Rules of the Game 2025: Uncommon Techniques from Insightful Designers

[Music] Hey everybody, thanks for coming out to uh Rules of the Game for 2025. Uh please remember to silence your noisemaking devices. Uh turn in your surveys, that sort of stuff. My name is Richard Rouse. I'm studio creative director at Farbridge. We have a lot to get through today, so I'm going to dive right in. Um, this is a session where we get five designers to speak for 10 minutes each. Uh, each speaker talks about a rule they use in game design, a technique, trick of the trade, that sort of thing, a way to think about games, um, that they found useful in making great games in the past. You may agree or disagree with the different rules, but that's fine as long as it sharpens your design thinking. Um, we've actually been doing this session since 2015, so hey, that's 10 years ago, which is kind of shocking. Um, well, thank you. Uh we skipped a few years in there. Uh like last year we weren't here, but we're glad to be back.

Uh but I did want to go back to that very first session from 2015 for a minute. Um yeah, so the very first speaker we ever had in this session was Laura Lynn McWills and uh some of you may know her. Uh she sadly passed away last year. She was a veteran game designer who led design on everything from the original Full Spectrum Warrior to Free Realms, the early MMO for kids. Um and she did a really great talk that really set up the session in a lot of good ways. She talked about making emotional connections. Uh, you know, her talk was about, you know, every game is about emotions and what emotions do you want to evoke with your game and how can your system support those? How do the rewards that you give players support generating those emotions? It was really good talk. She also talked about, you know, the process of play testing and seeing what players are reacting to, what emotions they're having, how can you reward them for the emotions you want them to have versus not have. It was really good. Really set the tone for the session. um you know but but just beyond talking about game design that she talked about a lot at the game developers conference uh she also just talked about game development studio

culture challenges in development that sort of stuff she was uh uh big into blogging uh very voluminous Twitter poster later blue sky poster um and you know she was very open in those talks about her the incurable cancer that she was dealing with you know went beyond game development um that led her to doing talks like this one uh called finding your way through difficult times you're not broken And um and though she framed this talk about her own health struggles, what she was going through uh and how she sort of could overcome it, um it was really about a metaphor for anyone going through difficult times and going through like a challenging situation. How you can stay creative during that. Um and let's face it, the game industry has been going through a hard time for a couple of years. Uh you know, with studios getting closed, uh you know, games studios have released beloved games have been closed. I've put up some examples of favorite games from studios that have shut down uh up on the screen here. Um, but you know, people are getting laid off. Even if you haven't been laid off, you know, people have been laid off. It's been pretty rough. Never mind if there's anything else going on in the

world that might be terrible that's upsetting you. And I know that this can block me creatively. I can get really stuck thinking about things. Why are we working on games? Why does this matter? You know, everything seems to be on fire. We can get creatively blocked. And that was my re-watching her talk recently. It was really inspirational to me. you know, she specifically talked about steps to go through if you're stuck and feeling blocked, what you can do to get through it. Um, you know, when there are horrible things. So, I encourage you to check this out. The talk ends with this quote that I wanted to show you. Um, just to read it here. Uh, I'm a game developer just like you are. I went through some Everyone goes through some It's really not that special, but I endured and I grew and I changed and so will you. And I learned that no matter what was going on, I wasn't broken. I'm not broken. None of you are broken. No matter what's happening to you, you're not broken. You're growing. All of us are growing. So, if you're going through tough stuff professionally, friends are going through tough stuff. The world's going through tough stuff. You know, just think there's there's ways to get past it and keep going. I encourage you to check out the talks. They're up for free on the GDC Vault.

Both of them. Uh the second one, you're not broken, is up on YouTube as well. So, check those out. I found them very helpful. And uh here's to Lyland to really showing us how to do this session well. But today onto some new game designers who are with us here uh a little bit later in the session. Uh Alicia the is going to talk to us about technical design and how to embrace you know amongst the beauty of systems maybe embracing a one-off. Uh Noah Falsstein is going to talk to us about how just how simple our game should be. Carla Engelre is going to tell us about ruthlessly prioritizing our games. And lastly Harvey Smith is going to tell us about design layering. But first, our first speaker is the studio director at Outerloop Games, where last year he shipped uh the dating, skateboard, skateboarding, and cooking mashup game, Thirsty Suitor. Highly recommended. Uh he has a long career going back all the way through games like Monday Monday Night Combat to Elder Scrolls

Mororrowind. He even did some art for my indie game, which I'm very indebted to him for. I give you John Dana Ekanaka. [Applause] I want to start a timer here. Okay. Um, today we're going to talk about creating intentional friction to build emotional resonance. Um, those are a bunch of words. Uh, it mean specific things to me. So, we're going to kind of go through that real quick. So, friction in our, uh, definition could be difficulty. It could be scarcity. could be unconventional controls or save system that you know you have to get to a certain point to save or number of limited saves a time like Majora's Mask where the player is expected to do a lot of things but there's certain um limited time for that or durability like we weapon durability or armor um narrative tension built by the story setups or bucking trends where uh a game in a

specific genre can do something completely different. Friction doesn't have to be about uh negative con um connotation as well. It could be texture, it could be just a little bit of texture for the player to um kind of find and enjoy. And when we talk about our emotion, there's lots of lots of emotions on this uh feeling wheel. And uh while it's nicely laid out um for therapy for me, I can go through figure out which emotion I'm feeling right now in a game or a player will experience these emotions all over the place and multiple things and it jumps around so it's not as clean. So we kind of think about that. And then when we talk about resonance is when mechanics enhance theme and emotion together. Um those the mechanics that you pick aren't um they're not neutral. They they come with baggage. there's a history, say a platformer or something else. So, kind of finding mechanics that um that can really enhance the theme of motion is part of the process as well.

