I quite liked it. Most refreshing is to see a game with 100% focus on storytelling and with no real padding. Problem is that you as a player is not involved in the story. Apart from some notes directly addressing you + some extra knowledge, the player's character has no part in the narrative.

György:
I would suggest playing it as it does enough clever stuff to make it worthwhile. If you are really interested in learning anything design-wise, watching an LP is far from optimal.

I am currently struggling a bit with the concept of failure. In a normal game failure is part of a gameplay mechanic, it is part of the loop that the game wants you to go through. For instance if a fall down a hole in Super Mario I have to restart further back and retry. The game is designed around this and it expects the player to fail sooner or later. When playing a Super Mario, I do not really mind failure as such, it is part of the experience to retry challenges and to become better at them. It is classical "theory of fun" stuff.

When we play a game that is not about mastery, as Michael alluded in the first post, we want to make sure that the player has a smooth experience as possible. Once we start using mastery loops all sort of problems pop up, that I am sure all of you are familiar with. The most important one is that it takes away focus from the narrative experience and the game's fiction gets viewed as systems.

However, there are instances when not having failure creates the opposite effect. In our new game, we will have dangerous elements that the player is supposed to fear and see as threats. That the player view them as threats is a core part of the experience and we build a lot from this*. So it is crucial that the player has these feelings. Now, it is pretty easy to build up a sense of threat without having a failure. Knowing that the threat is out there is enough and so forth. But it is not possible to sustain this state indefinitely, there comes a point when you need to show your cards. When this happens, you either have something or the player will call your bluff. For instance, in The Path, there is not really a fail state, BUT eventually the wolf will get you and your journey will be over. This is not really a normal fail state, but it is a sort of bottleneck or possibility collapse. I think The Path solves this very nicely, failure = end of this part of the game, and it works very well from the set up. (Sidenote: There is a lot of brilliant stuff in The Path, that I wished had gotten more attention, perhaps time for blog post on it )

This sort of collapse does not just happen when the player is out to "troll the designer", but it can happen even when the player is playing her role perfectly. Of course, we can do things to delay it (player is merely hurt by the threat, etc), but these are just stalling tactics. Sooner or later we need to own up to our claims.

How to solve this? Here is a just a quick list of thoughts:

*Just do it the gamey way and restart from checkpoint! Focus on making it unlikely this state occurs. But with enough threats the likelihood is pretty high of it happening.

*Do plot branching and make the death matter. This makes things seamless, but it is extremly hard especially if we have more dynamic situations where we are unsure of the possible states that can occur.

*End this scene, and continue to next. Only works in some cases (like The Path) and might destroy the narrative.

*Have some story related thing happen, eg inflicting pain on an NPC. This can be really hard to sustain though, and really just postpones the owning up part.

*Make failure compulsory. Sort of like how it works in the path, but feels like cop out. Problem sometimes is also that we want to avoid the failstate as much as possible.

*Threats are often best when the player has most of it in their minds.

*Remove the threat. This just is not possible all the time, sometimes the entire experience hangs on the player feeling threatened (as in our case)


How to solve? I dunno. I do not think there is one good solution to all this, but I at least want to get some better way of thinking about it.

*This is actually a new route we have taken very recently, but have to get in on that some other time.

Some interesting takeaways from my talk:

During QA time, the majority of interesting/relevant questions came from women, and men mostly asked questions that hinted at a lack of understanding.

During GDC EU this talk (or at least a similar version) got: 73/23/4/0 (excellent/good/poor/terrible)
Average for GDC EU is: 42/41/13/3

At GDC US I got: 52/33/14/0
Average for GDC US is: 55/38/6/1 (for design track only: 59/35/5/1)

And I think that my US one was better as I managed to round it all up better at the end (but might of course be wrong). So find this quite striking.

I should perhaps not be that surprised, as there was a general air of "what has he been smoking" during the applause. But still, it is BELOW average... And also important to remember that it was during the Experimental Games Showcase, so one would think that those attending would be really interested in the topic (or perhaps the long line for EGS was off putting?)

Not sure if this really mean anything, the us version of GDC has a quite different mix of people than the EU one. But still, felt I wanted to share

Live as in for free? I would love to see that talk.

Probably not free

And glad you liked the presenation script. Hopefully it goes live on the Vault so you can see me doing some "stunts" on stage

axcho:
Just gave it a go and it was super cute Great idea, and one which which really work well with simplistic mechanics. The only problem with keeping the illusion is that the time limit forces one to scrutinize the behaviors. I wonder if it would be be possible to change the game so that there was less of an competitive edge

Looking good! I really like the artstyle. Fun that there will be at least two Swedish myth games released this year (Year Walk being the other).

Curious to hear what notgamish elements you plan on adding. The point-n-click is a pretty stagnated genre since quite a while back, so interested to hear what new things you plan to bring to table.

Welcome!

Read all post already and it is great stuff.

Curious to know how you stumbled into this line of thinking.

I love reading this kind of stuff by people who want MORE than what is already there in games. It puts a nice form of pressure for me not to settle with less.

