Designing the Secrets of Animal Well (ft. Billy Basso) | Design Delve
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- Опубліковано 13 чер 2024
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In this episode of Design Delve J & Ludo sit down with Billy Basso to pick his brains on secrets design for the modern age.
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Music used in order of appearance:
Intruder - Stray OST
The Abyss - Hyper Light Drifter OST
Checking in - Celeste OST
The Notebooks - Stray OST
Secret Lab - Stray OST - Ігри
Big thank you to Billy for joining us in the design mines today! If you enjoy this content and wanna support its production please consider checking out our patreon!
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That's it! We have to find Billy Basso in the walls and then he'll give us a hint about where to find the door that allows us to enter the background layer of the world where we can find the submarine.
Also, great interview! Thank you.
I expected to find you there heh :D Cheers for your content Fury
I'll admit, I absolutely expected to hear somewhere down the line that you'd gone looking to interviews with the dev for even more hints! Glad to hear you're still having fun with it!
Featuring the man himself? LET'S GOOO
This game goes, way, way, WAY deeper than anyone thought it would go. Incredible work from Basso.
Is that Jolyne in ur pfp?
It goes so deep it overflows back to the top again
My concern with community puzzles is that often they end up existing only for a very small group of people for a very short amount of time. It'll be one or two invested communities on reddit or discord who pool together and figure it out by themselves and then the solution is on the internet for the rest of the game's lifespan as a weird vestigial thing you can't do anything with by yourself.
The bunny mosaic puzzle is an egregious example of this. Finding the solution seems like a 'forced multiplayer' situation since no single player can solve it on their own. But now that it has been solved you can simply search for the solution. I was quite frustrated by this puzzle in thinking it could be solved solo and wracked my brain for a week before I gave up and looked it up online.
the way mario wonder did it was great. you were in the level with 5 other people as ghosts, and so you got the collaborative feel in the moment. granted that requires people to be online which lessens over time.
Very true, it can lose that fun when you feel late to the party and weren't one of the ones who jumped on the discussion when you had the chance.
My sentiment exactly. Maybe it’s an unpopular opinion, but Animal Well’s “layers” that people keep gushing over is just obscure nonsense that doesn’t ultimately amount to much. I got to the endings and thought it was all anticlimactic given the hype around this game
Yeah I didn't touch the "community" post game nonsense but the core game was fantastic.
I think the best thing a game can do to combat the "wiki era" we are in is to have good hints in-game so players never feel the need to break immersion to find them elsewhere.
In Paper Mario: TTYD, you can get a partner who will tell you if there is something hidden on each screen of the game, and which direction it's in, by hitting a button. It's obviously more tedious than just looking and finding stuff without her, but if you're looking to 100% the game, you never need to look up a guide to find those items. You can do it all within the game itself
The TTYD remake really reinforces that with a button you can always press, it's fantastic
A really fascinating interview, and brilliant background footage that helps sell the game even further. Letting the player discover something rather than telling them with map icons and NPC chatter is an underrated skill in game design.
THERE'S A DEV IN THE WALLS
Billy Basso is an artist. He was (as we now know, incorrectly) told that some of the hidden stuff in the game would never be found, and his response was "I'll know it's there." Animal Well is his artistic vision, and he pulled it off. I'm glad he's being rewarded for his effort.
He def is picking up where Fromsoft left off
The key part of wiki-circumventing community building is a playerbase that values the mystery, and will help new players engage in the right mindset without simply telling them what to do. That will be the magic for animal well in the future
Okay I’ll say it, the way ludo looked at Billy when he thanked you was the most adorable animation I’ve seen in a design delve
I love that Billy came on to describe his design philosophy behind secrets.
Secrets in gaming are almost exclusively indie-owned because developers are so afraid the average player will miss them, so there's no time budget granted for them.
The trouble is, they're not wrong.
Unless your game manages the unprecedented levels of success that games like Undertale, FNAF, Inscryption, etc. have seen then you have to make it feel like a secret even though everyone will find it, or, create truly secret content and know that nobody will care enough to discover it when you barely scrape 100 sales on Steam and realize the time could have been better spent.