And let's talk about some examples. Uh getting over it. I love the game about climbing. Um moments of uh great excitement and uh moments of great dread as you kind of get to a safe spot, but then you fall all the way back down. And then um you get some um philosophical quotes with some smooth jazz under it, which I think is supposed to make you feel better, but I am not sure. I felt more like a taunt by Ben Bennifi. Um Papers, please. Lots of great uh things they do. It's an kind of unconventional control scheme where you're um playing a border control guard um and you have sort of limited time to figure out if this person is who they say they are. The the interface is excellent. You have limited space to move these papers around and also there's a time factor and the limited color palette makes the tone all fit together really well. Death Stranding, a game about delivering packages. A lot of friction in this game. Uh intentional friction in this

game. Um sorry, I'm watching the gift. Um I got caught in up in it. While the moment to moment is is sort of delivering packages, um there is a fast travel in the game. So we're kind of conventional uh third-p person game, but the difference is in their fast travel. If you get there, you can't um carry the packages with you. You get to a new location and then you have to pick up packages and walk through. I think that's that's an interesting uh choice to keep the sort of the intentional friction going for the rest of the game loop. And then outer loop, we make narrative games. Um we usually start with themes and emotions. We iterate on mechanics to fit these themes, emotions and um we kind of look at ourselves, our experiences, our um our families and friends. So kind of map real world feelings and vibes for those uh emotions and experience and try to fit the mechanics to them. Our first game we did in 2019, it's called Falcon Age. It's a

game about ra um raising a falcon and fighting colonizers. Um, and it's a first-p person actor adventure game where uh you walk around, the the player has a melee weapon, so has a limited range. Um, and then the falcon is some like a tool or a pet that you can send off um in the distance, anything you point at. And we were trying to make sure the the balance of what you can do and what the falcon can do. Um, there was some tension there. So, you can't just like send the Falcon off and take care of everything. You can send it off and um it will get hurt. There's like these towers that shoot needles. I know it's horrible, but the falcon does not die. It's fine. Um, it does get hurt. So, when it when it gets hurt, um, it comes back to you and you have to pull the needles out. You have to pet it. You have to you have to feed it. Um, and if you just try to kind of barrage through areas there, um, they're things only the falcon can take care of. So, we're trying to find a nice little tension between um, the two characters.

The last game we did, as Richard mentioned, it's called Thirsty Suitors. It's a game about fighting your exes and disappointing your parents. You play the role of Jala. She's a real messy 25-year-old uh woman that's coming back to her small town in Washington. All her six exes live there and they have a lot of beef with her all unresolved. So, uh we wanted to kind of figure out how we can show two people having emotional conversation and it's sort of um in this. So, we turned up into surreal battle using turn-based combat. turn-based combat worked out really well because of we wanted the words they say, the choices you make in dialogue and the actions to be equally important. So, in between the sort of the battle choices, you get uh dialogue and while it's an RPG uh using attacks and taunts and things like that, the mechanics are mapped to emotions. So, you can like hit somebody with a mood and if you get them into a thirsty mood, you can follow they're weak to thirsty, you can follow up with a thirsty attack.

So, we're trying to take sort of conventional RPG um approaches and then map it to the theme of this game, which is all about emotions and um resolving conflicts with exes. And then in between that, you're trying to connect with your parents. They're pretty pissed off at you, too. Um and this is the experience with my mom where I she won't talk to me directly. So, but if I cook with her, um she's she opens up a little bit. So, we kind of wanted to see if we can do that in the game. And so, while through cooking, your mom will open up a little bit. She's still pretty tense and and and you know, won't really give in too much, but uh the whole portion of this game is there's an approval meter that you're trying to meet with your mom and um once you do something really successfully, you know, she might have like really high emotion response to it, but she'll tell you that it was just okay. So, there's a lot of friction there. you can try to compliment her through the game and it turns into this compliment wheel and it's purely chance. Most of the time you will not not um

succeed. And then we want to contrast that with when you cook with your dad who's just uh completely different, very supportive, uh makes terrible jokes. Um but like we set up this contrast for later in the game where you have to get in some really deep serious conversations with your dad. And um you know it's kind of building that uh tension and friction early on to kind of set it up so we can hopefully do um tell a good story. And then by the end you fight your grandma um uh of course you do the matriarch of the family um in a you know she transforms into this giant um mega grandma. Um and at this point the the player has uh built up a lot of systems and skills and and um summons. So you could try to do that but we she totally crushes you down till you essentially um get the help of your friends and family and then at the end it really comes down to using words um emotional damage back and forth and kind of dealing with generational trauma um

to end the game. The current project we're doing is called Project DOSA. Um another RPG game. It's a game about two sisters in their um food truck mech adventuring through through the setting. Uh fantastical setting. Um they all they're trying to resolve conflicts with uh their found family and they all had a sort of big falling out. Um they all used to run a restaurant called Dose of Divas and it's about sort of similar themes of Thirsty um turn-based combat and battles and uh battle systems. Also the the part of this is different in in this case one of the sisters is dying. So it's like we try to really think about sort of how how do you deal with someone that's going through um through you know through loss and and and health issues and and dying which is something simil you know something that I'm kind of dealing with recently and you know kind of exploring these. So when we ever deal with something like

this death or illness we all you know we our approach is always like can we relate to it personally? can we do it from a a place of understanding and so that feels a little more authentic and it's not like we're trying to just make it to um you know just for gameplay but that's sort of what we're dealing with now. I'm not sure we're successful yet but um we're going through it. But that's project DOSA and thank you. [Applause] Thank you. Our next speaker uh is design director at Crystal Dynamics, but came up through the ranks of technical design on games like Red Dead Redemption to Tomb Raider to the Avengers. And so she loves working with game design teams, probably because designers are so incredibly willing to agree on things and it's always super easy. I give you Alicia. [Applause] I'm just going to set up my timer as

well. [Music] Sorry about the noise. [Music] All right, cool. We good? We're good. Um, all right. So, thou though I'm now contributing at Crystal Dynamics uh as a design director. Um, I've spent 14 years of my career working as a technical design individual contributor contributor and lead on large AAA projects. So today for my uncommon technique, I'd like to pass on three lessons to my fellow technical designers or those who work with technical designers uh about balancing a need for technical order with an acceptance for creative chaos. Or in other words, how to learn to stop worrying and love the one-off. Before we get into the meat of this talk, I want to make sure that we're aligned on the definition of technical design, as this is something I've seen vary from studio to studio. For today's purposes, I'm speaking to technical design as the following. a subdiscipline or specialization of design that is often a hybridization of engineering and game design. A type of

