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Episode 02: Lenophie (Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows)
283 Plays4 months ago
In this episode, hosts Alan and Syrenne are joined by Lenophie, the developer behind games like Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows. Topics include how Lenophie started making games, packing a cute game full of secrets, and "chaos vs structure" when designing games.
Please note that this episode contains spoilers for the game Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows.
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Transcript
Introduction to Draconeck and Friends Podcast
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to the Draconeck and Friends official podcast, where we peel back the curtain on puzzle games and the people who make them. I'm Saran, the producer at DracNeggitFriends, and I'm joined as always by Alan Hadelden, the head DracNeggit, DracNeggitFriends.
Meet Lenafi and Her Game Packerette
00:00:34
Speaker
Today we're joined by Lenafi, who you may know from her work on Packerette down the Bunburrows. Hello! How are you doing today? Perfect. Just got back home. this is Awesome! ah Can you introduce yourself? ah Kind of anything that I missed in the intro there? What you do, what you've worked on?
Lenafi's Diverse Role at Bunstack
00:00:56
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm Lenofi. I do a bunch lot of stuff. um Basically, you may know me for, as Siren said, for my work on Bunburrows, for which I did game design, codes, of shadow art, writing, marketing, and stuff. So we're a team of three people at Bunstack working on the game. And on my side, I also do programming lessons and some streaming in French. Awesome. ah So kind of to kick things off, what got you into game development in the first place?
From Engineering to Indie Game Development
00:01:28
Speaker
um So basically, I was in like generalist ah engineering school, and I was very like, I didn't like what we were promised to be, like in terms of like jobs and stuff, and positions, and I really wanted to like make stuff. And so I ended up like trying to learn game dev on my own on the side and etc and it ended up with me making some various prototypes and participating to game jams where I met the rest of the well the artist backret the backret the real one ah from bunst.
Transition to Full-time Indie Development
00:02:04
Speaker
And then we started working on Horry Bunnies back in 2019. I also joined a publishing company called Abiding Bridge, which I stayed there for three to four years, I think. And then I went fully indie last year when we released Packret Danza Bunburrows, which we had been working on on the side for two years. That's great that you've been able to go full time with it.
Bunstack's Unique Game Themes
00:02:30
Speaker
Yeah. And yeah, you mentioned horror bunnies. I guess it's like a fun thing about your team is you only work on games with bunnies in them. Is that right? Yeah, but because the thing is like we bonded over our love for bunnies and how we had like some like we wanted to bring some like edgier and darker themes to like bunny stuff because you know like just being weird and so that gave horribonies which is still in development and we decided to work on a smaller scoped project bun burrows after we made a successful entry for the Ludum Dare back in 2021. And here we are. Awesome. So do you want to talk a little bit about Horror Bunnies and what that game is like? Yeah.
Exploring 'Horror Bunnies' Game
00:03:17
Speaker
So that game is a, how'd say, it's been a long time since I last pitched the game. um So basically, it's a bunny breeding game, like think games like Tamagotchi or Nintendogs. But the twist is that you have to handle the genetics of your bunnies in order to have them fit the criteria for holders. Basically, like clients saying, oh, I want a pink bunny and you have to produce that pink bunny. So that implies either classic breeding or you can do some genetic manipulation. And so the game gets some darker twists as you delve into its depths. And it's a narrative-heavy game. And, yeah, it's been in the works for four years. Cool. And did you put it on hold for a bit while you were working on Pacoret down the Bamboros? Or were you working on them both at the same time? These were like, that development was Troubled Waters. And so we ended up making a smaller sculpt version that we released on itch.io. And we have plans, to like, come back to the game at some point to make the full version for Steam. But yeah, like, it's been more than a year since we last touched the game, basically.