I would love to hear Yahtzee's take on Animal Well.
As someone who is just beginning their career as a video game designer, Design Delve has been an invaluable series. Hearing J and other developers (and Ludo) share their expertly crafted perspectives about ALL aspects of game design has been beyond informative; it's been enlightening. Thank you all for bringing us such incredible content!
The idea of DESIGNING puzzles with the message boards and social media talking about it to figure it out is astounding. It's so simple, but obviously effective at building the kind of word-of-moith hype and interest that a lot of AAA studios dream of. What an amazing way for an I die to shine in the crowded space of video games.
The "community puzzle" idea is very interesting and a great way to accept the "wikification" of secrets-based games - though, it can also be frustrating for a solo player. For example, there's at least one puzzle which is all but impossible to solve by yourself (and that 'all but' would involve insane amounts of trial and error), which can also be isolating if you're not all that keen on participating / want to do as much as you can without resorting to help.
(I'm particularly proud myself of finding all but 2 eggs without help...but eventually determination turned to boredom!)
There are several such puzzles at least and its clear by the games design with how much tedium secret hunting has (specially when you get a new tool that need you to search the whole map) that this game was much more focused on accepting the 'wikification' end.
That said I do think that games implementing this need to either be community puzzles the whole way (IE ARG) or end on a satisfying point for the community aspect to become more prevalent (IE Tunic). Because as it stands with Animal well the end game got very boring to search for more secrets and let the game end on a sour note.
Also a general criticism of the 'community puzzle' form is how time gated it is. If you aren't part of the initial puzzle solving then you miss out on the community experience and instead are left having to read wiki's to be hinted towards the solutions, making for a much worse experience.
I don't think the secrets were too unfair for a solo player. At least, the difficulty felt on par with similar games like Fez and Tunic. I managed to get most of the rabbits and eggs without help, and the rest with only minor hints (except the mural). I feel like the rest of the secrets beyond that are firmly in the "community puzzle" area and I don't feel bad about not finding them on my own.
That said, I do wish there was an egg tracker for the last few eggs. I also wish Billy would patch in an alternate solution to the mural for solo players, sort of like The Lost in The Binding of Isaac. Something as simple as allowing a player to cycle through the pieces would keep the sense of discovery without forcing new players to resort to a walkthrough.
The mural feels like a good example of how even an incredibly talent game designer can struggle with the blurred line between designing around 'wikification' and designing a compelling single player experience.
I'd never considered the topic of designing around walkthroughs or designing to cultivate solving communities and Animal Well is Master Class in both.
However I agree that having a puzzle that was not solvable without looking up the answer is not a design choice I agree with.
@@theresnothinghere1745 Your point about the community puzzles having an expiry date is a good one - it does mean that for the majority of players (who weren't in the initial rush) aren't going to get any satisfaction out of solving it, because they can't contribute any more.
Even the most complicated puzzles probably have a month's lifetime in them max - ARG enthusiasts are almost scary in how much they rip the game apart to find things.
Yeah, God of War Ragnarok was so egregious about giving you puzzle hints that there were times when Atreus gave me the puzzle solution before I even realized there was a puzzle in the area. I'd go around looking for basic loot and suddenly be handed a puzzle solution.
Why even put puzzles if they're gonna do that
Either they hand out the hint way too early, or they forget to explain the puzzle at all, and there are no actual hints. Either way, Ragnarok has layers upon layers of unforced game design errors.
Billy is featured in this video? Guess we'll have to analyze every single frame of this.
Such a unique gaming experience! Who would've thought a well could go so deep?
I just realized why the dog always has a subplot to carry the video to its premise.
It's the Ludo narrative.
Fascinating interview.
I like Animal well a lot. But I didn't really like the community puzzle approach in the later part. I prefer harder puzzles that are soloable. A lot of animal well puzzles fall into the space where they're not - some are flat out not possible solo - which made me sad mostly. I prefer if its more like Tunic where that kind of puzzle was SO obscure that as a solo player you pretty much didn't notice it.
In Animal well, stuff like the bunny picture or some of the secret bunnies mostly frustrated me once I understood they were not soloable.
