Untangling Experiments in Split-Mind Design: A Soft Body Postmortem

[Music] alright hey everybody thank you very much for coming out today my name is Zeke Brandt and I developed soft body by myself over the course of about two and a half years so I'm gonna be doing a post-mortem today about some of its split mind design principles that I implemented into the game so the game just came out last May on PlayStation 4 and on PC so I'm sure there's a few people in the audience who haven't had a chance to play it or don't really know that much about the game so I just want to give everybody a sense of what the game looks like so I'm gonna play a short gameplay trailer and then we'll go straight to the straight straight to the top [Music]

[Music] [Music] okay so soft body is this kind of chilled out but very difficult action game in which you control two beautiful gooey snakes at the same time so it's has it's heavily influenced by a lot of

action games especially like shmups and twin-stick shooters but I try to introduce a number of mechanics that are a little bit unique to action game stuff like painting the world with your body as opposed to shooting and there's also a lot of level variations so there being as well as being like bullet hell levels with like tons of layers to paint and navigate through there's also these sort of ethereal contemplative levels that have a slower vibe to them as well but soft body but the thing I'm most interested in in the game and the thing I'm probably most proud of is the split mind design mechanics that I ended up implementing it to the game in other words like controlling two snakes at the same time so when people first do this it seems like it's something that's mentally impossible it feels like your brain is trying to actively resist doing the thing that you want to do and what the game wants you to do so it's it's just kind of a very challenging task so I always felt this mechanic was

interesting but it actually took me a long time before I was able to wholeheartedly introduce it into the game so even after I played a great game like brothers a tale or two sons which I think did an amazing job pushing this controlling two things at the same time mechanic I was still at a I was still a bit at a loss of how I could make it work for a soft body but after more than a year of gradual development you know I fully embraced the brain splitting challenge of controlling these two things at the same time and I ended up implementing a new mode into the game the aptly named hard mode hard game mode so this hard game mode has a very high skill ceiling and it requires an immense um of concentration from the player almost all the time they're playing but designing hard game really helped me refocus the games level design and fine-tune the game's difficulty curve and it really invigorated my work on the game including on the rest of the game including like the tutorial and the introductory mode so we're good today

we're gonna do this postmortem in three parts so the first part is soft game and soft game kind of covers the first year year and a half of development I'm gonna go into how my process kind of gradually generated you know these game elements that worked really well but actually didn't and they were kind of appealing the first time you're playing around with him but they didn't really work well together and so the game was kind of conceptually muddled in hard game I'm gonna delve into all the work that I had to do in order to sort of untangle that mess and refocus the game and kind of reap and kind of crystal-lined that his I design a bit and finally I'm gonna wrap it up with a split mind pedagogy which will try to get some useful takeaways from this kind of like otherwise esoteric idea alright so part one designing by tasting okay before I talk about soft body I want to show you a game I was working on right before so this is a screenshot from moneymoney it's a an ambitious narrative game it's got lots

of characters and it's got a whole bunch of dialogue and a bunch of meticulously crafted black and white pixel art you know and of course you can play as three different characters and you know it's just sprawling it's all over the place and when I finally sat down to try to like create something out of this content I mean the obvious thing happened is that it was just wasn't playable is nothing I was doing was actually useful for a game experience and so I would have to kind of rework it and I did this once and then the second time through I just decided I was going to take a break for a little while you know I wanted to I decided I was going to try to do something completely different and make a game that was just designed entirely around a core of interactivity where I'm at the very start like working with working with movement working with objectives in the game so basically an action game and this is what I came up with so in the first few days of prototyping soft

body I got this beautiful gooey snake and I don't know I just immediately kind of liked it it's very simple and it felt really good to move around and actually it's this is what it is it's just a bunch of circles being spawned and so you get a circle that like spawns every frame and then that circle the circles radius will then grow for 10 frames and then the circles radius will start to shrink and then every frame there's about a 4% chance for the circle to start wobbling and this is what gives the snake it's kind of like gooey organic feeling the wobble so I like this for two reasons one it's like pretty and but also strange and lifelike and adorable but not cute on it so a visual thing but the main thing was it just was a joy to control the it was a joy to control the body especially with a controller in fact I would say that analog analog sticks really played a huge role in shaping soft bodies