Meta Design in Bunburrows
00:04:35
Speaker
So yeah, so you were working on Horror Bunnies, and then you you started working on Packaret. Were you particularly into puzzle games before you started working on packorette yeah susan yeah absolutely like i'm a big puzzle nerd but not in the sense that i immensely love like classic puzzles like i'm not a big on like crosswords or puzzles or even like basic soccer band like that's not my kind of stuff i'm more interested in like games that have some meta aspect to them and that's something that comes back a lot in bumbrose and so like games i i love in puzzle game in general are like fez tunic um baba is you and things like this the thing is i basically my love of puzzles comes from that place of i like the mechanics but if it's only about bringing mechanics and like level design to sublime them it's not really enough to get into them like what i love the most in puzzle games like finding out about its secrets and like the secret structures that like orchestrate all of the game like finding out about the environmental puzzles in the witness or finding about the golden cross and tunic and stuff like this um it was that kind of feeling that i aimed to um achieve uh with bun burrows like basically you have your classic puzzle experience with puzzles and mechanics and variation of all of that and then you get that it's not all of the game has to offer. And I realized that, and the meta twist in Bond Bros is that everything is interconnected. And it's my own way of going meta in puzzle games, like subverting the expectation of like individual levels and like have them actually connected to one another and then it's about finding ways to like provide new ways to interconnect levels like when you start playing the game as normal player you just go like from top to bottom but burrow to burrow and then you realize that there are way many more ways to navigate the world and that's because like basic puzzles have this epiphany about like you get your small amount of epiphany per level and what I aim because what I love the most in puzzle games are like the large epiphanies that get me to revisit all of the game and so I aim to put as many like big epiphany moments in the games as possible.
Origins of Bunburrows' Meta Twist
00:07:05
Speaker
So was that part of the design of like, was that meta stuff in the game there from pretty much the beginning of the project? Yeah. In the game jam version, which we made in three days, we already had like, I think, yeah, we already have like two of the mechanics, like without delving too much intoory, we did have the bunny stacking, and we did have some traversal mechanics. So, yeah, it was, like, from the start, it was there, and then it was only a matter of of scaling that up, because the Game Jam version only had one burrow, and I already had in mind what we could do with many more burrows adjacent to one another. Cool. How long did it take you to... I mean, outside of those first mechanics in the first version, like how long did it take to iterate on that? Not just to make the that stuff feel right, but also for you to feel satisfied with like how it interacts with the rest of the game.
Game Design Process and Feedback
00:08:07
Speaker
That may sound uncommon, but I didn't really iterate on the design. like We did cut and kill features, but we didn't like really have to remold some of them. like Back in the jump version, I already had plans for the pickaxe, which wasn't there and how it would be used to like navigate uh in the meta space and it just worked like that that sucks to say that but in our case ah most of the feedback we got when we did beta testing and what we had to iterate over was more about the player controller and like bringing like the undo redo systems uh bringing um uh input buffering and stuff but in terms of core mechanics and core levels we didn't have many big changes to do and iterate over yeah and i feel like there's an interesting thing with your game where initially it feels very, very approachable and fun and cozy.
Player Experience and Game Complexity
00:09:08
Speaker
And then as it goes on, you you throw in these extra mechanics and these twists and these extra things to think about. And it actually kind of exposing complexity and becomes quite overwhelming. Was that like an intentional? like because And it's also kind of mirrored in the in the themes and the framing of the game was that like an intentional journey you wanted people to have yeah like and that's the experience i aimed for on the steam demo as well because basically like on the steam demo you only have one burrow and you can reach the end of the demo levels as well in like 13 levels and what i aim for is that people within on on the base game or in the demo that they quickly get their first epiphany moment that tells them okay now the game is an open world and it's like i aimed for the same feeling i got when i played noita and i realized that the main shaft was only like a tenth of the game uh to say it's uh like it's even less than that but yeah in my case yeah to me that feeling of of providing something overwhelming is part of why the epi epiphany works like to me like it's also the epiphany i get when i play metroidvanias and like i get the power and which i didn't um foresee and i'm like oh i can use that in all of these rooms which i had not taken note of because i hadn't realized that i could do that and in our case yeah it's about crafting multiple instances of that feeling of getting overwhelmed by the possibilities that are opened over past levels it did get us some um negative feedback, but like very minor. like We did get like maybe five reviews, which said