A Puzzle Designer’s Top 4 Puzzle Design Tips

Morning all, hope you had a restful break over the holidays. But unfortunately it is the new year and that means getting back to it. And for me that means writing more devblogs.

So welcome to the Kana Quest devblog for January 2020.

If you’re new here, Kana Quest the game that I’m making. It’s a cross between dominoes and a match-3 puzzle game… but it teaches you how to read the Japanese alphabet. I designed over 300 levels for this game and because of that I feel as though I have some idea of what I’m doing when it comes to designing puzzles. So for this month’s devblog I am going to go over my Top 4 favourite bits of puzzle design advice.

4. Learn How to Manage Complexity

So within any game you are going to have complexity. Traditional game design says that you want to keep the game’s difficulty within the “flow channel”. Basically, don’t let the game be too easy or too hard, difficulty trends upwards as the player gets better, but you do have fluctuations of difficulty over time. I mostly use the word complexity over difficulty here because I find it is complexity that produces difficulty. However, there are different types of complexity to consider. The three main types of complexity are:

• Complexity of given information
• Complexity of “solution” or “win state”
• Complexity of execution

Lets quickly define these in a bit more detail.

Complexity of given information, is the amount of information the player has to process. For an example. If you are playing Magic or Hearthstone, if your opponent has a 1/1 creature, no cards in hand, no trap effects and they have 1 life left. And then you have a spell in your hand that deals 1 damage to anything, you have very little complexity of given information. In this example, you have two possible actions. One will win you the game, the other postpones the end of the game. Its very easy process all the information. And as a result, that is not a very difficult game state. But if we gave both players a full board of creatures each that have different effects and both players have full hands and full life… now there is so much for information that the player has to parse. This makes the game harder.

Complexity of “solution” is based off how hard it is for the player to figure out what their “win state” looks like. Many games have very clear and consistent win states. For example, a platforming game your win state is to get to the end of the level. It’s very clearly defined for the player. Puzzle games are somewhat unique because often the player does not know what the “win state” is when they are going in. Part of the fun is figuring out what the win state is. For example, if you sat down and started a crossword and you knew all the answers, it would not be fun. However sometimes, especially in puzzle games you need to be able to figure out what some elements of the end state look like in order to progress. If your “solution” is so complicated that it is near impossible to figure out what the end state looks like, then that often means a puzzle is way too hard.

Finally Complexity of execution. This is how difficult it is to execute the actions the player needs to do in order to win. For example, in a Souls-like game, you can often see what you need to do quite well, but executing that plan is often where the difficulty comes in. In puzzle games, how complex the specific order of actions must take to win, determines the complexity of execution.

Here are some diagrams on the breakdowns on the different types of complexities between genres

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So, you might have noticed that for Kana Quest, the complexity of information is maxed out. This is because each game piece is a Japanese letter, and the player has to remember what each letter is in order to match the sounds between letters. Because of this, the average player has to mentally track what letter is what. What this means is that I cannot use complexity of information to up the game’s difficulty. If I were to try increase it, players simply would not be able to process what is going on in a given level. Because of this most of the time, when I am trying to make a more challenging level in Kana Quest, I usually increase the complexity of execution. Of course these complexity levels will fluctuate within a given game (turn 1 hearthstone has basically no complexity on any vector, but that ramps up significantly over a match).

The reason I’m bringing complexity up is that to make a good puzzle game, you need to know what vectors your game has a lot of naturally. And of course every puzzle game is different so you need to have a good understanding of the different types of complexity in order to properly manage it in your game. Puzzle games especially have the reputation of making the player feel stupid, if your players feel stupid, you probably haven’t properly managed complexity. And hopefully understanding these vectors will give you a better idea of where to start changing things.

 

3. Avoid Red Herrings

This tip is related to Number 4, but do not include red herrings. What I mean by red herring is that you include an element within a puzzle that confuses the player of the solution. Red herrings massively increase the amount of solution complexity. The reason is that they stop the player from being able to understand what the end state is.  If you include a element, it needs to be clear to the player what function that element is supposed to do. Lets look at some examples from Kana Quest.