development and I've always really really loved analog sticks I felt amazing like especially on the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox one these new ones this has such a smooth action like I feel like you can do almost anything on an analog stick and it feels good you can move it in a really fast circle or a slow circle around there like barrier you know I like the gentle resistance of the spring when you're like pushing in a direction yeah so I felt like I'd stumbled onto a great way of designing the core of the game I could just design the game around what felt good to do with a controller and so at first development was centered around a single question how can I make movement feel rewarding and great so of course the controls were the central part of this but I was trying to design obstacles and enemies that would encourage movement and center reinforce that and also give some personality to the game so from the shape of bullet patterns like having them as circles or semi circles so that people like would move in a circle as opposed to like in a straight line and

they're just pushing themselves in some certain direction to the sound when you paint walls - the way that I designed like certain enemies you know from from the beginning all these small refinements were meant to accentuate movement and so here's a clip right now if like an enemy I design in which yes it's completely designed so that yours always circling it and that's like the fun thing that I found that you could do but what I actually define is rewarding and great what does this actually mean to me so of course it's like you know there's the game's mechanics and there's rules so like there's stuff that's great when it's like oh it's it's not fussy when you paint a wall because they're like painting radius is really big yeah that's rewarding and great and others you know small stuff that are about the aesthetics and whatnot but really there was also this like emotional appeal that I was trying to go for so with the games like corrupt and Fez I felt like there was something that was much more compelling than just like the mechanics

in place like Fez for instance but whenever I see a screenshot I kind of have this feeling you know it kind of evokes this musical memory like this time I spent with a game and I don't know it's kind of like hearing an old song or remembering where you were at the time and I think Fez does that really really really well on the other hand like something like ripped has this really strange mood and it's about puzzles but even before you're even before you've solved a puzzle even before you've like gotten to the like the real gist of the game it's still compelling still you still want to keep playing it not just because it like feels good to move around so it was important to me that the game wasn't just some design fetishy achievement and elegance but that it would have some sort of emotional energy as well especially since I was like really searching to find like energy to keep prototyping after this awful moneymoney experience so it is kind of strange to me those I was thinking about this when I was putting the talk together it's like I talk so much about like making

the game feel great and like building it around these this you know control is really simple concept it sounds so elegant it sounds so like minimalist but you know with all this energy spent on the controls and the tight movement and the fluid feelings and stuff so why would I choose to pursue this really intense challenge of controlling two things at the same time it's something that seems to be completely in the opposite of a kind of a chilled out experience and I don't know if I have the greatest answer but you know I was trying to make stuff but I wasn't trying to over without overthinking it you know part of staying in this great creative mind space was the possibility of having some kind of like wishful thinking and wishful features you know I had to kind of convince myself that even if I was obvious if even if a feature was obviously out of place if I felt strongly enough about it I I thought that I would be able through some sort of gradual unconscious and conscious explorations I would be able to find a way to make it work and so instead of

going through a big planning process I decided to continue prototyping in this kind of exploratory sense you know it's I guess prototyping built on ignorant and energy with a goal but no real plan how to get there essentially I was trying to make it development was a bit wishful in general and this is here I've got the wishful features idea all all planned out here so this is how it because there's a number of these things in it I'm not going to go over everything like all of the failed problems with like adding in a narrative or trying to do co-op mode so those were with wishful features but some of them really did work so you introduced this like promising feature if it isn't great you leave it in any way you don't like it's if it works then it's like yeah great I'm the best in the world if it doesn't work these we no sweat we'll see what happens it's kind of like leaving a bug in your game I said salsa Sol ski is everything he did

a talk once about like how he just likes to leave bugs all over his game because it's just like he find some inspiration they'll give him a good idea and it's I don't know I've kind of resonated with me so this was my way of doing it I guess but I'll leave in these big features that didn't make any sense and then you know just hope for epiphany you know so back to controlling two things at the same time we haven't talked about that in a little while so I was starting to build a game out I had this thing where you could paint walls it looks nice in it was very important to me that it wasn't fussy or frustrating like that painting radius is quite big so you didn't have to get too close to the wall and yeah and then you had this slight kind of mechanic where you're pushing a ball along a rail and this is sort of where the two bodies stuff started to come together so I had a couple of mechanics so I had the ball I had the painting and then I have finally this