that they felt overwhelmed and that they couldn't focus on the game. But most players in the niche, ah which found Bunburrows, really enjoyed that aspect. like That gave them... like They already had the puzzles figured out, so adding an extra layer of planning and like not strategy but like of picking okay so i have to be um tidy about how i explore the world because once you realize that you can go everywhere you have to give your put yourself limits on what order you're going to be doing stuff and i get the feeling that people liked doing that yeah speaking personally yeah i definitely liked the honestly i like the fact that my focus of like my primary like type of puzzling kept evolving i'm going to tease my spouse a little bit and say that they ah said that, quote, this game is too smart for them. this this But they had a great time too. But like, they got to enjoy a lot of that like early content. And I enjoyed the early content, but I really got to dive in as it kept going as the mechanics kept changing. What I had in mind when making the progression was that casual players could ideally make all of the five boroughs without figuring out the beta gameplay, and it would be fine. In practice, most casual players get stuck on the third and fourth world. So that's something that I will fix in my next puzzle games, I think. But yeah yeah, to me it's more of I want casual players to feel that they missed something but it's not wrong it's not bad they can just finish the game and be done with it meanwhile more hardcore player will be like oh I get that like that's you're making me a promise like I can see that there is so much more to the game and it gives them the will to like figure out and look out for that kind of stuff and so yeah it's it's a balance to find between off-putting your casual players and like providing for your more hardcore players yeah and so yeah i feel like a lot of games like this with with hidden secrets have like a few different layers to them where they've got like the the approach layer and then the secrets locked
Designing Player Journeys
00:13:07
Speaker
behind that. And then you've got the hardest of the hardest, the 100% in the game. What's your take on how how the game is at that level of like, oh, well, I found all the secrets. I found found these mechanics. And now, yeah, I mean, i guess I guess what I'm asking is like like what's your take on how much the game expects people to 100 percent it like to me the ideal critical path for players is to do the three first worlds if they are casual just like they are on race to get to the fifth burrow and that's fine for more hardcore players i expect them to get stuck at the very end of the third world because so it's designed that way so i could tickle them into why can't i get that bunny because i get so many you can only get through meta gameplay and so more hardcore players would be like okay there is something special to do here there is a special mood it's it has its its own biome and And i it's obvious I can't get that bunny with the tools I have understood. And in most cases, for mid to hardcore players, they figure out that they can do stuff here. And so they learn about one of the first layers of meta. And that way, they can also get in their first baby bunnies if they haven't. And that will unlock the meta progression ah with Opheline on the the surface. And from then, you start getting more and more um objectives from her, like getting more and more baby bunnies. And that forces you to look further down into the meta gameplay so that you always know that there is much more to do and you don't have to stop with the promise of rewards and stuff. So yeah, to me, it was more figuring out these basic burrows, figuring out the first layer of meta mechanics after a third burrow for more hardcore players. And then to me, it's more, it's in the fucking around part of the meta gameplay where you realize how much deeper the meta goes and eventually people get into the hell levels and from there once you have entered the hell levels you are pretty much again on rails to like explore everything like it's hard you won't get all of the bunnies from the start but you can explore all of it and finally get a grasp of how big the game is. Yeah and i really think that the game does a great job at that and some of that balance looking back at the game because it's been a while now since you've released is there like a moment or a part of the game that you kind of wish had been done differently but like what's shipped is shipped or are you like just really happy with how the whole thing came together um i have two regrets uh the first one is i wanted it so that each world started with a new mechanic but in the end what i did is that i would have like two to three levels levels with the previous mechanics before introducing a new one because I had metagameplay working, which was great. The problem with Bunburrow is that once you have your levels put into the burrows and you start seeing the connections between them and you start reworking the levels around these interactions, it's hard to move them around. Like, for example, I think that the C2 level, like the second level of the middle borough is bad. Like it's a good level, it's a hard level, so it's a hard level, but it should have been elsewhere in the game. And it's a huge wall that casual players get. And I've seen players rage quit on that level. Meanwhile, the third level, like the level just after that, was a new mechanic with very easy levels. So I would have wanted it so I got tutorial levels at the very first of each world. that like That's a very like basic level design stuff. But I was hindered by the meta