Evoking Emotions and Achieving Success by Breaking All the Rules

hello everybody welcome to the independent games summit and I am happy to introduce Thomas grip directly from Sweden and he's going to tell us about amnesia and I guess yes okay yeah so hi everybody so as Ben said I am Tim asleep and I'm one of the founders of frictional games for ten years now I've been working on various horror game project the first five I've mainly done the homebrew stuff and for the last five I've been involved in various commercial projects these commercial projects include games such as the pramana series and now most recently amnesia the Dark Descent which is the game that this lecture will sort of focus on now the reason why I'm so interested in horror

games is because it's one of the only genres in games that focus on Vulcan emotions it's perhaps the only honoring games that dust is even commercial projects they can throw away more normal game stuff that you have in order to get close into this horror atmosphere and horror games is not really even a gameplay style collage honor and most of the horror games you see your action-adventure type of affairs but I don't see in a problem with a strategy game being a horror game as long as you have this kind of horror response to it now this focus on evoking emotion is something that has been very evident in the development of amnesia the Dark Descent and we had to have this really strict goal that we should have a strong horror motion more than in any other game we are made before and because of this I think that amnesia is very well

that the best game we have made so far and press responds that we have a heads of ahead for the game that seems to confirm this for example a Rock Paper Shotgun says it's I think it's safe to say that amnesia is the most successfully frightening game to have been made and the game informer says if Resident Evil is aliens amnesia is alien and we have also a part from the hearing these a good words from people we have sold over 400,000 units and this is without any real PR we have only relied on word of mouth and the press responses you just saw and this is for a niche game like a horror game and on top of all this we have actually gotten quite the reputation of being the scary game now here's some example from the internet here you have the scared pug someone who played amnesia Dark Descent for five minutes and ok that's close enough here's someone who drew them

served during one of the scenes in our game now having this kind of response is is really really great we're really overwhelmed with the response that we have had from this now you can ask why this success why is the Nisha consider such a scary game now I think this boils down to three main principles and during this lecture I will go over these main principles and discuss them and how they came about and then I will also dig a little bit deeper and discuss how what are these principles mean what they can do tell us about the game design in general now for the first part where I just talked about the different decisions and so the first design principles is not to use any weapons in amnesia pretty much what the player does is either to hide or to run away from the monsters they encounter this decision has a bit of a history to it it

all started out with that game diplomatic demo that we did in 2006 and when frictional games really didn't existed due to design but but I guess mainly due to a lack of resources we didn't have any combat in that game now when we started our first commercial game penumbra overture overwhelming player response said you must have weapons in your game so we thought this makes sense it's a very common horror trope that the protagonist s as a last line of defense picks up whatever is around and use that to offender the enemy there are their monsters or whatever away and this is really interesting so we thought that yeah we must have this and in penumbra tech demo what happened was that the player found all this stuff lying around and they can imagine themselves oh I can pick this up and use that as a weapon and we thought okay if you can't pick it up then it might break the immersion of the game so we made a combat system for

forever over tor and we made it intentionally quite the clumsy our intent was that the player should just hit an enemy and then run off and wait until the danger was over now the Arsenal for penumbra overture it had stuff like yeah pretty clumsy pickaxe a hammer and a broom and so we went to great lengths to make sure that the D weapons were not very practical and on top of this we never called them weapons item we call them tools so we made all this we had this clumsy a combat system we had this non practical weapons or tools and we had this vague naming as I said and we thought okay we're set we're gonna emulate this last line of defense we were wrong it turns out when the player has an opportunity to kill something they will if only armed with a puny little hammer and you have this

lose the demonic dog charge in them the player will just go to straight attack and try and bash the brains out a lot of this dog and now of course two things will happen here either the player will find some ingenious way to abuse her system killing the enemy quite easily and that's because of this the scariness factor goes down or the other thing that happens is that the player will just treat the data your normal first person hack and slash go ahead with that and then die horribly of course thinking that oh god the combat sucked in this game and the game sucks and so only a minority did what we thought they would do so the combat was failed now for our next game the follow-up for a penumbra over to her Black Plague we thought we had to mend this somehow but but how to make it work the obvious thing would be okay Alexis fix the combat and we talked about this a bit so we can add some circle strafing I can sell though or let's just we had