designer that often serves as a liaison between engineering and design, improving communication between the two disciplines. And lastly, designers that are advocates for both their fellow content designers and the fast creation of stable, compelling content. As technical designers sometimes sit in a nebulous space between design and engineering, it can be they have to oscillate between uh decisions that favor the on-screen experience versus uh the extensibility of the underlying code. And that can be really tricky to decide which which of those to favor. So today's lessons are from mistakes I've made in my own career where I've been overzealous about my commitment to order. Um which is a mistake that I see uh technical designers make time and time again as they grow into their roles. I spent what I like to call my gamedev formative years uh at Rockstar Games working on Red Dead Redemption and Max Pain 3. And thank you to my Rockstar people who showed up today. I'm very splattered. Thank you. On pain, I learned from this mistake um that assuming that perfect game gameplay scripts are better scripts. Pain was a collaboration between three rockstar

studios, uh Vancouver, New England, and Toronto. And I was helping out the Vancouver studio. Around alpha, the three studios started swapping ownership of levels to increase velocity. Um, and each studio used but each studio used its own wildly different scripting style, which put a massive cognitive load on developers, um, which was increasing opportunity for bugs, and it was pretty troublesome. So, all of us scriptors banded together to propose a unification of our scripting standards, requiring a complete refactor of well over half of the game scripts. And as a young enthusiastic tech and tech technical designer, I was a passionate advocate for this effort because I was spending countless cycles studying unfamiliar scripts uh before making surgical fixes or adding new beats. And the thought of so much lost time was a source of anxiety for both me and my team. But we were ultimately overruled by our studio manager who argued that that was uh too much time for no on-screen benefit. And I was dismayed at this decision. I was very angry. Um, and

I was confused because I didn't I was confused about how he couldn't see how much time we were losing. Um, but ultimately he was 100% correct. Young in my career as I was, I really didn't see time as a factor in our decision and it was just too late. Um, remember we were in alpha um, and one-off scripting patterns were slowing us down certainly, but at the point of the project that we were in, it was important to focus on delivering the best experience we could with what we had. It just wasn't time to be chasing perfection. And that brings me to my first lesson. Players won't remember your beautiful orderly code. They'll remember how the game made them feel. So, when you have to make a choice between order and chaos, really consider the the phase your project is in and the cost versus value a decision uh a decision has that could destabilize the experience the player receives. I had the pleasure of helping Crystal Dynamics close out production on Terminator 2013, which was my first exposure to visual scripting. And remember, I had max pain on the brain. Um, I was at a new studio. I had a chance to champion order and structure

so that we didn't lose cycles late in production. Um, I had a chance to start a new and I could use structure to improve the creative process. Or so I thought. So, context. Just before you hit the final boss fight in Tomb R 2013, you fight this guy. And this guy's name is the Oni Stalker. And it's a really cool fight. It's actually considered to be um one of the cooler fights in the series by fans. And this is what he looks like under under the hood. Yeah, I'll just give it a minute. Um, yeah, I kept the screenshot because I used to send it to new technical designers at the studio as a plea. Um, please, please help us avoid this in the future. Um, and I'm sure most of you in this room are familiar with blueprints from hell. And most of you who are familiar with visual scripting languages know this is just one of the big pitfalls of trying to represent delicate timings, uh, delicate gameplay timings in what is essentially a flowchart. And you can even see here, um, our poor rendering just kind of render just kind of giving up. Um what we would do is we would perform the jiggle test um on these types of scripts just to discern what was create what was connected to

what. Um and these graphs were bug factories uh pulling on a single connection could cause a whole sequence to stop working for unknown reasons. And it took me a really long time to understand why and how these types of scripts uh kept happening because they did. Um we had them on Rise of the Tomb Raider and we had them on Shadow of the Tomb Raider as well. And more often than not, they popped up in highly scripted sequences with delicate timings like this on stalker. But it was because of exa exactly that. These highly scripted sequences with delicate timings took countless iterations to get just right. Designers were iterating at lightning speed to find the right balance of music, visuals, haptics, voice over, pacing, and challenge. Milliseconds mattered. Maximizing iteration cycles had far more value to the experience than adhering to rigorous scripting standards. And did I wish they used them? Yes, absolutely. But at the expense of the experience and iteration speed, no. So, this is a place where our tools kind of failed them because we did try in the wake of Tomb Raider 2013 to

encourage more rigorous scripting patterns, but the standards consistently clashed with iteration speed. And since blueprints from hell is still around, I would bet that none of us have fully cracked the code on perfect tooling just yet. And that's my second lesson. That lesson is that iteration is just messy. And no matter how good your tools are, um, or sorry, no, no matter how good your tools are. So, please find a way for it to be okay to be messy when you're working on your game. Um, make it okay to be experimental and wild in development. Embrace the chaos. Plan stabilization passes or codification passes or just let sleeping dogs lie. If the content is doing its job and it's a one-off, just let it be. My enthusiasm for finding ways to prevent the on stalker script from happening again gave me the reputation of being the scripting standards lady on the team. And while I was particularly interested sorry I was particularly interested in using content patterns to increase team velocity while reducing risk to uh that scripts like the on stalker clearly introduced and had to due to their fragility. And I wanted to

see if I could tame that chaos earlier in the project. Um and that's how I started my work on Marvel's Avengers. Very early in the project, I was paired with a level designer uh to work on some experimental multiplayer content. And this was a brilliant designer who had done some great work with us on Shadow of the Tomb Raider. He was and still is, I still work with him, uh very very experientially minded. And he wanted to sketch and iterate fast like the designer who created the on stalker. And I wanted to see if I could patternize things for him to make his life easier. In these early days, we were trying to find ways to make it easier to prototype multiplayer content in an engine that was still developing multiplayer content workflows. This is very difficult to do. And so to help this, I had created gameplay modules to chain meaningful gameplay chunks together. Um, it's a pretty classic idea. There's nothing revolutionary going on right here. Um, but at this time in development, a lot of the onus was on scripting uh to curate when data was synchronized over the network and how. And I wanted to take that burden off my creative partner. Ultimately though, all I did

was give him a a rigid framework to work within, and the blackbox concept made it far too hard for him to get those fine iteration cycles that I showed in the Oni example. Content patterns and modules are great for stability and scalability. I know he forgives me, don't worry. Um, but they're rarely good for sketching out an experience before you know what it is. A lot of technical designers learn this the hard way, and I am no exception. In my enthusiasm to make my partner's life easier, I had failed uh to make sure that I knew what we were trying to achieve. And this resulted in wasted time, stifled creativity, and frustration between us. We had big arguments. Not only had I skipped the critical step of asking what are we trying to achieve together, um I had also given him wholly the wrong set of tools to create with. Worse, we kept trying to use the bad patterns rather than taking a step back and going, "Well, hold on. Shouldn't we be trying something different?" And it showed in the content that we created back in those early days. It took too long to make. It didn't hit right. And we