gameplay, which was already in place. And the second issue I had was that we had to cut stuff. As you may know, currently, if you do the 100%, which the game asks you to do, ah promising content, ah you actually get a message saying, oh, well, the extra ah late, late, late content isn't there yet. And back then, we put a message saying, oh, it's it will be there in a few weeks. It's been a year. and The thing is, like, we can't, we still can't work full time on the game. Like, that's why I still do, like, classes and streaming and stuff. um But it's in the works. But yeah, like, it's a huge part of the game. And it also adds a new layer of meta gameplay. And when when I designed the game that layer of meta was there in the design and so it felt ah wrong to cut it but in the end I'm like it will be a new a new beat for the game like once we release that I'm pretty sure like a lot of content creators streamers and a lot of the community will pick it up again so we also like but so basically like the plan is that we had three big updates planned ah the first one is out since uh february i think or january we have made some big progress on the second one which is a quality of life update basically we want as many people to get to the 100% as possible so they get to experience the end game to the true end game stuff so it's a lot of like hint systems and for either the bunnies of the baby bunnies rules recap etc like a rule book that you would see like in games like how to write and stuff that you can relearn easily what you have already learned through gameplay and then we have our third big massive update with what's even below the hell levels and that that introduce new mechanics new meta gameplay that will again force you to revisit all of the game so yeah oh pretty exciting and yeah obviously we like it's not a secret i won't say which platforms but it's obvious that we kind of want to bring bun burrows into um some other platforms and so we would like to match the release of that final update with a release for these platforms. Because like that would make a good like little bundle of like, okay, that's a huge game for its price. And you will get our previous community to push for it. Like, oh yeah, we played that and it's even better than before. So yeah, that's our our plans for the next months of Bundler. Yeah, that makes sense. I'd like to go back to her something you said just now, actually. So you were talking about um how having certain levels had interesting meta puzzles, like maybe in an ideal world, they should have been put later or rearranged, but you were attached to the meta puzzle. Did you, yeah, I don't know if I i'm putting words into your mouth but yeah like did you did you find you were getting attached to meta puzzles and like did you find that the shape of like oh this specific level and this specific level gives rise to you like this really interesting interaction that is only possible because of these two levels or do you think that if you had rearranged things you would have ended up with like different meta puzzles, but they might have ended up being kind of similar? Yeah, I like i know I'm a bit obsessive about the meta stuff, and so yeah, that was a hindrance. And like I should have moved to these levels, but it was too late in development, and I really liked these levels. it's hard to let go sometimes and I clearly didn't do it. People didn't hold it against me because the rest of the game was good enough. But yeah, I will definitely do it differently for in a new game. And like, yeah, in that case, I could have crafted... The thing is like, it's not as easy as moving a level around because it's always about the context of what levels are next to it and in my case that would have meant for some levels to make brand new levels around them for the meta stuff and making those levels in a way that they are also interesting independently so that was like against my then my not design philosophy but it was against my pipeline because basically what i do when i make levels for bumbrows is i have i don't have a spreadsheet like patrick trainell does or whatever like but like when i think about like what mechanics i match with on another and the like and so usually i have have what I call the level bag, which is basically like when I make a level and I don't know yet where I'm going to put it, it goes in the bag. And usually once I find a spot for a level, it's very hard for me to reconsider putting it elsewhere because usually I've made a decision already about how hard the level is and how it connects to the rest. And if I realize later that it wasn't as easy as I thought it was, that's a bit too late. Like that's something I have to rethink for my next puzzle games. But for Bunburrows, it's as it is. I won't change the levels. I won move them around it's it's fine got it how much were you designing the meta puzzles to be like self-contained versus how much were they meant to be like you have one meta puzzle which can break over a different meta puzzle which can like it it feels like this the for things to like go exponential. um In my case, I didn't think of any containment for the meta-gameplay. That was a bit of an oversight. ah But basically I was like, okay, there's a good opportunity to put a meta-puzzle there. like It works. And so I would end up putting it in the game without much thing like i would have some um some of the cascading effects in in mind like okay so if i put metastop there it will interact with the metastop from that other level next to it and so meaning that you can make an even bigger pile of bunnies and i was like that's fine because the game will be like the to me me, when I released a game, it