Gorogoa: The Design of a Cosmic Acrostic

Hello. Hi everybody. Um I'm Jason Roberts. I think I'm supposed to tell you to silence your devices, please. Um my talk is called Gorogoa, the design of a cosmic acrostic. So, who am I? Um I should say a bit about my pedigree, which is mostly non-existent, at least prior to this game. I was a software engineer up until 2012 and making non-entertainment software. I was an artist in my spare time. I like to draw. Um mostly I was making gifts for my mom, that kind of thing. Um I started a couple of parser-based text games in the '90s that I never finished. Uh apart from that, Gorogoa is the first game I ever tried to make.

Uh and it released in December. I don't want to spend a ton of time on this, but obvious question, why did it take so long? It was in development for uh 5+ years, 5 years full-time. Um I think the short answer is that you can't skip the learning process when making games. Um the conventional wisdom is start with something simple, finish it, move on, do something slightly more ambitious, finish that, and move on. And I think Gorogoa is not actually a counterexample to that. I think that inexperience added years to the project. I ended up throwing out a lot of uh prematurely polished work. And I may even have learned more slowly because I think some lessons you can only learn by finishing something and letting go of the protective delusions that allow you to get through the project.

I released a demo of the game back in 2012 that has been bouncing around the internet ever since. Um, and I sort of made it by instinct. I didn't read any game design books uh or even understand that I was supposed to be thinking about design. And it looks more like a complete vision than it really is that that early demo. Um, it uh I wound up with scenes much of you know that seemed I enjoyed making them. I enjoyed finishing art. But those scenes were not really motivated narratively or thematically. And people could you know, people thought the demo was dreamlike, but that only gets you so far. Um, when it came time to extend the the game to full length, I had to find a way to

build in more story structure and stronger thematic through lines. And so it's sort of like I think an overall theme of this talk is about adapting story and theme to mechanics and form. Uh, even though maybe ideally it should be the other way around. Um, in the sense that you should know what story you want to tell and then decide which mechanics express that story. Um, in you know, in practice I think it often goes the other way. Uh and that the process of discovering which what sort of story to tell, what sort of themes to address was both conscious and and unconscious. Uh, back to the very early hazy origins of the game. I don't remember the sequence of events exactly, but I know that I was trying to write a comic at one point. A few years before I started Gorogoa, I

stalled about 10 pages in. Um the story already had problems, and those problems were sort of baked into art I'd already done and finished pages. Um and it was just too daunting uh a prospect to go back and and redo those pages. And you know, there which there's a lesson in that. Um And also I came to realize that it was composing the page that interested me more than telling a sequential story. The this um patchwork or mosaic of framed scenes is what I found compelling. And I I had to do something with it um even if it wasn't going to be a comic. Um and so why what is compelling about it? I'm going to try and dig into that and explain it. Starting with this basic building block, which is a single framed image.

The fundamental building block of of Gorogoa. Uh we I think you know, everything that we with the exception of virtual reality, everything we consume, all this media is inside a frame. It whether it's the edge of the TV, the edge of the phone, edge of the movie screen. But we're we've learned to try and forget that the frame is there. That's what we mean by immersion. You forget the room you're in, you forget the world you're in, yourself. You kind of mentally project your yourself through the screen into the world on the other side. It's sort of like virtual reality by sheer willpower. But there's space outside the frame, and I I think that's you know, that's fertile territory for design, as as strange as that might sound. And I think by working on a comic, I, you know, what

you can't ignore the frame because your mind doesn't disappear inside any one frame for very long. You have to pull haul your consciousness back out and move on to the next frame. So, the frames become visible. That's what got my attention. That's what got me started down this design path. So, Gorogoa starts with a single frame in a big white empty space. And I think when you do that, the decision to leave empty space is clearly intentional. And you can tell that somebody made the frame visible for a reason. The frame itself is part of the message. Uh but what is that message? And I'm going to look at what What are the inherent properties or what I What do I feel are the inherent properties of the frame as an abstract concept? Well, first, I think the frame This is It's subtle, but I think it has a poignancy to it. If you imagine sitting in a room looking

out window, whatever you see out there, uh you can't really be a part of it. You can't reach it. Uh you can't touch it. All you can do is send your your mind out through the window. Um and it had that had sort of a very sweet human sadness to it, I think. And some of that sadness is present when you're playing a game or watching a movie, also. And as you shrink the frame down and make the space outside of it larger, then that separation becomes that we normally try to forget, uh becomes more clear. And I think that creates a more wistful and sort of oblique relationship to whatever is inside. Also, a frame is a clue. If I put a frame around something, I'm clearly trying to say something. I'm sending a message. It's It's guiding you to something. Um And I shrinking the focus concentrates significance. A frame represents curation. It isn't

neutral. It cares about what it contains. Um it's making a choice about what to include and what to exclude and it's excluding almost everything. Uh A frame is It's an act of affection. You see things inside a frame often because they're precious. It's like a little jewel, like box you built for something that is that you care about deeply or like a halo. Um Frame is mysterious because you can see the space outside the frame. Your attention is drawn to the limits of what you can see and I think that naturally makes you wonder what's beyond that that boundary. And also, a frame is like a prison. It's a box or a fence around whatever is inside.

