#(these things are real but difficult to intuit if you haven’t encountered the ideas before which is why so many people don’t understand)

[scholarhect]

think of gender-separated esports leagues as less like assumptions that women have weak brittle fingers that can’t hit the keys fast enough compared to men, and more as something in the vein of “girls who code”

[breathe-smiles]

pt i. fragile notes

prologue:

i hope you’re not reading this. you know who you are. i can’t think of a reason why you would be [reading this], but in the slightest chance that you are, i hope you stop eventually (or at least come to an understanding of why you do continue to).

this piece is all about you. you’re enlaced in every word and punctuation. but i promise that it’s for me and i’m the reason i’m writing. i forget that this blog is my space - the only space i let myself be unapologetic, completely honest, and brutally real. so if you’re looking for something written to and for you, open any of #s 1 through 10, even if you’re still afraid to.

this piece is a collection of things i’ve jotted down over this period of time in between my last letter to you and now. these are feelings and emotions and thoughts that i have not been able to address, process, comprehend, or make sense of. these are things i’ve put on hold.

i’m in a headspace i’ve never been in before. i am encountered by circumstances i don’t know how to overcome. i actually thought i knew it all this time around - how to deal with any insecurity, separation or loss, heartache, growing pain, or communication issue. but once again, my fate has taken me on a path that is so indecipherable. what’s guiding me? where does it want me to go? is it taking me somewhere? where do i turn?

my sense of direction is pretty skewed to be upfront. i haven’t had to deal with a curve ball in quite some time. i’ve been meticulously in control for a long while. and it’s been great paving my own path; in the past 2 and a half years, i’ve learned a lot about the kind of person i want to be and how to potentially get myself there.

but now life’s in flux again. i’m feeling things that contradict each other; my thoughts are so mixed up i almost feel numb. i feel so much that i feel almost nothing. i wonder if this is a product of your departure or the arrival of a new period of growth - perhaps both (because they’re separate, but not mutually exclusive).

so, here are some fragile notes. my goal is to sort through them until i make sense of them. i want to reestablish my grasp on my being and my journey, because my life at the moment feels all over the place. i’ve always strived to create a world for myself that’s black and white, a place where everything has its boundaries and is clear. now that i’ve been in gray zone for a while, i want to gain a better understanding of where i’m headed and where i’d like to be headed. because the future’s in my fate, but it’s also in me. the roads are paved, but i’ve got the steering wheel. i’ll buckle up, i guess.

revisitings + expansions of already written words

i’ve been trying to convince myself that you don’t mean the world to me but you do, and you might always will. at least a little bit? you walked into my life and demonstrated to me what love could be (even redefined what i wanted it to be). despite knowing that there’s always going to be somebody better, you are, quite simply, all i really need.

i want to apologize to myself every time i choose to love you more than i love me. that’s every time i hold back from calling you drunk, every time i stop myself from asking you to be in my life again, every time i feel like i’m falling apart and i know you know how to fix me - but i know i’d never let my broken parts get in the way of you being absolutely carefree and happy. i apologize to myself that i can compromise giving in if it means something better for you, if it means giving you a better chance at being content. i apologize to myself for all the little times i put you above me, even if it only proved to me that my love for you was genuine.

why do we let beautiful things die?

they do say if you love something, let it go - and if it comes back to you, it’s yours.

i’ve recently come to the conclusion that it’s been difficult not saying your name out loud because you’re relevant in so many contexts. i don’t think i’ve stopped talking about you since we’ve broken it off, and not even on purpose. i wrote you into my future; i talked about you because you were in the infrastructure of so much of my life. i didn’t do it on purpose, that much is clear to both of us. we tried so hard not to do it when we were together, but i guess i did subconsciously because it was so easy to. you made sense with me. you made a place for yourself in my universe so effortlessly. you became embedded into my world. my future entwined itself with parts of you so much so that my future became you, even though it wasn’t supposed to. upon your departure, it took me a long time to understand why i wasn’t in pain. i understand now it’s because it didn’t even feel like you were gone (but now it does, and i think you really are gone). my future was you but it’s supposed to be me. isn’t that what you always believed? that your future was and will always be you? perhaps there was never even a place for me.

as i was assembling all of your things into a box, something i didn’t get to do until thanksgiving, i realized there were just too many pieces of you in my surroundings. objects of utility that have become a part of my daily life, small tickets from places we had gone that i had superglued to my door, my toothbrush and turtle anklet and that gigantic plush bunny you helped me carry back to my house. there are parts of you in my life i still don’t quite know how to delete. there are objects i don’t know how or where to put away. you’ve left your mark. some days i can still feel you sitting on my bedroom floor, and other days i can’t shake the image of us laying on my bed crying on our last day together. man, that shit makes my heart drop.

i’ve said goodbye to you more times than i can count. i’ve said goodbye to you so many fucking times and it jeopardizes my need for ultimatum, something i’ve always achieved with my last letter. unfortunately, it’s not been the same in your case. i’ve declared that i’m over you, still in love with you, angry at you, sulking over you, again and again in cycles that it stopped making sense to me to declare anything at all. do i love you? do i hate you? do i blame you or do i blame myself? am i over you? am i not? maybe that’s just how this life thing works - you can’t always be sure i suppose. i just wish i didn’t feel like i needed clarity to properly function and exist.

i don’t know if you ever really understood how you made me feel. the security and comfort you brought into my life, like i could see everything in a blink finally working out, like years of floating not knowing where things were going finally pulled down with gravity towards reality. you made me feel like everything was coming together. you made me feel okay, merely solid for once in my life. i’ve never ever felt as okay as i did with you. maybe i don’t feel quite okay right now, but i know i will be. because i have to be eventually, right? or at least that’s what my best friend tells me when i ask him if i’m going to be alright.

your departure feels like a slap in the face, a reality check, that things don’t work out like they feel like they’re supposed to, that your fate and your growth and your life may very well have always been separate from mine. maybe we are no longer together because we were never a unit. we were two distinct beings tied in pinky promises and interlocked hands, like a string tied in a knot eventually coming loose.

now that you’re gone and you love another and you’re growing with somebody else, i feel an odd sense of separation and distance that i don’t know how to explain. it’s like a discrepancy that i can’t make up for, like you are morphing into a person that is unfamiliar to me, a person different from the one i remember and held close and adored, like i don’t know you like that anymore. and though it’s not surprising that you’ve moved on to somebody else, it’s somewhat unsettling because you were somebody i was committed to knowing forever. one sided things have never been my groove, and maybe here knowing that you’re holding somebody new so close, you really did lose me.

maybe you’re still you, and i’m sure you’re still you. you’re just taking on parts of yourself that you have yet to find and keep finding. that was the agenda, wasn’t it? so perhaps i am overthinking and perhaps i am doing the same. perhaps i am doing everything you’re doing - growing, discovering, creating, and attempting at loving - but my brain is villainizing you because i feel like the stupid one. for believing that we were something so incredibly irreplicable and special and unique, that our love was something maybe so extraordinary that it was all only in my head and not yours. my anxieties always try to discredit the love i experience through my relationships, like these loves are not as grand as they might’ve felt. and i wonder if that holds true for our love, too: was it just as ordinary as any other?

we are not a fairytale. while i’ll care about you forever, i’m the only one in this world that loves me more than anyone else could. that means doing what’s best for me, understanding you don’t love me like i always thought you would. the dreams and the fantasies and the idealizations and the pedestal i put you on - it’s all in my fucking head. and i need to throw that shit out if you’ve moved on, you know? i don’t sulk on what’s not mine.

i’ve been unsettled with the idea of losing you for a long time but i find a slight comfort, something eerie inside of me, simultaneously making me want to fly and glow and shine, but also very sick to my stomach, that maybe i’ve already lost you. here i am holding onto the slight intuition that you’ll be here again one day, something that we said we could feel in our stomachs, something like a 6th sense. months of fluctuating between knowing you’re gone and knowing you’ll be back, counting on the fact that you are something so amazing that i’ll probably never be able to replicate, comparing everybody i could love to you and saying how could this person ever measure up. but who am i kidding? you’ve long moved on. you left and you found a new world where there’s no place for me. and maybe deep inside of me, i always knew there was no place for me, that maybe i was never essential, never needed, and i know still very clearly i am not - and it’s never hurt me because i know you and how you are. i was an episode and a companion for only a period of time, a character that only made sense in part of the plot. but i also know, as perfect as i make you out to be, that this is not what i want out of a lover or a partner. i shouldn’t feel unnecessary. i know i deserve better. i know i deserve more.

when have i ever been afraid of loss? when have i ever not known what to do with a vulnerable heart and some disappointment? i have navigated through these emotions prior to this. every healing journey is different and so is every period of growth, but i can hold onto where i’m heading. i know where my hope and my faith can take me. i know fate’s doing its thing. i know there’s something bigger and brighter and better out there calling my name, pulling me towards it - even if i don’t know what it is right now.

and i’ve spent these past few months hoping the prettiest things for you, the most beautiful moments and experiences, the happiest and most enlightened you could be. but i need to start wishing these things upon myself. i’ve given you every last bit of love i wouldn’t feel guilty giving you. it’s time for me to love me. what do i want? how do i get there? what bits about myself are in for reform? is this a solo journey or do i let people in? it’s in flux. maybe gray zone is not so bad. i feel myself growing. i just want a sense of direction.

i’m going to be patient with myself because i always am. i will not let anything even scratch my well-being. so that’s that, right? detox, breathe, and feel again. rebuild, construct, create, and rise. isn’t that what i do best?

to you: i hope you find what makes you weak. i hope you find what makes you crazy. i hope you find what you can’t live without and i hope you find what has the power to kill you. you’ve never had weaknesses to me; nothing could ever make you soft. but there’s strength in letting things make you soft - and i hope you find that.

there’s beauty in coexisting between the delicate and the indestructible. i know who i am and i know what i can do and i know as shaky as i may be, i am capable of shaking the world. i am a powerhouse even if i don’t believe it sometimes. so what’s a loss of a boy that i loved gonna do to me?

i find it interesting that our breakup was essentially us moving to different cities and turning off love switches for the other person. needless to say, i never knew love worked like that. but i guess since i’m writing this, it doesn’t work like that (at least not for me).

i knew it was over when i listened to the way you talked about her. it’s okay; i know how to stand on my own two feet. you’re not holding me up anymore but i’m still steady.

what i’ve learned from our breakup is that your dreams and your goals can exist at the same time as people you love. you can grow as an individual despite being with somebody you love. i didn’t do what was true to me when it came to our breakup and loving you. my truth is that love is stronger than anything else. i didn’t stick around to prove that. i didn’t give it my best shot. and for a little bit, i think i hated myself for it. but i remember that i am only one half of me and you, so maybe we just weren’t meant to be.

something has to fucking change.

i am having trouble processing our breakup because it’s filled with contradictions. why did i let you go when i knew i loved you? was my love for you really the reason i let you go? who would i be if you were still in my life? just how sure was i about you? why do i find it difficult to open up after you? why do i constantly remember all the ways you took care of me so perfectly? am i really not ready to move on? where do i stand emotionally? am i over you or not? i know you prioritize yourself more than anything, but were we really something you could let go of so easily? do we have different perceptions of our relationship? why do i feel like i’ve always been on the same page as you, but i’m trailing behind so far now? did i believe in us more than you did? was i the only one that thought our love was so special? was that discrepancy always there? did months of mental preparation for our breakup do anything for me? these questions fucking suck.

i have to remember that every period of growth is different and i can’t expect the same things to happen in cycles. just because i know how a breakup goes doesn’t mean it’s going to feel the same every time. it’s scary because it’s unfamiliar. it’s scary because you don’t know what’s gonna happen. breathe. take it easy. (i sound like jay but these are honestly probably his words.)

i guess we didn’t have as coherent as a partnership as i thought if we just gave our relationship up so easily. we didn’t even put up a fight. we didn’t even try. i’m ashamed i thought we stood a chance against forever.

i guess we let this go because it wasn’t good enough to keep around. our love felt like something else, but it still wasn’t enough to stay.

the amount of growth i’ve experienced in the past decade has morphed me into completely different people at different points in time. but i somehow feel like i’ve always been consistent in lots of ways. i wonder which parts of me have been held constant and which parts of me have continued to change. will these parts always stay the same and will these other parts always be temporary?

there are moments where i’m taken over by memories of us in all the places we got to see together. i don’t even try to think about them, but they just reappear in my mind. living with you, being on a plane with you, figuring out maps with you, learning about the world with you. philadelphia and los angeles have taken on new meanings for us, but upon revisiting these memories, i realize i lost my most intimate companion. i don’t think i can call you my best friend, nor were you simply my lover, but i did lose my most immediate connection in proximity. i was supposed to do so much with you. i guess the worst part is knowing very well we were capable of it.

i let you define home and now new york city is just you everywhere i go. fuck that shit. this is my city. i’m reclaiming my space. my bed. the 7 train. the church we’d volunteer at. central park. college point boulevard. driving lessons. your parking spot. my sheets. the front porch. new york is mine. i can’t let you define what new york is to me. i shouldn’t be afraid to come back to my city just because you exist in its crevices. this is my home. our last memories here are not. you are not.