First Iteration of World 5 Level 5 in Kana Quest

So lets break down whats going on here. In Kana Quest you match sounds between letters, when all the Kana are connected, that’s when the level is complete. In this level there are Slime Kana (The green ones). They cannot match, but they can change the vowel sound of any movable Kana (So not the Stone Kana). So here the player has to use slime kana to make two chains of three Kana that connect to stone Kana. One of the core “questions” of this level is that you have to figure out how to the Slime Kana next to the Stone Kana. Do you use them on the top row, or the bottom row? Pretty simple right? But, in playtesting we found that players correctly used the two い (i) correctly, but used the え (e) wrong and it was causing frustration. The problem was that because the く(ku) was immediately above え (e). For some reason, player’s kept interpreting it as, oh going up is correct because they are next to each other (but somehow ignored the な (na) that was also next to the え (e)) Our solution?

We just moved the く(ku) over one spot.  It keeps the “question” of the level in tact, but it removed the “red herring”. The red herring in this situation is using the え (e)on the く(ku).

It is incredibly easy to make a red herring by accident, and the only real way to catch them is to playtest and see where players get hung up. And of course, maybe you have a puzzle game that is about getting lost or being obtuse then maybe you can be a bit more forgiving of red herrings. But if you leave them in make sure your players don’t feel like they wasted their time for following a red herring.

2. Try to distil a puzzle into a single element.

I mentioned this briefly when I was talking about red herrings. But you should be able to distil a level down to a singe element or “question”. Lets look at some levels to see what I mean.

World 1 Level 3

This is one of first levels that stumps players. This level asks the player “can you correctly order these three Kana, while positioning them in a way that connects to the Stone Kana”.

 

World 3 Level 15

This level asks the player “can you figure out the correct order you need to move the three normal Kana on the top into the four One Way Kana on the bottom”.

 

World 8 Level 6

The core question of this level is “which one of these three Kana do you slime with う?”

So, the reason I think this is helpful is that it allows you as the designer to hone in to what is important to the level. If you find a level has LOTS of red herrings, properly understanding what you are trying to ask your players in a given level will allow you to get rid of unneeded information, and ask the question you are asking in a more easily understood manner.

Now of course, you don’t need to have only “one” core question in a level. You will often offer the player two core questions, especially as levels get more complex. But when you are introducing new mechanics, or introducing new ways to use old mechanics it is really important to hone in on one very clearly asked question and cut all unneeded information. In other words; only include the information complexity you need, and cut all that you don’t.

One last thing before we move on. When you use this technique to introduce a new element or question I find following a three act structure is helpful.

1. Introduce the question in its most basic form
2. Ask the same question in a more complex form
3. Ask the same question but with a curve-ball this time.

Number 2 is pretty heavily inspired by two episodes of the game maker’s toolkit. Please give them a watch as they explain what I’m talking about VERY well.

1. Give Your Players Small Wins

We are going to finish with something I wish I thought about more at early stages of Kana Quest. And unfortunately for me its a little too late for me to go back and solve this now. But why is this important?

• It allows you to make more complex levels as the small wins can guide the player to the solution in way that doesn’t feel like giving them the answer.
• When you make longer levels, it helps your motivate your players.
• It stops your players getting bored.

Now I did add a mechanic that attempted so solve this problem: Ghost Kana. Lets go over why they work and why they don’t, so you can learn from my failures.

World 6 Level 10

So Ghost Kana are immovable, and They always have a number on their head. When the player creates a chain of Kana the length of the number on their head they come back from the dead and the player can move them as per normal. Sometimes they come back as blank tiles (if they have green flames) sometimes they come back as actual Kana (blue flames). So the attempt with this mechanic was to allow the players to have some small victories along the way. Like “hey you get a chain of three kana!! Good job, have a cookie” type thing. The problem is that while Ghost Kana do a good job of guiding the player down the correct path they don’t feel like much of an achievement. They don’t make the player go “yes, one down one to go”. Instead they make the player go well crap now I have more Kana to worry about.

A good “small victory” mechanic I think signals to the player that the level has just gotten a little bit easier, and they did good (even if it is an incredibly small victory). And you want to know what game is the undisputed KING of this idea? I already gave you a hint but writing the dev’s name…

Its Candy Crush.