this mouse control it's remove the mouse control but the more we discussed issed we just realized that this is just gonna make the game into a hack and slash and that's not really what we want the game to be so this time we'll remove the weapons from the game and this sometime not due to lack of resources but as a design choice now which combat gun players approach the game quite differently the enemies received is more frightening and players started to note this other experience wise more important thing so not only was the whole combat ordem the enemy encounters changed but to change the entire looked at the game and this was quite a revelation for us even so the lure of having combat it's quite strong so from nesha of course we thought ok let's let's do a combat system for amnesia so we added a combat system and then once again we fail with it it was just too

too hard to balance it without can you're getting this kind of response that we had in overture so I will talk a little bit later on why they're this lure of having combat is so strong and also when you remove combat why the game changes in very drastic ways now for the next thing ya know death so this may sound a bit weird for a horror game other titles in the genre I've gone to great lengths to make sure that dying is said is really really bad you have Resident Evil who have this their ink ribbons in order to make sure that the player doesn't save it off and you have forbidden siren that uses you have to repeat the entire levels now intuitively it might seem that okay if we have a strong penalty for the player whenever they die whenever they're in a situation when to think they're gonna die it feel like a lot is at stake now I do agree that this is

true but only to a certain extent the first the time when we started thinking about this no death Feeny came about with the shape sequences chase sequences is very important in horror movies and in horror literature having the protagonist of your story being hunted by something unknown or something scary if you assemble this feeling you have in nightmares when you're running but you're not going anywhere so this is quite done in strong emotion so we knew we had to emulate this for our game somehow first time we added it was in our first commercial project phenomena virture turns out 50% of the people that played it okay they liked that 50% that played it the other half that is and they just hated it so you can ask yourself or we ask ourselves what is the difference between these two groups it turns out the people that like they vary even they've managed to complete this a

chase sequences in one or two attempts the other people that took more tries and they don't like it so the solution to fix this is really easy you just don't make the PD player repeat it more than two times now reality this is not deaths easy of a design decision to make because it means that you throw out the trial and error from your game and trial and error is something that's it's seen as a good design choice in in many situations and I remember speaking about this on the internet and it was not an uncommon for people to think when I spoke that you shouldn't have trial error they said it but trial error it's the the ingredient in games so as I think it's fair to say that it's a wildly held belief that the trial and error is a very important part of your games and Aniyah I admit I have a thought is too

and so it shouldn't come as a surprise that when we did our Black Plague which was the sequel to Panama overture we didn't fix the system we have the same death mechanic and from neisha our intent was to still have the same death mechanic that you once you died you had to repeat the obstacle over and over again until you managed to overcome it now it wasn't very late until very late in development the half a year before amnesia was to be completed that we had decided oh we shouldn't have any death and this came about at the time when we thought about a lot of the design that we had in our game the design that we chose to implement in our fake death system or fake essay is that the player doesn't lose any progress when dying but they're teleported somewhere else and

the important part is that we changed a little bit of the level so when the player had died and he woke up and didn't know what to expect this time around and we thought that this fear of the unknown would be enough to make the player frightened of dying and also on top of this because we changed the map we can had additional skiers so let's say to play a walk through a hallway and the first time around the world and the new monsters then they died later up and then they had to row up through the hallway again and then we can have some monster hiding or popping out through a corner this time and that made a great effect because the player you can have revitalized this section of the game and now that we implemented it it worked out way you're better than expected and amnesia is filled with all these shape sequences but yet nobody but as I know about has complained about this chase sequences and this is saying quite the

thing and even if they actually figured out this isn't to figure out that if I die I doesn't really matter they still thought it was scary some people even thought it was scarier once they figured out that system help them along because they thought okay the game takes care of me then I can focus on being immersed in the game instead keep in mind and that this system could really easily be exploited so let's say the player faces an enemy can just run up against it each entire time and eventually they it would manage to overcome the obstacle but yet pretty much no one did this and I think this is amazing and considering how slapped on and rushed this sort of mechanic was it wasn't until the half blast-off year that we implemented it and we are tons of other stuff to do at that time so the events we added and the changes we made they were all quite rushed now on to the final design principle no competitive

