myself and my friends Jazmin and Grim endeavoured to create a game in 48 hours around the theme “Joined Together”. Our team created a 2D puzzle platformer where the player could astral project their spirit to help them solve puzzles. Our team did incredibly well considering it was our first ever game jam, and the tight deadline!

 Scream Dream

The second coming of Pangolin’s in Pyjamas, this time for the Australian Global Game Jam in 2022. I have forgotten this jam’s theme, but our team created a 2D action platformer in 48 hours with the idea of: “What would the nightmare of a nightmare creature be?”. Thus, we put out nightmare creature into a world of overwhelming cuteness.

Open Day

My first group game project made at QUT with the Unity game engine was a game that we developed with the purpose of inspiring people to attend university. With my friends Emma as artist, Bianca as programmer, and myself as designer, team lead, and supporting programmer, we created something that we were very proud of in less than thirteen weeks while studying other subjects.

Zoolich

The Pangolin’s in Pyjamas strike again! Now with the additional members of Emma and Bianca! The first Brackeys Game Jam of 2023 has just recently passed and, despite a couple of us moving home in the middle of it, we created another fun little puzzle game. The theme of this jam was “The end is a new beginning”.

After some deliberation, we decided we wanted to create a puzzle game where the player was a lich who had been removed from their real body and turned into a slime. Their objective is to solve puzzles and find their way back to their real body to regain their powers and dominate! We fit the theme by making the player have to “die” to an enemy in order to gain the form of that enemy. Each enemy has their own unique abilities (e.g., wombats can push boulders), while ghosts have no abilities at all. The player must choose the correct form while dodging ghosts in order to complete the puzzles!

Our team had a lot of fun working on this jam, and I’ll be writing a post-portem in a later post!

Current Project: Partner Game

Lovers of Neopets, Tamagotchis, Pokemon, and Digimon, unite! My current project aims to be the final destination for all lovers of pets and partner creatures. Combining the love of having a bond with a magical creature, with none of the forced labour, this game will be full of fun, excitement, and adventure!.

Description

Adventure around a world while exploring different locations. Strengthen the bond with your partner creature and help rebuild a city that has been almost destroyed by a trio of evil creatures.

Details about the current development of the project, and future development plans can be found in the next post, and future posts!

Thanks for making it this far into the blog! Here’s your reward: Todays frog; the Malaysian Horned Frog!

Image retrieved from: https://reptilesmagazine.com/malayan-horned-frog-care-and-breeding/

[prophecytoad]

The Beginning

Hi reader! Thanks for stopping by! This is the first post of my fortnightly blog. I plan for this blog to be a center for my game development journey, as well as for my perspectives on game design principles, problems, and frustrations. I hope that you will find the material in this blog to be enlightening!

Before we get into any of the good stuff, allow me to first introduce myself!

My name is Dan, but online I go by ProphecyToad. I named myself after my love for amphibians and my need to always plan ahead. As of writing this, I am a 28 year old, third year university student studying a Bachelor of Games and Interactive Environments, majoring in Game Design and minoring in Software Development.

Why do I play games?

Video games to me have always been a display of the beautiful minds of so many people, that have come together to create something that people can invest themselves into in their own unique ways.

I personally play video games for two main reasons: Emotional investment, and mechanical skill display. I love a game that is well written and has themes that can get me invested in the world and characters, but I love a game even more if it has a great deal of well-designed mechanical skill expression.

My history playing games

I’ve been playing video games since my earliest memory on the Windows 98 operating system, with classic games such as “Putt Putt saves the zoo”, “Tyrian 2000”, and “Doom”. Over the years since, I’ve played many different games, sometimes forgetting to do anything else for days at a time (oops).

I was introduced to competitive games as a teenager with the likes of Halo 3 and Guitar hero, and became absorbed by the idea of skill expression in video games. This interest carried me to other games such as Magic: The Gathering, League of Legends, and Rainbow Six Siege.

My Favourite Games

My top 3 favourite games + 1 nostalgia game as of writing this post

Monster Hunter World

This game at its core is simple: go on a mission -> kill/capture a monster -> make equipment from monster parts. The concept is extremely simple to understand, but is done VERY well; largely due to the exceptional combat and creature design. The game is built entirely around allowing the player to demonstrate their skill with incredibly well-paced combat.

Photo retrieved from https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/01/25/monster-hunter-world-review

Resident Evil: Biohazard

The only game in the last decade that I immediately replayed after finishing it, and intentionally unlocked all the achievements for; this game is a masterwork of its design. The levels, puzzles, and story of this game had me invested from start to finish. The game doesn’t try to be more complex than it needs to be, and instead makes use of the sparce systems and mechanics to add to the ambience of the game.

Photo retrieved from https://www.ign.com/games/resident-evil-7-biohazard

Halo

Now, I’m not going to get involved in the debate of which is the objective “best” Halo, but Halo has always been a highlight point for me whenever a new one released. Futuristic powersuit fantasy? Check. Shooting cool, but bad aliens? Check. Saving the universe? Check. What’s not to love?

Photo retrieved from https://www.ign.com/articles/halo-infinite-release-date-preorder

Nostalgia

Digimon World

The first game that I played that made me think, “I can’t wait to get back from school to play this!”. Digimon World combined my love for digital creatures and my love for adventuring into a neat little package with its own unique sense of style.

Retrieved from https://www.ign.com/games/digimon-world

 Check out this cool frog that I did a poster for in primary school: The Turtle Frog!

Photo retrieved from https://museum.wa.gov.au/explore/frogwatch/frogs/turtle-frog