Simply making a move in that game feels like a small win. It makes you want to keep going. But a lot of the more advanced mechanics are just more “small win” mechanics. The locked squares that become unlocked when you match something next to them are great small win mechanics because when you unlock them, it feels like an achievement AND it makes the level just a tinier bit more easy. I know it’s not the answer you wanted to hear, but you can learn SO much from Candy Crush and any aspiring puzzle designer would be a fool to ignore the lessons you can learn from it. Like think about it, the most common criticism levelled at puzzle games as a genre is they make the player feel stupid. Candy Crush is a puzzle game and no one has ever accused it of making you feel dumb, and it a widespread mainstream hit in a genre that often is seen as niche. And I feel like a lot of its success comes from this principle of giving the player lots of small incremental victories on the path to beating a level. I wish I payed more attention to this because while I think Kana Quest is a great puzzle game… if I had learned this lesson it could have been an amazing puzzle game.

 

Wrapping Up

So that’s the devblog for this month. I hope you liked it and that maybe you learned a thing or two along the way. If you did like this, please consider giving me a like or subscribing to the Kana Quest mailing list at http://www.kanaquestgame.com to get all the Kana Quest devblogs when they come out.

If you think Kana Quest is neat, you can wishlist it now at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/725850/Kana_Quest/

Or you can follow the social medias at

• https://www.facebook.com/KanaQuest/
• https://twitter.com/KanaQuest
• https://www.instagram.com/kanaquestgame/?hl=en

Until next time, take care and have a good one.

 

 

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Kana Quest DevBlog March 2019

Hi all, its another month and that means its time for another Kana Quest DevBlog!!

Like last month I have just been working on levels. But the big difference between this month and last month is that I am now SO CLOSE to finishing all the levels in the game! There are 13 worlds in a Kana Quest, I have finished making levels for 11/13, and the 12th world is more than two thirds complete. So we are in the home stretch here folks.

At this point I have had a chance to work with all the mechanics in the game and I thought it would be fun to talk about each in depth about the positive and negative elements of each.

And oh how the mighty have fallen. This is a Mystery Kana, and they were the first mechanic I made for Kana Quest, and I was so proud of it at the time. And I still think its a valuable thing to have in the game, but the more I used it the more utterly irritated I got when I play-tested any level with them in it. So why did I make them? Why are they important? And why are they so irritating? So I made Mystery Kana because I was having a very specific problem, players weren’t flipping over the Kana to learn the pronunciation to complete the levels in the first world. This is problematic because it would render the entire function of Kana Quest meaningless. So I needed a way to effectively force the player to look at them. Mystery Kana do that very well. They just also irritate the player at the same time. The way these things work is they cannot move, but can match. The player needs to keep track of what each Mystery Kana, does and does not match with. Then using that information, figuring out what the Kana’s true identity is. The biggest problem with Mystery Kana is they just simply break the flow of the game and force you make non optimal moves to figure them out, and then you can complete the level. The end result is they start to become a nuisance after a while, and its for this reason they get phased out after world 4.

The One Directional Kana have been a solid work horse throughout development. There are so many things about this mechanic that are excellent from a designer’s perspective. 1st is they are easy to understand from a player’s perspective. The arrow shows you what they do; they only move in one direction. 2nd is they have a huge amount of design space. Design Space is a design term for talking about how many different interesting configurations a mechanic can be used in. And these Kana allow for so many interesting levels to be made. I am still finding new and interesting ways to use these things even in the 12th world. They are also very flexible in how they can be used. If you want to build an entire level around them, you can and it will probably be a really fun level. But you can also just throw one of these into a level to help guide the player towards the solution. I suspect once I have finished making levels, and I’m in the polishing stage I will end up adding a lot of One Directional Kana for this exact reason. What’s more is they also have interesting interactions with basically every other mechanic. The only complaint I have against them is they can be very punishing of mistakes. The reason for this is if you move one spot too far and then make a bunch of other moves, you end up spamming the undo button more than is ideal.

The fourth world’s mechanic is the Ice Kana. These Kana will keep sliding in the direction you move them until they make an invalid move. These Kana are a good mechanic, but no where near as easy to work with as the One Directional Kana. They have a large amount of design space, they have interesting interactions with most other mechanics, and they can make some very fun levels. But the problem is that you can’t just through one of these into a level. Even if the Ice Kana is supposed to be a minor element to a level, you have to build the entire level around the Ice Kana to accommodate it.  This is not a bad thing as it allows you to create a nice change of pace for the player at points, its just something that needs to be treated with care. Another small problem is they tend to demand levels be a fair bit larger than a similar level without them would be. Other than that, I think Ice Kana are great.