struggled to get something really compelling on screen. We fought the patterns more than we used them. Content patterns absolutely rock when they're used properly. They can reduce risk when fixing bugs. They can speed up content creation velocity. And they can make it easier to onboard new developers when production is is in full swing. But it's important to resist the urge to lock down patterns too quickly. Doing so before your game really knows what it is risks fighting against them. Patterns are powerful, but they are most effective when they crystallize naturally as the game forms its identity. So, to quickly review my three lessons, lesson one, players won't remember your beautiful, orderly code. They'll remember how the game made them feel. Absolutely champion your project's technical needs, but stay aware of your game's experiential goals and your remaining timeline. Lesson two, iteration is messy and mess is part of the process of realizing great gameplay. Set aside time to be messy and set aside time to tidy up, but don't try to do both at the same time. And lesson three,

if your patterns make realizing the experience harder, they are just bad patterns. Remember to spend time collaborating with your partners on their problem and avoid imposing structure too soon if the problem itself isn't clear yet. So my fellow technical designers and friends of technical designers, stop worrying. Pay attention to the place you are in your project. Listen to your clients. Chaos and order will eb and flow. And that's game development. Thank you. Lovely. Our next speaker, oh my GDC voice catching up with me. Uh, our next speaker started off in Coinop with games like Sinister before going to Lucas Arts to work on games like Indiana Jones and the F of Atlantis and has more recently worked on things like VR and AR while at Google and has done extensive work in the gaming and health field. But one more shout out, I did want to uh shout out the series of talks that he did with Hal Barwood many years ago called the 400 project or four of the 400. They

talked about game design rules uh that Hal and Noah had cooked up out of the 400 that exist. So we've got a few more to go in this session. Uh but that was a great inspiration for this talk. I'm glad to finally have in this session Noah Noah Falsstein. [Applause] Okay. Thanks Richard. And uh this is actually a good segue. I hadn't uh seen Alicia's talk, but that um screen with the sort of spaghetti uh uh flowchart was was inspiring. Um so, um I'm going to try something a little bit different here. Uh so here we are. Uh this is my rule. Okay. Thank everybody. Yeah. [Applause]

You know, I I thought I was going to start a new uh record here for GDC talks. All right. Anyway, I forgot the second part of the rule. So, let me explain why these last three words are are so important here. So, a lot of people a lot smarter than I am have been championing championing simplicity. In fact, I heard two of these people uh that I'll be talking about quoted just in the last few days by other speakers. And they come from all sorts of different areas, science, art, writing, music, engineering, but all of them believe that simplicity is a key virtue in what they do. And you can get the exact quotes if you like uh quite easily through through Google on there. But my favorite three quotes are are these because they're in fact I think the simplest of the three. Uh the engineer that you see in the upper left, Kelly Johnson, is the one who came up with keep it simple stupid. And of course uh the acronym is even simpler than that. Uh Mi Vandereo on the the

lower left was an architect who did a lot of those uh glass and steel skyscrapers and he came up with less is more which is wonderfully simple in itself. Uh and I think it's probably quoted more than any of these others that I've seen. But my favorite quote is one that's at least attributed to Einstein that everything should be as simple as possible but no simpler. And that last clause is really critical because it implies an algorithm we can apply to game design. And if you just go for simplicity alone, you end up with my initial, you know, recordinning talk here. Uh you don't learn how to simplify or when you've gone too far in simplification. So before I I learned this, I had to, of course, make the kinds of mistakes that one does that uh make you realize what's necessary. And I worked on this arcade game, Sinar. Uh it came out way back in ' 83. Uh this is, by the way, my 37th uh GDC. Um and uh I was a project leader

and co-designer, but I also did a lot of the coding specifically for the AI. And this is a one mehz processor. We had a bunch of enemies moving around of different types with different missions. Uh, a big guy called the Sinister came at you. These little crystals we had to keep track of and shots being fired and very complicated, very elegant, lots of really complicated stuff happened very simply uh, inside the code, but it took a long time to write that code. And like Alicia was mentioning, if you're not really affecting the player's emotional state, you may be wasting your time. who certainly spent a lot of time that just wasn't ever seen by the player there. And from then on, I always looked for ways to simplify things. And Einstein's quote gave me a really uh what I think is the best and and simplest approach to simplifying. So he says, "It's not enough to simplify. At some point, you simplify too much and it breaks down." And I took

his advice by looking at game mechanics and their interactions and cutting them back over time. And then you do that and eventually the game you simplify it so much that something doesn't work anymore in the game. And at that point you go and you add in whatever it was that you just took out and you're back at probably the the simplest uh level that you can get. So I applied this in the production of a game called Chaos Island. It was one of the Jurassic Park games. And this was a game where you're out uh fighting against dinosaurs. They're you're trying to collect the dinosaur eggs and there are hunters out to get you is based on the second Jurassic Park movie. And uh in order to make the AI for the dinosaurs, I and the hunters actually, I came up with a pretty simple method that involved uh just keeping track of the ranges that they could see things and the behaviors that they tended to do. And I c cut it

back and cut it back until it was really simple. And it got so simple it actually got boring, which is the real problem I think with uh being too simple. So I added in uh one of the last things I had taken out, which was a little bit of randomness. And that made a lot a lot of the uh players attribute random chance to actual intention or dinosaurs wild animal behavior. It actually worked really well and it's a lot simpler than doing something complicated. Uh I've learned that a simple sorry a similar uh process was used in making the rocket engines you see on on the right side that each one being simpler in design and actually being more effective. And their method uh to quote it specifically was delete any parter process that you can you may have to cut add them back later. In fact if you don't end up adding back at least 10% of them then you didn't delete enough. And I think that's that's good advice. Uh, I have to say one of the things I learned is that it's not just good game design, it's rocket science. But don't do this unless

you can afford to blow stuff up when you make mistakes, you know, and works with games and rocket science. Maybe not so much with a government, for example. So, when is I'm not being political, am I um when is simple not so simple? Uh so at at the 2002 GDC Scott Mloud and Will Wright had a presentation about Mloud's ideas in his book Understanding Comics. Uh anybody here present for that talk? Few of you. Okay, quite a few. And uh it was really interesting. One eye opening moment for me was when Scott showed this image that you see and I'm paraphrasing him here. He explained that having a near photorealistic image uh is hard for people to personally identify with because that looks like somebody else. So, it's good to simplify it, but if you go too far, you end up with basically an emoji that has no personality. So, there's often a spot somewhere in the middle. I think he mentioned the Simpsons as being really good at this where uh you're at the right uh place

