I always got that feeling after my first day of the year skiing, never with water though. I’ve not that often been to beaches, just goes to show the difference in where we grew up. That feeling is the full-body equivalent of the Tetris effect.
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never been skiing once 
I guess the water thing plays into hangoutitude. I wasn’t that big of a fan of mario sunshine’s levels but I had a really great time just fucking around in the game world. the controls were so great. the rocket ability that let’s you run fast was a ton of fun too.
I kinda wanna revisit sunshine one of these days. I don’t really have a way to play gamecube games. guess I could get a GC-USB adapter and dolphin it up
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thinking about maybe branching off into a Galaxy Oddity thread about the concepts of “hangoutitude” in games.
agreeing with what toups said about sunshine, plus thinking about how much i enjoyed traversing around Mario 64 when i was younger. i still liked Galaxy 1/2 but they never quite compared to 64 and Sunshine for me when it came to the environment and mobility.
I’m saying that separating “level quality” and “movement quality” doesn’t make sense. Level and player movement is a single monolithic unit in game design terms. Combine Sonic movement with SMW levels or Gimmick movement with Sonic levels and the result will be pure crap. I don’t know if players would be inclined to complain that the “movement” is crap or that the “level” is crap, but they would say one or both of them is crap, and that this is among the worst games they’ve ever played. Doesn’t matter how good all 3 of those movement and level designs are in their original game.
I disagree on this, there has to be more than a vacuum. There needs to be platforming challenges in the prototype level to see how it feels to try and maneuver precisely. There needs to be walls to see how it feels to walljump, enemies to see how it feels to try to land on the head of a goomba, and so on.
I looked for a bit of documentation on the actual Mario 64 prototype process, I found this on Wikipedia so far:
[quote]
The development team placed high priority on getting Mario’s movements right, and before levels were created, the team was testing and refining Mario’s animations on a simple grid. The first test scenario for controls and physics involved Mario interacting with a golden rabbit named “MIPS” for the Nintendo 64’s MIPS architecture CPU, who was included in the final release of the game.[/quote]
So the very earliest stage was a flat field, then the second thing was interaction with a NPC, and then presumably they went on to stuff with walls to refine the walljump and so on. I think you’re probably drawing on having heard this type of history in what you’re saying, but a key thing from my point of view is that the movement tuning didn’t stop evolving after the flat field stage. Another important thing is that even when designing the movement on the flat field, they were at least imagining platforming challenges as opposed to just going by “feels good” without that implied context.
The very existence of the castle grounds in Mario 64 (and Delfino Plaza in Sunshine) argue against that.
The grounds are just a big, open area to fuck around in. Anytime you boot up Super Mario 64, you start in that area, so the designers wanted you to consistently get “warmed up” by moving about and jumping and long-jumping and sliding and slide-jumping all over the place. The game proper rarely demands that you utilize the full range of abilities you can engage in your “warmups”. There’s just a specific kind of entertainment you can get out of this random fucking around
Sunshine’s hub has the same idea, but with a small town of cute little fantasy Italian-style buildings that encourage the same kind of freedom of movement. The various level entrances aren’t split into different areas like Peach’s castle is, they’re spread out across a single map, into monuments or onto the roofs of buildings or on boat decks. All the silly waterpack powerups you get are available as you unlock them, to little practical effect besides the joy of moving around in a virtual space.
I agree w/ mothman b/c neither of these games take full advantage of the joyous range of movement they offer, there’s definitely a gap between movement quality and level design. the best games properly sync up the two (which is why, sadly, Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine are not the best games).
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Yeah, you make a good counterpoint. Personally, I greatly value how those hubs provide formal unity and spatial orientation, but don’t really care whether they can be used as open play spaces. To me, experiential and hangouty elements of games should always be held together by a core of goal-oriented activity. But that is my own bias. And I think it’s also possible to arrive at a synthesis of these views by observing that an open playground is also a space for players – and game designers trying to put themselves in the shoes of players! – to define their own little goals.
On a personal note: I feel very strongly about the argument that I’m making here because of an epiphany I had when trying to design games on my own. I’m hardly a master game designer, I just have a bunch of half-finished prototypes plus one finished puzzle game which I won’t link here because I’m not that proud of it.
All of these unfinished games, naturally, started with a dick-around empty area. I spent quite a long time polishing the feel of the movement: one of my games had a grappling hook and it was really important to me. But no matter how much I polished the feel, it felt dull and uninspiring to play around with it. I wondered if my game idea just sucked or I sucked at polishing and I could never make it good.
Then, as soon as I added a goal and a game over condition to the prototype, the game suddenly came to life. Being a “game” as opposed to being “play” made all the difference. That’s a lesson that will be at the core of my process if/when I get back to making indie games.