And I think that creates an unconscious tension. At least it does for me. Because if you see a prison, you want to see an escape. On some level, you want to see the frame broken or transcended. So, frames, at least in my mind, the way I think of it, um have all these qualities inherently. And so, the question becomes, you know, how to tell a story that uh that speaks to these properties, that that resonates with these with these inherent qualities. And once we add interactivity and you know, interactivity in Gorogoa is very simple. You can just zoom in on parts of a scene. But by zooming in you're transferring all the properties of the frame to whatever you zoom in on. So you are making it a clue. You are you know, you are lending it mystery. You are imprisoning it, etc. And so looking around in Gorogoa and in

in this format is very forceful act. Now once you start putting together multiple frames, so sort of inching back towards the comic page. Um it's sort of like you're now putting together a whole gallery exhibition, multiple pictures on a wall. And whenever you put multiple pictures together, it's sort of like you know, montage in cinema the your your brain fills up with uh heat lightning trying to make associations, you know, why are these pictures together and your inner conspiracy theorist is just starts attach connecting red strings back and forth. And you know, if you can if you have multiple interactive frames, then every time you interact with a frame to change what's inside of it, you're re-curating that exhibition. And each each one of those changes, if one of four panels changes, that sets off a new whole new

like cascade of mental electricity as your brain again tries to figure out what how these things are connected. And that larger possibility of space of how the frames could be connected is sort of what led me away from sequential storytelling because that's only one axis of of connection. And maybe this search for connections between between images or fragments will turn out to be a narrative theme. But, the question remains uh after everything I've said, how to make that into a game. I've got a set of panels. I can interact with each panel um and multiple panels, like I say, make the promise of connections. So, we need them to interact with each other somehow. One of my early ideas was some sort of card game cuz once the comic panels are decoupled from the comic page,

they sort of look like cards. They're little rectangles. Um what if we can move move them around, stack them, play them on each other? Uh I uh don't have a mock-up of this. I never built it, but if you can imagine a playing card having an interactive scene inside, like one of the panels in Gorogoa, you enter that scene and by exploring it, solving puzzles inside, you change the picture on the card, and thus you change the properties of the card. So, maybe you can turn a uh two of diamonds into five of hearts, something. Um but that idea had some problems. First, I don't know about card games. Um I don't know how to make the rules interesting or fun. I don't know how to relate that top-level card game that you're playing to theme or story. And as soon as you make the scenes interactive, then you're creating a world that feels like it should have some narrative. Um and besides, because you're changing

the properties of the cards, you're cheating at whatever the game is, and that makes it makes the whole thing pointless. So, how about something more like a card trick, something that feels like magic? I want to keep I like the physicality of the cards, and that's retained in the final game. This sort of like subtle things like drop shadow and the papery sounds when you pick things up and put them down. Because I think that that physicality makes it more magical when they come to life and you can interact with them. But the interactions between tiles should also feel magical. And we don't need complex rules for this top level, you know, game. Uh you know, you don't need to know how to play cards to enjoy a card trick. So at some point I sort of I guess I mixed in the DNA of a jigsaw puzzle. This This is like what is the most literal way in which two scenes

can connect? That's connect visually to form a single image. And jigsaw puzzles are simple but compelling. Putting two pieces together uh you know, that's that's exciting. It's like It's like reuniting two halves of a uh torn photograph or something. And this idea satisfies the promise I was talking about earlier, um resolves that tension that you want to see things escape from their frames. It involves illusions, plays with subjectivity and perspective. I love all that stuff. And it satisfies this It relates to this old fantasy of I think of putting two pictures up on a wall or seeing two pictures on a wall hanging side by side and wanting them to kind of melt out of their frames and join together. And I had the same fantasy about two computer games running in windows side by side on a uh on a computer screen and that's

sort of what gave probably what gave rise to this game. And the stacking variant of the puzzle mechanic I see as the same thing just in a different axis. Uh Maybe it's more like adding the last piece to the center of a jigsaw puzzle in that case. And I'll come back to talk about that mechanic a little bit more later, but first I want to go back and trace another part of the design lineage of Gorogoa, which is the classic adventure game. And I think especially amongst designers, those classic adventure game puzzles are often ridiculed for having needless complexity. Um the nouns and verbs and the mechanical language are hidden and unclear, and they tend to fetishize go out of their way to include counter-intuitive uses for objects, which makes it hard to reason and solve puzzles. And many modern puzzle games um separate