The Slime Kana are another mechanic in a similar vein of the Mystery Kana as they both play around the sound matching aspect of the game. And so what they do is they will change the vowel sound of any kana you use them with. However unlike the Mystery Kana, these do not get highly irritating after a while. The main reason for this is that they often feel like they are helping you, rather than getting in your way. And because of this is they can just be plugged into a bunch of levels to add a little bit extra. But the biggest weakness of them is that they struggle being the core element of a level. Where the Ice Kana can’t help but be a diva, the Slime Kana struggle with it. Another problem with the Slime Kana is that because the Kana that appear on them can only be Slime Kana it does mean that the Kana on them just get seen less than every other Kana. But the gameplay of them is still solid enough that I made two variants of them.

 

This is a Ghost Kana. Ghost Kana, cannot move and cannot match. But they will come back from the dead once the player has made a group of Kana equal or greater than the number on their head. This is a tricky mechanic. And honestly they represent the biggest disparity between what its like to work with them, compared to what its like to play with them. Because playing with them is honestly pretty good. They make interesting scenarios, and force you to think about the level in a different way. But from a designer’s perspective these things are so hard to work with. You have to engineer levels so carefully around these to make them fun for the player. They have very limited amounts of design space too, so I honestly struggled to finish the world where these were introduced. And what’s worse there are some mechanics that this straight up does not work with.

So this is the first of two Slime Kana variants. This is a Blue Slime Kana. Blue Slime Kana are different because they only ever attach to Kana that end with an “i” sound… and they add an additional vowel to match with rather than completely changing the vowel. This is because of an actual function in Japanese. See Blue Slimes can only have the following letters や/ゆ/よ. And these letters can attach to other letters to make slurred sounds. For example き(ki)+や(ya) = きゃ(kya). So きゃ will match with “i” ending kana, “a” ending kana and “k” starting kana. This makes the mechanic quite satisfying for the player to use because it opens more doors for them than regular Slime Kana do. And its for this reason that they can be a bit frustrating to design around as a game designer. Another problem with them is they have to attach to a kana that ends with an “i”. This over the course of the game makes “i” ending kana being over represented in comparison to other kana. Whats more is that often you have to design levels in which fully utilise the multiple vowel sounds. But this often leads to further exacerbating the over represented “i” problem. But other than these issues, these kana have all the strengths of regular slime kana. And they allow me to illustrate an important part of reading Japanese.

 These are the Paralysis Kana. They can be moved once… but after that they turn to stone and cannot be moved. These are probably my second most useful mechanic, just after One Directional Kana. They allow for interesting level design, and they have a good amount of design space to them. Not quite as much as One Directional Kana, but still a large amount. They are also very easy to understand what they do. And they can be the focus of a level, or be used as a back up element. The biggest problem that they have though is they have a hard cap on how difficult they can make a level. This isn’t a bad thing as it does mean it’s basically impossible to make a level that is too difficult with these but it does make them a bit more restrictive as one might like in later levels.

Transform Kana are pretty straight forward. Then can become any Kana, but they can only be one Kana at a time. This mechanic probably has the least frills of any of my mechanics, and you what that’s ok. It works just fine. They ask a simple question of the player, and that question is “where am I needed, and what do I need to be?”. So the trick to designing around these Kana is making sure there is a spot that can only be connected with a Transform Kana. Which is fine as long as one is careful with the other Kana that are used within the level. If you aren’t careful the player will just plop the transform kana anywhere and not have to think at all. They also suffer the same problem that Slime Kana face in that they struggle to be the focus of a level, but they do slot into lots of levels pretty easily.

Here is the final Slime Kana variant. And this is yet another instance of me basing a mechanic off an actual function in Japanese. There are small added strokes called “tenten” and “maru” for Hirgana and Katakana. These will change the consonant of the letter they are attached to. In the game this often is something that is a disadvantage, not an advantage like the other two Slime Kana. Because of this you cannot finish a level if there are any Purple Slime Kana left in play. This forces the player to find the part of the level that can accommodate losing its consonant sound. Basically everything that applies to the first two applies to this one.

  

This is an “n”. Because they don’t share a consonant or a vowel with any other Kana they cannot match like a normal Kana. So I decided to make them the Unfriendly Kana that all other Kana hate. So for as long as an “n” is in the level, you cannot complete it. So how do you get rid of an “n”? You dump them into a rubbish bin. Which looks like this.