mechanics when I mean by a no competitive mechanics is game systems that instead of setting up challenges that the player needs a complete works along with the player and how to correct itself according to the players play style or just doesn't really affect the gameplay in any way and this choice has its base in our sanity mechanic and the sentiment mechanic as it's a base in that very early on and the project we knew that we wanted the player to be afraid of the dark somehow we knew that we wanted if he stayed in the dark he should be penalized with something so we should really fear the darkness and we first thought okay let's lower the player's health but then that doesn't really feel right so we added a sanity system instead we also extended this sanity system to monsters and other sites instead and we added also four

penalties to this for example if the player whose walk speed if insane would be lower or enemies who would have easier to spot the player if he was insane and then eventually the player would die and so with all these penalties in and we thought that okay the player will not want to be insane in our game we just had to balance it now turns out balancing this sort of system ain't very easy instead there's lots of things to the consider with this kind of balance and how many tinderboxes these are the resource the players used to light up the environment how many of those of the player collected how fast do they move through our levels and how are you do this spare on their land boil and so on on top of this the sanity system doesn't really reset itself so something that you do not pick up enough

in the boxes at the start of the game can have repercussions at the end of the game so if we didn't find the system balanced what we had to do was to replay the game several times using different play style every time we made a change it just wasn't working so it led to the design choice that was quite drastic that okay we shouldn't have any penalties we shouldn't have any gaming aspects to the sanity system instead we thought it more as a mood feature we just the Play game system just keeps the balance and moves along in the same way that the player does it how to adapt itself and once we had this kind of system instead it out adapted itself all of the problems disappeared plus players were more immersed in this kind of system and because they didn't have to beat it so they can just role playing it instead and this kind of out to

correction it just also spurred him an imagination of the players they role play through what was happening to them and so on and work worth noting is that just that's the no deaf mechanic even if the players figured out how the system worked most players were scared anyway and were immersed in it and some players were scared even more when they realize this we apply this kind of thinking to our enemies instead so we said okay instead of having them as a challenge all these enemies let's have them s on a part of the atmosphere instead and the way we went about with this is consider the players looking at an enemy and he has to hide and then he has to go in hiding in a corner and the oppressive darkness his sanity is draining and the enemy comes lurking and sniffing around trying to find the player and the player sits there yes Oh Willie go away and then he the enemy comes really close and

then he walks away just in time and the place oh yes finally he doesn't spot me and then he can sneak up and there no he's still there and so on having all these thoughts but what really happened in the KKK and AI was that the AI knew him in a way where the player was and he was okay I'm gonna just get really close to the play area and not not near enough so he's really spewed and then is gonna walk off and if you yell sit still and doesn't run away and I try to play a hero which is changed in their play style he will be okay and this sort of system it creates these really tense moments that's feel scripted but they come out of the dynamics of the system if we would have had a more competitive a system that we're supposed to challenge the player having this sort of their response would have been a lot harder and it would have been lot harder to have it consistently here reproduced as well now just gonna

list the different things I've gone through so we had no weapons no death I know a competitive mechanics with this stuff I'm just gonna give a little taste what we accomplished but is where these things and this footage I'm about to show might be a little bit disturbing so a sensitive viewers are warned now I don't like it shut up [Music] oh [ __ ] oh [ __ ] I can see the vein I can see it Oh No