Yeah the bunny mural was really frustrating. It's one of the first really noticeable landmarks you come across in the game and you regularly pass by it while doing stuff.I kept looking out for things that might hook back to it and I was really excited when I got that one item that opens up the controls to it in the room. But then that didn't go anywhere. Then there's that other mural of a bunny along with some faces in the top right and I thought maybe that was somehow connected to the mural. After all, it's a bunny mural, it's even the same color scheme. But nope. Completely unrelated. You get 2 different items that let you see things in the world you couldn't before so of course I went around, both in the room and all over the map, looking for some kind of hint. Nope. I only learned what was up with it when I gave up on the game.
It's really bad when a game that asks you to be hyper observant and curious about the world gives you such a prominent dead end. It makes you feel like a chump for trying to take the game on its terms.
nothing but respect for billy for being a solo dev and a great one at that! glad jim got ahold of him to make this great video!
I think it’s crazy how Billy made the whole game using only the Donkey Kong bongo controller for all his inputs. Absolute legend!
The thing that drives me crazy about modern game design is the abject FEAR these devs have for players getting stuck or frustrated. They have bent over so far backwards that the games themselves are suffering for it now. Puzzles that solutions or hints are given for the moment you step into a room, quest markers galore, teleportation to and from a quest npc, empty worlds full of set dressing with nothing to find, everything is automated or a checklist, ETC.
The curiosity of your average modern day player has been so stymied that if an NPC tells them something they instantly believe them unless the game gives them explicit direction otherwise. Where as in days gone by if an NPC were to tell you "oh that place is forbidden you can't go in there" our response would be "hold my beer" This is why I have so much respect for games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Tunic, Rain World, Hyper Light Drifter, The Outer Wilds, BG III, Hi-Fi Rush, Environmental Station Alpha, Balatro, Hollow Knight, Celeste, and now Animal Well among many, many others. I respect them because they respect me as a player, they respect my intelligence and skill, and they want me to get more out of the game than simply being a paycheck for the devs.
Mosa Lina might be up your alley. the dev describes it as 'aggressively random' and that is an apt description
@@zerorig Can't say I've heard of it but I'll look into it. Thanks for the recommendation. EDIT - I lied I have heard of this game I merely forgot about it.
The first time i saw the manticore was genuinely one of the most scary experiences ive had in a video game.
I want that shirt Billy is wearing
Thinking about how the original version of The Secret World had full blown ARGs and a built in web browser to support it. I think it'd be cool to see more of that in games, maybe have a built in chat room and forum for secret discussion
I feel like that would be the perfect solution, as it adds that real time element that you just don't get if you use the wiki
This game is not for everyone, I think the multiplayer secrets have built in design issues; these issues only really apply to layer 3 and maybe layer 4.
First of all, there is a time limit for finding all those secrets, because after the community has found them; there is no more ARG or playground talk, only looking up a wiki. This makes the end of the game a checklist with no engagement with the game world itself.
Secondly, it makes the game impossible to complete for a solo player, and it might be nearly impossible to know when it is appropriate to "give up" because persistent solo players are punished. Giving up means there is no satisfying ending for a single player if they think they can catch all the bunnies.
I think it’s even somewhat duplicitous not to mention up front that this game cannot be completed fully by a solo player.
Animal Well is as close to a masterpiece as a game can get. If you appreciate games and how far they can expand in all dimensions (including your own) please play it. It's ridiculously well detailed and thoughtfully designed. Def my GOTY of 2024
First impressions of this game doesn't seem like it'd be for me but I will support anyone doing indie development. Even if it's just interacting with the video so I can reach someone who may like
Hell yeah, I loved Animal Well so much!
For me, I think while the community collaborative stuff is cool to hear about after the fact, it doesn't make for a great experience if you go in solo.