puzzles more cleanly from the world. They have a unambiguous noun-verb set, uh clear and consistent visual language. I mean, think about uh test chambers in Portal or the the panels in The Witness. But I grew up uh loving those adventure games, and I partly love them for the very qualities that some designers wanted to uh expunge. And I think when the core fantasy of those games, or part of that fantasy, was lost in that process of modernization. Because I think that fantasy is not just about inhabiting uh a clever character. I think it's a fantasy about a world that's inhabiting a world full of hidden potential. And those games uh love the exotic repurposing of ordinary objects, because that's about elevating In my mind, that's about

elevating the ordinary. It requires us to look closely and carefully at everyday things for a second layer of meaning. And some of that is lost when puzzles are too cleanly set apart from the world. I also think that fantasy, unlike a lot of video game fantasies, maps readily maps back onto the real world. Um it's something humans have always yearned to believe, I think, that there are these secret compartments of meaning in the world around us that were put there by something larger and invisible uh that's that's leaving us messages. I a friend of my mom's, who was a poet, uh honestly believed for much of his life that uh the reality around us is a projection of the unconscious mind. Uh like a very lucid dream. And so he uh used a version of Freudian

dream analysis on waking life, which means he'd look at objects and events around him, interpreted them as coded symbols from his unconscious mind. So, when he arrived in a new part of the country, he would start looking for clues. You know, he would look at uh poster on the side of a building or uh the signs, street signs at an intersection, or a flyer on the ground. And, you know, he would rearrange letters, he would look for visual uh puns, and he would follow these clues one by one and then until he figured out where he was supposed to live. And I obviously I have some uh logistical and metaphysical problems with that theory, but I think we can all understand why someone might want to believe that. The world is frightening and it's chaotic, and it's a compelling notion that something invisible is speaking to

us. Um again, it's a deep-seated human compulsion to go looking for that hidden language with which the cosmos is trying to guide us. And I think and again, I I think that's obliquely connected to the core fantasy of of adventure games and it's certainly a core theme in in Gorogoa, that search. So, I I think of the core mechanic in Gorogoa as sort of like a visual acrostic. Um an acrostic is, for example, a poem where the first letter of each line forms a vertical word. And unlike crossword puzzles, they're often hidden. And I'm going to argue that an acrostic can be a spiritual or a metaphysical metaphor. Because it's an almost literal depiction of transcendent meaning. Um if you look at only the the expected form reading horizontally, uh you're missing something essential. The answer lies on an invisible axis.

You have to rotate your perception out of that axis to see a transverse transverse vein of meaning. And that's a powerful idea because it means that humble objects can be the intersection point between those two dimensions, between the ordinary and between and the eternal or or otherworldly. Um and so that allows the the the sacred, uh if you will, to be accessible through the mundane without being contained or, you know, or constrained by the mundane. So, I I think of my this poet's view of the world as being like a cosmic acrostic. Poster on the wall is like a letter that's in two sentences. It's belongs to two different dimensions of meaning. One dimension is to sell tobacco and the other dimension is to tell my mom's friend where to go to look for the next clue. So, what do I mean by a visual acrostic? Well, it means that elements in Gorogoa

belong to two crossing axes of meaning. And not just the obvious axes of the grid. Here we have something that's a piece of a train map on one axis, but on a different axis it's a ladder. Here you have a figure in a window on one axis of meaning and on the other axis it's a profile on a coin. Here's the edifice of a building in one dimension and in the other dimension it is part of a pachinko machine for this falling rock puzzle. So everything has a dual nature and that's that was an an essential uh principle of the design. So like the the scaffolding that you see here um which is part of this falling rock sequence uh it's built to slow the rock down so the puzzle is easier to solve, but it's also there to repair the building that it's on, which has been damaged in a war. So it has a a place in the chronology of the game world.

The banners exist as visual clues to help the player connect the tiles together, but they're also there to advertise the opening of the museum. And the same is true for other scenes in the same sequence. You have uh ribbons that are uh wrapping sacred objects in this in this basement. And sometimes I will I will build scenes in the game so that they allow me to include a lot of exotic uh varied objects in one place like a museum or a basement where religious artifacts are being stored. So that's a bit of a cheat, but uh the point is that everything should seem everything should have that duality of meaning. I was which mean I had to work very hard uh so that nothing in the world looks like it's just there to be part of a puzzle. Um and the effort is made to justify every puzzle element in every scene within the story. Because again that that acrostic that duality of meaning is is essential

thematically. Um this same rock puzzle, which is the last very last puzzle I put in the game, so I'll talk about it a lot. Uh it's and sorry there's no animation here, but it's the only timing puzzle in the game and so it was controversial. But it was it was added to address a specific issue with the design. Uh and that's central tension in Gorogoa is the balance between sort of uh discovery and challenge. Because as I've said, this is this is thematically part became partly about searching for things that are inscrutable and astonishing and otherworldly. Um which is partly about escaping from predictable mechanical patterns. Fantasy is about exploring beyond the limits of what we understand, encountering encountering something large and mysterious. Uh but you know, how can you solve puzzles without understanding?

