Designing the Anti-Platformer: Mushroom 11 Puzzle Systems

[Music] [Applause] thank you um something about cell phones and forms all right let's start um all right so my name is Tai Karen I'm the owner of untame and the creator of a game called mushroom 11 um mushroom 11 is a game about destruction and and growth uh and the only way you can move is is by destroying your own cells the game was released in October uh in on Steam Gog and humble um and we're going to talk a little bit about the the design of the puzzles all right quick background uh game started in 2012 the global game gem at NYU the theme was the Ora Bor which the snake eating its tail um I was thinking about um um a 2d creature that has a set of cells and you remove the cells they immediately regrow so you have this

cycle of Destruction and growth I called it pixel blob and quickly changed it to mushroom 11 which is a whole story in itself this is how the game looked after uh 48 Hours um it it clearly had something interesting going for it although it was very slow and clunky um and even though it was presented in this very naive layout um I recreated this layout just for the purpose of this talk and I was trying to think um you know uh um what what you know what are the reasoning for me to just put this layout and this is basically the default uh layout I can clearly uh see Mario uh here and you know what would Mario do in this case you could either slide or jump over the Gap uh and then you know I just put this interesting mechanics on it and even even though I really didn't give any attention uh to the layout uh already uh with the even though you don't have any jump you could do a bunch

of different and interesting things like uh uh use the free form pruning and the split and the reattachment and the fact that you have this cellular level uh Persistence of the physics to go over all all sorts of obstacles uh you can use the rigid uh skeleton to grip and conform to a Terrain uh you can use the the idea that you can regenerate from even one cell which kind of opens the idea of sacrificing you can destroy the cells but as long as you have even one then you're good to go uh to cross uh all sorts of obstacles um the idea that you can shape uh your set of cells in any way means gives you unlimited shape and extent uh but it also shifts the center of mass which opens up a whole sorts of interesting behaviors and and physical uh uh effects like gation tumbling uh and momentum so um but yeah the risk was that I have this interesting mechanics and um but it's presented in this familiar uh package so

I it took me the longest time to kind of try to figure out what this game is about um I call it the anti platform which represents the uh mental leap that I had to go through to kind of understand what's the nature um of uh of this behavior and what does it mean what do the mechanic mean what does it need to have also it also stands for the idea that the main weapon for any platform which is jumping is completely absent from the vocabulary of of this mechanic uh a couple of words on the uh mechanics design um so one of the first thing I did was to eliminate growbag so as you remove cells uh they immediately change the uh probability for regrowth where you removed it so it kind of perpetuates the growth away from the uh cursor allowing you more uh uh control over where you're going um another thing is that this game is not about walking it's not a walking simulator which means that it's not just one button or joystick you

there's a lot of attention into just moving so making uh this enhanced gyration and allowing you to Tumble forward gives you this opportunity to make this much more enjoyable even this very very basic motion which is very important um the idea of eliminating the midair growth something that's kind of controversial in in my own uh mind uh the fact that um you can't grow midair uh allows you to control your own size and by that you control your own weight um uh also if I did allow uh midair growth it means that you can kind of eliminate the purity of the puzzles by just flying over some of the obstacles uh so uh this was eliminated so I'll talk about that further further and they have the the idea of um using the size and the smaller the the mushroom the bigger it tries to grow back to its original size which means that if you keep it really small it grows really fast you can walk really fast but your your size is super small so you have very small surface area so you have less control so you have this interesting

speed control trade-off and if you have a trade-off you have a game um so and you have um so you have this unlimited growth which is something that took me a bit to to reach for a long time I had uh this energy bar and you would pick up these creatures and get gain energy and use their energy to regrow um but then I realized that I was actually punishing the players for doing the one thing that I enjoy the most so quickly I just uh uh completely split it and people ask me what the creatures are well now you know they're just for points and the growth is completely unlimited um and the idea of going from right to left um if you play this game in 2012 2013 you know that this is actually designed for uh tablets and if you try to play uh this game on a tablet you realize that as you go from left to right you your hand is in the way of anything that's coming towards you so um I just you know thought why not just make it from right to left I mean I'm talking about right-handed who are the

grand majority sorry lefties um and um but then it's like the question is so why are all the Platformers go from left to right so I had this interesting discussion and it went through you know Western languages with ink being smudged uh if you would go from uh uh right to if you would write from right to left uh and then the Cartesian uh coordinate system and then maybe some lazy developer trying to use unsigned integer to avoid going negative anyway um so why not use powerups uh I've been thinking about that a lot I had a lot of tense why not have it bigger go lighter faster invincible so yeah I decided to not go there at all because it took me the longest time to figure out the parameters of the growth um the speed the number of cells the weight um all the all these things took the longest time to find that sweet spot if it was too small you couldn't reach uh some of the obstacles if it was too big you have

