A picture couldn’t just suddenly fall from the wall, or boards fall away from a window. These changes couldn’t be wholly arbitrary. “Before it was there, you could dive all the way into the stuff on the table before it’s necessary, before you needed it, and that pushed the cognitive load into the red zone,” says Roberts. So one early sequence is set in a room with a low cloth-covered table, and at a certain point the cover blows away to reveal objects below it. “Something in the scene has to change,” he says.
Maybe not strictly logical, but when a detail is revealed or removed, you have to be able to divine why. One thing to understand about the way Roberts designed Gorogoa is that everything that happens has to seem reasonable. For example, if a scenario contained a detail which wasn’t useful yet but would be in the next sequence, or had outlived its usefulness, Roberts devised ways of gating it off to avoid the player fruitlessly investigating it.īut he didn’t make it easy on himself. In fact, even with only four tiles, Roberts found himself having to be very careful to limit the number of options in a scene and to guide players’ attention. But four turned out to be the sweet spot.” I know that when people saw the game early on they said, ‘Oh, this is too simple, there’s only four tiles and a really small number of permutations’. “Four scenes seemed to be the limit of what people could keep track of, and that was pushing it. “I wanted each scene to be very deep and have lots of detail,” Roberts tells me. But more than that, six tiles was just too much for a player to take in. In practical terms, with six tiles each image became too small to be able to see the details, which would mean creating some kind of crude zooming system. He wanted a three-by-three grid to accommodate more complex puzzles, but soon saw how that just didn’t work. But, initially, Roberts himself thought the four tile configuration might be limiting. Surely the range of possibilities in the configurations of images would be so low that you’d stumble on solutions just by clicking around? Solutions aren't simply about sequence though you're not reconstructing panels in a comic strip, you're playing with space. If you haven’t played Gorogoa, the four tiles that hold the images you swap around and zoom in and out of might look painfully restricted. And in making it, Roberts found that each decision he made had profound effects on others, the biggest being limiting the game to its two-by-two grid. You draw relationships between images and find them leading into and influencing wider themes. Gorogoa is also a game about linking things together. And in making it, developer Jason Roberts found that making things fit was one of the greatest challenges he faced, whether those things were puzzles into the game's tiles, sequences into its story, or details into players’ heads. Fitting a detail in one image with a detail in another and see how it produces something new.
Gorogoa is a game about fitting things together. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games.
0 kommentar(er)
