The following is a weekly devlog for MIND CONTROL DELETE, the Early Access standalone expansion to the original SUPERHOT. Check it out HERE


“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein

So this time let’s not spoil anything from the upcoming update. Let’s stay clear from that and let you have a bit of surprise when it arrives, ok ?
This time let’s talk a bit about one little aspect of SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE that might come unnoticed at first glance. The visual language of SUPERHOT games and how we use it.

Anyone who did any quality and usability tests with their game will tell you that watching someone else play your projects for the first time can be really painful experience. You sit down, watch as the player struggles with your tutorials, forgets basic game mechanics or gets completely lost in your levels. Than you cry a little and redesign everything.
With game immersion everything comes down to communication with the player. Allowing him/her to understand what the heck you are trying to say. Player should understand your game from the get go without you saying a word.

By limiting SUPERHOT to three colors we gave ourselves a clear and easy to read visual language. Red is bad, black is usable, white is the background. Game about shooting red dudes with black guns in white space. Clear enough?



While this set up is easy to understand for the player it poses a bit of design difficulties and limitations. Adding new content can be a bit challenging since it needs to fit into our restricted visuals.

Like for example the recent addition of new enemies to the game. Both concrete and red weapon guy had to be conceived within the limits of our preset visual scheme.
Thanks to that players can immediately guess what is the difference between new enemy types and how to approach them. There was no need for additional explanation since players were familiar with the visual cues used in the design of new opponents.






Another fine example is the updated visual cue of hotswitch. We decided to add more umpf to the way game tells you when the hotswitch is possible. It needed to be obvious and clear for the player so he could hotswitch without any overthinking. Marcin our art director added this sweet shader that makes red guy glitch whenever you hover your crosshair over them and hotswitch is ready.



This small addition does two things:
Let’s you know when you can hotswitch but also lends itself visually to the glitchy aspect of MCD.


Even the way we approach level design in SUPERHOT: MIN CONTROL DELETE follows certain rules imposed by our visual language. I’ll let Marcin The Art Dir do the talking. I stole a few pages from our internal design bible that he wrote and illustrated.








As you can see he is talking about environments that “make sense”, are not “distracting” and using the design of levels to "talk" to player. That’s creating and following a clear vocabulary of visual language. Everything so that the players might enjoy time bending gameplay of SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE without hassle.

You can’t immediately see most of our visual design choices in MCD and honestly, you shouldn’t be able to. Because as cheesy as it might sound , what you feel during gameplay is far more important than what you know.
We don’t want you to think. We want you to react. Your mind is software and it only interferes with your immersion ;)

I could go on about visual and interactive language for hours so let’s stop here.
Hopefully I didn’t bore you to death .



Create your own reality
Szymon from SUPERHOT team