- When I go into one of these games, there is a desire to go in blind to avoid ruining surprises and depriving myself of the ability to solve things on my own, or at least amongst the friends I stream it with. I always resist looking things up for as long as I can because it always kind of feels like opening the floodgates. If I looked this thing up, I guess I'll just look up this thing... etc. At least if the game was linear, I could look up just the part I got stuck on and try not to look elsewhere, but in a game like this, how am I supposed to differentiate between being genuinely stumped by a solvable puzzle and fruitlessly running into a brick wall because I don't have what I need to do anything here yet? And if I do end up going to look things up, things are so interconnected that often just finding the answer to one question leads you down a rabbit hole (heh) of spoilers when you find out that the thing you were trying to solve needs this. So where is this? Oh it's over in this area that needs that to get to? Well where do I get that....? So at what point am I supposed to shift from "No spoilers" mode to "go talk to people online to figure stuff out?"
- If you don't play the game right at launch or aren't a part of the communities where people do this secret hunting, you just miss out on that cool group discovery process. After all is figured out, you can't go back to the forum or discord or whatever and get the kind of conversations that the game was trying to encourage. I got the game on launch but kind of worked my way through it slowly because I was only playing it at night when my friends could get on. We hadn't even finished the game and there were already videos online showing the entirety of the endgame secrets and true ending stuff. At that point I'm not joining in with the community, I'm looking up a guide. It's kind of weird to have a single player game with such a short shelf life before you can't play it the way it was intended anymore. Normally that's purely the domain of online multiplayer games.
So for me and my friends, we kind of just didn't enjoy Animal Well enough to dig deeper into it. We finished the basic ending along with finding most of but not all of the eggs, then I just gave up and watched the spoiler videos. Which is kind of a shame. We've really enjoyed games like this in the past and I really wanted to like this one, but there was too much that dragged the experience down for me. The platforming and backtracking was frustrating and made getting around to solve puzzles tedious.
And when I looked at the post-game stuff, I felt pretty justified in not wasting my time pursuing the true ending stuff. Mixed into an all or nothing collectible hunt was: A puzzle you literally couldn't solve on your own, a puzzle you couldn't solve without a specific piece of hardware, and challenging platforming segments I probably would never have been able to do. I might have had some fun solving some of the puzzles, but I would have been pissed when all of that would have been for nothing when I couldn't do the last few things on my own to actually complete the hunt and unlock the ending.
In contrast, I really liked Tunic and we played through like 99% of it without looking anything up and just discussing it amongst friends. Partially this was because it wasn't locked behind particularly challenging tests of action skills. But also, the only part of the secret hunting that felt outside of our capabilities was at literally the very very end. We completed the true ending and the very last thing was some difficult translation task that we didn't want to do and all that revealed was a website with an arg hook. But by that point we were satisfied. I didn't feel satisfied with the basic ending of Animal Well and I definitely wouldn't have been satisfied to have done all the things I could plausibly do on my own only to hit a wall. That said, Tunic wasn't without it's faults. We spent waaaaaay too much time on something that turned out to not even be a puzzle lol.
Thank you for including the rising dog platforms, I will stop trying to bubble jump straight up.
Was already convinced to get this game, seeing this video on it just makes me all the more excited! (Not gonna watch it though cause I don't want spoilers, but I hope a like and comment help)
It's hard to make a game that's instantly fun then evolves to be more fun and also satisfying, but Basso did it. In my opinion, it's right up there with SMB2.
I don't like 2D games. I love Animal Well. Animal Well is one of the smartest game I've ever played.
I'm a huge believer in trusting your players to figure things out... that they will find satisfaction in completing puzzles/secrets and that is the point.
It’s like Fez never existed. Gamers have such short memories.
Yep, I'm getting mega-fez vibes from this! I'm going to enjoy it when I get to it, but completing it 100% seems.. hard
Personally, I long for a "Wiki Game" that fully embraces the community and perhaps even has some form of connectivity to the official wiki. let the people interacting with it effect things in the game, though that would require always online for the game and cookies be allowed from the wiki, but hey, sounds like a unique experience waiting to happen. I'd love another DDLC or OneShot featuring a wiki instead of my system32 folder :P
oldschool runescape has a wiki button under the minimap hah
Great interview
I feel really mixed about the community solutions. to summarize my issues, basically now you are forced to HAVE TO google stuff if you want to 100% animal well. it's effectively impossible to collect everything if you play it without an internet connection. I've seen several comments and posts criticize it for exactly that, and I don't know how to feel. it's impossible to discover everything solo, no one has done it yet. in my head that seems really bad, and I'm surprised you praise it so much in this video, but I would love to hear other's thoughts. imagine if no one in mario 64 had ever collected every star without a guide - that sounds awful yet you praise design like that in this video and I'm not sure I understand, and that's how I feel about things like the bunny mosaic puzzle, and there's even several other comments on this very YT video expressing nearly identical sentiments. I still love the game (and the channel) I'm just a bit confused about some design decisions like this and your choice to praise them.