there. So, you can use the Einstein rule here. And the main thing is, you know, I mentioned if it's too simple, it can get boring. The real problem is that even though simplicity is a great virtue, so is depth of play and variety and sometimes you oversimplify so you don't have those things. So finding ways to make a game simple to understand but deep and varied over time is challenging but it's not impossible. I only have time for for one of the the rules that uh one of the ways that one can do that. So I'll I'll focus on that and that's emergent complexity. Uh a Tetris is is a great classic example of a game that succeeded and it was elegantly simple. Uh it was a huge hit. But the question is, is it really too simple in that the only way you can make it harder is by increasing speed? Uh they tried a lot of successor versions. They tried, you know, two-player versions and a lot of complexities, but none of them ever exceeded the original game's popularity. By contrast, uh in the match three area, there was Bejeweled that did a really

nice elegant job, but also didn't have a lot of depth and a lot of repeat play. And then we got to uh Candy Crush Saga and they hit a a a winning formula of a very simple match three game. But the complexity comes in by adding rules over time that build on the other rules and create a much more complex and rich set of uh connections. It's a whole more than the sum of its parts. And that emergent complexity in fact is is defined as uh where complex behaviors and patterns arise spontaneously from the interaction of simple components resulting in a whole that's more than the sum of its parts. And two great examples of this of course that have entertained people literally for hundreds and even thousands of years in one case are uh chess and go that both have emergent complexity. They share that concept of really simple boards and simple rules, but they also share the quality of being multiplayer. And of course, in video games, that can

complicate development over a single player game, but we've all found that that's often much more popular partly because it means with human opponents, you have an almost infinite variety of strategies that come into play. Um, they also have uh emergent complexity and that these simple rules and boards have room for billions of different configurations. And uh I think particularly with Go, it's impressive how such a you know, two different types of uh counters in a a simple board like that has so much depth to it all and it's kept them popular for thousands of years. So to sum up here, you know, here's here's one algorithm that uses what uh Einstein said. It's certainly not the only way to do this simplification, but it's a good one of you find the fun, you keep improving it by adding some new features, maybe adding depth and variety there, but you simplify it back down until it breaks. And then you go back one step to just before it broke. And you repeat that over and over until you've got a perfect game or more likely you've run out of time and money and you have to ship it.

Uh, and emergent complexity is not the only way to get around this, but it's the best one I found. It's just really hard to uh top what has happened in a game like Go. I'll leave it at that. Thanks. Thank you everybody. Our next speaker Oh, there goes the voice again. Uh is CEO of Between which helps parents uh navigate the digital world and gets kids to develop good media habits. Uh she was head of interactive storytelling for a time at Netflix and wrote the book designing games for children. I give you Carla Engle. [Applause] All right. Hello my friends. Uh high five your neighbor. Let's wake up a little bit. Yeah. There we go. Right. It's also interesting right back there's a bunch of really grumpy people. So,

all right. So, hi, I'm Carla. We are going to talk about ruthlessly prioritizing your wildest imaginations. But first, let's take a little trip back. Anyone recognize this? How many people chose Sugar Puffs? Anyone remember her Frosties? Uh, so this is Black Mirror Bander Snatch. It launched uh six years ago now, which feels like forever, but before Netflix had games, we had interactive storytelling. And Bander Snatch was our first adult title that we launched. And uh you know we launched with I think on about thousand supported devices in 24 languages globally day and date. And it was pretty wild to watch the response of everyone. You know millions of people sat down and they were choosing Frosties or Sugar Puffs, Accept or Refuse Job, Kill Dad or Back Off. And we Yeah, spoiler sorry if you haven't watched it. You should have watched it by now though. So spoilers are fair. Um, we were nominated for BAFTAs, for Hugo Awards, it won Emmys. It sparked

internet debates over serial preferences. And yet, I took so much heat for this thing, especially from this community because people were frustrated. They wanted more. They wanted more choices, more endings, more freedom. Essentially, they wanted a video game on Netflix. And so, this tension is what we're going to talk about, though. Um, there we go. Um, sorry, paper. It's a weird technology to use. Um, so we're going to talk about this line between boundless creativity and practical constraints because what can really look like a limitation can actually be a catalyst for some of our most innovation innovative work. So I joined Netflix in 2014 and founded what became the interactive content initiative and eventually grew into the games initiative. And before we launched Bander Snatch, we'd actually launched a bunch of kids titles. And we had done countless experiments with these titles. Each really teaching us a lot of critical lessons about how we work within the constraints of the of the Netflix system. And what I learned from each and every single one of these, as well as from all the years of game development is really about how to frame

constraints not as barriers, but really about how we can use them as blueprints for prioritization and getting things into the hands of consumers because ultimately I really want to ship things. So, has anyone ever tried doing a here lies premortem? Yeah. So, if you a little bit I love this because it is such a great mental trick for shifting perceived constraints into something positive or way to work through it. So, because most of us naturally resist constraints, we push against them. We wish they didn't exist. But really, I want to flip that perspective entirely. And so, I love doing these here lies premortems. So you literally sit there if you really have a dramatic team dress all in black like throw a full eulogy for your project and you do a here lies our brilliant idea killed by and you start brainstorming. So it could be strangled by technical constraints. Maybe the budget got slashed, maybe nobody actually wanted it, right? But you work through these so that these annoying limitations

essentially become design considerations. And so you're visualizing failure by ignoring constraints and you're starting to design with them instead of against them. So first let's talk about Sesame Street. So in 2010, uh if you back remember the Nintendo Wii, there was all these adorable videos and stories of preschoolers playing Wii Sports. Um and so I was going back and like looking at old YouTube videos and everything. It's like absolutely such a delight to watch. And so Warner Brothers um hired me to do the Sesame Street Nintendo games. And it was like totally a dream come true to be able to work on this project until the constraints started to hit. So we start though by like we're going wild. We're brainstorming like oh my gosh we can do like we can do leapfrog. We can do jumping jacks. We can run in circles. We can play Elmo says, right? We're having just crazy ideas of all of these things that we can do with this Wii remote. And then we start doing a here lies premortem. And it's like well here lies our brilliant Sesame Street game killed by weotes flying into the TVs. kids