is a property of the players, meaning that the metagame play is theirs. And so I was like, okay, so I know there's going to be 500 baby bunnies possible. If you find 2000, it's fine. and like I love the i love the idea that um even now, we aren't sure that people found like all of the baby bunnies because of the nature of the game. like We can never be sure that the theoretical maximum of bunnies was found because of the complexity of the game. like We think that we are fond of of them, but we can never be 100% sure. And I was fine with that, but there was one caveat that I didn't foresee which was that sometimes it implied redoing stuff multiple times basically there is a part of the game where you can do like a huge pile of bunnies like 14 or 15 I don't remember and the thing is the 13 last bunnies of the pile are the same. It's the same actions to get them. It's only a matter of which of the first bunnies you can send down the hole first. And so you can send all of them at the same time. You have to pick one of the bunnies to send down, meaning that you have to redo the same ah pass like four or five times to get like 15 piles in which only differ by one or two bunnies and that felt bad and even the biggest playthrough of the game which was made by allen's rock like highlights how annoying that is and a lot of players told us that yeah that wasn't very well designed and and i was like i didn't know you had to do this because like i had not designed that part of the meta leaking and that's also part because we we rushed a bit the play testing on the very final levels like i could have seen that coming had we released the game maybe one or two weeks later but it is like it is and i mean i'm fine with some part of the final part of game of the game being a bit grindy and to compensate that in the next update we're going to lower the number of bunnies because basically we learned that the game gets grindy when you get past the 400 mark so we're like okay we're going to for 400 or 450 instead of 500 so that we smooth a bit the curve for people who just want to see all of the game has to offer and not just get the completionist aspect right yeah that makes sense yeah this i guess this is what i was kind of getting into earlier when i was asking about 100% in the game so do you feel like in your mind 100% in the game is like getting to that message in hell or how much do you feel like the game is pushing the player to find every single possible baby bunny yeah to me basically like on my design sense the current end game is getting those three pairs and getting that message after the last update it, it will be also a very specific moment.
100% Completion Philosophy in Games
00:26:28
Speaker
Like the game will have a true ending like Baba Is You does. Like currently there's a ah sense of like missing ending because you don't get like a big cinematic. You don't get like a big special dialogue. You only get like a promise for more. And so, yeah, there will be like a singular particular moment, which would be extremely well hidden. So it will be like something very dumb to get, but it will be fun. But yeah, despite that, there will still be room for more than the 100% because I can't foresee everything. ah So that's left side for the players. Like for those so for which it matters, they will go look for it and there will be like praise for that. But the game will only acknowledge it. Well, you will get your counters counting up, but you won't get the in-game a reward of a cinematic, of a dialogue. Because again, just like in the base game, I can't foresee how much babies and bunnies people we get. And that's fine. To me, it's part of the design. It's part of letting go and let the players like appropriate um the work. Yeah, I think there's actually a really interesting distinction between the the design in your game and the design in Monsters Expedition. like In some ways, they're very similar. like they're both You're solving puzzles, and it's a nice linear progression. And then you start breaking things, and and then you start finding secrets and then you start finding the secrets and the secrets and I feel like we made very different decisions at one point which is like I was trying to sculpt it down into like oh let's let's try and prevent it getting out of hand let's try and highlight only the most interesting possible cases and you were going like oh no the chaos is the point the exponential the building on the building on building of is the point and yeah that makes a very different feelings of going through the end game content i think and the thing is it's still like a kind of controlled chaos because the thing is that I don't think it would have felt great in Monster Expedition to like make boats everywhere and just like enter levels from any possible point. In Bunburrow, the thing is like usually the starting point of the chaos is still like a carefully crafted interaction, which people realize as such. Like they will go like, oh, these two levels are connected in that very specific way, which allows me to do that very specific interaction and then once i've did that it's chaos and the other countermeasure i put in the game was counting for intended solves which were the home captures basically i think people okay you can wreck chaos uh in all of the game but at some point you still have to get serious and properly capture everybody. Yeah, no, that makes sense. I guess since we're talking about Monster's Expedition, is there anything you want to ask me or pick my brain about, about that game or any other? Hmm. So basically, yeah, about the meta and the chaos, like how did you you find your own balance? Like why did you decide against