12:05 is where he talks about it but the short version is that the extra parts of the game weren't really designed to be solved by a single person offline in a vacuum.
you can debate whether such a thing should be a part of a game, but if it was some extra DLC that kind of undermines hiding secrets in the game.
@@zerorig yes that exact moment is what I was referring to. Just because he mentions it doesn't mean it's a good idea, in fact I think it's awful personally, undermines is the right word. Don't want to sound too harsh but it's just so bizarre and odd - there's a reason no other game has ever been praised for doing something like that.
I think part of what makes it so rough is that the rest of the game is so good and polished, so this stuff sticks out like a sore thumb. Either way I still bought it for my friends, lol.
@@tommo0 It would be awful only if that was the ONLY end to the game. But the game has already given credits by the time ANY of that is relevant. That's all just extra for extra effort. Sometimes games make you grind for effort. Sometimes they make you pay, sometimes things are just really hard, and sometimes you HAVE to share information to progress.
The fact that the game essentially ends with so much probably left unanswered will definitely push any gamer that wants to to explore beyond and find out more. There really is only one major puzzle that more or less requires community work, and that puzzle is only for the latest of late game solutions. Everything else COULD be solved by one person in game, usually with clues in the game and not just pushing on random walls randomly.
@@bronkula Mario 64 gives you credits without getting every star. Yet it would still be awful if you couldn't get every star without the Internet. What a weird hill to die on. Not only that but at least for me, you will pretty much encounter things like the bunny mosaic even if you don't have internet and are just a serious player.
Also just because some other games do things just as terrible doesn't suddenly magically make it a good design decision - what kind of whataboutism bullshit is that.
Also sorry if I come off as too harsh.
Pretty simply, the game was designed at its core to have the true ending be able to be completed without a guide, which lots of people have done. Everything past that is really more of an ARG, a separate game that requires being connected to the internet as the whole point. It’s more like if collecting all 120 stars is fully doable, but to find yoshi you have to work with other people on the internet to solve puzzles and figure out how to get up there or something. Just some extra cool stuff for the community who enjoyed playing and beating the main game. All this extra stuff isn’t even really meant to be discovered, more just something the dev felt like doing because he likes secrets in his games.
great interview
Together we all will be Well Spoken
So you're telling me the reason I got beat up by a kangaroo is World of Warcraft?
Need this game the Dev is a legend big love.
I'm all for locking Extra Special Secrets behind community puzzles so long as the core game is satisfying as a totally solo experience. So far, Animal Well hits that benchmark for me, not done yet though.
Celeste OST spotted! ♥
And wish listed. Next pay check I'm grabbing a copy!
Design Delve GOATed as always
I do just wish the game had an easier mode of transportation while you solve the final puzzles I started getting ill wandering around aimlessly slowly. The bubble jump is fun for early game but it hurts a bit when trying to go around. And the warp only helped so much.
I appreciate the map, since in an indie game called Creepy Castle I was missing one item and I just stopped playing the game entirely because wandering around and not managing to do anything different was making me physically ill. And the game was so obscure it didn't have a wiki. Animal well has much better travel, but that little issue still causes me to either stop playing and talking about the game, or look up a guide so I am not aimlessly wandering. I guess aimless wandering is only mitigated if it is fun to move around.
Hrm, it's single character "Legacy of the Wizard" from NES.
I love Metroidvania games so this was sounding like something I'd like to play, but then came the part about needing to find information outside of the game and that just killed it for me. The biggest deal breaker for me for any game is feeling like I need to leave the game to progress in the game.