One thing I have been thinking about, and that might contribute to these kind of comments, is that games lack an "artsy" middle ground. Either you have these games that lack all intention of being art, or you have games like Bientôt l'été that are very "artsy" and meant for a narrow audience. This is true of just about any major artistic game recently released: Dear Esther, Proteus, Kentucky Road Zero, etc. It is sort of like you would only have Bruckheimer and Von Trier films to choose from. This makes the market very polarized and adds to the hostile atmosphere. It might have led to the belief in many that it is only possible to make in any of these extremes.

It is also interesting to theorize why this division has occurred. Could it point at some inherent property of the medium itself, that expression is hard unless in abstract form. The only thing close to a middle ground that I can think of are Heavy Rain and Walking Dead, which both have to give up a lot of the basic features of the game medium (both being more passive than active). Also the subject matters, while there are a bit of nice bits, are not really comparable to middle ground seen in other media.

Tried it out today. Only tried the intro story and one go at the mystery on. First impression is: shallow and slightly chaotic.

While it is well written and all, it just gets messy really really fast. The problem is that with all this complexity comes the annoyance when the game does not work as you wish it to, or lack the options you want to pursue. It is really cool that NPCs start speaking without you being around, and just making being able to create a story by dumping a few characters in a situation is awesome. The outcome does not feel very engaging to me though. It seems to confirm my own thinking that complexity just makes the overall narrative experience worse.

This game is designed to be played many times and even feature achievements for getting certain results in the story. Of course this would not be possible in a fixed narrative. So in order to really to get something from this system, you need to play multiple times. Problem is that when the individual rounds do not come off as very fun on their own, it is hard for me to play it more just to see the capabilities with the system.

I sort of think that the writing almost comes in the way. It would be more fun to have it more abstracted and just let it be a Victorian Social Life Simulator. That way my rounds would be simpler and it would be an outcome driven experience, instead of an experience that is mostly about reading.

As I said I have only played it once though, and probably need to give it a few more goes before getting a really clear picture. I do doubt the basic outline of the above will change. Having said that, since it is free I think everybody needs to give it a go.

Looks really interesting! Will give it a go over the weekend!

Interesting that it is very close to what Chris Crawford has been after for 20+ years, just simplified. And doing it simplified if the only way I think it will work.

Has anybody given it a go?

In many cases it I think it is a problem of depth vs breadth. The more you make sure that everybody feels comfortable in your work, the less you can really hone in on certain issues. For instance, if you have a piece of art that addresses a certain philosophy/theme/etc, then maintaining goodwill is very much depending on your audience. People have not heard of/experienced this philosophy/theme/etc before might have trouble grasping or agreeing with the basics, and you need to maintain a very casual level. But for someone into this area, the casual level is boring and shallow, and does not respect them. So I do not think it is really possible to make works of art that aim to reach everybody, without somehow loosing impact. This means that some works of art must be against the good will of most people, because it would be betraying your target audience otherwise.

This might be what you are after, but my own take on all this is to respect the time of your audience. This means that whatever I have in my game is something that I think will be a valuable addition to their lives. This is of course subjective, but I think this sort of thinking is lacking in the development of most games. Instead the mantra is to get as much as possible out of your concept. To stretch as much as is possible. This is very apparent in larger productions where the sense of the game by a product of great value trumps all else. But it is also very apparent in indie games, where you just try and make as many level as possibles. In many games, the levels are sort of like the tedious (and often educationally bad) problems you see in math books. Two pages of solving the exact same problem, over and over in different permutations. Many games are just this. It is just busy work. I think this is disrespecting the time of the audience. Jon Blow actually has a really good talk about this, where he compares this sort of design with people slowly swindling money from others, without them noticing.

I agree to a certain extent. As Michael says, it is not universal. For instance I agree that classical adventure games can be very annoying and test the patience of the player. This is  a big reason why I have often have more fun playing them  when I am using a walk-through, which is not really optimal. On the other hand, some people actually WANT their games like this. They want to get stuck and ponder, and do not mind doing grinding brute force puzzle solving. It is even so that NOT having this sort of playstyle would going against their goodwill. I do not feel this way, and if one looks at what games are popular, I guess most people do not.

Perhaps a better way to say it so do not misuse goodwill for your intended audience. This I agree to 100%.

Anybody else played this? I finished the last episode last night and I absolutely loved it!

In terms of mechanics and storytelling it is nothing new. Basically it is a mixture of Heavy Rain and a simplified adventure game. However, it uses these things really well, even amazingly well some times and really improve upon the games it draw inspiration from.

I would say the main three really great things are:
1) Choices are all about roleplaying and immersion. It is not about some sort of story-optimizing like you do in Mass Effect and it works great.
2) By using simply and focused input, you can create a really strong experience. Again it is not about winning or competition, it is all about making you part of the moment.
3) It is about people. The engagement does not come from killing zombies, solving puzzles, etc. It is all about your relationship with the other characters and about living through certain situations.

It is by no means perfect and there are some stuff I would really like to improve (the lack of interaction flow for one). But it does show that by just using the tools available, creating good interactive experiences is all about design and art, not tech.