Uh you know, I had considered I've considered early on just taking the puzzles out. Um many people who loved Gorogoa don't care that much about puzzles. They just wanted the experience. So, should I allow players to just explore the world and stumble across those surprising connections? That might be truer to the fantasy. Uh because those revelations should feel beyond comprehension. And we want that feeling of a vast and and strange universe. But I in the end and admittedly partly because I like puzzles, I decided to keep them. Um I think some degree of challenge is appropriate to the theme because in essence this is something we want to be able to believe about the real world and if it were possible to just stumble across secret connections in the real world, it would have happened by now. And also, I think those revelations gain substance from the effort involved to

uncover them. Uh we want to be required to look carefully or or think differently. And besides, connection to something greater should I think it's Instinctively we feel like it should require some sort of a test. Uh and also, puzzles impose pattern, and some pattern is essential. Uh I'm trying to create a sense of mystery, but mystery is really is about not about no pattern, it's about a half-glimpsed pattern. Too little, and you feel like there was nothing there to find, and too much, and the mystery dissipates. Uh so, it's all about the right amount about of disorientation. That and that balance was crucial. Um the surprise and delight of stumbling across something, a challenge or test, on the other hand, uh the way tiles fit together in the game may be initially surprising uh and magical, but at least later in the game,

puzzles are intended to require an additional reasoning stage after that discovery stage. I decided to limit the mechanical complexity uh this train map you see here was going to be part of a much more complex puzzle where there are multiple tiles with multiple maps that fit together, and the train goes back and forth through this like headachey spaghetti of train tracks. Um but I decided that that was too much pattern uh in a way, in a sense. Um pendulum too far in one direction. But the I mean, back to this rock puzzle, again, sorry there's no animation, but it's I put it in the game because it can't be solved accidentally, essentially. Because it's a timing puzzle, you have to understand how it works before you solve it. And that is there as a reassurance. Um, I think the earliest puzzles in the game are the most amenable to um, sort of accidental discovery. And I

felt that at this point in the game, the player needed to be reassured that they could get a hold of something, figure out something, and that there was some some sense here. Uh, And similar another the puzzle that comes right after it, this clock tower puzzle has you're setting the time on a clock. The position of the hands have enough permutations that it makes it difficult to brute force. And again, that is tipping the balance back towards some degree of of reasoning. Uh, the next chapter of the game has a series of these wheel puzzles. You, uh, may stump me you may partly stumble upon the means of turning the wheels, but then you, uh, in theory have to think about their orientation. And that repeated pattern, uh, allows players to make some simple deductions. Uh, okay, one last thing about this rock puzzle, which is that

uh, you can't see it here, but the way it works is rocks are knocked out of this box periodically by explosions. Um, it's a city under bombardment. And you solve the puzzle by waiting for bo- for rocks to fall out of that box. But why? I mean, wouldn't it be easier to have the player just click or tap on the box to generate a rock? Well, the answer to that question I'm going to take a deep dive on because it's a small, seemingly small design decision that had a lot of implications. Again, in theory, a high-level vision or aesthetic should ripple downward to low-level mechanical decisions, but I think in practice the opposite happens a lot. Um, and that's a good idea, at least early in development, to allow that bottom-up disruption. Uh, because that may nudge you towards the seed that crystallizes everything else. So, as I mentioned, um, the game is

descended from adventure games. And the scene inside each tile originally played like an adventure game, including, you know, they basically had missed controls, where you can not only move around, but interact physically with objects. You could open doors, push buttons, uh, you know, turn levers, that kind of thing. Uh, and that means that made it possible to uh, it was possible to implement puzzles within a single scene. I, within a single panel. So, I could put a combination lock on this door here, and maybe you have to search a nearby, uh, graveyard and find one grave that's better tended than the others, get the date off that, that's the combination. Perfectly pleasant, um, puzzle. And that was nice because designing the puzzles where the two tiles connect is super hard. And it was a nice safety net. I could pace the game out using these, uh, puzzles that are just inside one, uh, one scene.