[feel199x]

♛┈⛧┈┈•༶to protect our district ༶•┈┈⛧┈♛ chapter VI

ceo!au, mafia!au, ceo!hwang hyunjin, mafia leader!hwang hyunjin

I  II  III  IV  V  VI VII  masterlist

a/n: ohohohoho it gets w i l d

warnings: themes of sexism and violence

                                   ┍━━━━━♥♠♣♦━━━━━┑

Nobody spoke, nobody even looked at Hyunjin as everyone quietly climbed back into the van. Whatever sense of equality, whatever feeling of friendship and teamwork that had sprouted these past couple days was completely obliterated. Now it was clear, painfully clear that Hyunjin was the leader, and everyone else? Everyone else was under him, the ground beneath his feet. This was a side of Hyunjin that you didn’t want to get to know, but you didn’t have a choice.

That was the whole thing, wasn’t it?

You knew there was unspoken anger in the car, the tension weighing down on you, making it hard to breathe. Changbin was gripping the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles were turning white, and Jisung was shaking his leg as he looked out the window. Even Chan, by far the person who seemed most mature out of the group was struggling to even out his breathing. But you couldn’t afford to be emotional like them, you had already made that mistake once. You knew they saw you as weak, as emotional, you knew that’s why Woojin targeted you. Sure, you had basically confessed your love for Hyunjin in front of him and that was certainly part of it- but it wasn’t all of it. And that was the problem, you were stuck between putting on an act, a facade where you would eventually break character and being yourself- and being punished for it. And you suppose that yes, all the members of the team struggled with this, but not at the same level, not at the same extent, it just wasn’t the same. So, you didn’t say anything, you didn’t react. You did what not even the boys were doing, you pretended.

Shakespeare said it best, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

You were deep in thought when you heard the clicking of the gearstick as Changbin pulled it.

“Be up by six,” Hyunjin ordered, “we have business to do.”

At that, everyone filed out of the car. No one looked or interacted with each other, everyone sauntering off to their rooms. And so you went to yours, greeted by your quiet mother- still mourning. You rubbed her back as she sat crying on the table, holding tightly onto a family picture you had taken years ago. You tried to coax it out of her hand, but as she refused to let go, you had to take it out of her hands and nearly carry her back to bed. You sat on her bed, stroking her hair as she cried herself to sleep. It wasn’t difficult not to cry, and you wanted to- you wanted to completely break down and let it all out. But nothing happened.

You didn’t have time to mourn.

You weren’t even sure you had slept, you had been staring at the wall for so long that time seemed warped. Even as you heard your phone ring from your bedroom, all your actions seemed automatic- as if you were on autopilot, and you were. It was a coping skill, not a good one, but a coping skill nonetheless. You didn’t have to deal with reality, it didn’t have to be real if you didn’t allow it to be. You wanted to be early this time though, so your routine was slightly rushed. You were rubbing the sleep out of your eyes, making your way to the meeting area so you wouldn’t have to take the bus again. That was the plan, of course, until you felt yourself slam against the wall. Sir Hwang’s hands were around your throat, but he looked calm, nonchalant like he always did.

“You’re a stupid little bitch, huh?”

“Yeah,” you said between gasps of air, “a big old bitch, you’ve caught me!”

His hand tightened around your neck as he smiled, and you gave him a sweet smile back. “You’ve got some fuckin’ nerve. Didn’t I warn you? I was so nice, so civil.”

“Maybe if you kill me you’ll make a better point. You know Hyunjin needs me on his team.”

“Does he? Couldn’t I just get any man, who would be so much better than you?”

“Some old fucking geezer? Be my guest, asswipe.”

“You better watch that pretty little mouth, baby. Hyunjin might not be able to keep you in line, but I can.”

“Is that so? You better kill me then, ‘cause you’re doing a shitty job.” You were trying to control your desperate gasps for air, but your vision started to fade. Still, your pride would rather you pass out or die by his hand than beg him to release you. So, you spat on his face and he let you go as a reflex, pulling out a handkerchief to clean the spit off his face. With that, you collapsed on the floor, rubbing your neck.“You’re lucky you’re pretty. Your mouth is only good for one thing, remember that. Next time, you’ll be in 4419.”

You knew he wasn’t lying as he put the handkerchief back in his chest pocket and winked, sauntering off to do whatever inhumane thing he had to next. You should’ve been terrified, completely shaken. But instead, you were angry. The tears slipping out of your eyes? They were of rage as you stared down the hallway, rubbing the handprints on your neck.

You were going to destroy that man, and his district. You were gonna burn it the fuck down like hellfire.

You got up like nothing happened, making your way down the hallway and the stairs to where the boys were. “Boys,” you nodded, wanting to be the first to speak and acknowledge your own presence. Chan and Changbin turned to you.

“Your neck-”

“Sir Hwang,” you explained curtly, “I’m fine.”

Chan nodded, looking slightly worried. “Can I check? It looks pretty bad, how are you feeling?” Before you could answer, he touched your neck and you couldn’t help but wince. “It looks bruised,” he commented, “And your eyes are bloodshot. You should call out, we’ll cover for you.”

“Chan’s right,” Changbin added, “You should take a break, I’m sure everyone will understand.”

You shook your head, “No way. I’ll be fine, don’t worry about it.” They looked at you worriedly but didn’t push. Jisung finally came by, apologizing for running late and raised his eyebrows at you.

“I’m fine.”

He looked at Chan and Changbin, both of them shooting him a warning look and Jisung nodded in understanding. Off you went. The day was ordinary, but you were feeling the consequences with your encounter with Sir Hwang soon enough. You hadn’t even checked in when you ran off to the bathroom, feeling dizzy and nauseous

“Must be that time of the month..” you heard someone say as you desperately pushed your way into the cinema, “Must’ve got knocked up.” The laughter was muffled as you collapsed in the bathroom stall, hanging over the toilet bowl as you taste the throw up sitting in your throat but just wouldn’t come out. You leaned against the wall and wiped the saliva from the side of your mouth.

You were gonna burn this shit down.

You returned to your desk, sitting down and taking calls- organizing meetings. It was boring, tedious work. But you would rather make schedules for a lifetime than kill someone who didn’t deserve it. Hours had passed of doing this work, putting up with comments until finally, finally, lunch break came. You were going to leave as soon as the clock turned to signal noon, grabbing your bag and coat. You wanted to binge on some takeout in the park, you wanted a break. But Hyunjin tapped your desk, and you spun around slowly- leveling your eye contact with him. You thought he was going to apologize for his little tantrum, but he did quite the opposite.

“You can’t go to lunch. Meeting with Third Eye in five.”

It was impersonal, Hyunjin staring right past you. His face was blank, devoid of any tell-tale emotion, but most of all, he wasn't tapping his thigh. He didn’t linger any longer, checking his watch and putting his hands in his pockets, walking off into the hallway back into his office. Instead of going to the meeting room immediately, you went back to the bathrooms.

“I thought you’d be here.”

“Must be intuition.”

“What do you think they’re gonna say?”

“Nothing good. Got my ass kicked yesterday.”

“I guess we both look rough.”

“We haven’t even begun to pay the price.”

“Can I say something, something fucking insane?”

“Depends on if you trust me.”

“I do. Do you trust me?”

“With my life.”

“I’m gonna burn this shit down to the ground.”

“You’re gonna need someone to douse it in gasoline.”

Without another word, you went to the meeting room and sat down in your seat, somehow still one of the first to get there.

“How’s your day going, Chan?”

“Boring. You?”

“Not any better.”

“Guess I’d rather argue with corporate lawyers than plan an operation, though.”

“Like we have a choice.”

Jisung and Changbin came in together, and the rest of the members of Third Eye filed in, sitting in their seats.

“That was something big you pulled off there,” a guy you recongized as Seungmin, spoke up, “Surprised you aren’t dead.” The rest of the members shot him a wary look, but he just shrugged. You crossed your legs, leaning back into the chair and placed your hands on the parallel armrests. “Is that so?” you said, “And why’s that?” It was you turn for your team members to shoot you a look, Chan nudging your foot as a plea for you not to push on further.

“Just an observation.”

And you didn’t, you had to play the long game here- even if that meant bowing out of verbal battles. You had to pick your battles, and you couldn’t choose all of them. So, instead, you reinforced whatever idea he had in his head.

“I’m surprised too.”

Woojin was watching the entire conversation very carefully, and you pretended not to notice. However, you made sure that the outline of Sir Hwang’s hand was visible to everyone, the blue and violet splotches of bruised skin disgustingly obvious. Hyunjin appeared, taking a seat in the head chair and stared down Woojin. Even though you had only seen Hyunjin a few minutes before, he looked overtly happy. A small and friendly smile plastered on his face as he leaned into his chair, taking the hair out of his face.

“Mind telling me why you called this meeting Kim?”

“I have a proposal.”

“Oh? Do tell.”

“Let’s join factions, divide and conquer.”

“How does this benefit me?”

Woojin scoffed. “We won’t have to resort to petty battles like this, Hwang.”

“For a mafia leader, you wear your heart on your sleeve.”

You expected Woojin’s face to tighten, even a little bit, but he remained blank like unused paper. “Better than acting like my father, don’t you think?”

“I think it’s a lot better. Your father wouldn’t have surrendered so easily.”

“And your father didn’t have to pretend,” Woojin sighed, and quickly added, “We have problems bigger than us. Seungmin got a notice that the feds are thinking about investigating.”

“I’m aware.”

This was news to you though, and you weren’t very fond of paying the price for sins you didn’t commit. You and Jeongin made quick eye contact.

This district was gonna burn in hellfire.

                                     ┕━━━━━♥♠♣♦━━━━━┙

[nintendotreehouse]

Dragon Quest-ions Answered: Fujimoto-san Talks Dragon Quest Builders

Hi hi, everyone! Theresa from Treehouse here. Hope you’re still having fun saving the world of Alefgard, and keeping it out of the Dragonlord’s clutches.

With all of these sconces and braziers, you could say I have a thing for fire…

The Dragon Quest series is a powerful force in the world of Japanese RPGs, and Square Enix has quite literally rebuilt the experience from the ground up, creating something exciting for fans and newcomers alike. As for me, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity of working with them leading into the launch of Dragon Quest Builders on Nintendo Switch, and as a fan of the game myself, I took a moment to ask the game’s producer some burning questions…

Theresa:

This game takes place in the world of Alefgard—the setting of the very first game in the Dragon Quest series. Why did your team decide to return to this important location in the Dragon Quest franchise?

Fujimoto-san:

We felt the objectives and setting of the game would be intuitive if the world from the first Dragon Quest had fallen into ruin, and you were tasked with recreating it as you saw fit.

The final boss of the first Dragon Quest, Dragonlord, has a famous line, “I give thee now a chance to share this world and to rule half of it if thou will now stand beside me.”

If you answered “Yes,” the world would fall into darkness. Game over. But Dragon Quest Builders takes that world clad in darkness and allows you to rebuild it as you see fit. This game challenged us to create an alternative, hypothetical world, one that progressed differently in important ways.

Also, we used graph paper when we were creating the 2D pixel tiles of Alefgard’s geography in the original Dragon Quest game. So, in a way, Dragon Quest Builders revives the original game world with both 2D and 3D blocks, and we hope everyone will play this reborn vision of Dragon Quest.

It’s difficult to pull off that look and look regal in an evil throne room.

Theresa:

The cities you rebuild, like Cantlin, are from the first Dragon Quest game as well. How did the development team go about choosing which specific cities players would get to rebuild?

Fujimoto-san:

We had an idea to reverse the order in which players visited cities throughout the original Dragon Quest story. The flow we ultimately chose starts the player out near the Dragonlord’s castle, sending them off to rebuild surrounding cities and finally revive Tantegel Castle, the starting area of Dragon Quest, only to return to the Dragonlord’s castle across the sea.

Theresa:

On the subject of building, this is a pretty significant step away from Dragon Quest’s traditional gameplay style. Why did you decide to reimagine an established RPG franchise as a building game?