[Music] I'm not sure if this makes me a little bit [Applause] so I'm not sure if this makes me

depraved but I'm really pleased to see that kind of reaction and so this reaction it's quite strong but it's not as unique moment if you search YouTube for amnesia reaction you will see tons of this kind of stuff and I want to note again this principles that we implemented you're quite rusty at the end of the project the no death mechanic and the no competitive mechanics were at the very end of when we tried to fix everything else it was rushed so I believe there's tons more to explore with these kind of stuff than this leads me to the next part of this talk which I will go dig a little bit deeper into it and now it's time for three general principles now the no combat thing what I think this boils down to is that we should be a little bit careful about finding fun fillers for our games fun fillers is something that I think is

it's a gameplay mechanic that once implemented it you can have lots and lots of gameplay with it and stuff like this is of course combat it is used in pretty much every game and I think the reason for it it's so hard to come up with other interesting ways of interacting with our virtual world so we do it with combat so instead of fearing out some system that can consistently be used in a way to move along with the narrative you just want to drop a bunch of enemies into a room and then place the player there and have them fight them and this is the why the lure of the combat is so strong and we have been tempted ourselves as well but as we have seen once we remove the combat new horizons open up once we remove that weapon that bobs in front of the screen day players start to approach the game quite differently and I think there are three main reasons for this the first off is the myth of multitasking we like

to believe our brains are these big parallel computers get them taking input from all over the place and process it all simultaneous so at the lower circuit level our brains are big parallel computers but at the higher level it just doesn't work that way instead are they are like in techy speak like single core computers if you have two things that you want to do at the same time you have to switch between them and every switch means an overhead and this overhead means that okay everyone get that so let's move on here now this of course has impact on our

games if we have a game that's about combat them do you have other elements in the game as well if the player chooses to focus on these other elements they will worse at the combat so if the combat has a competitive element to it meaning that if you're good at it it's easier to progress and you get more out of the game if you have an outer log popping up from somewhere while the player is shooting off enemies they will just push that out of your log aside and keep shooting at the enemies because that's what the game is about and there doesn't even have to be enemies on screen while you're because this is for this is self effect to set in they can just have the threat of having enemies and the focus will be off from other things instead but if you remove this clear your head and the player is free to focus on other things instead and when we made this switch from penumbra overture to black play given where black

plague didn't have combat it was quite obvious this change now the second reason for not having combat is that the tools we give to the player they tell them what role they have in our games so if you give the player a gun you will expect to go to a shooting range now this is partly because of condition to play games in this way in the past but it's also that once you have a specific tool for the variant interaction it would tell the player what role they play the way they interact with the world the changes or defines the way the player is so and if we want to for example have the player that's detective we need to make sure that the interactions we have in our game supports this role of the player so if we want to have different expressive in games we need to make sure that the interaction supports these expressions

the larger part and interaction has in a game the larger part it will form the way the players see themselves and I think it was Tim Schafer that said that he realized how Psychopaths must feel the only way they can express themselves with a gun so all people they meet the astute at and if we want to have different experience we need to have different sorts of interaction once we remove weapons we force the player into expressing themselves in different ways and the third reason is density of information flower I like to liken amnesia to sort of then sort of a sensory deprivation chamber and once the player is in the game to start to focus all on this small stuff that they in the combat game wouldn't notice at all so for example if a little small sound or a

quiet sound is playing they will give lots of the thought to this sound so if to hear some creeks in the corridor start thinking what was that noise could have been an a creature stalking me oh well I'm haunted I need to hide and this just from from from a little sound and when watching videos of people playing our game we see this vast difference from other games that have much more action focus now the downside of having this sort of approach is that it's much harder to design it as a designer you know every nook and cranny of the levels that you're designing so when you're trying to put yourself in the place of a first-time player you won't it will be very hard to emulate the kind of experience they're going to have an example of this is this map in amnesia and we were sure that would be really boring and we talked about and said or there's not enough events it's not gonna be very

frightening the Flair's gonna be bored out of their skulls when playing this then it turns out when they played it they were more than enough engaged you thought that it was really thrilling this level and we had no idea about this so because of this hardness I think it might not be tempting to have this order design because it's very hard to try it out but I mean this is a new thing and the more we can design levels in this way the more we learn it and I think it can become much more intuitive than it was for us and a really great example of this in for the loss of information information density comes from the blog which is called the awesome X machinima and the writer there he tries to play GTA 4 as a law-abiding citizen and here's what he writes about it some snippets walking the streets I heard near hours of conversations insults and quips from the civilians