that chaos in most expeditions? So partly it was because I'm interested in content for content's sake. I didn't like the idea of asking people to do similar things repeatedly in order to break the game open. I wanted each meta puzzle to feel different and to be using things in a meaningfully different way rather than going like, oh, I've got this this grab bag of tricks I can apply and I'm going to have to just like choose a trick and like see that I can use it and then go somewhere else. I'm like, oh, I can use this other trick. I was more interested in like, oh, like these two or three levels, they are designed in such a way that there's an interesting puzzle there. And it's very hard to take logs out of the this area because the moment you can get logs out of this area, you kind of don't know where you're looking for the puzzles. And so I feel like designing it so that it's very hard to take logs out of the area where I'm intentionally asking you to solve a meta puzzle makes it so that you can reason more about how to solve the puzzle. And I guess in your case, you have a similar thing where that initial moment is like part of that designed solution of like, oh yeah, like I have these resources. I think there's something here, but what can it be? And like, it can only really involve these two levels. So what, how do these two levels interact with each other? But even after that point, I was like, oh, well, if you can break this puzzle and get this a log to one of three places and you can get it from one of those places to one of five places, then you either have to have like a lot of secrets or you have to have secrets which are kind of redundant with it oh well either way you have secrets which are kind of redundant with each other but you either have secrets which are there's a lot of them and you're just going through the motions some of the time or you only have a few places where you're trying to get to but you kind of have to exhaustively search through the entire world to figure out the actual way of getting there and there's a lot of dead ends that you're like oh well this is exciting I can get here and then I can get here and then oh no but now there's there's nothing I can do from here and that that felt like a kind of anticlimactic structure so I really wanted people to anytime they break something they can feel like they're making progress yes my case case, I I have have more of a sandbox approach, which which I'm like, okay, so it's the pleasure of figuring out that how much more the tools imply. Whereas in Monster Expedition, I get the feeling that when you figure out meta gameplay, it's already like accepted as the base pack of what we can do. like Once you realize you can make boats, well, you get levels making boats. It's not really like an encouragement of revisiting everything because like it's in the flow of the progression of the game. ah In my case, I think I like the sandbox approach because I think it's a way to tackle how rigid puzzle games are because like we're working like with these like tight tight grids and like systems that's and like hard walls that prevent player progression and in the case of Bunburrows you get these hard walls when you're a casual player but for a more advanced player they will only get like medium-sized walls and then once they get past the learning about the meta gameplay they can go basically everywhere and that prevents uh like myself i'm a good puzzle gamer but i've never finished babai zoo or monster expedition for that reason because like i'm just not good enough for the very very very late game levels and that prevents me from seeing everything, which I'm sure I would find levels which I could be able to make. And so I kind of like the structure where it's linear at first, and then it's chaos at the end for the hardcore players so that they can see all of the game as to offer. And also with the way that the Monsters expedition Exped late game like this the structure of everything uh try not to just spoil everything but uh the way that it is it also led to a lot of post-release adjustments yeah i figure yes both in terms of what we expected which was players were able to break things in a way that we did not expect slash soft lock themselves slash leave the world of the game entirely. oh Which was, those are always my favorites. But also um when we did a our major content update, the museum expansion update, we also used better in-game kind of language to showcase to players where we kind of are and are not expecting some of these big meta puzzles to start so that you can kind of look at the world map, see the patch of clouds that tells you there's a part of the world that you have not been yet. And then you go around the area and it'll kind of gesture at, this is where you should be looking. This is maybe a log that can go somewhere. And then through the next update with the hints update, we made that more transparent where you can toggle to get a hint about where to start. Where does the end state need to be. You can like kind of graduate ah through these different hints to try and get through so that more players can see some of that endgame meta content. A system which I totally stole for Bunburrows. Basically, like when I was thinking about how to provide hints for bun burrows, the most logical ones was to show the final position of the bunny. Because the thing is like in bun burrows, a lot of the difficulty comes from red herrings because yeah there is no moving parts except the bunny itself. The level most of the time stays as is. It's only a matter of which corner is the right one for the bunny, whether it is manufactured or whether it is there from the beginning. And