Fujimoto-san:

The Dragon Quest numbered series continues to be created in the tradition of classic RPGs in which the hero saves the kingdom. While we use those traditional RPG elements as the focal point for non-numbered Dragon Quest games as well, we also use those titles to experiment with other ways to play in the Dragon Quest world.

With Dragon Quest Builders, we sought to create a play experience that had never been accomplished before—a marriage of Dragon Quest RPG elements and sandbox elements that lets you freely create things.

Sandbox-style games are not something that most Japanese players are deeply familiar with, and we developed Dragon Quest Builders with this in mind.

My immediate reaction to anything that was once dead and comes back to life. *insert repeated attack button presses*

Theresa:

Looking at this game, some people might think that it’s simply a building experience, but there’s actually a really engaging story here too. Can you please tell us more about how this story was developed, and how the building elements were integrated into it?

Fujimoto-san:

From the very beginning, we decided that the overall story would be about getting caught up in the Dragonlord’s trap at the end of the first Dragon Quest game, having the world fall to ruin, and then reconstructing the world. But we knew that charting out the plot and the building gameplay elements simultaneously would result in a half-baked, non-cohesive game. So, instead, we focused on designing the gameplay first, basing the mechanics on what we wanted the user to create at various points and what tools they would use to accomplish these builds. That way, even just the simple act of playing is fun and highly motivating. Finally, we then thought up details of the plot that would work well with these mechanics as we fine-tuned the gameplay.

The goddess has spoke-eth—I shall rebuild this land and claim it my own! …Err, fine, I’ll claim it for the people, I guess.

Theresa:

Since the game’s original release, how have you seen new players, as well as Dragon Quest fans, react to this “classic RPG-meets-builder" style of gameplay?

Fujimoto-san:

It feels like we’ve allowed Dragon Quest fans who haven’t played a sandbox style of game to easily discover the fun of this play style through this carefully crafted mix of RPG and sandbox elements.

This is the same type of reaction we received when the first Dragon Quest game expanded the appeal of the RPG genre in Japan 30 years ago.

Theresa:

Since Dragon Quest is such a long-running series, there was a lot of deep lore for the development team to draw upon while working on this game. What is your favorite surprise or Easter egg hidden away for fans to find?

Fujimoto-san:

There’s a lamp that you’ll need certain building material to craft. If you make this lamp and place it in a room, some sort of change will happen to the villagers. In Dragon Quest, this is a household element and one minor, fun item.

The Slime with the little beanie hat is my personal favorite throwback in this room. Super cute!  

Theresa:

While knowing Dragon Quest lore certainly adds to the experience, players don’t need to have played previous Dragon Quest games in order to follow what’s going on and enjoy it. How did the development team ensure that this game would be so accessible for new players?

Fujimoto-san:

For Dragon Quest itself, the game designer, Mr. Horii, always chooses mechanics that the player can instinctively understand, and puts his heart into creating something that anyone can relax and play without having to look at the manual. When Mr. Horii playtests a game still under development, he always plays it as if he was a brand-new player. Then we revise all the stumbling points.

Dragon Quest Builders was developed with similar tests in mind, ensuring that even those with no knowledge of the Dragon Quest series can freely enjoy the game.

Theresa:

It’s an interesting design choice to have the player start each chapter from what is essentially square one, as they teleport to the next town with the most basic equipment and no access to their previous materials and constructions. What made the development team decide to structure the game in this way?

Fujimoto-san:

Actually, the initial plan was not to split the game into standalone chapters, but rather to have everything connect in one overarching flow. But during the development process, the director, Mr. Niinou, suggested that we make a big shift in this plan. He proposed that we split the story into more distinct chapters to address a problem that occurred when all of the pieces of the narrative were more interconnected.

To illustrate this problem, imagine that you’ve just rebuilt the town of Cantlin and moved on to the next area. If you’re still able to access the location you’ve completed, then collecting the resources you need for the work ahead will be a very simple task. And there goes the challenge of the game! We realized that it would be too easy of an exploit to harvest new materials by continuing to build up Cantlin throughout the game. For this reason, we changed direction and split the story experience into chapters, so that the player would be able to create each area with a refreshed outlook.

In making this change, there was a concern that you wouldn’t be able to revisit your experiences from chapters you already played*. So, we designed it so that, as the chapters unfold, some sort of progression occurs. It’s a spoiler, so I won’t say any more than that… (laughs).

*Spoiler-Free Note from Theresa: Discovering fun details in Story Mode is really fulfilling! Normally, sleeping in a game is a simple act to restore health, but in this game, there’s something more to uncover. Also, after completing a chapter in Story Mode, you’re able to unlock similar areas within Terra Incognita, so you can gather and build things that you’ve encountered previously.

There’s a satisfying feeling in creating so many things, and that over time, you’re able to build better and more complex creations. And in doing so, you feel this nice progression for your skills in the game, which sets you up for the ultimate challenge near the end.  

I hear the next town’s gonna be a real fixer upper…

Theresa:

Fair enough! (laughs) Let’s change topics, then… This game features music from a wide selection of Dragon Quest games. How did the team decide which tracks to include?

Fujimoto-san:

Well, to start, since the game is set in the world of Alefgard from the original Dragon Quest, we created arrangements of all of that title’s music. From there, since the game was developed with creation at its core, we pulled in songs from the numbered series that are relaxing. And for the emotional story scenes, we used stirring music from across the series.

Theresa:

What was the thought process behind adding the Great Sabrecub and Dragon Quest Game Pak as exclusives for the Nintendo Switch version?

Fujimoto-san:

Terra Incognita (free-build mode) is a vast land, so we thought it would be fun to enhance the player’s ability to move about quickly, take down monsters, and gather materials. That’s where the Great Sabrecub mount came in.

In Dragon Quest, the Great Sabrecat often appears as a mount, but in Dragon Quest Builders, its head didn’t look quite right, so we decided to use the cute Great Sabrecub for the first time.

We also have completely recreated the look of the original Dragon Quest game’s cartridge on the Famicom. We had an idea of placing it in the land of Dragon Quest Builders, and from there, thought about the possibility of creating retro Dragon Quest themed blocks and objects.

Pouncy! Pouncy! Pouncy!

Theresa:

As a follow-up question, can you tell us more about why the development team decided to make this exclusive content only accessible in Terra Incognita?

Fujimoto-san:

If you use them in the story mode, it breaks the balance of the game. Since strange blocks and objects exist in the landscape of Terra Incognita, we made sure the exclusive content was only usable there.

Theresa:

Thank you so much for your time today! As we wrap up here, do you have anything else you’d like to say to the fans?

Fujimoto-san:

We’d love it if you used the in-game feature to upload the cities and landscapes you’ve created in Terra Incognita. We are very interested in seeing what sort of world you have created in Dragon Quest Builders. I’m sure there are those who have beautifully revived the cities, or others who’ve completely destroyed their world’s mountains and cities and everything... (laughs)

We are working hard to develop Dragon Quest Builders 2, so we hope you are looking forward to it.

Also, for those of you who haven’t played Dragon Quest Builders yet, please go try the demo.

Ever feel like your day is just taking you around in circles?

Theresa:

Thank you so much to Fujimoto-san and the rest of the team at Square Enix for providing us some of the gritty details behind the development of Dragon Quest Builders. For me, this game has been a great intro piece to the Dragon Quest franchise and a comfortable gateway into building-style games. I hope you all get to experience it and share your stories—as well as your building masterpieces!

That’s it from me for now. Tune in next time, fellow gamers! ^^

—Theresa A.

[jam2289]

Priorities

I am completely burnt out. It's my fault, obviously. I have a mental issue, failure to consistently choose priorities.

I have known about this issue for most of my life now, but I haven't been able to resolve it. And, realistically, I'm ambivalent about it. One of the reasons that I've been able to do so many cool things is because I'm all over the place. But, it definitely holds me back. Let's go over a few of things I'm working on and how I'm trying to manage them, and then we'll dive into some theory on how I might be able to resolve some of this.

I've been driving so hard over the last few weeks on the political battle with Dalton Township that the stress wore me out. A couple of days ago I fell asleep while reading, woke up, stumbled into the kitchen and opened the fridge, and there, right in my face, was some pizza. I ate two pieces. I just wasn't mentally prepared at that moment for it to be there, to resist the temptation. Well, my digestive system can't take that. Then, the next day I ate some salami that I reacted to a bit. Then, the next day I woke up sick. That's today. I don't have days to spend on recovery right now so I have to press on.

I edited a 7,000 word horror story today. I think it went pretty well. It's difficult to focus on something like that when you're sick and tired. I'm also still working on editing the stories for the "Horror Without Borders" anthology. I'm not too stressed about that.

I am a little stressed about the Harry Potter speeches in two days. The woman that organizes it hasn't been responding to my messages. I bought cap guns to use instead of the muzzleloader pistols I borrowed, because there was some concern about those. I did do my own tattoos that turned out pretty well. And, I did carve my own wand, which looks decent. I'm still working on two of the speeches, but I'll get them.

For the last few weeks I've had significantly fewer students in the morning, apparently because it's exam time in China. That's really putting a squeeze on my already poorly managed finances. That's stressful.

I haven't made any progress on the business, or much of my own writing, or any philosophy, recently. That's disturbing. I didn't get to paying my quarterly taxes. My computer mouse is broken. My car needs some new parts, that I have, I just have to connect with the mechanic to get them on. Etc, etc, etc. A bunch of other stuff.

One of the biggest things that's going to help is that other people are moving forward with the township recall, election, and prosecution projects. I just don't have the personal capacity, or the desire, to do all of that. It would have to become my full life, and I would probably end up dedicating the next 5 years to fixing Dalton Township. My life expectancy is 5 to 15 years, it's just not worth it for me. I did a lot to get the ball rolling, and I think that was mine to do, now it's someone else's turn to push.

In the end, that's all fairly normal I think. But, how do I get away from being normal and manage this better?

I don't know. Let's throw some things out here and see what we can arrange. My personality scores are odd, and definitely work against things like success, order, consistency, and structure. So, I have to come up with something a bit different.

I was thinking about this over the last week, choke points and bottlenecks. What if I just focused on those? For anything that I want to do my major bottlenecks are health and money. As far as health goes I think I've recovered from some stuff that most people wouldn't be able to recover from, but I still push it to the limit and sometimes find my breaking point, just like driving down my immunity right now. And money, I've just never focused on money, I need to fix that. But, I don't seem to have the natural internal drive for it.

The three-tier priority system I designed sounds great, and seems logical, it just hasn't helped me. Art, business, and philosophy are tier-one. Since I made that system I have done almost nothing with any of those. So, it's useless.

Health and money are means to ends. Without knowing the ends that I'm pursuing I think the motivation fades. Unless, of course, you make them ends in themselves. I used to do that for fitness, but I think that's behind me now. I need a reason to pursue either health or money, and it can't be for things like comfort or to avoid bad things, because that doesn't seem to work for me. (I'm not sure I can, or want to, become money obsessed. But, maybe I need to for awhile.)

Thus, we are at the conclusion that we must focus on meaning before means. That's what I tried to do with the three-tier failure. Tight systems are fragile, they're easy to break. Maybe I need to make the system even more flexible. What if I only have two main categories: meanings and means?

I will write more on meaning in life at a later point, but quickly; meaning in life comes from the real pursuit of true value. Real and true are interesting words in that sentence, they have to do with not being self-deceived and not contradicting yourself across time, as well as being more objective in general. Things become objective by expanding the perspective across time and points of view and noticing what remains consistent. If you didn't get all of that, that's okay. It's too much to cover in a paragraph. In the end, to a large extent, meaning has to be judged by something like intuition anyway, it's more of a feeling than anything. You could call it something like generalized accumulative tacit knowledge if you want to sound like you have a graduate degree, or you could call it something like spirit if you want to sound spiritual. Aligning your soul with the will of God would be the best religious one. All the same thing.

Alright, so, to orient myself in the world I need to first determine meanings. This completely changes how you perceive the world, which then changes how you act. To some extent I do this. Almost every night before I sleep I write down my creative, experiential, and attitudinal values for the day and tomorrow. That has been the most effective program like that I've ever encountered. I made it up, based on using psychologist Viktor Frankl's meaning categories across time.

Maybe this is where my three-tier model could come in? Which one of the nine categories feels the most meaningful at any given time: art, business, philosophy, romance, health, adventure, religion, politics, fun?

What are we really getting at here? Is it something like psychological orientation in the field of life values? Maybe.

Since choices have to be made, then sacrifices have to be made. You can't do everything, especially not at the same time. That's called opportunity cost in economics. Maybe, when I make a choice to pursue one meaning I should do some kind of ritualized sacrifice of another meaning that is the opportunity cost? I might be onto something there.