It's only for a few optional puzzles well after the main game finishes. If you don't like doing stuff out of game I would still recommend it for the rest of the puzzles.
I rolled credits in this game and I'm still afraid of spoilers
2:20 You can do that?!
Tries it
Smacks head
I figured out how to bubble-pillar long before I learned you could simply shoot a bubble laterally and jump at the same time
It sounds fun if well executed but I've seen many examples of weird and/or frustrating puzzle games and not having hints or guides makes it too high a hurdle to continue. Also, having to rely on others on a single player game sounds annoying but for those with social anxiety, it must be terrifying. Even the bravest people can be shut down by either the developer or the community (see "Get Gud" in Dark Souls). Also, obscure hints are more frustrating than obvious one and having to backtrack and/or have things written down is a nightmare. I remember playing FFVII and have one scenario play out 3 times but on the third, I had lost the clue I wrote down. There was HOURS in between too.
Holy shit this is the biggest meal you’ve cooked to date im so happy
I imagine designing a game around secrets to be extremely challenging. Also, yes the days of the playground conversation and exchanges are behind us.
Not necessarily behind us they've just changed form. We're still exchanging information it's just the way we do it and the frequency of how often we can being the things that have changed.
@@Askanon It's not quite the same though, is it?
@@Canadamus_Prime Not entirely no, but then nothing ever is. Time passes, things change, or in some cases they stay the same. The actors are the same but the stage is different. Such is life. That said I do miss the 90s and the simpler times of my childhood. I miss them dearly.
i strongly rerspect Mr Basso for not only accepting, but encouraging Wiki diving
Absolute GOAT
I think theirs a certain lure of puzzel games that will draw you into them by the joy of discover the solution.
The way we solve the puzzel is also important as Billy said in the vid to have you think of how you can use your tools in the game, in puzzel games of old ala lucas arts where you would make some truely mad leaps of logic to solve a puzzel wich was more trial and error defeats the though behind a puzzel being a test of mind.
To gather around with others to talk about problems you gotten stuck on is a great way I think to build a community around your shared joy of the puzzel and is again like Billy said a form of multiplayer activity can be part of a puzzel game just like in portal 2's multiplayer mode, to wiki the solution is in the end cheating your self out of the joy of puzzel solutions.
You can't stop people from going to wiki for the solutions but I would argue that once you steep over a certine amount of wiki solutions are you even playing the game anymore? will the joy of the clever puzzel and it solution that gave you a "sense of pride and achievement" be their? would you ever replay or explore more to see if their was something you missed?
6:21 Well, that did happen for me. I really really wanted to love this game, and the art style is exactly my thing… but I lost interest about 2 hours in when I encountered that white ghost dog thing, and I couldn’t work out how to escape it and keep the frisbee.
And I knew I could probably find a UA-cam video showing me… but at that point why even bother playing the game instead of just watching a UA-camr play it?
I have to resist the wiki's call these days, it's too easy.
I love the idea of community driven games!
This game is like a combination of Halo 2 and Halo 3
I think it's not worth worrying about guides and whatnot, some people genuinely enjoy games that way and people who ruin the experience for themselves, well shit man, hindsight is 20/20. Make your game, make it not for a hypothetical anyone, make it for a hypothetical someone. There's no guarantees one way or another, but at least in the second case someone out there will remember it.
Accessibility is a market issue, ultimately you are deciding who you are willing to leave behind and, guides much like peripherals, may be what brings in the wider audience. If you make a game about secrets but don't trust players will enjoy finding secrets you need to make a different game.
I chased the highest achievements in FFIX, and spent 40-50 hours getting the Excalibur II. This was PS2 days whe n nobody but me would know. So I vibe with this shit.
I see this game and I get anxious, because I think I won't get it. But it looks so great I might overcome it eventually.
The community-based multiplayer aspect is great IMO, but that's the souls player speaking, I guess it might not be for everyone.
Why do I feel like there are secret hints to stuff beyond what we already know here. Have I been playing this game too much? Have I spent too much time on the AW Discord? Yeah, I probably have.