But, I decided that having those single tile puzzles was diluting the effect of the game and, uh, by not using the core mechanic. The core mechanic is about connecting panels, tiles together. So, no single tile puzzles were allowed. I was going to take away my own design safety net. Um, which I call the no touching rule. Uh, comp- So, I'm completely going to take away the player's ability to physically interact with the world inside a tile. And so, the player can't bring about any change in the game world, except by combining two or more tiles. And that, as a, uh, new designer that felt really virtuous and disciplined and I was I was proud of myself for that one. Uh but there were some complications. Like if you look at this system here, uh if you have the ability to interact, you could click on that crank in the top tile and crank the bucket up. It rises

from one tile to another. Without that option, I the only way I can make this puzzle work is by adding a counterweight to this the other end of the rope. Uh the player can't put in energy into the system. So, I have to put I have to build essentially potential energy into the world. But the problem is or one potential problem is that as soon as these two tiles are connected, the system moves. The bucket goes down, the weight goes up, and it's a that's a one-time, one-way state transition. It's really difficult in the design to reset that. And it's prone to self-solving. You connect two tiles and something moves before you even realize what you're doing. If again, if the player had the ability just to turn that crank at the top, then it would at least require one extra interaction interaction after connecting the tiles before the you know, this very very

simple puzzle could be solved. And also, the player can then could crank the bucket up or down and that creates a much bigger, more robust state space for the puzzle to exist in. So, this is a serious constraint on on puzzle design. The And the crow puzzle at the beginning of the game um is was driven by that decision. There's no way for the player to knock that fruit loose to drop into the bowl or to shake the branch. Um so, I had to create this crow which takes off from the branch and that was very expensive. I had to do I had to do all that animation. Um so this turns out to be a costly decision. Um here's another puzzle. And a lot of puzzle design in Gorogoa consists of just sitting around thinking what things look like other things. Uh a sun sort of looks like a gear if it's

done in a stylized form. Uh crenellated castle wall looks like a linear gear and they could fit together to make a rack and pinion assembly. But it needs moving parts so how does the player make it move? Well, this one idea I had is to add a navigation button that allows the player to move their camera to the right. So and if the camera moves to the right, the wall subjectively moves to the left. Uh and but the sun stays at the same position in the sky because it's parallax layer is at infinite distance. So the relative movement of the two parallax layers cause causes that uh gear to turn. And I I like that approach a lot. Um it's sort of I said that looking is supposed to be a forceful act in Gorogoa and this is sort of sort of having that effect.

But it's also sort of cheating because the player is changing the state of the world using just one tile. In a way I've taken a navigation button and turned it into a button that operates a piece of machinery. So is it really using the the core mechanic? I decided it wasn't. So instead um I have a scene in the game where the movement of the camera is driven by the movement of the character. Character is walking, the camera drags the character for you know cinematic reasons essentially. And so I get the same effect of camera movement. But the difference is that the the character is literally driving the action now. And that's much more thematically compelling. Um it you know I'm I'm taking the efforts and energy of the character and literally hooking up a a drive train to it. Um and

it works well with the themes of this chapter in the game which is about sort of uh the role of repetitive and mechanical ritual in uh in devotion. So you know maybe the this the no touching rule isn't such a liability after all. Maybe it's it you know it's leading me in interesting directions I wouldn't have gone in otherwise. Uh and even more than that because by taking away the player's ability to physically interact with the world I've disembodied them. And that turned out to liberate my whole thinking about the game. For example a disembodied character can just fly across space. Uh it doesn't require any um physical explanation and nobody ever questions it. Uh because there's no sense of physical presence in the world. Uh disembodied player can enter character's

thoughts or memories. You can enter the world inside the China pattern on a plate. That was really powerful and I don't know that maybe players would have accepted that in addition to and still be able to you know turn cranks. But thinking not thinking of the player as embodied freed up my mind as a designer. And at an even higher level, um limiting the players' uh interaction makes the relationship between the player and the story more oblique and mysterious. Uh And that leaves room for wider range of interpretations about what the interaction with the game means. And notably, it allows the entire game to feel as much like a mental process as as a physical process. Like maybe someone sorting through fragments of experience or memory,

looking for those connections. And uh Gorogoa is often called dreamlike, and some interpretations of what uh dreams are about have to do with that process of uh sifting through these chunks of experience and trying to find patterns within them. And again, this connects to the properties of a frame. This this idea of the mental process of of sorting through memories, cuz the frame creates that same sort of melancholy distance that you have uh the same relationship you have to memories. There are scenes you can see uh and examine, kind of turn over in your mind, but never re-enter. So, again, this is a relatively, you know, secondary or

tertiary decision. Uh it didn't that this uh no touching rule, that didn't seem to me like a uh it seemed optional. Like, the game could have been built with or without that decision. And but having made it one way, that rippled up to not just to affect the game all the way at the narrative and thematic level ultimately. So, speaking of narrative, what kind of story does it make sense to tell with these mechanics? This is a question I asked very late in the process in a way. I had to kind of feel my way to this solution um as you know before I was able to think about it consciously. Um and since it's a puzzle game, the basic question is how do you combine puzzle and narrative? Well, there's a tried and true approach, which is puzzles as obstacles for a protagonist