Instead of goals and objectives, check out "Systemantics" by John Gall to see why those often don't work, what if I had areas of interest to explore? That sounds more like me. I cannot see the end, I am walking into the unknown, so how can I have a goal that is the end?

(Here's something else that should have been in that book: 1) Complex systems usually operate in failure mode. 2) Humans are complex systems.)

Motivation is linear at the most basic level. You can move toward something or away from it. Something new that's close to you in time and/or space will cause behavioral inhibition, caution. Something new that's further away from you in time and/or space will cause behavioral exploration, curiosity. Caution may protect you at times, but "all the caution in the world will not feed you." That's one of my favorite quotes from psychologist Jordan Peterson.

(Curiosity killed the cat is famous. There's a set of better phrases that are less well known that go something like, Caution was the primary cause of the cat's general malaise and self-loathing.)

We have a lot of information here, can I pull anything out of it?

Meaning before means.

Some unknown mechanism for guiding the pursuit of meaning, let's call it the Internal Meaning Mechanism.

Areas of interest to explore: art, business, philosophy, health, adventure, romance, religion, politics, fun.

Maybe some kind of ritual when a choice is made.

Alright, I'm not sure that helps at all, lol.

What about an anergy/energy ratio?

What's anergy? This is from "Systemantics".

- - - - - - -

Any state or condition of the Universe, or of any portion of it, that requires the expenditure of human effort or ingenuity to bring it into line with human desires, needs, or pleasures is defined as an ANERGY-STATE.

ANERGY is measured in units of effort required to bring about the desired change.

- - - - - - -

That's really my problem right now, I have way, way more anergy than energy. I'm completely out of balance. My mother always told me that life is about balance and being flexible. Maybe we're really looking for something like an anergy/energy equivalency. We're getting really close to just reinventing the idea of flow, which is a balance between skill and challenge, but I like anergy much better, I think it goes with meaning better.

Alright, what if I assess the anergy state of each of my nine areas, and then guestimate the energy needed to resolve the anergy state in a satisfactory way? I think that might lead to something. Maybe I could do that for individual projects. Yeah, level of dissatisfaction compared to the amount of effort needed to bring it into alignment with satisfaction. Life should be based around that.

Now I just have to figure out how to apply that. Maybe next time, because right now I'm tired and need to sleep so that I can get a couple of important projects done tomorrow.

________________________________________________

You can find more of what I'm doing at http://www.JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com

[welldietreviews-blog]

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[gamingtipsandtrickshacks]

Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle Review

We will never know how my life could have gone had I never been introduced to mobile puzzle games. Over the persistent draw of just one more round, assignments were left unfinished, books unread and emails unanswered. I spent endless hours of procrastination determined to prove that I had the smarts it took to solve games that wanted me for my brain and not my reflexes. Even though I've since moved to YouTube as my favourite method of procrastination, Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle makes it clear that deep down I haven't changed.

Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle

Developer: Blue Wizard Digital

Publisher: Blue Wizard Digital

Format: Reviewed on PC

Availability: Released on April 13th on iOS, Android, PC and Mac

In this isometric top-down puzzler, you take control of the one and only Jason Vorhees and kill your way through a variety of levels by sliding Jason across a grid until you literally bump into your victim. After getting to all targets, a final mark will appear. You end each level using a finisher move, a particularly grizzly and over the top kill in which limbs fly and blood flows freely. Kill enough people with this move by clicking/tapping at the right time and you fill a bloodlust gauge. Once it's filled you gain new weapons - who knew you could slice through a person with an acoustic guitar?

As horrible as that sounds, surprisingly it isn't. Killer Puzzle features super-deformed characters with big heads and tiny limbs, and while their screaming will definitely have your potential company raise an eyebrow, killing these tiny guys won't cause sleepless nights. It feels weird to admit that it seems okay because the characters are cute and chubby, but everything is just that far over the top that it's fun rather than gruesome. Should the splatter prove too much there is always a "PG-13" option in the settings which removes the blood and censors the finishers. If you really enjoy the finishers however, there's the Murder Marathon, a mode with the sole purpose of ramping up your kill streak.

Complexity creeps up on you.

The Friday the 13th theme is a nice idea especially for genre fans. In homage to classic horror television, Killer Puzzle is made up of individual episodes, each featuring a different location such as the classic summer camp, an apocalyptic wasteland or... the beach. Each episode consists of, you guessed it, thirteen levels. The Easter eggs I spotted made me laugh more than once, and the severed head of Jason's mum easily makes my list of favourite video game companions.

Most importantly, behind the bloody exterior there's an intuitive and clever puzzle game. At the beginning of each level Jason will pop up somewhere on the board and you can take stock of the layout at your leisure. You quickly note the positions of people, traps and obstacles and then confidently make your first move. An optional top-down view helps to put things into perspective. After covering the basics of how to slide around to get to people, Killer Puzzle continuously finds new ways to make your killing spree just slightly more difficult.

Each level introduces something new: people start running away from you, obstacles keep you from your victims and traps such as holes and bodies of water can harm you as much as they harm them. As the board fills up with more targets, the order in which they are dispatched becomes another important element in successfully finishing a level, since they act as movable obstacles that stop you just as much as fences, trees and other items do.

Since Killer Puzzle gives you time to understand its mechanics and shows rather than tells you what to do, it doesn't become overwhelming. Upon encountering something new, you first get to play around with it in an easily solvable level before it's used it in combination with all the other pieces you already know, constantly building on existing knowledge. In a way it feels like slowly learning how to play chess, if the end goal of chess was to kill people while wearing a hockey mask.

There is more than a little of Blue Wizard's own Slayaway Camp in the mix. Happily, Slayaway Camp is a banger too.

The more intricate the levels become, the more often the game tries to lure you into a false sense of security. Many times the solution seems instantly clear but turns out to be just that much more complicated. An X mark on the board is meant as assistance in early levels for example, as it tells you either where you are supposed to land at some point or which row you need to go through. As you move to increasingly trickier levels however, even this will eventually be used against you.

Killer Puzzle isn't a difficult game. Levels rarely take longer than a few minutes. Should you get stuck there are a couple of options to get you back up on your feet. You can either redo a few moves by literally rewinding the episode, ask Jason's mum for a hint or even watch the complete solution in fast forward.

By staying absolutely fair, Killer Puzzle deals with its addictive mechanics in a responsible manner. Even though it is a free-to-play game clearly designed with the people in mind who just want to play a few short games on their phone and then end up getting sucked in, progress never depends on power ups or any other item that many mobile games not so discreetly offer for real money. Here, re-entry is easy and the consequences for losing yourself in the game will never extend to your wallet. You can buy up to four additional episodes for real cash, as well as a handful of gimmicky new costumes for Jason, but that's it.

Another method to keep players coming back is the Daily Death mode. In it you can solve a different puzzle every day, set in what's likely an office full of gameplay developers so overworked they simply didn't see Jason walking in. For solving puzzles thirteen days in a row you gain a new weapon to use in the main game.

This no strings attached approach is probably a deliberate choice: Killer Puzzle's developer Blue Wizard was founded by PopCap alumnus Jason Kapalka, who has worked on Peggle and Bejeweled, someone who knows ways in which fun games can be misused and who had a hand in the very games responsible for the near-death of my academic career. Fast forward a few years and Kapalka and his team still know how to drive me to distraction. At least this is my job now.

[ngtrend-network]

Managing Changes Is The Secret to Starting a Business

  Going toward another path requires changes. The key is doing what should be done at your pace. 

Beginning something, regardless of whether it's another business, item or administration, exercise or morning schedule is energizing, inspiring and accompanies a sound measurement of vision, as well. These are the things that get us through the primary week, the initial two weeks, the main month et cetera. 

Yet, things can get hard. We confront challenges that risk crashing us. I've surely encountered that in my own business, particularly considering that my whole showcasing structure depends on content. Getting crashed is simple when you see changes in activity or get negative remarks, for instance. What's more, here and there, we basically lose center since we feel like the test that we set ourselves is just excessively. We understand possibly we bit off more than we can bite. Everybody has expected these emotions sooner or later. 

With regards to beginning your own business, making another item or endeavoring to expand your item extend, these sorts of sentiments can have a genuine, unmistakable impact on your real, genuine income as well. 

The colossal thing is there are such a large number of strategies and systems that you can use to remain on track, yet when we consider the idea of "beginning" something, we're regularly seeing that from the point of view of ceasing or positively slowing down, something different. 

How about we utilize the case of beginning your first business. Normally that business began as a side venture, or something happened that constrained you out of your past occupation and made you choose to begin something for yourself as opposed to finding another comparable position somewhere else. The primary concern is, beginning your first business is an alternate mood to what you've been doing, ordinarily. 

It's a completely unique draw on your chance, expects you to be engaged and propelled, self-started and responsible to yourself. Furthermore, this is the place issues can begin. This is the point at which the staggering emotions can set in. 

The key to beginning: Finding your pace of progress. 

Change is something that we should all grasp. In any case, in all actuality we can't all grasp change similarly, with similar procedures and results. Change can be hard. While considering a switch into independent work, change can be considerably harder. You have a horde of things to stress over: 

Covering your bills 

Discovering precisely what it is you need to do 

For whom you will do it 

Coordinations of conveying it 

Where to work from 

Step by step instructions to draw in clients 

The rundown is unending. 

Change is an awesome thing, yet it carries with it an entire scope of new difficulties, challenges that you essentially may not acknowledge or be prepared for. The key to advancing through a time of progress - to be specific beginning your own business - when things seem unfavorable is to recognize your own "pace of progress." 

What is "pace of progress?" 

Tragically, numerous new entrepreneurs surrender too early on the grounds that the level of progress that they encounter amid those initial couple of many months essentially turns out to be excessively for them. 

Much the same as plunging again into a rec center routine and hoping to lift an indistinguishable measure of weight from you did when you were at your pinnacle will feel difficult to begin with, hoping to start another business, make your very own routine inside your business, and distinguish the errands you have to achieve each and every day to keep that business pushing ahead will feel awkward. 

In any case, distress is to be grasped, gained from and worked through. The main problem isn't the inconvenience by any means. The main problem is that we effortlessly contrast ourselves with everyone around us, those we see on the web and any other person, to be honest, who we feel are "better" than us. As in this way, we end up plainly disappointed by the advance that we are, or aren't, making. But instead than survey advance against our own past points of reference, we evaluate it against the apparent accomplishment of every other person. The consequence of this is we constrain ourselves into a pace of progress that can be too quick for us. 

Everybody approaches change at their own pace. The key to keeping up some beginning period rational soundness and center is to acknowledge what your pace of progress is. What amount would you be able to grasp before you feel overpowered? Where is your line? What amount of progress would you be able to take before you begin to return to your default, "utilized" conduct? 

Propensities are difficult to break and similarly, new propensities set aside an opportunity to shape. Keep in mind that when you begin your first business. You essentially haven't done this earlier and along these lines, you're encountering a monetary change, as well as a social one as well. Be aware of your body, and tune in to what your psyche is letting you know. Confide in your gut intuition, and enable yourself to acknowledge the change step by step. 

The key lies in organizing what needs doing versus what you can really acknowledge as a component of your new normal. Your obligation is to complete errands, each and every day, that move the needle in your business. Those undertakings should precede whatever else. 

In case you're excessively centered around being a definitive business visionary and copying the achievement that you see online from individuals who have been doing it for a considerable length of time, at that point you will make a pace of progress that is essentially too quick for you. Moreover, on the off chance that you endeavor to quicken towards your vision too rapidly, you could again compel a pace of progress that you're not happy with. 

There's a distinction between being roused, driven and comes about arranged and endeavoring to do excessively, too early. Your pace of progress is the speed at which you can grasp your new schedules, new methodologies and procedures while as yet being centered around making and measuring comes about. 

 This exercise in careful control is enter in the beginning of your first business, and without it, one side will assume control. You will concentrate completely on comes about and understand that you let the backend of your business slip, just to watch it push you into burnout, or you will concentrate totally on the "vibe great" work on the backend of your business, not isolating what you have to do from what you like doing. You'll get yourself left with no trade out the bank, truly rapidly.

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[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Note: This post (originally published at darklorde.com) is all about the Engines of Play. If you are not familiar with Taste/Satisfaction Maps and their uses, the Big 5, Self-Determination Theory, etc, I highly recommend watching this video before reading the article. It will make so much more sense. Like, Oh Em Gee.]

A Random Encounter With Relic

I’m in San Francisco. It’s GDC, so the sidewalks of the Moscone Center are packed to bursting with nerds of every stripe. The day is bright. I cross Fourth street, on my way to Moscone North--and someone calls, “Jason!”