walking the streets that had never heard since I certainly would have missed careering down the street it's a top speed and shooting back at the cops in pursued on me I saw bill words I never knew existed buildings I had no idea I could enter I watched a man on a bench flip through a fully rendered pages of an actual book a store or an Irma tisha sleekly in a sidewalk and watch a police officer play someone in the back of his cruiser after an elaborate fruit pursuit Larry down he writes this rather than the poor for the course every infraction no matter how slight becomes a thrilling crescendo moments dismayed emissions themselves nerve-racking experience and I just think this greatly shows the new kind of frontiers this open up with this sort of thinking now the next lesson is no proper death and the lesson I think here from this design principle is that we should be really carefully consider if trial and error is something that we want in our games now obviously some games thrive on

trial error I'm not saying that these games throw them out but if you have a game where the player is supposed to be present in our virtual worlds we need to consider do we really want the player to might might stuck in endless loop or be forced to repeat things over and over and then and there are three main reason why we do not want to do it at least I think there is first of all hard to repeat moments and I think this is the most important ones and an obvious example as I've mentioned before our Bechet sequences when we repeated them too many times they just weren't tense anymore but there are other examples as well sad scenes scenes that are boring but set the mood or scenes that are your sensory demanding other media they thrive on these sort of things but they're almost absent from actual gameplay not cutscenes that is in our games and I

think that we might actually arrive probably missing out on a lot of things if the only thing that we want in our games or situations that are easily repeated the next reason is that once you repeat something over and over you start to see below this you start to see the mechanics how it all works and having trial and error not only makes this possible it might even force this behavior if you have something that the player needs to overcome and the player yeah in order to progress he needs to a figure this out needs to overcome it then the player is forced into thinking how does this system really works and the way to do it is that the ship away on their own make-belief and they're taking herself out of the immersion the more times to repeat it and I'm not sure if that's is something that we want in argument making the players to feel on immersed by the make a mechanic's and now the last and perhaps more evident reason it's just a flow of

the players narrative do we really want players to repeat section is that a good part of the narrative we want to bring to the player and I think this is a very very important point but some some people might say okay but if we just let the player play through all this with without new obstacles there will be no tension but if a horror game has amnesia can not have any trial and error and still manage to be scared perhaps even more scary I'm not seeing why this shouldn't be possible for other games as well that aren't the horror games now last design principle this is the no competitive mechanic that we used for the sanity nai and what we learn from this is we once we remove the competitive aspect that forced the player into overcoming these goals and trying to beat the system we got a better response and it was much

easier to consistently replicate the the behaviors that we wanted then if the what it did was that it allowed role playing instead of the player optimizing a system now what I mean by optimizing a system is that normally what two player dust with this interaction once it's competitive is that it changes the game's stats in some way and so for example you say the player is faced with two enemies now he has to make a choice here what to do and it dispensed on okay what weapons do I have at hand and how much ammo do I have for each weapon now what are these enemies what kind of stats do I know they have what weaknesses do they have and what what might a mean that at the road head and so on and so forth now the player can choose okay I'm just gonna do what's fun but that's not mostly what happens what happens is that the players tries to do what is best for them game stats or game mechanic a wise and it try to have bad

bad things happening to themself to try to avoid that and what this does is that it forces the players into a certain behavior controlled by the game mechanics imagine having this sort of optimizing system or optimizing experience for something that is supposed to elicit emotions from the player like simulating a relationship say we have a character that constantly follows the player around now we might come to situation where the player stands between okay or I'm gonna do what's best what my feelings telling me to or I'm gonna to do what's best for me gameplay wise now this might of course be interesting but what I think mostly happens is that the player will just okay I'm just gonna do what's best for me Gary Weis withdrew the feelings here I want a progress later in the game and if you have a system that have repercussions over a long time like we know our relationship has then I mean the player is not going to want to jeopardize the gameplay later

on in game they're not sure what's going to happened for them later on and this is why I think that the if you want to do something like this we need to remove the competitive aspect we need to see the sort of the mechanics as something that just brings more to the experience so and and also another thing with having if you think that okay okay I'm gonna have game mechanics but I'm sure that my game mechanics are gonna go hand in hand to the feelings but as we saw with the sanity mechanics over a long game it's try balancing that try playing your five-hour game for over and over they're using different play styles and making sure that they be that they have the currently consistent emotion throughout it's very hard if not impossible task now instead what I think as I said that we should have this series as something that it's just part that improves the experience to think about game graphics grain graphics started out that's