uh in a you know in a in a typical dramatic narrative. The story needs obstacles, the protagonist needs to demonstrate cunning or perseverance. So, that's it works great. It's classic for a reason. But Gorogoa doesn't work that way at all. Uh it sort of turns that model inside out. Instead of uh puzzles inside of a story, it's a story suspended inside a puzzle. The protagonist isn't solving puzzles. Um the player is solving puzzles and from sort of an external uh god-like perspective and moves the player moves independently of the protagonist. They just the two sort of like cross paths. And at least to me I mean puzzles you solve in the game do facilitate uh character traversal, but um many of them at least in my mind are as much about discovering the story as advancing the story. So, is is any of this a good idea? Um I

could take you know I could rip all the pages out of a great novel and hide them around the city and the novel might be a delightful read and looking for the pages might be a delightful scavenger hunt, but are those two unrelated delights that I've just stuck together? And the story of the novel might suffer from pacing issues as you find the pages out of order, etc. Um so uh that steered me away from a traditional dramatic narrative uh because the emotional arc and act structure would be too disrupted, the chronology is all chopped up and scattered and folded back on itself. And I was drawn more towards something like that is a like a parable um that suits the spiritual themes of the game and and what I'm trying to say. Uh and a parable is instructive. It's it's an act of communication. Uh typically they're to typically teaching a lesson of some

kind. Uh it doesn't it doesn't just exist to provide dramatic satisfaction. Uh you're not supposed to entirely lose yourself or forget that it's a story. And that is that's related again to the to the form of the game. Like I say, the a frame by its nature feels like a clue. So, it feels instructive. It feels like an act of communication. And because you are looking at the game world through this shrunk down small window that allows you to keep at least one eye uh on this on the exterior world. And so, you don't forget that you're being told a story and you don't forget to be to ask why you're being told that story. So, the I feel like the form of the game is putting the player into the right uh posture to to interact with a parable. Parables are often puzzles in that they're you know hidden in allegories.

Um and they are a riddle that has to be unlocked. And unlike the search for the novel pages in this case, that might be a virtue because uh the act of solving the riddle is part of the message of the parable. I think every parable that requires this kind of unlocking has a second, in addition to whatever its specific lesson is, it has a second more general lesson, which is about how to look for meaning in the world, to always look for that second layer. So, this is which is why I argue that it is acrostic in the sense that that I mean. Um At least if it's uh an allegorical parable. It it's teaches us exists to teach us that lesson of of duality of meaning. Um and uh that just leaves the final question, a parable about what?

Um and I again they This well, I don't want to reveal too much. But it is about the lifelong quest for that hidden transcendent meaning. So, it sort of it folds back on itself conceptually. Um I There is a There is a dramatic narrative contained inside the game. Um So, it is in sense, you know, it functions on two levels at once. It is meant to be a story about a character, um but also it is meant to be structured and read as as a fable. Um Maybe one way of looking at it is it is an attempt to look at a real life at the pieces and fragments of a real life and

retroactively impose the structure of a parable of a fable a parable upon that life. Um and you can make of that what you will. Uh again, I don't know how well this worked. I The story of the game is the and how it comes across is one of the things I'm most uncertain about in the end product, I think. Uh creating a sense of mystery was a core part of a core goal of the the product. I was inspired by Uh I was particularly by this puzzle book called Maze that I played when I was a kid. And I never solved it. Which meant that the mystery of an of that unsolved book was something that I carried with me my whole life. And I wanted to recreate that feeling. But I couldn't do it by making an unsolvable game. So I had to find some other way to make

mystery an inherent part of the experience. So the story of the game, I never went out of my way to make it more obscure, but uh I also allowed the inherent sort of obscurity of the storytelling mechanism to to function as an asset, I think or or I hope. And as for the story of the game, I'll leave the rest up to your interpretation. And that's it. So nice. We have time for questions. Uh if you have a question for Jason, please go to one of the mics in the aisles. And I'll start things off. Uh So because the game is multi-platform, were there any puzzles that you want to make that you couldn't because it has to be playable with a mouse and a finger and a controller? Well, that the multi-platform decision was made relatively late.

Um you know, again, there's a there's one timing puzzle in the game and that became an issue uh with the switch because just the uh operating the the pointer with the control stick is just slightly more challenging. And so, we thought that puzzle might be a deal breaker, might need to be altered um for the switch, but in the end we decided it was it would work well enough. Go ahead. Hi. Um, whoa. Uh as a designer of some of those old-school adventure games, I I really enjoyed this a lot. It It I think you took a managed to kind of capture a lot of the feeling that as you said, but with a very fresh approach. One of the things that I thought that was inherent in what you did that really solved a problem that we we had with um the old and even some of the new-school adventure games is that you always want to have a degree of choices, but not so many choices that you feel that you're just going through, you know, 50 different locations trying 17 different