I wasn't surprised--it happens to me a lot at GDC. Stay in the games biz for long enough, and GDC will eventually become one big reunion.

What happened next, though, absolutely does not happen every day.

A friendly-faced fella pushes his way out of the crowd, and introduces himself as one Mitch Lagran, a Lead Designer at Relic Entertainment. While I unsuccessfully suppressed my fanboy reaction (because DAWN OF WAR OMFG), Mitch explains that he had attended my Engines of Play talk last year...

...and that Relic had actually implemented the methods I had laid out in that talk.

He claimed that he wanted to thank me for it because it had made a huge difference to their process and was great stuff. I stared at him and tried to think who had put him up to this.

I mean, no one actually implements that stuff. Come on! That’s not how the GDC works!

The GDC is supposed to be a place where you go and listen to people talking about lessons and techniques--ones that you desperately wish you could apply because wow it would make your dev life so much better--and then you go back to your studio and everyone tells you about how yeah maybe that stuff worked for those guys, but that it won’t work here, see, because our situation is different.

And then you sigh, and maybe you try again in three months. Eventually you just go about your business.

GDC is not where RELIC FREAKING ENTERTAINMENT goes to find whole new process for their game conception phases.

But, here’s this guy, and he’s shaking my hand, and he's expressing his gratitude and his appreciation, and I so I play it cool and say, “Really?! You… actually used my stuff?!?"

He nods.

I ask, "Uh… so, what happened?!”

He told me. Later, he sent me a more detailed description of what the results had been. And what he said blew my mind.

So, I asked him if I could write it up, and share it.

A More Proper Introduction

That’s the back story for what this post is about. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present something akin to an actual case study for what happens when you apply the Engines of Play (which includes these charts called Taste Maps, and the process of analysis that goes into them) to a real dev environment.

Hrm.

By “actual case study” what I really mean is “the guys at Relic were kind enough to describe in some detail what they did with the ideas, and what the results were”. That isn’t quite a full case study. It's more like a front-line report or something. BUT STILL. CLOSE ENOUGH.

I mean COME ON! How often does this kind of thing just happen?! Never. That's how often.

A quick reminder: The Engines of Play is a way to figure out what kind of player taste you are trying to target with your game, in a way that is quite a bit more specific than “achievers” or “shooter players”. The methods involved do require a little bit of coming-up-to-speed, but they benefit from being both fairly intuitive and being backed up by systems that have a metric-fuck-ton of academic white papers and research done on them.

Remember all that? No? Well, here's a couple of videos for you.

Good now? Great!

A Conversation With Relic

I mentioned earlier that Mitch Lagran was kind enough to send me a long description of how he and his team have used said Engines. For our purposes here, I think it’s best if I let Mitch speak for himself.

Mitch: Hey Jason, it was nice getting to meet you down at GDC. Hope you had a good one this year.

Likewise. You have a cool beard.

Mitch: Given that you seemed interested in feedback around our use of Engines of Play at Relic, I figured I’d give you a run-down of how we’ve used it and how it has worked out.

You da man.

Prepro: Good

Mitch: It’s worth keeping in mind that we are still early on in our production, so we haven’t started adapting your model with a production oriented mentality yet. I’m guessing that when we do, there may be some slight shifts on how we use it to communicate.

I can tell you from experience that its use in production is likely to simply diminish. Once the key design targets have been set, we found that the model drifts into the “background lore” of the project. It doesn’t seem to be all that useful during the meat of production.

We did find that near the end of production we experienced a brief resurgence in interest in the work. As we prepared our communication plans, and as the game was starting to come together, there was a storm of new conversations around confirming whether or not we had built what we had intended to build--and Taste Maps are great for that.

At that point, too, there were a lot of new people coming onto the project who had not been exposed to the method, and both found it surprising that we had done all that work so far in advance and found it surprising that it seemed to work.

So: high use in preproduction. Low use during production. Brief flurry of use right as the launch plans are being discussed in earnest for the first time. That was our experience, anyway.

I look forward to learning whether or not your experience turns out to be similar!

Broad Appeal

Mitch: Overall we’ve found a fairly strong degree of success in using it both as a design lens and as a communication tool for the team.

It came along as part of a larger initiative pushing towards more intent driven design and as a part of a broader design structure shift, so it is a bit difficult to separate its effects from everything else, but it has been called out as a valuable part of the changes.

It has seen praise that extends from our executive level down to junior devs, which seems pretty damn impressive to me.

I know, right?!?

That was the part about this approach that surprised me the most—that so many completely different groups of people involved in the production found it to be useful.

I originally designed the approach as a tool for designers, and expected that the sell would be a hard one with the marketing and business teams. But we found quite the opposite to be true! The biz people were enthusiastic, and (in my experience) already prepared to look at our game through this lens. Instant adopters.

I am psyched to hear that this might be a repeatable phenomenon.

Satisfaction Is Hard

Mitch: Generally, taste maps have had a stronger adoption than satisfaction maps.

I think that may be partly due to me not having pushed satisfaction maps quite as strongly, so it’s something I am planning on trying to work on (especially because I want to ensure that we have a strong connection to the PENS model on our team).

However, I also think that it is because Taste Maps include a more visual component, so team members find them easier to latch onto and express. Given that, I am hoping to explore some ways to present the satisfaction maps / PENS model in a way that will give people a stronger connection to it.

I found the same thing. I think there are many complicating factors here.

Here's one: I found that discussing satisfaction is just harder than discussing taste. My theory is that because its effects are so much more remote than the immediate-gratification of taste that most people are simply under-prepared to think about the whole concept. I know that I was, and that it took long years of effort to really get the feeling for how satisfaction works. It’s still a work in progress for me, in fact.

That said: wow is long-term satisfaction important. I have come to understand that if you make a game that only offers short-term taste satisfaction, that people will play it for 30 minutes and then never come back. The core three satisfactions of Self-Determination Theory / PENS give us the reasons why people will come to believe that your game is worth spending some of their precious time on this planet on.

It is tricky to think about. But learn it: the success of your game depends on it.

(I agree with you about the part about the visual component for SDT kinda sucking. I think the way I laid out satisfaction maps was sort of a cop-out, and deserves a better approach than just “fill in these three boxes”. We’ll see if something better can be developed.)

Brand Analysis FTW

Mitch: As our team is not working on a new IP,

(FOR THE EMPEROR!!!!)

we might have had some different uses for it than you on For Honor. Specifically, we went through an early exercise analyzing past entries in our franchise using taste maps and satisfaction maps.

That’s... so... cooooooooooool!!

Mitch: This was part of a larger effort aimed at a reverse / hindsight engineering of the overall creative direction of the franchise. Engines of Play was a hugely valuable tool in this process.

It gave us a strong lens to view the successes of the franchise through. We then used that to base future development off of.

We basically took the franchise maps as a base that we should build on, and used the taste maps as a way to choose targeted areas we wanted to improve. Our output was ultimately an overlay of the two, showing the original franchise maps with our targeted improvements on top.

This also gave us a tool to discuss the scope of both improvements and maintenance (the latter being the amount of work required to maintain the same degree of success in any specific axis in a modern iteration of the franchise).

So basically, if we had rated the franchise has having best-in-class coop in the initial taste-map, we did an assessment of how changes in coop play in modern games would affect our ability to hit that mark.

From there, we would choose specific areas where the past franchise had scored lower and we felt would be strong candidates for ratcheting up the next iteration, based on how feasible it would be to fit into our scope and how closely the different axes aligned with existing creative direction.

I am so impressed by this. I had some vague notion as we were working on this that you could maybe apply taste maps to genres, or something, but I never investigated it. What you describe here, with taste map overlays (overlays!!) frankly seems so obvious now that you’ve explained it that I am going to just adopt it into my design process.

I also adore the idea of re-evaluating the viability of your features through the lens of “are we still best-in-class?” during pre-production. That sounds to me like a process that literally everyone involved in production could get behind, understand, and participate in.

Good one, guys.

Brand Satisfaction Is Stable

Mitch: In the process above, Satisfaction Maps were used in a similar way. We used them to establish where the sense of satisfaction has come from in the past, with the idea that we can use that as a required foundational base.

Basically, it gave us the parts of the game we should not disturb, but should instead aim to improve and build around.

It’s funny, right? Satisfaction theory (SDT, etc) is so damned important, but once the core pieces are in place and working (which, if you have made a successful game, must be true), you can then largely rely on them.

Building a game with a high opportunity for mastery, or with extensive customization and self-expression options, or with strong social systems that give the player a clear idea of where they stand in the community—these are things that players will always want, in some form or another. So, you’re right: if that part ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

That said, if you discover in your analysis that one of your three satisfaction pillars is a tad weak, then a new version is a perfect time to shore that up. It will always pay off, if you can execute on those features well.

It Brings Out Disagreements Early

Mitch: Our process of creating our own taste maps saw initial discussions of franchise maps, followed by members of our senior leadership team each creating their own versions of what our taste maps should be. These were then used as discussion drivers in creative meetings aimed at establishing our direction.

We often found that one member of the team would have a significantly different take on where we should target on a specific axis.

This would tend to indicate a very different perspective, which was useful in driving discussion and debate. It also resulted in a large portion of our team having a deeper understanding of our direction and a sense of ownership over it that they hadn’t in past productions.

I’m going to go ahead and state that I think you have hit on the #1 most valuable part of integrating this tool into a dev team’s process.

What happened for you is exactly what happened for us. And, resolving those differences and disagreements about what we were shooting for (years in advance of the game’s release!) produced several key things (some of which you mention above):

We caught the disagreements ahead of time, before they could cause much damage (in the form of lost work or game incoherence).

Once the disagreement was resolved, we all had a clearer idea of where we were all going.

Collectively, we had more confidence in our direction, since we all understood why we were targeting that specific feature or experience.

Having the why in place well ahead of ramping up for production meant that when we did go wide and started working on everything at once, our key leadership all were very clear about the vision and the goal, and in a way that was easy to remember.

It is difficult to measure how valuable this was. The effect of that knowledge would be that we would not need to have as many discussions on this topic, so how do we measure the impact?

Still, my experience on other projects tells me that it mattered quite a lot. Since we already understood the goals, we didn't improvise quite as much. I believe it was a huge part of our success.

Some Axes Are Unclear

Mitch: Through the process of discussing our Taste Maps, we ran into several tension points where there was disagreement and uncertainty on what the different axes mean.

A lot of discussion, for instance, revolved around the differences and specific definitions of Multiplayer, Solo, Coop, and Combat.

This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it gave our team a valuable tool to align our own definitions of these things. However, our experience was that there was a degree of uncertainty in the specific meanings of the axes, which could result in each team using the model with customized definitions, making cross-team communication a bit more difficult.

We found similar problems, and sometimes around the same axes. I think those ones could use a naming update.

If I were to approach that problem today, I might do something like this: Crowd <—> Alone (NPCs don’t count, only real people), and Together <—> Against.

I’m not 100% sure that this would resolve the problem. But that’s how I see it today.

Would Be Great To Have Personas

Mitch: I have noticed a bit of an issue around the need for more memorable or chunky information from the maps, but I think this is basically solved by what you mentioned around building some player personas.

[ Reader: The context for this is that there is one part of the whole mapping process that I didn’t find a good way to explain in my GDC talk (given the time constraints and the amount of information I was already downloading onto my audience): player personas.

What we did (in brief) was to take our taste maps and then generate four imaginary players that covered all of the most extreme tastes in our chart (by simply placing four dots on our map, one dot per Domain, in the furthest corner of the taste zone). We then generated some basic demographics about who they might be.

At that point, we could use those personas as a more accessible way of talking about what the maps meant in terms of real players.

So... I shared this info with Mitch on the sidewalk at GDC when he mentioned some of the challenges he had faced using the system. After I got done explaining the missing link, he looked at me...

...and for a minute I thought he was gonna punch me or something. Like, “DUDE. WHY DID YOU NOT MENTION THIS IN YOUR TALK.”

But then he smiled, and said something like “Yeah! I bet that would do it!” and moved on.

He didn't punch me at all! Nice guys, these Relic people! ]

Mitch: I attempted to improve it a bit for our team by breaking out some broadly categorized player types based on our maps, but I think your idea of building more fleshed out characters would work better.

The main issue is just that people sometimes have troubles keeping the maps as a whole in their mind, whereas more chunked info like “George” or “Skilled Builders” is a bit easier for people to grok and use in discussion. So a tool like the personas you described seems like a pretty solid add-on to the existing model based on our experience.

Yup. I wish I had presented it in the first talk. Maybe the next one!