something that could hardly represent what the core of the game lost and Dennis we have progress we're getting better and better and better it's sort of game graphics we're at this moment we have these all these graphics and pretty much none of it directly it has any anything to do with the core of the game and I think that game mechanics can play the same part that they don't have to be part of the core game but they can just enhanced experience way before us now to round up this talk and just discuss quickly the road ahead there a little bit I want to just dig into what these principles mean first of all I said we are scratch the surface on the things I've talked about it there's tons of stuff that we can improve that we're already know we can improve and I'm sure other people can figure out even more but there's a central theme to these sort of principles and I think that's even more important we have the know deaths the thing and we removed a

failed state from yet we shipped away on something that's common in games and what we found underneath what was brought to us underneath was a totally different kind of experience we removed combat from the game combats that's so common in games who shipped away on that and then when we honed in on what we wanted with our game we found these other things instead we and finally removed competitive mechanics we let the mechanics and move along and put it out to correct themselves with the player instead of constantly setting up goals and we shipped away on that and another time we just figured something there below that it was so much more interesting and but there's a pattern here by focusing on what you believe is the central experience you can think of changes that can be made to the game changes happens to the game that you never thought would all of this came about when we asked ourselves what is our game really about what is the real real intent of our game I think that's

the big lesson here without this sort of thinking amnesia would not have been possible to make and I don't think this is true only because it's a horror game that the market and it's true that the market for horror games is more used to throwing away a common game designs principles what that tells me is that other kinds of games have even more to explore because the corrugator Danaher already explored all this if we want to advance our medium we must allow it to be expressive we must not think about how games are supposed to be but we must think about what kind of meaning we want them to carry and that's where I believe that the future of games lie thanks for listening [Applause] [Applause]

thank you [Applause] any questions or anything ask me anything not not anything that was so bad worrying for me yeah it's their microphone there is Sudama so we we get it on the recording my name is gonna be live from the English game education and I think you're riding in that this this thing can be used other games than horror games could you come with an example of what could be done to other games yeah for example okay now I'm just gonna take this other top of my head but for example a romance game picture you have a who if you just take the general consensus of how you design a game you should have made a romance game with points like hearts okay how many hearts have I collected and then make it into a

challenge or something but instead you might just think about just let the player move move along with this kind of stuff and depending on it might not fail but you might get a different experience what he tries out don't punish him for making a wrong move or something like that and and that then you might get to the right kind of experience don't let the play role play instead that's just a top of my head but there's tons of other stuff I mean education games that take place during an expedition to the Arctic or whatnot so go on that would be fun they're like the John Franklin expedition as a game that I would play that anything else no I know hi first of all thank you Wow there was a real brain teaser but when you talk about pain mechanics without trial and error and competitive mm-hmm mechanics features and when he talked about not maximizing the game stats or

the players wouldn't that ultimately lead to movies and where do you get the game back into the experience well it's all part of is interaction part of the experience I mean what is a movie it's a it's a premie strean of consciousness that you get you can't change the movie but if you have this interaction and the player can move along in the world I mean just an example yeah I'm not saying that the Nisha is like the best example minim Nisha is you just move along with the player there's no competition but the competition can come from other things as well you can have what should I do in this you cannot still have repercussions to it for example let's just say that the player shoes is not to save a character due to whatever reason then stuff can happen in the game due to them not saving but it doesn't mean that it game mechanically has to be it can just be emotional things I mean you don't care about a character dying in whatever

movie you see because because it effects your DVD players okay now you guys can watch DVDs for another 15 minutes next week because he died I mean that's not the thing why you're emotionally invested in something and that emotional investment can be just as strong as a game mechanic can and it doesn't really run wild at the same at the same place because the player can themself change how they want to this game mechanic to be or a role play how they want to perceive it I mean if that makes sense do that answer it any other questions thank you thank you