getting confused and we had to ship it on the DS as well, right? Yeah, I loved getting that news. So, we had four major constraints that we had to work through. Children had to hold the Wiibo in both hands horizontally, right? So, all of a sudden, you lose a bunch of great interactions. Every game had to work on both the Wii and the DS. And then toddlers, okay, we're talking two-year-olds, needed to understand how to play without adult intervention. And we had a tight deadline and a budget. So things were a little rough. So our creative challenge became not what's the coolest game we can make, but what's the best game that we can make within these boundaries. So we had to make some really tough choices. Uh, Leaprog, my absolute favorite, totally thrown out the window because it was boring as all get out on the DS and also it had safety concerns that there's actually some like very real risks of kid playing kids playing Leaprog. So keep that in mind if

you got the little ones running around. But what we ultimately built was so much stronger, sharper, and actually playable. So we ended up with these 20 mini games, including a very bizarre horse brushing teeth game. Yeah, I mean, how many people get to have that on their portfolio? But it had these 20 great mini games that kids could actually play on their own. So parents could go make dinner or do whatever. And it was something that parents really loved. And so the magic wasn't in keeping every idea. It was really in knowing which ones we needed to fight for and which ones to let go of. The constraints gave us guard rails and allowed us to really make these ruthless decisions about what would play best. So we carried these over. You know, this is something that's continued to really sit with me over the years as I design. And so as we moved into interactive storytelling and these are a bunch of the titles that we actually launched, we had to really think about how do we build these? And so if you go back to, you know, it's roughly 2015 when we started working on this concept and were a bunch of gamers who were working at Netflix thinking about like what if we

made an openw world TV show like what would that look like? What if viewers could control the characters like a video game? But just like Sesame Street, our boundless creativity needed to meet reality. We faced a really unique set of constraints working within the Netflix environment that no other medium had really encountered at this kind of scale. So we started working through the constraints. So our here lies exercise with this, you know, started to really be about here lies Netflix interactive killed by buffering wheels, incompatible devices, and confused audiences who didn't even know they could make a choice. So we really ended up with three critical constraints. One around device reach. So, like I said, we launched on about a thousand supported devices, which meant it had to work with a remote control where you're like up, down, and okay button, as well as on a mobile device, as well as with a mouse. So, how we had to think about how you could make a good experience suddenly like the Wii and DS didn't seem that crazy. This was like a much more challenging environment and we needed those choices to be seamless, right? because we were navigating, you know, so you approach

this moment where it's like kill dad or back off and all of a sudden the Netflix spinner shows up. Like that would be just awful. You know, you're in the height of the moment. And so we needed these to be as seamless as possible. And then we really needed users to engage because most people their experience with Netflix is press play, drop the remote, and you snuggle back into the couch. But we needed them to hang on to that remote. So all of a sudden, this became framing for all of our conversations as we're working through these scripts. So as we started working on our first title is actually put some book with dreamworks and we start working through this and really thinking about how do we how do we make this the best experience possible and the nice thing about working with animation and with kids content especially with a show that already existed is that we had about five seasons of the existing show that we could play with. So we started prototyping up a storm. We literally had walls covered in sticky notes as we were building out stories to kind of test concepts. We repurposed footage. We literally took episodes of the show,

sliced them together, recorded new voiceovers, and built prototypes that we could go out and research with kids and their parents to give us the foundation of how would people engage. And then we ran tons of technical tests behind the scenes because again, we really needed to understand how do we push this to be as seamless as possible. So all of those things together became our template. Now, by the time we started working on Ber Snatch, which was around the time that that Puss and Book launched, we had a lot of good sense of things. We weren't just experimenting anymore. The formula was starting to become clear, but also at the same time, when you start working with this for adults in live action, it became really complicated. So, I also have a spaghetti drawing that was not a requirement in this, but you know, it's nice to to be able to be part of the crew here. And so, you know, when we started really like thinking about banner snatch and a here lies premortem for it, it was like here lies banner snatch killed by infinite possibilities, performance issues, and a tangled script that no one could actually follow. So, this made us to make make some really tough decisions. So, not every branching path

survived final edits. The script actually went through about a hundred revisions before we landed on what we actually ended up shipping. Um, it was funny because the script would actually break, which Charlie would often joke about was the only time he ever had a script that would literally just crash, which, you know, us as game designers like, "Yeah, that happens all the time." Um, and the UX had to guide people smoothly without breaking the storytelling because again, we didn't want to end up in that place where you're about to pick a tense moment. So, balancing that and shooting those choice points was really key for us. But we also knew that we were crafting within these constraints. We weren't creating Skyrim. We weren't creating Minecraft, right? we were creating something new, this hybrid of film and of interactivity for the Netflix platform. So that really all of those things together is what brings us back around to that tension of the unlimited creative possibilities and the practical constraints because really I think the trap is too many ideas survive too long. You know, we we get caught in this like creativity versus

constraints and it feels like a choice but how we bring them together is really like that's the goal of ruthless prioritization. You're not choosing constraints over the innovation. You're using the constraints to fuel more focused, more impactful ideas because really ultimately what what I care most about and I think most of us do is we want to ship products and get them into the hands of our users so that we can continue learning and continue building more things. So thanks. [Applause] All right. And our last speaker has led the design on everything from DSX to Dishonored. And I'm looking forward to his next immersive sin sim. An immersive sin. What's that? That sounds great. Uh he's warned me he may go on a little long. So let's get going with Harvey Smith. Uh thank you Richard for the opportunity and for the shout out to Laura Lynn who

was truly a brilliant lovely person. Uh I absolutely love GDC and I just wanted to say before I start even in the darkest times remember you your brilliant work you bring joy to millions of people and that's your purpose for being here. That's that's what brings us uh joy as game developers. So keep doing what you're doing. All right. Um, we're on Richard's slides. Um, okay. Yeah. So, this is a short simple talk about uh thoughtful interconnections between game systems, level design, and narrative. And it's how uh it's it's all about how you can support creative play on the part of the player, leading, I hope, to deep, memorable experiences. Yeah. So, I'm Harvey Smith. I'm best known for the DSX and Dishonored games. Um, I haven't been to 37 GDC's like Mr. Fstein. Wow. Uh, but I've been in games for 31 years now. And I just want to say