It Reduces Team Tension

Mitch: A major benefit I’ve found has definitely been the ability for the design team to specify our focus and intent based on the taste maps to other team members.

This has actually relieved a lot of tension on our team related to past projects. I’d guess you may have seen similar things on For Honor, but because RTS games are a bit of a niche it’s helped us communicate much better why specific team members aren’t connecting with our current drives (eg: team members who may be more strongly attached to building and solo gameplay and don’t connect with the game while we worked on skilled multiplayer focused features are no longer uncomfortable with the situation).

Yes! Yes, yes, yes. And, furthermore, YES.

One of the hardest moments to get through smoothly in game development is the moment where a dev who is working on a feature says “well, I don’t even get why we’re making this. I mean, players want <the opposite of what the feature offers>, not <the thing the feature offers>.”

Awkward.

Because what do you do? At that moment, your team member is not asking to be educated about the broad variety in player tastes, and probably has been simmering on this gripe for quite a while! It’s a moment that is fraught with peril for a team culture…

…and having the taste map to refer to is an amazing method of short-cutting the assumption of unanimity among players that is the core problem there. The chart demonstrates in clear terms not only that variety exists on these spectra, but what the positive opposite of your personal taste actually is.

We found exactly what you have found: a team that understands the broad variety of their player’s tastes can work more smoothly, because then your personal taste doesn’t have to be treated as though it were right or wrong.

Seems Like It Works

Mitch: The TL;DR is that your model is definitely working well for us. There’s some tweaks I’d like to make on our usage around satisfaction maps and getting more digestible player types, but overall it’s been great.

Thanks for going to all the work of putting together your model and process and sharing it by the way, it’s been super helpful for us.

Nothing beats learning that the work has actually mattered to someone else, man. Thank you.

Conclusion

What is so amazing to me about Mitch’s commentary and his team’s experience of using the tool is how precisely it mirrors our own experience. It would be one thing if the tool simply worked as designed, right? But here, what I see is that the exact same follow-on effects have developed on his team.

The increase in clarity and commitment. The broad acceptance of the tool as valuable. The decrease in tension.

These appear to not only be effects local to the For Honor team. Once is a fluke, but twice is maybe a pattern.

If the deployment of the Engines of Play into a project can produce those kinds of effects even just more often than not, then that goes a long way towards demonstrating that maybe it isn’t just a pretty model.

I’m excited to be able to make the claim that maybe it’s actually a good idea, and to have some data to back it up.

Thanks, Mitch, for taking the time to share your team’s experience. Thanks, Relic people, for letting me write this piece. And thanks to all the amazing devs at Relic Entertainment: congratulations on a huge launch. I look forward to enjoying your games for many years to come.

[gamingtipsandtrickshacks]

Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle Review

We will never know how my life could have gone had I never been introduced to mobile puzzle games. Over the persistent draw of just one more round, assignments were left unfinished, books unread and emails unanswered. I spent endless hours of procrastination determined to prove that I had the smarts it took to solve games that wanted me for my brain and not my reflexes. Even though I've since moved to YouTube as my favourite method of procrastination, Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle makes it clear that deep down I haven't changed.

Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle

Developer: Blue Wizard Digital

Publisher: Blue Wizard Digital

Format: Reviewed on PC

Availability: Released on April 13th on iOS, Android, PC and Mac

In this isometric top-down puzzler, you take control of the one and only Jason Vorhees and kill your way through a variety of levels by sliding Jason across a grid until you literally bump into your victim. After getting to all targets, a final mark will appear. You end each level using a finisher move, a particularly grizzly and over the top kill in which limbs fly and blood flows freely. Kill enough people with this move by clicking/tapping at the right time and you fill a bloodlust gauge. Once it's filled you gain new weapons - who knew you could slice through a person with an acoustic guitar?

As horrible as that sounds, surprisingly it isn't. Killer Puzzle features super-deformed characters with big heads and tiny limbs, and while their screaming will definitely have your potential company raise an eyebrow, killing these tiny guys won't cause sleepless nights. It feels weird to admit that it seems okay because the characters are cute and chubby, but everything is just that far over the top that it's fun rather than gruesome. Should the splatter prove too much there is always a "PG-13" option in the settings which removes the blood and censors the finishers. If you really enjoy the finishers however, there's the Murder Marathon, a mode with the sole purpose of ramping up your kill streak.

Complexity creeps up on you.

The Friday the 13th theme is a nice idea especially for genre fans. In homage to classic horror television, Killer Puzzle is made up of individual episodes, each featuring a different location such as the classic summer camp, an apocalyptic wasteland or... the beach. Each episode consists of, you guessed it, thirteen levels. The Easter eggs I spotted made me laugh more than once, and the severed head of Jason's mum easily makes my list of favourite video game companions.

Most importantly, behind the bloody exterior there's an intuitive and clever puzzle game. At the beginning of each level Jason will pop up somewhere on the board and you can take stock of the layout at your leisure. You quickly note the positions of people, traps and obstacles and then confidently make your first move. An optional top-down view helps to put things into perspective. After covering the basics of how to slide around to get to people, Killer Puzzle continuously finds new ways to make your killing spree just slightly more difficult.

Each level introduces something new: people start running away from you, obstacles keep you from your victims and traps such as holes and bodies of water can harm you as much as they harm them. As the board fills up with more targets, the order in which they are dispatched becomes another important element in successfully finishing a level, since they act as movable obstacles that stop you just as much as fences, trees and other items do.

Since Killer Puzzle gives you time to understand its mechanics and shows rather than tells you what to do, it doesn't become overwhelming. Upon encountering something new, you first get to play around with it in an easily solvable level before it's used it in combination with all the other pieces you already know, constantly building on existing knowledge. In a way it feels like slowly learning how to play chess, if the end goal of chess was to kill people while wearing a hockey mask.

There is more than a little of Blue Wizard's own Slayaway Camp in the mix. Happily, Slayaway Camp is a banger too.

The more intricate the levels become, the more often the game tries to lure you into a false sense of security. Many times the solution seems instantly clear but turns out to be just that much more complicated. An X mark on the board is meant as assistance in early levels for example, as it tells you either where you are supposed to land at some point or which row you need to go through. As you move to increasingly trickier levels however, even this will eventually be used against you.

Killer Puzzle isn't a difficult game. Levels rarely take longer than a few minutes. Should you get stuck there are a couple of options to get you back up on your feet. You can either redo a few moves by literally rewinding the episode, ask Jason's mum for a hint or even watch the complete solution in fast forward.

By staying absolutely fair, Killer Puzzle deals with its addictive mechanics in a responsible manner. Even though it is a free-to-play game clearly designed with the people in mind who just want to play a few short games on their phone and then end up getting sucked in, progress never depends on power ups or any other item that many mobile games not so discreetly offer for real money. Here, re-entry is easy and the consequences for losing yourself in the game will never extend to your wallet. You can buy up to four additional episodes for real cash, as well as a handful of gimmicky new costumes for Jason, but that's it.

Another method to keep players coming back is the Daily Death mode. In it you can solve a different puzzle every day, set in what's likely an office full of gameplay developers so overworked they simply didn't see Jason walking in. For solving puzzles thirteen days in a row you gain a new weapon to use in the main game.

This no strings attached approach is probably a deliberate choice: Killer Puzzle's developer Blue Wizard was founded by PopCap alumnus Jason Kapalka, who has worked on Peggle and Bejeweled, someone who knows ways in which fun games can be misused and who had a hand in the very games responsible for the near-death of my academic career. Fast forward a few years and Kapalka and his team still know how to drive me to distraction. At least this is my job now.

[gamingtipsandtrickshacks]

Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle Review

We will never know how my life could have gone had I never been introduced to mobile puzzle games. Over the persistent draw of just one more round, assignments were left unfinished, books unread and emails unanswered. I spent endless hours of procrastination determined to prove that I had the smarts it took to solve games that wanted me for my brain and not my reflexes. Even though I've since moved to YouTube as my favourite method of procrastination, Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle makes it clear that deep down I haven't changed.

Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle

Developer: Blue Wizard Digital

Publisher: Blue Wizard Digital

Format: Reviewed on PC

Availability: Released on April 13th on iOS, Android, PC and Mac

In this isometric top-down puzzler, you take control of the one and only Jason Vorhees and kill your way through a variety of levels by sliding Jason across a grid until you literally bump into your victim. After getting to all targets, a final mark will appear. You end each level using a finisher move, a particularly grizzly and over the top kill in which limbs fly and blood flows freely. Kill enough people with this move by clicking/tapping at the right time and you fill a bloodlust gauge. Once it's filled you gain new weapons - who knew you could slice through a person with an acoustic guitar?

As horrible as that sounds, surprisingly it isn't. Killer Puzzle features super-deformed characters with big heads and tiny limbs, and while their screaming will definitely have your potential company raise an eyebrow, killing these tiny guys won't cause sleepless nights. It feels weird to admit that it seems okay because the characters are cute and chubby, but everything is just that far over the top that it's fun rather than gruesome. Should the splatter prove too much there is always a "PG-13" option in the settings which removes the blood and censors the finishers. If you really enjoy the finishers however, there's the Murder Marathon, a mode with the sole purpose of ramping up your kill streak.

Complexity creeps up on you.

The Friday the 13th theme is a nice idea especially for genre fans. In homage to classic horror television, Killer Puzzle is made up of individual episodes, each featuring a different location such as the classic summer camp, an apocalyptic wasteland or... the beach. Each episode consists of, you guessed it, thirteen levels. The Easter eggs I spotted made me laugh more than once, and the severed head of Jason's mum easily makes my list of favourite video game companions.

Most importantly, behind the bloody exterior there's an intuitive and clever puzzle game. At the beginning of each level Jason will pop up somewhere on the board and you can take stock of the layout at your leisure. You quickly note the positions of people, traps and obstacles and then confidently make your first move. An optional top-down view helps to put things into perspective. After covering the basics of how to slide around to get to people, Killer Puzzle continuously finds new ways to make your killing spree just slightly more difficult.

Each level introduces something new: people start running away from you, obstacles keep you from your victims and traps such as holes and bodies of water can harm you as much as they harm them. As the board fills up with more targets, the order in which they are dispatched becomes another important element in successfully finishing a level, since they act as movable obstacles that stop you just as much as fences, trees and other items do.

Since Killer Puzzle gives you time to understand its mechanics and shows rather than tells you what to do, it doesn't become overwhelming. Upon encountering something new, you first get to play around with it in an easily solvable level before it's used it in combination with all the other pieces you already know, constantly building on existing knowledge. In a way it feels like slowly learning how to play chess, if the end goal of chess was to kill people while wearing a hockey mask.

There is more than a little of Blue Wizard's own Slayaway Camp in the mix. Happily, Slayaway Camp is a banger too.

The more intricate the levels become, the more often the game tries to lure you into a false sense of security. Many times the solution seems instantly clear but turns out to be just that much more complicated. An X mark on the board is meant as assistance in early levels for example, as it tells you either where you are supposed to land at some point or which row you need to go through. As you move to increasingly trickier levels however, even this will eventually be used against you.

Killer Puzzle isn't a difficult game. Levels rarely take longer than a few minutes. Should you get stuck there are a couple of options to get you back up on your feet. You can either redo a few moves by literally rewinding the episode, ask Jason's mum for a hint or even watch the complete solution in fast forward.

By staying absolutely fair, Killer Puzzle deals with its addictive mechanics in a responsible manner. Even though it is a free-to-play game clearly designed with the people in mind who just want to play a few short games on their phone and then end up getting sucked in, progress never depends on power ups or any other item that many mobile games not so discreetly offer for real money. Here, re-entry is easy and the consequences for losing yourself in the game will never extend to your wallet. You can buy up to four additional episodes for real cash, as well as a handful of gimmicky new costumes for Jason, but that's it.

Another method to keep players coming back is the Daily Death mode. In it you can solve a different puzzle every day, set in what's likely an office full of gameplay developers so overworked they simply didn't see Jason walking in. For solving puzzles thirteen days in a row you gain a new weapon to use in the main game.

This no strings attached approach is probably a deliberate choice: Killer Puzzle's developer Blue Wizard was founded by PopCap alumnus Jason Kapalka, who has worked on Peggle and Bejeweled, someone who knows ways in which fun games can be misused and who had a hand in the very games responsible for the near-death of my academic career. Fast forward a few years and Kapalka and his team still know how to drive me to distraction. At least this is my job now.

[gamingtipsandtrickshacks]

Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle Review

We will never know how my life could have gone had I never been introduced to mobile puzzle games. Over the persistent draw of just one more round, assignments were left unfinished, books unread and emails unanswered. I spent endless hours of procrastination determined to prove that I had the smarts it took to solve games that wanted me for my brain and not my reflexes. Even though I've since moved to YouTube as my favourite method of procrastination, Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle makes it clear that deep down I haven't changed.

Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle

Developer: Blue Wizard Digital

Publisher: Blue Wizard Digital

Format: Reviewed on PC

Availability: Released on April 13th on iOS, Android, PC and Mac

In this isometric top-down puzzler, you take control of the one and only Jason Vorhees and kill your way through a variety of levels by sliding Jason across a grid until you literally bump into your victim. After getting to all targets, a final mark will appear. You end each level using a finisher move, a particularly grizzly and over the top kill in which limbs fly and blood flows freely. Kill enough people with this move by clicking/tapping at the right time and you fill a bloodlust gauge. Once it's filled you gain new weapons - who knew you could slice through a person with an acoustic guitar?

As horrible as that sounds, surprisingly it isn't. Killer Puzzle features super-deformed characters with big heads and tiny limbs, and while their screaming will definitely have your potential company raise an eyebrow, killing these tiny guys won't cause sleepless nights. It feels weird to admit that it seems okay because the characters are cute and chubby, but everything is just that far over the top that it's fun rather than gruesome. Should the splatter prove too much there is always a "PG-13" option in the settings which removes the blood and censors the finishers. If you really enjoy the finishers however, there's the Murder Marathon, a mode with the sole purpose of ramping up your kill streak.

Complexity creeps up on you.

The Friday the 13th theme is a nice idea especially for genre fans. In homage to classic horror television, Killer Puzzle is made up of individual episodes, each featuring a different location such as the classic summer camp, an apocalyptic wasteland or... the beach. Each episode consists of, you guessed it, thirteen levels. The Easter eggs I spotted made me laugh more than once, and the severed head of Jason's mum easily makes my list of favourite video game companions.

Most importantly, behind the bloody exterior there's an intuitive and clever puzzle game. At the beginning of each level Jason will pop up somewhere on the board and you can take stock of the layout at your leisure. You quickly note the positions of people, traps and obstacles and then confidently make your first move. An optional top-down view helps to put things into perspective. After covering the basics of how to slide around to get to people, Killer Puzzle continuously finds new ways to make your killing spree just slightly more difficult.

Each level introduces something new: people start running away from you, obstacles keep you from your victims and traps such as holes and bodies of water can harm you as much as they harm them. As the board fills up with more targets, the order in which they are dispatched becomes another important element in successfully finishing a level, since they act as movable obstacles that stop you just as much as fences, trees and other items do.

Since Killer Puzzle gives you time to understand its mechanics and shows rather than tells you what to do, it doesn't become overwhelming. Upon encountering something new, you first get to play around with it in an easily solvable level before it's used it in combination with all the other pieces you already know, constantly building on existing knowledge. In a way it feels like slowly learning how to play chess, if the end goal of chess was to kill people while wearing a hockey mask.

There is more than a little of Blue Wizard's own Slayaway Camp in the mix. Happily, Slayaway Camp is a banger too.

The more intricate the levels become, the more often the game tries to lure you into a false sense of security. Many times the solution seems instantly clear but turns out to be just that much more complicated. An X mark on the board is meant as assistance in early levels for example, as it tells you either where you are supposed to land at some point or which row you need to go through. As you move to increasingly trickier levels however, even this will eventually be used against you.

Killer Puzzle isn't a difficult game. Levels rarely take longer than a few minutes. Should you get stuck there are a couple of options to get you back up on your feet. You can either redo a few moves by literally rewinding the episode, ask Jason's mum for a hint or even watch the complete solution in fast forward.

By staying absolutely fair, Killer Puzzle deals with its addictive mechanics in a responsible manner. Even though it is a free-to-play game clearly designed with the people in mind who just want to play a few short games on their phone and then end up getting sucked in, progress never depends on power ups or any other item that many mobile games not so discreetly offer for real money. Here, re-entry is easy and the consequences for losing yourself in the game will never extend to your wallet. You can buy up to four additional episodes for real cash, as well as a handful of gimmicky new costumes for Jason, but that's it.

Another method to keep players coming back is the Daily Death mode. In it you can solve a different puzzle every day, set in what's likely an office full of gameplay developers so overworked they simply didn't see Jason walking in. For solving puzzles thirteen days in a row you gain a new weapon to use in the main game.

This no strings attached approach is probably a deliberate choice: Killer Puzzle's developer Blue Wizard was founded by PopCap alumnus Jason Kapalka, who has worked on Peggle and Bejeweled, someone who knows ways in which fun games can be misused and who had a hand in the very games responsible for the near-death of my academic career. Fast forward a few years and Kapalka and his team still know how to drive me to distraction. At least this is my job now.

[gamingtipsandtrickshacks]

Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle Review

We will never know how my life could have gone had I never been introduced to mobile puzzle games. Over the persistent draw of just one more round, assignments were left unfinished, books unread and emails unanswered. I spent endless hours of procrastination determined to prove that I had the smarts it took to solve games that wanted me for my brain and not my reflexes. Even though I've since moved to YouTube as my favourite method of procrastination, Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle makes it clear that deep down I haven't changed.

Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle

Developer: Blue Wizard Digital

Publisher: Blue Wizard Digital

Format: Reviewed on PC

Availability: Released on April 13th on iOS, Android, PC and Mac

In this isometric top-down puzzler, you take control of the one and only Jason Vorhees and kill your way through a variety of levels by sliding Jason across a grid until you literally bump into your victim. After getting to all targets, a final mark will appear. You end each level using a finisher move, a particularly grizzly and over the top kill in which limbs fly and blood flows freely. Kill enough people with this move by clicking/tapping at the right time and you fill a bloodlust gauge. Once it's filled you gain new weapons - who knew you could slice through a person with an acoustic guitar?

As horrible as that sounds, surprisingly it isn't. Killer Puzzle features super-deformed characters with big heads and tiny limbs, and while their screaming will definitely have your potential company raise an eyebrow, killing these tiny guys won't cause sleepless nights. It feels weird to admit that it seems okay because the characters are cute and chubby, but everything is just that far over the top that it's fun rather than gruesome. Should the splatter prove too much there is always a "PG-13" option in the settings which removes the blood and censors the finishers. If you really enjoy the finishers however, there's the Murder Marathon, a mode with the sole purpose of ramping up your kill streak.

Complexity creeps up on you.

The Friday the 13th theme is a nice idea especially for genre fans. In homage to classic horror television, Killer Puzzle is made up of individual episodes, each featuring a different location such as the classic summer camp, an apocalyptic wasteland or... the beach. Each episode consists of, you guessed it, thirteen levels. The Easter eggs I spotted made me laugh more than once, and the severed head of Jason's mum easily makes my list of favourite video game companions.

Most importantly, behind the bloody exterior there's an intuitive and clever puzzle game. At the beginning of each level Jason will pop up somewhere on the board and you can take stock of the layout at your leisure. You quickly note the positions of people, traps and obstacles and then confidently make your first move. An optional top-down view helps to put things into perspective. After covering the basics of how to slide around to get to people, Killer Puzzle continuously finds new ways to make your killing spree just slightly more difficult.

Each level introduces something new: people start running away from you, obstacles keep you from your victims and traps such as holes and bodies of water can harm you as much as they harm them. As the board fills up with more targets, the order in which they are dispatched becomes another important element in successfully finishing a level, since they act as movable obstacles that stop you just as much as fences, trees and other items do.

Since Killer Puzzle gives you time to understand its mechanics and shows rather than tells you what to do, it doesn't become overwhelming. Upon encountering something new, you first get to play around with it in an easily solvable level before it's used it in combination with all the other pieces you already know, constantly building on existing knowledge. In a way it feels like slowly learning how to play chess, if the end goal of chess was to kill people while wearing a hockey mask.

There is more than a little of Blue Wizard's own Slayaway Camp in the mix. Happily, Slayaway Camp is a banger too.

The more intricate the levels become, the more often the game tries to lure you into a false sense of security. Many times the solution seems instantly clear but turns out to be just that much more complicated. An X mark on the board is meant as assistance in early levels for example, as it tells you either where you are supposed to land at some point or which row you need to go through. As you move to increasingly trickier levels however, even this will eventually be used against you.

Killer Puzzle isn't a difficult game. Levels rarely take longer than a few minutes. Should you get stuck there are a couple of options to get you back up on your feet. You can either redo a few moves by literally rewinding the episode, ask Jason's mum for a hint or even watch the complete solution in fast forward.

By staying absolutely fair, Killer Puzzle deals with its addictive mechanics in a responsible manner. Even though it is a free-to-play game clearly designed with the people in mind who just want to play a few short games on their phone and then end up getting sucked in, progress never depends on power ups or any other item that many mobile games not so discreetly offer for real money. Here, re-entry is easy and the consequences for losing yourself in the game will never extend to your wallet. You can buy up to four additional episodes for real cash, as well as a handful of gimmicky new costumes for Jason, but that's it.

Another method to keep players coming back is the Daily Death mode. In it you can solve a different puzzle every day, set in what's likely an office full of gameplay developers so overworked they simply didn't see Jason walking in. For solving puzzles thirteen days in a row you gain a new weapon to use in the main game.

This no strings attached approach is probably a deliberate choice: Killer Puzzle's developer Blue Wizard was founded by PopCap alumnus Jason Kapalka, who has worked on Peggle and Bejeweled, someone who knows ways in which fun games can be misused and who had a hand in the very games responsible for the near-death of my academic career. Fast forward a few years and Kapalka and his team still know how to drive me to distraction. At least this is my job now.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Note: This post (originally published at darklorde.com) is all about the Engines of Play. If you are not familiar with Taste/Satisfaction Maps and their uses, the Big 5, Self-Determination Theory, etc, I highly recommend watching this video before reading the article. It will make so much more sense. Like, Oh Em Gee.]

A Random Encounter With Relic

I’m in San Francisco. It’s GDC, so the sidewalks of the Moscone Center are packed to bursting with nerds of every stripe. The day is bright. I cross Fourth street, on my way to Moscone North--and someone calls, “Jason!”

I wasn't surprised--it happens to me a lot at GDC. Stay in the games biz for long enough, and GDC will eventually become one big reunion.

What happened next, though, absolutely does not happen every day.

A friendly-faced fella pushes his way out of the crowd, and introduces himself as one Mitch Lagran, a Lead Designer at Relic Entertainment. While I unsuccessfully suppressed my fanboy reaction (because DAWN OF WAR OMFG), Mitch explains that he had attended my Engines of Play talk last year...

...and that Relic had actually implemented the methods I had laid out in that talk.

He claimed that he wanted to thank me for it because it had made a huge difference to their process and was great stuff. I stared at him and tried to think who had put him up to this.

I mean, no one actually implements that stuff. Come on! That’s not how the GDC works!

The GDC is supposed to be a place where you go and listen to people talking about lessons and techniques--ones that you desperately wish you could apply because wow it would make your dev life so much better--and then you go back to your studio and everyone tells you about how yeah maybe that stuff worked for those guys, but that it won’t work here, see, because our situation is different.

And then you sigh, and maybe you try again in three months. Eventually you just go about your business.

GDC is not where RELIC FREAKING ENTERTAINMENT goes to find whole new process for their game conception phases.

But, here’s this guy, and he’s shaking my hand, and he's expressing his gratitude and his appreciation, and I so I play it cool and say, “Really?! You… actually used my stuff?!?"

He nods.

I ask, "Uh… so, what happened?!”

He told me. Later, he sent me a more detailed description of what the results had been. And what he said blew my mind.

So, I asked him if I could write it up, and share it.

A More Proper Introduction

That’s the back story for what this post is about. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present something akin to an actual case study for what happens when you apply the Engines of Play (which includes these charts called Taste Maps, and the process of analysis that goes into them) to a real dev environment.

Hrm.

By “actual case study” what I really mean is “the guys at Relic were kind enough to describe in some detail what they did with the ideas, and what the results were”. That isn’t quite a full case study. It's more like a front-line report or something. BUT STILL. CLOSE ENOUGH.

I mean COME ON! How often does this kind of thing just happen?! Never. That's how often.

A quick reminder: The Engines of Play is a way to figure out what kind of player taste you are trying to target with your game, in a way that is quite a bit more specific than “achievers” or “shooter players”. The methods involved do require a little bit of coming-up-to-speed, but they benefit from being both fairly intuitive and being backed up by systems that have a metric-fuck-ton of academic white papers and research done on them.

Remember all that? No? Well, here's a couple of videos for you.

Good now? Great!