thing where you actually just detached so I actually I've relegated the like the second body as just a kind of a powerup and I wasn't really you know I wasn't really doubling down on this idea of controlling two things at the same time I hadn't really pushed it too far because every time I try to do it it just felt like awkward and you know the one body would get on the other other side of the screen from this one so like suddenly I get confused in my brain doesn't like it and so these were problems I had and I just wasn't I guess I wasn't hard-headed enough to want to just sit down and and try to figure out what the real problem was and so we have these the three mechanics we paint push and pop and at the moment you know we get controlling two things at the same time not all the time but it's working it's kind of working with paint a level that level changes oh now that now we

can get the power up and kill the enemy because that's what the powerup allows you to do and I don't know it just wasn't really a lot of people when they played around with it if they I wasn't pushing them towards it so why is this in the game why is this in the game and it's kind of what I got over and over for the first year of development but being what I was but I did really enjoy doing it was something I was slowly getting better at and gradually like finding my way to figuring that it was a good thing but I just hadn't made a big step mechanically to like introduce it so controlling two things two things at the same time but not quite all the time so now we're gonna go into part two so about 15 months into development you know I had these great mechanics you know could paint stuff you could pop stuff you could push stuff in the rail and there was a whole lot of enemies that but a lot of this stuff didn't feel good it was like there were some fun levels but

the whole the whole of the game wasn't coherent it wasn't well organized and it was maybe good enough for me to feel okay about the first twenty or thirty minutes about the game but the late game was repetitious I was using the same I was using the same like turrets with the same bullet patterns just more of them and I was using you know more rails and so it just began to felt like a just longer levels of the first 15 levels so but instead of like doubling down and working on better levels and working on more mechanics and really trying to figure this out I've gotten in this bad place where I was still doing these kind of wishful features which had really served me well I thought at the beginning not with this part but with other parts and I would I would started making these kind of like narrative parts that really didn't further the game they weren't getting to what was gonna finish it you know during the early developments my my during early

development my ideas about leaving stuff in the game to see if it gets better was starting to feel uninspired and I started working on other stuff other than like soft bodies main levels and you know trying stuff out like a co-op mode which I knew immediately it didn't work but I knew it and I knew it wouldn't work without more work and but at least it was closer to the game itself I guess there was all this muck that I was like kind of walking through and I was just like way behind on designing the levels and all the work I was doing was just a sort of this short-term distraction you know like some sort of a plot twist yeah suddenly you're a worm inside someone's brain I mean it was kind of cool but it it wasn't actually anything and so you know I ended up where I am now it's just like what am i doing what I'm just not I don't have the right way of going about this right now and just playing around and suddenly you know I mean this co-op mode I mean is

good idea it's a weird idea right you know you're playing co-op mode but you're only controlling one snake and you're playing it with your brother or something and he likes it you kind of like it well you know you keep doing that we keep we kept sitting with the co-op mode and playing through it until I actually did have one great epiphany was that if I played co-op mode I could actually just play it by myself and this was so much better than trying to design something where we had to try to communicate and trying to design all these other features you know like if and when I first do it first did it it was just the oddest experience I could feel like physically feel part of my brain kind of rewiring it am i rewiring itself and so I finally got sick of exploration and one day I just sat down I had this co-op mode and I was like okay I'm gonna start outlining the game's challenges I'm gonna start to figure out like what I can do to like make what what is actually going on with

controlling two things at the same time that is really really difficult and so we have hard game mode oh wait the slides out of place okay so the challenges as they were outlined is we have using two snakes at the same time so this would be something like this mode here apologize okay so this is someone trying to play through it and notice they're not moving them really at the same time so one just kind of hides and the other one does all its obstacles and then when this gets done Heat they're gonna move only when they get right close to each other again and then that one will hide and then it will go do you think so there was all these problems with trying to implement this kind of like co-op mode already on top of the single-player mode because people just wanted to make it easier than they wanted to make it easier there was nothing pushing them to actually approach these like incredibly intense challenges and so I started outlining

what these challenges were theirs using two snakes at the same time like just not hiding something or movement at the same time any any sort of thing that way crossing the snakes this is a big one actually so you're controlling everyone's trying to keep the snake that they control with a left analog stick on the left side of the screen and they're trying to keep the snake they control with the right analog stick on the right side of the screen and whenever they cross those over people just get all mixed up and they really have a hard time with it and they die immediately so I needed to figure out some way to introduce these challenges that where people could figure out how to do it and they weren't just constantly like into and in such a big environment where they could try to just cheese it you know and they would and then keeping distance from each other was also just another big problem and so I had to figure out ways how can I get people to use them at the same time how could I make them cross the snakes and how can I force them to stay away from each other and all the while making it kind of fun and