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This is what I do too, but my experience of it is different. I have very high expectations of movement and strongly believe the movement of a game should be fun on its own so I spend a very long time on the movement (I haven’t dropped in on this yet because I’d end up with an essay defending the position, and, it’s the weekend). In fact I find myself motivated to increase the core systems much more than level design and so tend to systematize more level elements than I strictly need to, instead of creating hand-crafted encounters that are repetitive to me.
I’d argue this speaks more of our personalities as players than as a game design lesson. Obviously you need both to make a functional game; the grey wastes of a game in production aren’t necessarily fun.
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I totally have the same problem with not being interested in handcrafting levels. It was one of the biggest stumbling blocks that made me abandon several games. The prospect of placing one block after another in a level editor seems so tedious in my imagination. (I have zero interest in playing Minecraft: again you can see the contours of my anti-play personality.) For that reason, I was drawn to designing roguelikes and puzzle games.
But I think there’s something I’m missing here, another epiphany I still need to have. I think there is something that I don’t understand about handcrafted levels, something that falls below my level of consciousness, and that’s why I’m uninterested and don’t really know what direction to go in when you place me in front of a blank level editor.
Hmm, it’s really helpful if you have someone you can ‘play’ with by building levels for them; you can get into a healthy cycle of being motivated to teach them concepts, to set up traps, to prove cleverness, to tell a story. Without that you have to feed off the happiness of a hypothetical audience which I found tough until I had a store of memories I could draw from.
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I’ve never designed a game in my life but part of it may have to do with your basic personality. Not everyone is “creative” in the sense of being able to dream up novel situations ex nihilo. I have a highly critical frame, I’m very good at recombining elements that are proposed to me or identifying strengths and weaknesses of an idea, but I’m not very good at just coming up with ideas. This probably extends to level design during game development as much as anything else.
Pretty sure the idea that any creative genius dreams up anything ex nihilo is a damaging myth. Art is so much made of traditions and building on the past. From Software is one of the most creative studios out there, but what they are really doing is combining an enormous variety of videogame traditions, and in their visual look drawing on a lot of unusual real-life visual references (like the Primeval Demons just mentioned in the other thread, which are based on actual ~Cambrian-era creatures).
The question is, what kind of process allows you to draw on these inspirations in the right contexts when appropriate, since humans can only think about basically one thing at a time and they are buried in memory.
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Definitely. My experience is that while some people are certainly better at coming up with ideas – they tend to riff on anything presented – it’s only one of a bevy of skills needed and certainly not a prime factor. Dedication, thoroughness, analytical skill, communication skill are all more important.
Consider that 90% of all ideas have to be discarded anyway; most studios are not hurting for more ideas.
Well ok fine, I don’t literally mean from the Void, I just mean, having a thought like “I’m going to create a sort of Greeklike pantheon of gods and titans whose warring produced a complex religious and political world that is now dying and is based on tricking people into propping it up with their feeble efforts” isn’t a thing that would occur to me even after an exhaustive study of traditions and building on the past.
If you like, creation is an act of synthesis, but what I am talented at is analysis.
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Maybe that’s a difference in motivation? I feel ‘creative’ when I’m jazzed on a mood from an experience and want to replicate it; I only want part of that experience and want to represent my personal interpretation of it, so I need to extract a piece, pull it together with the other things I’m finding cool at the moment, or truthful. This results in a product new to others but it doesn’t feel that way to those who create it.
I’m reiterating and I don’t want to talk down, but worldbuilding grows out of a kernel held by one person. When it’s done well it’s because it has received small deposits of insights and connections to real myth and internal references to make it consistent, over a long period of time. Nobody does this instantly and few do it alone.
I’ll only cop to popularly-imagined creativity when I dream. I’ve had fleshed-out scifi concepts build over a morning dozing and I can only write them down and hope to trigger the emotive response I had on rereading my notes.
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I agree with all of that, but it doesn’t invalidate my point that some people are way better at doing that than others. And by “doing that” I mean synthesis, which your post fleshes out quite well.
We all create something, even if it’s just the words we say to the guy behind the counter at McDonald’s. But the kind of synthesis that produces expressive art is a talent, and some people are more talented.
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It’s a process.
I’m sorry but I’m really allergic to this talent viewpoint. It discourages people getting into creative work just like it discourages people from getting into math. At the first difficulty, people conclude they don’t have the talent, instead of thinking about how they can improve their process to address it. It’s toxic.
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Most of the creative efforts I’ve had any success at I have realized it wasn’t a matter of me having some level of talent, it was just that I had stuck at it and put the work in over time. It’s really liberating to think about it like that, like anything you want to do is just a matter of time getting good enough at it and developing a sense of confidence that’s like yeah I totally can do this thing who would have thought.
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i so, so agree with these thoughts and its something i think about a lot!
Everyone and anyone can be a creative and the idea that that “true art” emerges from only a small portion of the population that are “talented” is incredibly damaging.
this too, is an important acknowledgement and i think highlights the (not definite, in fact eminently mutable) difference between creators and critics
some people are one or the other, some people are a little of both!
talent is overrated
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