the high points in my career, uh, the games I've loved the most have all involved, uh, like deliberately trying to make decisionrich space for the player. So, the player is constantly making decisions, multiple decisions about multiple things all layered together so that they walk away with a strong sense of investment. I did that. You did something different. I did that. And it builds engagement. And in a nutshell, that's what the whole talk's about. If I can figure out this system. Um, all right. So, my personal influences are immersive sims, uh, hybrid of RPGs and shooters. Um, you know, my my heroes in game the game industry made games like System Shock or Thief, uh, but also more recently Stalker, games like that. It's it's the games like DSX or or or Dishonored. That's that's what I love. Uh, and D and D, of course, I've been playing D and D since the night of my 11th birthday, 1977. Um, and so my conclusions will be different from your con conclusions. If

you make beautiful puzzle games or uh very uh lineageoriented uh Japanese RPGs, you will come to different conclusions. We have limited time though, so let's just go. All right. So, this is part of a longer talk and I'm going to put it online. Uh if you look at Harvey 1966 on Blue Sky, you can find me and I'm going to post the rest of the talk there. But today I'm going to cover three of the points. Uh the core idea here is to layer your game uh your game space with decision-rich game design. Uh importantly, we want these techniques to be applied to thematically cured game elements. So everything feels narratively rich and like it goes together and the player is not making infinite decisions. They're making decisions within the space of what the narration kind of guides them toward. Not just player freedom, uh, and lots of player decision-m, but player freedom within a curated space. This is not an exhaustive list. Uh, today during this short 10-minute talk, we'll cover some of these. We'll fly through others. They'll be in the extended version. Uh,

and the expanded notes will be online. Um, in a nutshell, as with this Dishonored 2 GIF, um, it's one of my favorite games I've ever worked on. and I moved to Leon for four years to work with the team there at Arcane. Uh in ideally a game's level design space and its game systems will feature all the elements I'm talking about today almost all the time. Um you know the player's face with a locked door, gets distracted, wants to see what's scrolled on the wall, has to move a barrel, makes a sound, attracts a nearby enemy, just systems that cascade into one another. uh it asks a lot of the player and it's very chaotic, but if done well, it's very engaging because the player's constantly making their own decisions. Uh for the talk today, I'm going to use Pre Prey 2017. It's one of my favorite games of all time. It's practically the poster child for this kind of layered design approach. Uh it's a game by the late great Arcane Austin. Uh we got shut down last year and yet it's a game I did not work on. Uh which makes it a

pleasure for me to look at. like it's a game from the company and the sort of subg genre that I love that I that I wasn't a part of and I will get quotes from Raphael Co Antonio and Ricardo Bear the creative leads on the project and Susan Cath who's the producer uh they were all generous with their time so let's get going so from this list uh nonlinear explorable space um prey is full of interconnected circular space where you can often see different points of interest from where you're standing what is the impact act on gameplay. Uh this approach lets the player sort of read their immediate surroundings and pick the things they care about. It's not infinite directions, but it's a carefully curated and presented set of areas. Instead of run toward uh run forward toward the obstacle or prize, you have a deeper level engagement of engagement. I'm a big believer in this idea and it underpins everything I'm talking about. When the player makes decisions, they become more invested in your game. uh their commitment to the decisions

they make and the style of play it it becomes an expression of them. Uh in let's see I'm going to skip this slide. Uh at any given point above aboard Talis one the space station where prey takes place uh you can decide do I go open this locked door that I found I can see through the window something valuable. Do I secure the area first by putting up some security turrets that will deal with the incoming hostiles? Uh maybe I just try to reach something that looks very very hard to reach. It's up high or something. Every step of movement through the space uh a space like this becomes more meaningful because I can see multiple options. I have to decide where to go and what to act on which builds my investment. I begin to own the experience of the game. Uh so another point that we're not going to dive deep into, but it's finite resources. These things start to layer on each other. Uh there's nothing wrong with infinite ammo or recharging shields if that suits your creative vision. But in prey, the decision-making around how

to spend very finite resources has consequences. And the main point here is that it encourages measured creative thinking. I have this thing and I could use it for this or this. It has multiple meanings, multiple purposes. How am I going to use it today? Um, another core belief of mine is that anytime you can get the player switching from one pleasurable type of gameplay to another, the game feels deeper, less one note. Uh, resource management challenges and pleasures another part of the player brain. All right. So, another point in the list that we're going to talk a little bit about is uh reactive physics. Um, both incidental and player manipulated physics uh create gameplay opportunities all over the place. Physics interactions are some of the most dynamic elements in your game. In Prey, we're not just talking about crates and barrels and ragdolls. Uh, but we're also talking about hardening foam that can be used uh for navigation or climbing, defensive barriers, both erected by the player or

left behind by the game designer for the player to crash through. Um, we have enemies that bump into physics objects but also become physics objects. The mimics in the game, uh, they take when they're resting, they take the form of a coffee cup or a trash can or a chair. You never know in the environment what's going to hurt you or what is not going to hurt you. Um, it makes you wonder what's real and what's not real. And so these things moving around, colliding with one another, making noise, your actions doing that as well, it generates dynamic gameplay, emergent effects that uh weren't planned by anyone. Right? Wendy White was the engineer who dedicated years of her life to the glue gun. And here we see a player just making a new path. Uh they are spend they're meaningfully spending finite resources to manipulate physics. Um these elements in Prey continue to to layer. It's hard to talk about one thing without it spilling into something else. Here we're talking about physics. Uh but we're also talking about the earlier point about navigation through nonlinear

space. And we're also talking about finite resources and how you spend uh the the ammo for the glue gun. Again, minute minute-to-minute decisions that are required of the player that build on ownership and investment. The player can say, "I did that. Your solution was different than mine." And also in switching from one pleasurable type of problem solving to another, we provide a deeper uh play experience. So I go to coffee with Raph about once a week. Uh we worked together for a long time. I was at Arcane for 16 years. I've known him for longer than that. And on this topic, he said, "One of the things I love in our games is when people go, "Oh that worked." Uh to us, it's important to tell a story through the player's actions, not through cinematics. Uh, breaking the glass near the start of Prey was powerful because it happened through the player realization and action at the player's pace. And for that to work, you have to have an environment full of narrative rich gameplay interactions. And uh on this reactive physics topic, just to to close out, what we have here is the player with mimic powers has