so that means that you have to add noise on the rest of the level to make it look like it could be caught elsewhere, make it less obvious. But even if you knew where you have to put the bunny, it's still not obvious which was the path you have to take, the order of the operations. That I ended up making it so that the system in the next update is just showing the position and direction of the final step of the bunny. So yeah, thanks for the expedition. Alan, did you steal that from somewhere else? Is this just a chain of everyone taking from each other? Oh gosh. I don't remember if we stole that from anywhere. i If we did, then I have forgotten. Oh no. I i don't think so. I think it was just trying to figure out like ah what's the useful information here. Right, because we we knew we were going to do hints and then I think we are i don't think we stole from anywhere we definitely had a bunch of internal conversations kind of reverse engineering what would be helpful to players who were stuck early on in the main progression but also would be helpful to players who were stuck on meta puzzles yeah and and for for people listening, like currently, don't go copying that one because the best one we have is the one from kind of from Halls, like designing individual smaller levels for each single or level in the game to teach the levels mechanic without spoiling the actual level. It's so brilliant and it's maybe so time consuming to design but that's such a a fancy and amazing solution yes that feels like the utopian ideal yeah i mean i do actually think that that solution works perfectly for games like a can of wormholes and might work less well for games for like a monster's Expedition because actually in a Monsters Expedition, partly this is pacing, but some of the levels really just boil down to, oh, you got to use this trick. And you could have a hint level that's like, oh yeah, remember this trick. But the geometry of the level is such that the hint could be a combination of like, oh, what's the trick you need to use? And then where where do things need to end up after you've used that trick? I think there's something interesting, like Monsters Expedition does have like a little bit of redundancy in its puzzles, whereas Can of Wormholes is more like a game like Bonfire Peaks or something where but each level has a really unique crux moment. Absolutely. And then also you can be on an island and there are multiple puzzles to solve. The way we solve that with the hint system is that there's like a different language of hints for the meta puzzles. So the in-world hints for, hey, put this log here, are actually always just for the main progression. You need to look at it in a different place in the UI to find the hints of like, hey, look at these group of levels. You can do something here. Oh, I didn't know. That's clever. Yes. There's multiple types of hints. And then beyond that, we have always on show me the hint button and I'll tap it when I need it. Or don't surface a hint to me. And then also per platform, the default settings are different. Yeah, which I actually feel mixed about. a i I think like because we made it so that mobile hints are enabled by default and PC and consoles hints are disabled by default. ah the The hint buttons, not the hints themselves. Yes, on no platform is it defaulted to we're telling you the solution immediately. Yeah, but on PC, if you want a hint, you need to go into the settings, enable hints, and then go back to the puzzle you're stuck on. We did put a big dancing exclamation point guiding you to where the hints were we did but people don't navigate ui so i i like having reflected on it for a few years now i actually feel like no we should just defaulted it to on everywhere fair and maybe we would have if the game had launched with the hints yeah it's kind of an interesting thing patching them into an existing game in a lot of ways i do wish that they'd been there from the start but yes i think we would have been more open to enabling them by default if yes we if they'd been there by the start but yeah it feels like if you're adding them then like oh you don't want to change the experience for people too much.
Hint Systems and Player Experience
00:40:26
Speaker
Yeah, I do have the same um question. Like, in my case, I was wondering whether I should like toggle the hints from options or not. So yeah, avi I will give it much more thought now that you regret doing that. I don't regret it a lot, but I think there's a large group of people potentially playing on pc and consoles who would have appreciated playing with hints but would never go into the settings to find out that they're there yes the people that are and this was something we discussed at the time we just and we never we never felt great either way we just kind of made a decision as far as i remember but it is true that the players that are would be the most passionate about not using hints are also the same players that would be the most likely to navigate the settings menu yeah absolutely in my case the hint system I'm not sure yet for the base in system, but the hint system for the meta gameplay, it's much more in lore, which is like you toggle it by talking to Opheline, like to a machine next to her. So it's much more conveyed by like the story and like you don't have to pop up a menu, ah which is like not optimal for casual players. So I think like the best way to do that is to have an in-game and in-law toggle rather than a menu one. I don't know. Interesting. Yeah, a lot of different ways to think about that. Other than obviously working on your own games, you know you mentioned Can of Horm Holes, but what else have you been playing lately?