a lot of things to pay attention to and everything grows so if you leave something behind it grows so that actually uh makes kind of no no sense it's not it's not an advantage to have more cells necessarily and also the idea of invin invincibility uh what does it even mean when the the main control is to destroy your own s so all these things kind of uh made no sense so I decided at some point that the mechanics uh is going to stay the same and the entire mechanics is going to be built into the en environment the environment is the mechanics if you keep minimal character features and versatile environment uh you you end up with a rich experience um also I was stupid enough to submit the game even back in 2012 to a festival and while I did get in uh one of the jurors uh told me I'm concerned that there isn't much more to be explored with this mechanic challenge accepted all right so the next few years I was going with my trusted Sketchbook everywhere as you probably noticed and had a bunch of ideas I immediately try

to implement them and I came up with this set of puzzle mission statements um create environments that challenge the mechanics experiment with as many environments and derived mechanics as possible and granted this is completely personal this is a personal challenge that I put for myself to dig deep into this mechanic and figure out what I can do with it I don't think that a game is complete when every single path is explored um build on and combine mechanics challenging logic and skill uh and following the core unpredictable nature of the mechanics uh encourage exploration and open Solutions and make every challenge unique to mushroom 11 uh even this puzzle here is uh uh well we've all seen Platforms in Platformers but this is almost like a like backwards ironic implementation of of those platforms um now as for the goal Design This is another thing that I I took this decision very early on to have a linear

and consequential progression even um uh even the the Sid trcks are are kind of like just right on on the main path so you can just go and explore a little more uh for me it was a matter of Mastery just figuring out uh a lot of the puzzles are or ideas are based on each other and it was important for me to have the players being primed by by learning all these different uh vocabulary pieces and and just continue from there um and Al since I'm kind of the product of the '90s this is the kind of games that I like to play as a kid uh so I really enjoyed those um uh as for the even the story the story is told in a in a completely passive way in using background images um in order to not interrupt that flow so that was a a completely conscious decision all right now let's go quickly through some of the puzzle systems um so even walking in mushroom 11 is a quite a challenge you know so just understanding the fundamentals of control once you

understand those you can go and start mastering those basic control when things are starting to move uh under your feet you have some time pressure um uh if you go into the idea of balance and this changing Center of mass you have unstable Foundation all of a sudden open up a bunch of new ideas um excuse come on sorry um yay H so um by changing your balance and changing your center of mass uh you also change the environment some way you use your friction the fact that you you you gain some momentum you can apply that momentum on objects uh on the scene um also you can apply that balance on other object and those object in turn have different interaction with the with the environment in by themselves so that's another family of uh of uh challenges uh splitting another one of the core elements of mushroom 11 uh

clearly the the fact that you have distributed growth the number number of cells uh stays the same but you can uh cut it to any different any number of pieces with no loss of mass uh but as you do so you have some sort of tension management you have a few pieces you need to pay attention to each one of them but each one of them can be assigned with a different task uh so uh that opens up well bunch of the the ideas in mushroom 11 com from that um and also you can have the environment split for you enabling bunch of interesting and at least visually interesting ideas as well um the structure of mushroom 11 uh you can use it to conform and grip onto object and use it to progress uh further into the level uh in various ways um um the structure itself is can sustain any physical forces of gravity and other you know centrifugal forces and momentum and all all that and it's even strong enough to um to sustain same for forces applied

by other objects so can you can use it to stop other machines and whatnot um shape well clearly one of the things you want to do is try to uh shape a certain silhouette as given by uh you know by whatever in this case we we've used the shape sensors which is an entire discussion I could talk about what did I do all right um but more interestingly um you can use your shape to change the Environ en um or in some way become become the solution you become a tool this Dynamic tool in the environment that you can uh perpetually change and uh uh align to the environment um a quick word on the physics um the physics of shape shifting it seems very natural to us now if you think about it um if you add uh if if you change the center of mass it means that you expect a negative for negative Force to compensate for that change and

we don't have that in mushroom 11 in fact there is no consequences at all we're avoiding the the law of conservation of energy and it feels very very natural it also means that you have no uh Force applied on the environment um so what do you do when you don't have a force on the environment you you need to find other ways of handling the the environment and solving puzzles um it also means that you cannot grow you have to grow around object you can't grow into them you can't you don't have any Force so kind of like slime away slime in through cracks and which is pretty much the the idea of the D fungal organism makes a lot of sense um that's the main reason why moving in tunnels is so U satisfying um all right so once you have physics um any physical object combined with the fact that you have shape shifting and splitting be becomes interesting at in in any way you put it and completely unpredictable in some in cases and the amount of things that you