objects with each thing you can find in there. And I found that the four panels were a perfect way to do that and that it never was able to get too complicated even though, you know, the depth of each panel meant that there were lots of other choices, but there never was this sort of bewildering complexity. And I'm wondering if you experimented with going to, you know, 3 by 3 or 4 by 4 or, you know, or whether you just hit on that 2 by 2 is is, you know, early on as the the optimum. Uh okay, so the the question is about um uh considering a 3 by 3 grid uh etc. and about the implications for limiting for not confusing the player. Uh and yes, that is a big reason why it's a 2 by 2 grid. Um, one another reason is that the bigger the grid, the smaller the tiles or you have to add a another layer of zoom to zoom in on parts of the grid, which is too complicated. Um, but It was It's clear from testing the game,

especially because scenes within tiles are very deep in the sense that you can like dive through sort of multiple layers of reality. And four tiles was clearly the absolute limit of what people could keep track of. Um and in fact there are the number of scenes with four tiles in Gorogoa is actually limited for that reason. It's usually two or three um to make it more comprehensible. And one data point for you. I I thought that the story was intriguing, but I appreciated the the part that I I got through the whole game without ever thinking very hard about it and just sort of experiencing it in that dream-like way and I I like the fact I kept waiting for some point where you were going to penalize me for not having caught some critical story piece. So I appreciate the fact that that was optional. You're welcome. Hi there. Um thanks for beautiful game and a really intriguing talk. Um my question was uh just more from a

practical perspective. Um playing the demo a few years ago I sort of and then playing the the finished game, I picked up sort of small elements from the demo that had been rearranged and just how I was just wondering how did you keep track of it all and sort of when you were I assume you must have There must have been a lot of rearranging of puzzles and orders of things and how how does how do you keep it all in your head? It just seems so Um so the uh question is about how I keep track of the various piece pieces of the game and the design that I have to move around between iterations. Um I It is I It was mostly in my head and then the game itself becomes a document. Um I did So yeah, I threw out a lot of work on the game. And as I said, I put too much work into uh chunks of content that didn't make sense or that were not justified thematically. And

when I cut something, I I cut a whole puzzle out, I always think, "Can I repurpose this? Can I salvage it and stick it someplace else?" And occasionally, sort of, but most of the time, it didn't work and stuff that was cut just I mean, I might be able to take one little piece of the art and reuse it, but so for the most part, stuff that was cut just went away. So, I didn't have to keep track of it and uh yeah. Hi. I have a question about the You mentioned traditionally the emotional arc or story arc is too disruptive for the game. Um but a lot of happenings in the game is also um retractable. You can't return to the previous state. Why uh particularly this emotional arc or story arc is too disruptive? Wait. Yeah, explain. Sorry, what was that last part? Uh why the emotional arc you think it is too disruptive? So, you intentionally took

it out. Well, um So, so why do I think that the emotional arc of the game was is disrupted by the format? Yeah, if there Um because if if I think of the story of the game that I see it as being like uh an act structure like a three-act structure, then several of the acts are happening in parallel as you play the game. You're seeing two different threads in from two different points in time uh at the same time often. And so and and again, like you may that may you may not have even realized that and that's part of why it's that that arc gets that story arc gets disrupted. Um Time is mixing different periods of time are mixing with each other throughout the course of the game. And that and usually when you want to tell a story, you want to tell it in

chronological order unless you've got a very good reason not to. So, that's why I felt like that traditional arc was was challenging. Thank you. Hi. Um I just have a question about uh earlier you mentioned that those banners on the museum were to kind of also they were they served the purpose of showing the player like where they can connect with the other frames as well as the narra- uh the narrative implications. I was just curious if you had like a hard and fast rule for every frame of this will be an obvious clue for the player or if like how did you balance how much to hold their hand and how much to let them kind of shuffle the pieces around to figure it out? Right. Uh thanks. Um how did I balance giving player guidance with kind of disguising puzzle elements as as part of the world. Uh I guess play testing is a big part of that and and partly by feel.

But in that again so that that puzzle with the ro- the falling rock and the the banners that was one of the last puzzles and so I worked hard to find visual elements that were both justified in the world but also really strong. Um because if you don't that puzzle's complex enough that if people don't get the connection pretty quickly, they're going to be frustrated. So, how is the balance achieved? A lot of trial and error and seeing how people react to it. Thank you. Um thank you for the talk and um how do you decide on the elements you're going to use Um, that makes the like the puzzle seems very like connected even though like um, it it is very um, like it jumps a lot. Like it leaves the space and how can you decide this balance? The balance between