become an apple rolling around, bumping into another apple, which may be an apple that you can pick up and eat uh as a again a finite resource in the game, or it may be a mimic pretending to be an apple that if you bump it the wrong way at some point, it's going to spring up and attack you. So, Prey has just like layered space with decision-m and things to play with uh as as you go through it. and you know curated uh talking about curating based on the the narrative uh you know it's a space station Talis one so grav lifts are kind of a thing that go with the territory and here the the player is using the grav lift uh weaponizing it to send somebody some send somebody up um and here again layering the systems somebody uh an enemy has been glued up and then uh the physics lift that the player had they're they're sending them up. So, okay, another another point, the fourth on the list is uh sensory based AI. Another very highly dynamic element in your game is analog sensory AI. It's not

just enemies that attack based on rules, but enemies that add depth to the experience. So, their ability to see, listen, and be distracted. And in the case of Prey, enemies like the mimics are tightly wound together with physics objects because they can become things in the world. Uh it's a bit of a Kim's game. What what you see here is it's, you know, you're watching it over and over, so it's obvious that one of the mimics is not attacking. They're deciding to become a chair. Uh, but you'd be surprised if you play Prey, which I'd highly recommend. Uh, the number of times you get into a fight, a bunch of crazy stuff happens, and then you stop and go, "Okay, the fight's over. Everybody's dead. Was that chair there before? Was that trash can there before?" And you start to go, "I guess it was." And then boom, it attacks you again, or whatever, right? or you run over and you hit a trash can because it was just an innocent trash can, but you thought it was a mimic, right? And so, you know, the AI and prey is just uh is really interesting in how all of these things um like play with play with you, play with each other, uh becoming the

spinning chair that has a little impulse on it and rolls away because they can become things. And it's a bit of a Kim's game like I said. Uh they engage the players ability, the players ability to see, listen, and get distracted. Uh Susan is the producer on Prey and she said, uh I will always remember the mimics living the uh arcane design philosophy of improvisation with their AI. When I saw the dev team surprised over and over by the mimics, I knew we had something special. Like Susan would talk about walking around as a producer and just watching over people's shoulder and seeing developers surprised over and over by what was happening in the world. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but in the case of Prey, something like a mine is better than a grenade because you can plant the mine and you see the mimic. If the mimic doesn't see you, it comes over to explore. What is that? It's literally reaching out to investigate this new object that's been added to the environment, which of course detonates it.

And so setting the trap, which can be set anywhere, and the mimic has to be coming by or whatever, it ends up with this like very dynamic situation that 99% of players wouldn't put a mine right there. They wouldn't have this experience, but this one player would. Uh, I'm going to gloss over this section. It's not one of the ones we go deep on. Tactically advantageous space. Um, again, a series of of decisions you're making that we as game developers are exploiting exploiting intuitively because at some level we're still kids playing hide-and-seek. And that is just modern game designer code for we evolved as tasty humans being hunted by hungry larger animals. And so looking at a space and going, where could I take cover? Where could I hide? Where could I get advantage on everything? Look, a really critical point here for level designers, step one is letting the player come into an area, feel relatively safe, and giving them a chance to read the environment, not just constant action. And so,

on this subject of tactically advantageous space, Prey uses very clear, consistent rules around the placement of objects. A lot of the things that you see here are not just art assets. They are an important part of the gameplay vocabulary. um aiding the game systems that are talking to the player. Fire jetting from a pipe can be a hazard or it can be exploited tactically uh by passing players. If there's a pipe that is got a jet of fire, okay, avoid that. But that same pipe can be used without the jet of fire. It's not ruptured yet. And it's never used as a fake object or whatever. It's always if you shoot that pipe, fire jets out, right? So very consistent, just like a rigorous approach to how those objects are used because you're communicating with the player, and that's part of this tactical space thing. Last point here, narrative is too large to cover in a few slides, but so are all these topics, and it's a 10-minute talk, so let's go. Um, it's a classic, but as a game developer, you engage players by letting them interpret a location. Uh,

you can react narratively to their choice choices, changing outcomes. Um, see Dishonored. Also, uh, the narrative elements that you're including in the game help curate the game. They align the player's problem solving options and decisions with the game's themes. You are making choices as a narrative designer that help the player see what choices they can make, to see the narrative possibility space, to understand what the game is about and where its soul resides. On Talis One, uh, somebody has taken the glue cannon, some designer, and built a snowman. and the player comes around the corner and they immediately intuit it what's going on because this is halfway through the game, right? Uh they see, oh, one of the crew members uh made a snowman out of the foam. Um you're enabling players to glean and puzzle over details from the environment. Uh which enhances their engagement because they're actively involved in the problem solving. When I prompted Ricardo about this and he said, "Everything around you has been considered so that it has purpose and a reason for being there. It's specific, not generic." uh from broad design stuff

like how do they recycle food and water here to local details like why is the furniture in disarray in this room as an exercise our level design team answers the question what were the people in this space doing in the last hour of their lives and then we populate the space from there to support that story have a couple more slides and then I think I'm done um this is about environmental in in inference uh what were the people like living there did they play role playing games on company time. Importantly, was it 5e or uh OSR first edition? And the props in Prey are constantly reinforcing the game's themes, subject matter and themes. Technology at the cost of humanity, invasive dark science, technocratic control, how people find relief from all this oppression. Uh identity, what is something and what is not? Empathy, who has it, and is it even valued? These are the themes of prey. I might have gone over a little bit. I'm sorry about that. This is not an exhaustive list. Just to be clear, this is not a kitchen sink approach where you throw everything at everything. It's

about making sure your space invites creative expressive thinking um and the problem solving problem solving that arises from having objects and spaces that have multiple harmonious uses or meaning. The core idea is to let the player read, understand, and interact with the things in this list. Importantly, they relate to curated game elements. Not just player freedom, but player freedom within a curated space. Last slide. Um, all video games touch on some or all of these feelings. We should take a very deliberate approach here, thinking about our use and arrangement of these layered design elements and the significance they have in working together. Uh, this is a way to make a space that feels deep and rich and begs for player pace exploration and toy- like exploration. And that's it. Thank you very much. Thanks everybody for coming to Rules of Game for 20. What the hell? 2025. That's

it. And uh no matter what's going on in the world, keep designing games. Thank you. [Music]