can do just by placing an arbitrary moving object with mushroom is almost always fun uh at least it's for me anyways I enjoy it um so a lot of these puzzle just started with me putting stuff on the screen and seeing what happened um add that to the fact you have this cellular level persistence every any any cell has its own momentum and it the momentum is inherited even between uh splits and reattachments um we talked a little bit before about the changing Mass the fact that you have some control over your mass um so sometimes your way to combine with some momentum is the only way you can solve some puzzles but in some cases you would actually have to mitigate that changes in a way to keep yourself light so using split and mass already looks a little different and the fact that you have remote Mass shifting again something that doesn't seem very intuitive but once you play it this is level seven you kind of understand this intuitively uh

that you need to balance the Seesaw while progressing one of the pieces towards the exit uh applying external forces uh well we've all seen wind in in many Platformers uh but when you have a shape shifter uh that reacts to the wind in different ways based on the shape it already is interesting there's um you know use some turbulence uh uh simulated turbulence here and a bunch of other stuff but basically this is just wind um and another little you know a little change you have the same level is the sticky walls this uh plants uh it's slightly similar to the um wall climbing that we've seen before but in this case um as As you move away from the wall the center of mass changes it means that you need a higher a bigger surface area to stay on the wall so it's another little change that makes a lot of difference and other interesting uh flavor um and one of my favorite things is the the

water allowing you to have all sorts of uh interesting effects this unrestricted growth under underwater um the fact that you can shift your yourself underwater with no consequences allow you to do all sorts of things that obviously are not natural but they are completely natural in in the world of mushroom 11 um a couple of words about the hazards of mushroom 11 first of all uh Fireballs like almost every other game they are I call them the slap on the wrist because they are pretty much just like like your eraser they remove cells so they look very flashy and scary but that's just because of what you know about uh Fireballs uh more interestingly you have the acid infection that just spreads inside your body and the only only way you can heal yourself is by completely removing the infected area which I think is a nice metaphor for the story of mushroom 11 by the way uh and the insta death not used a lot but another interesting effect allowing me to put some interesting obstacles later on in the

game uh the boss is one of my favorite interesting opportunities in the game probably the one thing that took me the longest time to develop every level ends with this ultimate test of acquired skills um things that you've learned through that level um so um this is kind of this Perpetual procedural puzzle system that just behaves uh regardless of whether you're there or not you just live is there and then when you come into their chamber interrupting their way of life um it's just a lot of fun just designing those things um and one of the things we talking about the consequential um progression of the game uh one thing that I I don't necessarily enjoy in some games is the idea of key drop that magically after you beat a boss you have has a a key that you open a door and you magically teleport to someplace else for me it was very important to have some sort of consequence you kill the boss because the boss is in the in your way to the next area and sometimes you even use

their corpse to progress to the next level um all right puzzle types okay so clearly you can use it to have some logical puzzles and um a bunch of exploration and open Solutions this one's a is a logical puzzle with bunch of different solutions um one of the things that uh is important when you have open Solutions is uh the idea of avoiding distractions uh I call it the loose brick because if you have a loose brick it probably means that you need to push it once the player uh feels that there's something in there they're going to just stick to that uh solution and try it over and over again so just make sure that when you have open Solutions uh uh then then just don't make things that are taken away from that experience uh and then you have all sorts of combination of scale logic and exploration which basically is most of the puzzles in mushroom 11 you know you you get to see the the the entire all

the elements in the puzzle you try to figure out what to do and then you still have some hard time uh using your own unpredictable nature of uh of character to get through um all the way to 100% skill-based puzzles uh timing based precision based uh basically taking something from the uh General platformer world and putting it in the world of mushroom 11 and I'm going to talk about that puzzle in a moment um all right which brings you to what went well this is a mid morem because clearly I'm working on the tablet version mobile tablet version of mushroom 11 so um try and look back see what happened uh what went well um the game got great reviews a bunch of Game of the Year Awards uh best plat platform of the year uh but that really doesn't mean much what important to me is the depth and detail that I think I got into this game with environments the art the story the music the audio and the

