Introducing "Dismantle Design"

Talk to my girlfriend, and she'll be able to relate hundreds of occasions where her eyes glaze over with boredom as I drone on about one or another game mechanic. And despite being a gamer herself, our relationship at least partially depends on us not getting into these prolonged conversations (read: long, one-sided rants) about games.

Needing an outlet for all of my pent up game analysis, I've decided to start this little series on game design and mechanics. The focus of this series will be on analyzing various design decisions in a way that's more in depth than, say, a review, but less in-depth than what you might get from an actual developer. It's not that this series will be difficult to understand, but it will likely require that you've played games for a good portion of your life, and you find concepts like "balance" interesting. This is not going to be a series where I rant about how OP some hero is in DOTA. If you want that, you'll just head to the forums.

No, this series will be me grappling with design elements in games and trying to understand why they exist and what problems they create or solve. What's interesting to me about this series, and why I wanted to start writing it, is that I don't have any formal design background, and I'm not aware of how different design decisions affect game performance. Because of this lack of knowledge, this really is a series of unfettered exploration and, at times, wild conjecture. Since you all probably listen to the Bombcast, I'm assuming this is something you enjoy.

Time and Space: The Long Dark

The Long Dark (TLD) is a survivalist "simulation" game from Canadian developers Hinterland Studios, currently available as an early access alpha game. In this version, Hinterland has only opened up their survival sandbox mode, which simply tasks the player with surviving as long as possible in the unforgiving Canadian wilderness during the winter.

What sets TLD's survival mechanics apart from many of its predecessors is an almost obsessive focus on meters and stats. While many survivalist games will have a hunger mechanic, TLD actually has a calorie meter, and foods with various caloric values. TLD also includes thirst, fatigue, injury, disease and exposure (coldness). Varying weather conditions (storms, whiteouts, fog) will make you more prone to exposure; food items have a condition percentage which determines weather you'll contract food poisoning; water must be treated to ensure drinkability and so on. The point is, there are a lot of mechanics at work here, all of which, to my knowledge, are under scrutiny by the devs and being tweaked regularly.

I have some issues with the implementation of the various systems, mostly to do with Hinterland claiming that the game is supposed to be a "simulation", but that's not really what I'm finding myself most interested in. What's interesting to me about TLD is how it handles time and space. Eventually, I'll argue that since the map in TLD is small, this forces designers to increase the speed of the in-game time, but since many aspects of the game are not affected by this increase in speed, it forces the player to play what should be a methodical game, frantically.

Like most games that include clock time (as opposed to, say, a "timer" like in Mario. You might also think of "clock time" as a day/night cycle) as a gameplay feature, TLD speeds time up. If I had to guess, I'd say that a day in-game is approximately an hour in real-world time. So, why do designers do this? I know it's an obvious question, but it's worth talking about for some context. Well, one reason is that gamers are impatient, and games that are real-time will either be boring (since there won't be a lot to do) or they'll seem "unrealistic" (you'll accomplish a superhuman amount of tasks in too short a time). Additionally, if the day/night cycle determines various gameplay mechanics, you don't want it to take 8 hours of game-time for the player to see this content. Another reason, and one that I think is most relevant to TLD, is an issue of space. If the in-game time is real-time, and time plays an integral role in your design, then your game world has to accommodate this by being very large. Why? Well, otherwise the game will be too easy, because your character will be able to too quickly collect resources and explore.

Speeding up the in-game time creates some specific issues for survivalist games, especially ones that focus, like TLD does, on "simulation": the faster the in-game time, the faster your stats decrease and the faster you die. As a survivalist game designer, the task is to balance in-game time speed, stat degradation and resource gathering with an eye towards fun and realism. The problem is these two goals are frequently at odds with each other. But, there's another problem that I think is interesting for TLD: because Hinterland has chosen to handcraft static maps, the size of those maps are going to constrain the designer's ability to tweak these three mechanics. Why? Well, the size of the map at least partially accounts for the speed of the player's resource accrual. The smaller the map, the easier it is to find resources (food, shelter etc.), and the easier the game will be. In order to make the game feel realistic (that is, more difficult), a small map will force a designer to increase the in-game time so that resource accrual and stat degradation are more in-sync.

That might be a lot to digest, but here's where we are. TLD doesn't use procedurally generated maps like many of its survivalist peers, as a result their maps are smaller, since the cost of larger handcrafted maps is prohibitive (this is conjecture, but it makes sense to me). However, small maps make resource allocation easier, which in-turn means that in-game time must be sped up. Since Hinterland is trying to make TLD somewhat realistic, time and stat degradation are usually going to be linked in unchangeable ways (it takes 3 days to die from thirst, weeks for hunger etc.).

Now, the problem is that many in-game actions are not subject to clock time. For example, walking around a room, shooting a gun, picking up an item or almost any animation. If these actions were, it would make the game feel really weird. Imagine aiming and firing a gun at 24 times normal speed. It would probably feel like you'd hacked the game. Another important aspect that is unaffected by in-game time is the player's decision making. And TLD is nothing if not a game of weighing options and making decisions: should I run and risk being too tired to find wood or walk and risk dying of exposure? These choices are what makes the game interesting. The problem with TLD right now is, since resource accrual is somewhat easy, the in-game time feels really fast. And it feels so fast, that a game that should be a bit boring, feels really frantic. Instead of exploring the world, it feels necessary to search everything as fast as possible, and make split-second decisions without weighing all of your various options. In short, the actions that are not affected by the in-game time feel like they have to be done very quickly to make up for the fact that, well, you're dying really fast. Oddly, in speeding up the in-game time, TLD makes tasks that are unaffected by in-game time feel hopelessly slow.

This problem manifests in different ways, such as having to eat constantly or dying of thirst in your sleep. But, I think the most problematic element is pushing the difficulty curb up artificially by increasing the speed of the in-game time, and forcing players to compensate by memorizing locations and rushing through many elements of the game.

I don't know what the answer to this problem is for Hinterland. It might be that they need larger maps so they can slowdown the in-game time, but if they have larger maps, will the game become boring as the distances increase? Do they change the relationship between the various stats and time? How does that affect realism? Should Hinterland be so obsessed with realism? What is the value of it to a game if it means sacrificing fun?

My issue is that, right now, TLD is missing the mark on what it means to create a survivalist "simulation" game. Survivalism is about speed, yes, but it's also about planning and decision-making. It's not (exclusively) about running around frantically living hand to mouth, but about the slow accrual of resources that results in, if not comfort, at least a certain level of stability. It feels as though, right now, TLD is creating a (somewhat frantic) version of the early stages of survivalism, where you survive how you can because you're dying and stranded. But eventually that should transition into something more interesting and stable.