I loved the game and I greatly admire the care and thought he put into the different layers of secrets… but I think the attitude about community puzzles gets it backward. By creating puzzles that can only be solved by a community of people - which happened immediately after release, of course - he has basically ensured that the vast vast majority of players, ie anyone who encounters this game for the rest of time, will HAVE to look these things up on a wiki, because active solving already happened exactly once. Puzzles like these are gameplay designed to expire immediately.
The idea that a self-contained hint system would be “isolating” seems bizarre to me. Are books “isolating”? Are movies? This is just how artistic experiences work: you have them alone and then you discuss them with others. If you try to enforce the discussion by designing the work to require it, you’re just damaging the work.
I played Animal Well with great pleasure until I reached a point where I was up against something that I had already heard online wasn’t solo solvable. So I did what I had to do and looked at a site with spoilers - the community solving having happened weeks earlier, of course - and once I was looking at a pile of spoilers, the game as I‘d been enjoying it was pretty much over. After a great experience, it felt like a sour non-ending. And I fear that that’s going to be most players’ experience of Animal Well from now on.
that is the wrong question. There is no combating the "wiki game syndrome" because that is exactly what Billy talked about AAA and Sony's PS5 initiative. That "syndrome" exists probably as long games with puzzles exist. I have gamefaq pages that are older than google and before that there were magazines with that exact same role.
The great thing is: he understood that his target audience was only going to a wiki or a forum to find secrets as a last case resort, and the most passionate not even then. And he designed his game with those people in mind. All that was left was designing good puzzles. _Easy_ , right?!
Know your audience and think about them when designing your game. If you think about mass market appeal you will end up with open-world-survival-crafter-metroidvania-deckbuilder-souls-lite with zombies. And the lowest common denominator of all those elements.
I think Billy Basso is an actual genius. The fact that he understands all of the technical aspects of the game and it's engine, understands puzzle design and general game design fundamentals, and also has incredible artistic creativity as well is just extraordinary. The art and coloring and sound design in Animal Well are all fantastic. Truly remarkable.
I will say that I disagree with Mr. Basso's view on relying on external sources for gaming. Over the years, I've grown tired of games that essentially force the player to rely on wikis and external help to understand the game's mechanics. I prefer that games stand on their own. I'm not saying that the games need to scream their solutions to the player (like God of War), but rather that they provide the player with the tools needed to formulate their own decisions. That's where the true feeling of agency comes from after all.
This is kind of the main reason I don't play arpgs like Diablo or Path of Exile anymore. Players cannot really fully understand the mechanics to play on their own very well without external help and resources. And, as I've said, that's become a huge turnoff for me.
But anyways, Animal Well is genius and so is Billy, so much respect.
Hey, you guys talking about Animal Well?
I heard that it's like Halo 2 and 3 put together!
I'll be the outlier: this was a great, in-depth interview, but it still didn't sell me on the game.
There was nothing that pushed me, nor my blob character, to keep moving forward except I paid money for it, I passed the 2 hour mark, everyone and their mother kept being coy about it getting good after one "completes" the game, and so I stuck with it even though there was no urgency. I got to the end and was let loose back into the world with yet another item. I didn't care what was going on because my character didn't have any motivation.
Why should I care about finding eggs? Why should I try to speed run the game? Why should I try to find the super secret best ending? What is the super secret best ending supposed to mean for my blob?
"Vibe" game means nothing to me. Annoying-Bubble-Wand-Puzzle-Platformer is the better name for it.
Congrats to Billy Basso for creating and doing, but it flew right over me.
Same for me, and 2D metroidvania style games with retro pixel art is my favourite genre, and has been since the 16-bit era.
I enjoyed the first couple of hours of this, and then lost interest.
It just depends on whether you prefer puzzles and gameplay over story. Obviously if you love games that have story’s, then this one isn’t for you
Have anyone figured out what the beluga dance is for?
What the hell? Did UA-cam film critic Thomas Flight make this game? They sound exactly the same.