technology I think uh I'm I'm very proud of what uh we achieved uh the variety of puzzle and puzzle systems the creatures the bosses and a lot of Secrets some of which are U not yet discovered by the way uh the minimalism of the mechanics clearly and storytelling which is you know a talk in itself uh teaching I'm extremely proud in the way we give this novel mechanic to the players and slowly teach them uh by the way with the help of my co-designer Julia my wife uh how to get through and understand it like um uh any every new obstacle is kind of taught and it's you prime through these things so um by the end of level one or two players already know how to use this mechanic um The Challenge clearly the game is very challenging uh if you played it you know what I mean uh and the depth of emotion as a as a result as

someone said I love mushroom 11 I hate mushroom 11 but I also love it which brings me to what could be improved uh the difficulty curve um clearly the game ramps up in the second half of the game um a lot of skill and time based puzzles versus more slow exploration logic based puzzles um the length and the density of the later levels as well um I guess some of it is my ego I I found all these cool mechanics I want to put all of them in uh and you know even the very basic um game design elements that everybody knows that you need to kind of have uh something um you challenge the player and then have some sort of relief but all these things were so cool I just wanted to put all of them for the enjoyment of the players so it end up really being long and very very dense and very hard um limited control of course the the abundance of timing based and vertical vertically based and

precision control that's required and the idea of Purity versus fun with no growth in midair all these things uh kind of contribute to the idea of limited control so uh limited control in some cases uh caused some frustration clearly um and the idea of lingering defeat and lingering triumph which is some interesting observation that I had recently uh which brings me back to that puzzle that we've seen before the 100% skill by a based puzzle this is actually the top AR RQ factor puzzle in the game RQ stands for rage quit by the way so I I have analytics for all the puzzles and uh I I have this list of of all the puzzles that did well and did uh not as well uh and the problem the problems with this puzzle are pretty clear it's uh it's it's a limited control based puzzle it's it's very it's timing based it's Precision the a lot of vertical motion it's surrounded by other very very hard puzzles as well so there's not

lot relief and ultimately it has the lingering defeat if you fall off the the platform you have this long excruciating weight until you hit the ground and even then you have some time to go back to where you were um so clearly that's something wrong with that specific puzzle although this is all Julia's fault because it's her favorite puzzle um uh on the other hand um you have the lingering Triumph so after you beat a boss there's this this moment of that you want you want to uh just bask in the glory of winning and instead what mushroom 11 does because of that Purity is to uh introduce another small challenge to just go through to physically go through to the next level uh instead of just enjoying that moment of winning uh which reminded me of one of the biggest changes between Street Fighter 1 Street Fighter 2 when they introduced this slow motion after you um after you beat your opponent so you have that lingering effect of like seeing yourself beating or getting beaten so

just that that uh emotion is just much stronger which kind of also remind me one of our least favorite games in the world uh Monopoly which is pretty much all based on lingering defeat and lingering Triumph uh which reminds me a quick Takeaway on this whole thing um test early and often everybody knows that my game was out on day two it tested often because we went to bunch of events so we showed it all the time uh diverse beta team uh that's very very important uh I have a bunch of beta testers they're all awesome I love you all you probably here uh but they're all really good players they're fans of the game and they're pretty much better than me and if you see why some of the problems didn't surface people wanted the game to be harder and more challenging and you know uh so so just make sure that you have a very diverse beta Team all right so going forward to the tablet mobile version that uh I'm working on now so feat ing clearly touchbased which is the

origin design uh a shorter best of cut and the reasons are uh we want to enable uh you know the modified puzzle selection as as discussed um a better feed fit to for the intended audience and expected price point uh and Technical tackle technical constraints like memory and performance and aspect ratio a lot of these things kind of dictate a different selection of puzzles uh and what we're doing now is uh obviously working on the difficulty curve balancing skill logic and exploration U modifying removing puzzle with limited in timing based controls like the ones we've seen um twe the general control parameters so some of these things like the Purity factor is going to be altered a little bit maybe also in the other in the steam uh in the desktop game as well uh as for the lingering defeat and Triumph uh modify some of the layouts a less P punishing replay and more checkpoints were needed

um and ease the post Boss Challenge or make it a bonus that we're experimenting with a couple of approaches uh constraints and capabilities of the device so right to left for lefties so we're thinking of doing a mirrored uh version um just for lefties and the 4x3 aspect ratio which means that some puzzles are unfit there's the idea of exposing all the elements in the in the puzzle in one screen which is another discussion we but anyway uh and the idea of multi-touch puzzles are now allowed and a lot of puzzles are designed for multi-touch and they couldn't be in because you only have one Mouse imagine you have like a bridge of mushroom uh and then you need to cut it with two fingers so just the the centerpiece just falls down uh anyway so any ideas and any feedback is welcome thanks