A Conversation With Relic

I mentioned earlier that Mitch Lagran was kind enough to send me a long description of how he and his team have used said Engines. For our purposes here, I think it’s best if I let Mitch speak for himself.

Mitch: Hey Jason, it was nice getting to meet you down at GDC. Hope you had a good one this year.

Likewise. You have a cool beard.

Mitch: Given that you seemed interested in feedback around our use of Engines of Play at Relic, I figured I’d give you a run-down of how we’ve used it and how it has worked out.

You da man.

Prepro: Good

Mitch: It’s worth keeping in mind that we are still early on in our production, so we haven’t started adapting your model with a production oriented mentality yet. I’m guessing that when we do, there may be some slight shifts on how we use it to communicate.

I can tell you from experience that its use in production is likely to simply diminish. Once the key design targets have been set, we found that the model drifts into the “background lore” of the project. It doesn’t seem to be all that useful during the meat of production.

We did find that near the end of production we experienced a brief resurgence in interest in the work. As we prepared our communication plans, and as the game was starting to come together, there was a storm of new conversations around confirming whether or not we had built what we had intended to build--and Taste Maps are great for that.

At that point, too, there were a lot of new people coming onto the project who had not been exposed to the method, and both found it surprising that we had done all that work so far in advance and found it surprising that it seemed to work.

So: high use in preproduction. Low use during production. Brief flurry of use right as the launch plans are being discussed in earnest for the first time. That was our experience, anyway.

I look forward to learning whether or not your experience turns out to be similar!

Broad Appeal

Mitch: Overall we’ve found a fairly strong degree of success in using it both as a design lens and as a communication tool for the team.

It came along as part of a larger initiative pushing towards more intent driven design and as a part of a broader design structure shift, so it is a bit difficult to separate its effects from everything else, but it has been called out as a valuable part of the changes.

It has seen praise that extends from our executive level down to junior devs, which seems pretty damn impressive to me.

I know, right?!?

That was the part about this approach that surprised me the most—that so many completely different groups of people involved in the production found it to be useful.

I originally designed the approach as a tool for designers, and expected that the sell would be a hard one with the marketing and business teams. But we found quite the opposite to be true! The biz people were enthusiastic, and (in my experience) already prepared to look at our game through this lens. Instant adopters.

I am psyched to hear that this might be a repeatable phenomenon.

Satisfaction Is Hard

Mitch: Generally, taste maps have had a stronger adoption than satisfaction maps.

I think that may be partly due to me not having pushed satisfaction maps quite as strongly, so it’s something I am planning on trying to work on (especially because I want to ensure that we have a strong connection to the PENS model on our team).

However, I also think that it is because Taste Maps include a more visual component, so team members find them easier to latch onto and express. Given that, I am hoping to explore some ways to present the satisfaction maps / PENS model in a way that will give people a stronger connection to it.

I found the same thing. I think there are many complicating factors here.

Here's one: I found that discussing satisfaction is just harder than discussing taste. My theory is that because its effects are so much more remote than the immediate-gratification of taste that most people are simply under-prepared to think about the whole concept. I know that I was, and that it took long years of effort to really get the feeling for how satisfaction works. It’s still a work in progress for me, in fact.

That said: wow is long-term satisfaction important. I have come to understand that if you make a game that only offers short-term taste satisfaction, that people will play it for 30 minutes and then never come back. The core three satisfactions of Self-Determination Theory / PENS give us the reasons why people will come to believe that your game is worth spending some of their precious time on this planet on.

It is tricky to think about. But learn it: the success of your game depends on it.

(I agree with you about the part about the visual component for SDT kinda sucking. I think the way I laid out satisfaction maps was sort of a cop-out, and deserves a better approach than just “fill in these three boxes”. We’ll see if something better can be developed.)

Brand Analysis FTW

Mitch: As our team is not working on a new IP,

(FOR THE EMPEROR!!!!)

we might have had some different uses for it than you on For Honor. Specifically, we went through an early exercise analyzing past entries in our franchise using taste maps and satisfaction maps.

That’s... so... cooooooooooool!!

Mitch: This was part of a larger effort aimed at a reverse / hindsight engineering of the overall creative direction of the franchise. Engines of Play was a hugely valuable tool in this process.

It gave us a strong lens to view the successes of the franchise through. We then used that to base future development off of.

We basically took the franchise maps as a base that we should build on, and used the taste maps as a way to choose targeted areas we wanted to improve. Our output was ultimately an overlay of the two, showing the original franchise maps with our targeted improvements on top.

This also gave us a tool to discuss the scope of both improvements and maintenance (the latter being the amount of work required to maintain the same degree of success in any specific axis in a modern iteration of the franchise).

So basically, if we had rated the franchise has having best-in-class coop in the initial taste-map, we did an assessment of how changes in coop play in modern games would affect our ability to hit that mark.

From there, we would choose specific areas where the past franchise had scored lower and we felt would be strong candidates for ratcheting up the next iteration, based on how feasible it would be to fit into our scope and how closely the different axes aligned with existing creative direction.

I am so impressed by this. I had some vague notion as we were working on this that you could maybe apply taste maps to genres, or something, but I never investigated it. What you describe here, with taste map overlays (overlays!!) frankly seems so obvious now that you’ve explained it that I am going to just adopt it into my design process.

I also adore the idea of re-evaluating the viability of your features through the lens of “are we still best-in-class?” during pre-production. That sounds to me like a process that literally everyone involved in production could get behind, understand, and participate in.

Good one, guys.

Brand Satisfaction Is Stable

Mitch: In the process above, Satisfaction Maps were used in a similar way. We used them to establish where the sense of satisfaction has come from in the past, with the idea that we can use that as a required foundational base.

Basically, it gave us the parts of the game we should not disturb, but should instead aim to improve and build around.

It’s funny, right? Satisfaction theory (SDT, etc) is so damned important, but once the core pieces are in place and working (which, if you have made a successful game, must be true), you can then largely rely on them.

Building a game with a high opportunity for mastery, or with extensive customization and self-expression options, or with strong social systems that give the player a clear idea of where they stand in the community—these are things that players will always want, in some form or another. So, you’re right: if that part ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

That said, if you discover in your analysis that one of your three satisfaction pillars is a tad weak, then a new version is a perfect time to shore that up. It will always pay off, if you can execute on those features well.

It Brings Out Disagreements Early

Mitch: Our process of creating our own taste maps saw initial discussions of franchise maps, followed by members of our senior leadership team each creating their own versions of what our taste maps should be. These were then used as discussion drivers in creative meetings aimed at establishing our direction.

We often found that one member of the team would have a significantly different take on where we should target on a specific axis.

This would tend to indicate a very different perspective, which was useful in driving discussion and debate. It also resulted in a large portion of our team having a deeper understanding of our direction and a sense of ownership over it that they hadn’t in past productions.

I’m going to go ahead and state that I think you have hit on the #1 most valuable part of integrating this tool into a dev team’s process.

What happened for you is exactly what happened for us. And, resolving those differences and disagreements about what we were shooting for (years in advance of the game’s release!) produced several key things (some of which you mention above):

We caught the disagreements ahead of time, before they could cause much damage (in the form of lost work or game incoherence).

Once the disagreement was resolved, we all had a clearer idea of where we were all going.

Collectively, we had more confidence in our direction, since we all understood why we were targeting that specific feature or experience.

Having the why in place well ahead of ramping up for production meant that when we did go wide and started working on everything at once, our key leadership all were very clear about the vision and the goal, and in a way that was easy to remember.

It is difficult to measure how valuable this was. The effect of that knowledge would be that we would not need to have as many discussions on this topic, so how do we measure the impact?

Still, my experience on other projects tells me that it mattered quite a lot. Since we already understood the goals, we didn't improvise quite as much. I believe it was a huge part of our success.

Some Axes Are Unclear

Mitch: Through the process of discussing our Taste Maps, we ran into several tension points where there was disagreement and uncertainty on what the different axes mean.

A lot of discussion, for instance, revolved around the differences and specific definitions of Multiplayer, Solo, Coop, and Combat.

This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it gave our team a valuable tool to align our own definitions of these things. However, our experience was that there was a degree of uncertainty in the specific meanings of the axes, which could result in each team using the model with customized definitions, making cross-team communication a bit more difficult.

We found similar problems, and sometimes around the same axes. I think those ones could use a naming update.

If I were to approach that problem today, I might do something like this: Crowd <—> Alone (NPCs don’t count, only real people), and Together <—> Against.

I’m not 100% sure that this would resolve the problem. But that’s how I see it today.

Would Be Great To Have Personas

Mitch: I have noticed a bit of an issue around the need for more memorable or chunky information from the maps, but I think this is basically solved by what you mentioned around building some player personas.

[ Reader: The context for this is that there is one part of the whole mapping process that I didn’t find a good way to explain in my GDC talk (given the time constraints and the amount of information I was already downloading onto my audience): player personas.

What we did (in brief) was to take our taste maps and then generate four imaginary players that covered all of the most extreme tastes in our chart (by simply placing four dots on our map, one dot per Domain, in the furthest corner of the taste zone). We then generated some basic demographics about who they might be.

At that point, we could use those personas as a more accessible way of talking about what the maps meant in terms of real players.

So... I shared this info with Mitch on the sidewalk at GDC when he mentioned some of the challenges he had faced using the system. After I got done explaining the missing link, he looked at me...

...and for a minute I thought he was gonna punch me or something. Like, “DUDE. WHY DID YOU NOT MENTION THIS IN YOUR TALK.”

But then he smiled, and said something like “Yeah! I bet that would do it!” and moved on.

He didn't punch me at all! Nice guys, these Relic people! ]

Mitch: I attempted to improve it a bit for our team by breaking out some broadly categorized player types based on our maps, but I think your idea of building more fleshed out characters would work better.

The main issue is just that people sometimes have troubles keeping the maps as a whole in their mind, whereas more chunked info like “George” or “Skilled Builders” is a bit easier for people to grok and use in discussion. So a tool like the personas you described seems like a pretty solid add-on to the existing model based on our experience.

Yup. I wish I had presented it in the first talk. Maybe the next one!

It Reduces Team Tension

Mitch: A major benefit I’ve found has definitely been the ability for the design team to specify our focus and intent based on the taste maps to other team members.

This has actually relieved a lot of tension on our team related to past projects. I’d guess you may have seen similar things on For Honor, but because RTS games are a bit of a niche it’s helped us communicate much better why specific team members aren’t connecting with our current drives (eg: team members who may be more strongly attached to building and solo gameplay and don’t connect with the game while we worked on skilled multiplayer focused features are no longer uncomfortable with the situation).

Yes! Yes, yes, yes. And, furthermore, YES.

One of the hardest moments to get through smoothly in game development is the moment where a dev who is working on a feature says “well, I don’t even get why we’re making this. I mean, players want <the opposite of what the feature offers>, not <the thing the feature offers>.”

Awkward.

Because what do you do? At that moment, your team member is not asking to be educated about the broad variety in player tastes, and probably has been simmering on this gripe for quite a while! It’s a moment that is fraught with peril for a team culture…

…and having the taste map to refer to is an amazing method of short-cutting the assumption of unanimity among players that is the core problem there. The chart demonstrates in clear terms not only that variety exists on these spectra, but what the positive opposite of your personal taste actually is.

We found exactly what you have found: a team that understands the broad variety of their player’s tastes can work more smoothly, because then your personal taste doesn’t have to be treated as though it were right or wrong.

Seems Like It Works

Mitch: The TL;DR is that your model is definitely working well for us. There’s some tweaks I’d like to make on our usage around satisfaction maps and getting more digestible player types, but overall it’s been great.

Thanks for going to all the work of putting together your model and process and sharing it by the way, it’s been super helpful for us.

Nothing beats learning that the work has actually mattered to someone else, man. Thank you.

Conclusion

What is so amazing to me about Mitch’s commentary and his team’s experience of using the tool is how precisely it mirrors our own experience. It would be one thing if the tool simply worked as designed, right? But here, what I see is that the exact same follow-on effects have developed on his team.

The increase in clarity and commitment. The broad acceptance of the tool as valuable. The decrease in tension.

These appear to not only be effects local to the For Honor team. Once is a fluke, but twice is maybe a pattern.

If the deployment of the Engines of Play into a project can produce those kinds of effects even just more often than not, then that goes a long way towards demonstrating that maybe it isn’t just a pretty model.

I’m excited to be able to make the claim that maybe it’s actually a good idea, and to have some data to back it up.

Thanks, Mitch, for taking the time to share your team’s experience. Thanks, Relic people, for letting me write this piece. And thanks to all the amazing devs at Relic Entertainment: congratulations on a huge launch. I look forward to enjoying your games for many years to come.