All pics in this blog made by Zun in Japan, who is halfway his holiday

Fifty blogs ago, I wrote a vague rant about chaos and order keeping games interesting. Nearly a year later, I've reached the same conclusion again, but I've started applying it to more and more stuff. I've spent this week learning about programming, discussing potential improvements for Colony Survival, and playing new games on the PS4. The more I thought about the fundamentals of these things, the more they seemed the same.

Let's start with a summary of last year's theory, brazenly stolen from Jordan Peterson.
Chaos = The unknown, the undiscovered, darkness, evil, pain
Order = The known, the discovered, light, goodness, pleasure

It seems that nearly everything we do in life seems to fit the description of turning chaos into order. We eat to turn hunger into satiety, we study to turn the unknown into the known, we travel to turn the undiscovered into the discovered.

This cycle causes a couple of interesting problems. Firstly, once we've read a book, or watched a movie, or been in a location long enough, it's fully/mostly known and we grow bored of it. So that leads to the second problem. We don't crave order - we crave turning things into order, so we actually need chaos. What's a videogame without enemies, a movie without a compelling villain, a life without any kind of struggle?

That's the origin of the yin and yang symbol - the realization that these opposing forces complement eachother, and that you need a nice balance of both of them. Too much chaos, and you can't understand anything, can't make any progress. Too much order, and you're bored or stifled.

I think the relation to game design is obvious. We've got to make sure that Colony Survival is exactly that engaging mix of known systems and interesting threats, from the first ten minutes onwards, as long as possible. We believe there's currently too much "chaos" for a lot of new players, so we're going to work on improving the interface. But there's not enough of it for experienced players, so we'll also add new threats that only appear for larger colonies.


Programming
This week, I've continued to learn about programming, and I've really noticed the importance of the pattern above. Programming can be very overwhelming. It can be a 'land of chaos' where you fail to accomplish anything of use. There are quite a lot of weird rules you've got to know before you can succesfully execute a program. When you start running into arcane errors, or when you try to build things in Unity but things fail again and again and it's hard to find the source of the problem, it's easy to give up because you just don't see a way forward.

Something that really helped me grasp the fundamentals of programming better in a very enjoyable way was 7 Billion Humans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYdH5MoAGKI
I played it a couple of weeks ago and I definitely notice that I find it a lot easier to understand and write code now. It's a game about giving programming-like instructions to a group of robot-like humans. You can see exactly how each human goes through your instructions, and where it goes wrong. That's something that doesn't happen during regular programming, but experience with 7 Billion Humans helps you visualize it for yourself.

And the brilliant thing about 7 Billion Humans is how it continuously has an optimal balance between chaos and order. Each new command is properly explained and first used in a simple puzzle, after which the difficulty slowly ramps up. In the end, you'll be doing pretty complicated stuff that is truly valuable outside of the game. For anyone who is even remotely interested in programming, I'd definitely recommend it!



"Have you gone mad?"
"What's all this nonsense about chaos and order? Did he really only just figure out that games have to be the right balance between understandable and challenging?" If you were thinking that, I fully understand!

I'm pretty sure most of you think that the fact that things have to be a bit challenging (but not too much!) to be interesting is common sense. But I've spent the past two weeks learning about Unity and programming, playing new games on the PS4, and thinking and talking about Colony Survival in these terms. I've taken a very thorough and critical look at what I am confronted with and how I respond to it.

When does a game truly engage me and motivate me to keep playing? When do I get a bit bored but continue anyway? When do I quit in frustration? And of course, exactly the same questions can be asked in regards to programming.

In the end, I was "rating" and comparing every detail of the games I played. Their tutorials, their animations, their menus. And I believe I've learned a lot in terms of how to build an engaging tutorial and a compelling progession system.

Just a comparison between Metal Gear Solid V and Red Dead Redemption II is very useful. RDR's world is more technically advanced and more detailed. But I still have a hard time "getting into" the game. The game is mostly focused on the story, and at least in the beginning, there doesn't seem to be a lot of "long term interaction" between the player and the world. Sure, you can kill random people and make the sheriffs angry at you. You can hit a signpost while riding your horse and ragdoll of your horse realistically.

But the progression system mostly seems to focus on "eat, drink and bathe to keep your HP/stamina high". I need to play scripted story missions to progress, I can't go adventuring and free roaming and significantly improve my character by just doing that.

On the other hand, MGSV quickly explains all of its progression systems to you and makes it very clear when you're interacting with them. To unlock new weapons, gadgets and uniforms you need to collect GMP, resources like fuel and staff. You need staff in multiple branches, and every soldier has unique stats making them more or less suited for these branches. All of these can be found in the open world. You can get new staff by knocking enemies unconscious and extracting them to your headquarters. These headquarters can be visited and upgraded, physically adding new structures.

At the end of every mission there is a detailed report. You receive bonus currency for completing side objectives and for being quick and stealthy. You lose currency when you get spotted and ignite open combat. All the gear you carry into the field also costs currency, so there is an incentive to only pick what you need.

There's something very satisfying to spotting an enemy with exactly the skills you need, sneaking towards him, putting him to sleep and extracting him, knowing that you've permanently upgraded your headquarters. Both the action itself and the rewards are fun. Designing a game that does both in the long term is quite a challenge!

Next week will probably be the last Friday Blog while Zun is still in Japan. When he's back, Steam Workshop support is one of the highest priorities. And when that's finished, we'll significantly overhaul the interface and the progression system!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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