Um, the balance between um, like the scene and the elements you're using in different puzzles and uh, the transition um, like the smooth transition between them. Uh, well, I I mean so the balance between uh, seeing elements as as puzzle as mechanical pieces and seeing elements as as you know, story elements uh, again that's that's largely a uh, a matter of of trial and error. Um, as far as I mean you're talking about sort of the the flow uh, through the game. Okay, five minutes. Uh, yeah, I mean well uh, one thing that that flow from scene to scene was very important to me. I didn't ever want to um, have a have an edit or or a cut. So, I was things flow from

uh, one scene or moment in the game to another to create a a sensation of of flow and and sort of calm movement through space. Does that Does that help? And uh, another question, um, how can you put that on a like a high-level philosophical idea into a a solid mechanic? Well, I mean like I say I sort of worked So how how do you put a high-level philosophical idea into a uh, concrete mechanic? Yeah. Like I say I sort of worked backwards uh, partly consciously and partly unconsciously, from having built something. I mean, I I had kind of a I built the original demo on based on kind of a feeling. And that feeling was driven by the by the formal and mechanical properties of the game. But then I, in order to make more of it, I had to figure out what sort of what philosophically the structure of the game was saying and

then make the game about that. So, it's kind of the other way. Start with the mechanic and find the philosophy. Thank you. Hi. Um yeah, you clearly put in like a ton of emotional and like mental energy into this entire experience. And like, how do you continue persevering in the face of, you know, like discouragement and, you know, like conflict and just stress? Uh like, what what keeps you going? Um I guess, well, I mean, maybe because So, the game had So, what what keeps me going uh on a long long project? Well, sometimes I my my productivity did falter sometimes. Sometimes I did feel like giving up. Uh I think one important feature is that the game the visual art part of the game was very nourishing to work on. So, making art is for me is is pleasurable and it makes me it has a short feedback loop to make me feel good, feel good about myself. Um

whereas game design is the opposite. Uh it's it's it's off it's like broken and for a long time. So, to some extent the game was the was the source of strength for me during that that part of my life. So, um it was the thing I was most interested in doing and and working on. So, it wasn't the so I mean, occasionally it was the source of the source of stress in my life, but I think most of the time it was the escape from stress. Mhm. Cool. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, you've spoken really elegantly about the balance between the artistic and the the mechanical sides of the game and I I thank you so much for explaining so much of how that's one thing, but what I I'm really curious about the technical challenges. Um you talk about art being a big, you know, a motivating factor. Um when you zoom in through a scene, you have this line art style that needs to change to scale. Did you ever draw a scene that you realize, "Oh, I want to go a little further and then you throw it away?" Tell a little bit more about the technical challenges. Okay, so the question about the the

the tech of the game. I always considered it simple, so that's why I didn't cover it much. I mean, it so it you know, it uses parallax layers um and a sim- very simple 3D space that the camera moves through. Um but if you move from uh looking at an object from far away and then you zoom in to look at it closely, often you're transitioning between two different objects two different two separate drawings of the same object. So, I zoom in on a clock tower, I'm going from a small drawing of the clock tower to a large drawing of the clock tower, not not scaling the same drawing. I scale both drawings at once and then cross fade from one to the other and movement is blurry enough that you often don't see that. Um and then that's about it mechanically, at least for the inside of a a tile. Um Sure, did you ever find that you had to reorganize your workflow based on changes to how you wanted the scenes to be composited? Yeah, I mean the the workflow was ironed out pretty early on. Uh and but yeah I developed techniques for

how to sort of figure out the the home position for an uh uh an object and what it looks like from that perspective and then um and then quickly get to what the object looks like to uh from another perspective. Um it's difficult to to describe, but yeah, there uh there were approaches that I uh evolved over time for for dealing with that. Thanks. Thank you. Last last question. This was an amazing talk. Um Thanks. I I have a question about the dual nature of all of these things when you were designing. It seems like there would be a lot of dependency issues when you're iterating on your design, and I'm wondering um what maybe you learned was the greatest dependency? So, when you wanted to scrap a section uh and improve on it in some way, was it the art? Was it the the design

like progression? Um so, yes, everything in the game is dependent on everything else, and you know, what what was the greatest sort of challenge or pain point? Uh certainly art because it was so expensive to produce, and often times like the if you connect two tiles together, the the lighting has to match across you know, all the colors and lights have to match across the tiles, and maybe one is an exterior day daytime scene, and one is an interior uh nighttime scene, and if I need to change the puzzle for like visual reasons, that might force like the time of day to change in one of the two scenes. So, that pushes back onto the narrative. Um and that was a big challenge. Uh if I I'm trying to make a puzzle, and I think, "Oh, this puzzle needs one more tile for the to have enough pieces to work." Then that means I have to create a whole life cycle for that new tile. Um

I have to create a moment where it was born, and all the scenes that are inside it, what those scenes have to do with the story, and it uh and then like that have an extra tile around, which means I can't that might take up a space that would otherwise be occupied by another tile. And um so, the the just adding one more piece to a puzzle, if it's another tile, is like a hugely costly decision that like ripples forward and backward throughout the whole game. Great, thanks. All right, that's going to wrap things up. Please make sure that you