If the solution to a puzzle is so unintuitive that you need to look up a wiki, then something has gone wrong in the design. There's handholding, and then there's giving the player enough information to eventually figure out what you need to do.
you dont NEED a wiki to solve any puzzle. Some puzzles require collaboration with other players, but no wiki. I didn’t find anything unintuitive
Except that the information is always there. It's that sometimes said information is so loosely related or such a "there is no way you can actually do this in the game" solution that so few people will make the connection, but it's there.
It's not designed to be solved with a wiki, it's designed to be solved with the community and communities happen to always put stuff on wikis anyways. This game had several ARGs before it even released, so it's not surprising this design is in the actual game. The flaw is obvious, though, because it timelocks many puzzles to the release of the game.
Interaction
BING BONG 😄
On hints, the biggest complaint i heard about the newest god of war games are that the hints were excessive and annoying
It's like Halo 2 meets Halo 3.
It's time to finish the fight!
I mean, I still managed to get stuck very early on with a bunch of puzzles that clearly needed tricks or knowledge that I just didn't yet possess, and also that fucking dog that would eat me for trying to acquire the one item I could actually find. Having to look up a guide just to figure out how to acquire the first item to start progressing through the game was decidedly not fun, and kind of turned me off the experience as a whole.
This is one of the few games I bought even though I knew I would bounce off. It's not my style, but supporting indie titles that push games beyond "kill that thing" is important. This game is a puzzle art.
I'll say this, Animal Well isn't my type of game either. Not usually even into puzzle games. But this game got me hooked almost immediately. I recommend giving it an honest shot, even if you think you won't like it.
Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West were the worst at giving clues like 5 seconds into a puzzle. More than GoW imo.
A surprising amount of late game spoilers in this video.
The kangaroo is complete BS
It literally has three firecrackers in a row next to the statue where you use the K Medallion
not to mention that just about every other animal reacts to firecrackers in some way so why not try throwing a firecracker?
@@Pentacus I mean finding the kangaroo
It's not called a Metroidvania, it's called a SEARCH ACTION. Down with the Metroidvania cult!
I don't think community puzzles are a good way to fight "the wiki era" of puzzle games.
The game was released, and hundreds of people on a discord had fun solving the community puzzles for 3 days. But now it is solved, you can't be part of the solving anymore.
So let's say you buy Animal Well today, and you want to solve the final puzzle and see what's hiding at the end of it all. Your options are:
1) Figure out a puzzle that took several days for hundreds of people to figure out, by yourself.
2) Read the wiki.
I respect the dev for creating something inherently ephemeral, but I can't help but feel like I missed out.
that was one of the things that bothered the fuck outta me about horizon forbidden west. if you sat there for more than a few seconds trying to figure something out aloy would just shout the solution at you. SHUT UP i want to figure it out, and if i have problems i want to go find the solution, not have it handed to me when the game gets impatient with me.
I really do not get the hype around the game.
It is fine. There are better things to spend your money on, even without the same genre.
The level design, and the map, is not good enough to support his vision, so the endless back and forth to figure out what the hell the game wants you to do is tedious after the start of the game.
Some more story to set you out and make it clear who you are, what you have to do, and why I as a player should care would be beneficial.
That said, the sound, visual design and gameplay were all decent or good, but again, not revolutionary or top of the class.
I did very much like the aesthetic design of several areas.
I liked Animal Well at first. But I'm a completionist, and during the end game it all kind of fell apart for me, which left a bad taste in my mouth. It soured my opinion for the whole game. I think as soon as the player feels they need to reach for a walkthrough, the game has failed. Animal Well makes the same mistakes that so many Metroidvania games make: optuse puzzles that the player can't be expected to figure out on their own, or which may require a frame perfect trick that was never taught by the game, nor could reasonably be discovered by accident. Plus, dropping a lot of key items at the end, instead of evenly spreading them across the whole game. I didn't hate playing Animal Well, but I cannot recommend it to people.
Maybe I’ll give the game a shot. I was initially put off by the art style.
>Metroidvania/Brainia
Please don't try to brute force a replacement for the gameplay genre. It's not a good replacement name, and just pairing the two up side by side is patronizing.
The awkward Ludo schtick might be charming to some but it's just becoming tiring now.