so these kind of like challenges actually started to become real mechanics I just started designing mechanics and obstacles around what was difficult in the game so in this particular one well first I'll soften hard game mode if either snake gets if either state gets killed it's game over so in the other mode it's like the the other snake if it gets hurt it just like has a cool-down period and then you can use it again but this one's really brutal so you're forcing people to always be complete like completely cognizant of what they're doing with both snakes and then you have this line going around that if they like touch it then one of the snakes pops so you're forcing them to move around in a circle and it's something that I just do it slow enough that that then it's not too hard and this was another one I put together for oh is that like starting sorry about that

okay and this was another way of like forcing people to keep their bodies like further apart so this was a myth this was a level they have to not touch that circle that's surrounding the left body and so it forces them to kind of be in keep in mind what where they are what the other body is doing and not try to do this thing where they're like moving in a path together because they're just pushing the control the like analog sticks in the same direction and so and then then this one is like a combination of those two so after I put these in the early part of the game then we have these parts where okay you just have to stay in these circles it'll rotate and you have to keep distance and this is usually the level that people start to really get upset with me is that gonna play and then as as you

gradually introduce these like levels to people and introduce like ways of approaching these challenges people get better at it and then you can start to do really really interesting stuff so I actually have the like snakes collaborate with each other so in this one like you have a snake two bullet dropping snakes that like only the blue body can get rid of the blue pellets but the red but the blue body sorry the blue pellets pop the red body it's a bit crazy and then they have this red snake chasing after the blue snake and so I think it's actually someone told me it's easier if I don't explain it I think that's true actually and then you can be just kind of like really mean oh never mind we're not good I don't think we have enough time for that one anyway so anyway this so defining these challenges in defining what was actually hard about the game was kind of a lifesaver for me you know I at first I just wanted to

make a game that felt and looked good and you know have some great movement but I mean they didn't last forever and I ended up making it more of a traditional action game that I originally planned and so here's a few things I think that like by putting in hard game how I was able to reshape the game here's a few lessons I learned throughout it so by specifically to find so specifically define the challenge as your game provides so I studied music composition for a long time well before I got into games and one of my compositions teachers had a really smart idea about why people get stuck in the middle of a and what I mean it's like you know you're writing a piano piece you're two minutes into it one minute into it you get to a part and you're like oh I just don't know what to do next and you try something it doesn't work and so what people usually do is they keep banging their head against the wall on these last three measures and they think oh if I just get these last three measures I can figure it out but her idea was like no people they're having this problem because they don't understand what they did in the first minute of the piece

they haven't either they haven't developed it long enough or they're not taking advantage of that but it's not something that is in those three or four measures I think this applies to game design too so but maybe in an opposite way so if you don't have a clear idea of what your players need to learn or are trying to learn then you'll probably get stuck so you need to have these kind of like the high skill ceiling like very very hard things to master figure it out pretty early in development I think that does help help things get along quite nicely for a soft body this was a big help so develop obstacles that engage with the most with those challenges in the most direct way possible so for instance you know you we don't like it when the snakes cross streams so we're just gonna put a big line and that's just going to directly force people to do that sort of thing I mean obviously you want to have some sort of like taste when you put it in there you don't want it just like it's it's all part of the design right you want it to be tasteful but I find that like doing this doing

this and having as a clear obstacle that you've planned out will help you when you need to develop further obstacles that you can go back to that obstacle and just kind of be like okay can I make a variation on this so it's not so brutal or if can I make it faster I can make it slower is that do anything different for the game and that challenge and then finally difficulty is pretty subjective but it's not a huge problem when it's easy for you to chip to adjust so if you have a game that's too difficult and this really helped me with like in the late game when I would the difficulty was still a bit high and I was trying to like tune the difficulty curve so that you know players who don't like necessarily love super difficult games would start to get into it so if you have this all figured out like as far as what the challenges are then it's really easy for you to like oh I can just take this turret and it just shoots half as fast or oh I can like like there's a obstacle that spins around and so is killing players what if

I just made it shorter and it's it's more useful for you to have that than just play testing I think play testing is a really good way to like get a grip of what's going on with people are playing your game and maybe is it's a nice like warning signal that you've done something to you've done something too crazy but I've but getting a handle on it yourself like just in this way is a little bit better alright well that's all the time I have for today so I just want to say thank you all for coming out [Applause] you