Lenafi's Gaming Interests and Social Media
00:42:02
Speaker
ah Let me pop up my Steam. I'm currently in a Toxic Fury visual novels rabbit hole because being overly lesbian is one of my passions. Jokes aside, I only started recently that rabbit hole. I also started playing some Uminiko. I'm finally catching up with with the Bible. um And other than than that recently played the DLC of London Ring as anyone does oh of course I have to talk about it a game of the year 1000 times resist I have to say it properly what an amazing effing game I oh my gosh. the Yeah. like I can't wait to see what they will cook next because that's like a contender for Game of the Decade for me. And the thing is, it's only the first game and I'm yes so impressed. What a tremendous... Yeah. Oh my gosh. I had the experience last year of playing that as an IGF judge and then having to be silent about it and what it's about for months and months and months. yeah And not getting to talk to people about it. Yeah, in my case, I had found the trailer for the game back when, before it was signed by fellow traveler, I think. And I was like, this is such a jam and it only has like 10k views on YouTube. And I was like, why are people sleeping on this? And I was so glad when I saw the booth at GDC. Like, I swear that I was crying in the line because like I was behind someone like who had been playing the game for like 10 minutes and I saw that they weren't enjoying it and I was like I want to be in your place so much like I've been waiting for that game so fucking much and like I was like taken like I was so impressed by just the demo and it was only like the chapter one from the end game and the rest of the game is so much more mind-blowing that that first chapter ah yeah what an amazing achievement and then are there any other games that you're looking forward to both kind of in this puzzly space and just in general in the puzzly space ah let me check my gargantuan wishlist. I'm going to go through the 400 entries, but I may find ah by sorting them from release dates, I only get the upcoming ones. and Let me check. I have too many games on my wishlist and it hits a point where yeah just sorting them by release date is not helpful because there's just too many unreleased ones on there as someone with 29 games on my wishlist 28 of which are unreleased and one of which came out today I I don't understand. ah Wow. Could not live like that. I i just try and stay on top of it. My wish list is tell me when this game is out because I will buy it when this game is out. That's just where my wish list. Okay, so I'm putting a list. ah Give me a moment. I have some funny entries. Oh yeah absolutely and final one is how's it called again um it's a signalist like game rage of the universe okay so i have my list so i am waiting for ulwamerge room from the dev of ah needy streamr overload because like i'm such a digger for like this kind of eagle men are ra to like um i'm waiting for X-Zero, which is like the new game from the Brazilian developers of Unsighted. If you want to check them out, they have been kicked off Twitter, so it's on Blue Sky, I think. and Then there is a psycho giantess dating sim which like which which has been hiring me ah for a while like very like distinct uh style which like it reminds me a lot of a bag of milk outside of bag of milk there's keylocker raising soon quirky rpg as well and then like it's to finally it's like waiting i'm waiting for two games which are very like vibe based like stuff i usually get from like signalis or a thousand times resist which are urban miss dissolution and rage of the universe like i have like it's a kind of games where i've only seen the trailer, I got the vibes, and I'm avoiding spoilers as much as possible. I'm just waiting for the mail from Steam. Tell me I can buy it, and I will be the happiest person on Earth. Nice. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you for the invitation. It was very nice talking to you. Yeah. um Where can people find you online? You can find me on Twitter. it's ah That's my main social media, as long as it as it runs. ah Basically, Lenofi, which is also my first name, so you can just find me everywhere with that name. ah For your French, ah if there are some French ah people who are listening to you, I also do a podcast called Game Girls Advance, which is like six trans women talking about video games and politics it around video games. ah We usually cover like stuff like Game Regrets and et cetera. And I also do like some just talking streaming on Twitch in French. And so, yeah, that's what I do. Awesome. soon Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Drack Naked Friends official podcast. Our music is by Priscilla Snow, who you can find at ghoulnoise.bandcamp dot.com. Our podcast artwork is by Adam DeGrandis. Please rate and review us on your podcast service of choice and be sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations
00:48:29
Speaker
sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations. Thank you.
00:48:41
Speaker
you