Once an “n” is moved into a rubbish bin both are removed from play, and the spots they occupied become empty spaces on the board. This mechanic requires a fair bit of set up to get working, but once you set up a level to accommodate them its a solid mechanic that has a solid amount of design space. One unique problem with this mechanic is using effectively uses up twice the amount of space that a regular Kana would. Because of this levels with this mechanic tend to look very cluttered and can be a bit difficult to process. Outside these problems they are a solid mechanic that just needs a bit of preparation to make work.

 

Finally we have Kana Sliders. The art for these is still under way, but what these do is they move every Kana in a row or column down one spot as long as there is an empty spot on the board in that direction. This is a very easy mechanic to design around and offers a lot of design space that had not been available for me for most of the game. Because Kana Sliders care about empty space, it allows them to interact with Slime Kana and Unfriendly Kana that no other mechanic has been able to do so far. The biggest problem with them however is they tend to make levels with ridiculous amount of moves required to complete them. There are levels that require more than 70 moves to complete with this mechanic. This can be problematic especially if the player makes a mistake early on as they will be punished especially hard for that error. Other than that issue, I love working with Kana Sliders.

And with that this weeks Kana Quest Devblog comes to a close. Next time I think I’ll pick out a handful of choice levels, analyse them, talk about how I made them, and talk about why I think they are special.

Kana Quest Devblog Feb 2019

First thing’s first, I know I missed the January devblog. I’m sorry it wont happen again. But… it’s here now, and it’s a new year, which means this is the first devblog for 2019! This is going to be a big year for Kana Quest as this is the year we are going to release! Knowing the end is in sight is a strange feeling as I’ve been working on Kana Quest for the last two years of my life. But I hope you all will be there with me as we run headlong down this final stretch!

So what does this “final stretch” look like in terms of development? Well for me personally that means making all the levels. I had spent most of 2018 finishing the art and making all the visual assets, but in terms of gameplay, very little was being made. But now that I’ve finished all the visual assets and Reuben my programmer has finished programming in each mechanic, I am able to churn out levels very quickly. How quickly is that? Well since last month’s devblog, world 5, 6, and 7 now have all their levels made. Of course these levels still need play testing before they are 100% good to go, but they are playable, and reasonably balanced.

So, seeing as levels are all I have been doing this past month, I’m gonna tell you how I have been making them. And some of the weird things I have to pay attention to when I’m making levels.

The first thing I do when I start making a level is I figure out, how hard I want this level to be, and what kana I want the player to see.

Sorry if this is a bit too game design 101 here buuut… This is the flow channel. Flow is that feeling where you are in the zone. But getting the player into the zone requires very careful balance from the game designer. So something I’m sure you will notice when you play Kana Quest is that every three to five levels will build in difficulty, only to drop back a bit and then continue ramping up in difficulty.  The reason you do this, is that it’s just more fun for the player.

In Kana Quest there are a few different ways you can control the difficulty of any given level. They are:

• The amount of Kana in a level
• Size of the level.
• Potential board state permutations
• Number of potential solutions
• Complexity of solution.

So lets go through each of them. And first up is the amount of Kana. So in my experience, you have a hard cap of about 14 -16 different Kana in a level. Why is this? This is because past this number, there is too much information for the player to comprehend. And personally, even I can’t process levels with this many Kana. It’s also a difficulty that isn’t a lot of fun for the player. Solving the puzzles is fun, recognising kana… not so much.

The size of the level like the amount of kana, also has a hard cap. This time its not so much about overwhelming the player though. The largest you can make a level in Kana Quest is 7×4. This is simply because if you make the level any bigger, it will not fit on the screen. I know that sounds silly, but due to the way pixel art works, there is no easy way to just “zoom out” without also causing a lot of pixels to bunch and stretch. But honestly, most of the time this is plenty to work with. If you are smart about how you construct things this is not actually as bigger constraint as one might think it is.

What I mean by “potential board state permutations” is how many possible unique configurations can be made in any given level. So for example.

These two levels have the same kana, and the same starting positions but the first level is significantly easier than the second because the number of possible configurations of kana has been significantly reduced. Forgive me if my maths is wrong but the level on the left has only 120 unique board positions, whereas the level on the right has 362880 unique board positions. And while an advanced player can see through all the unnecessary information in the second level, it doesn’t actually make the puzzle any more fun for the advanced player because in both scenarios, the solution only requires two moves. So while you are giving advanced players a disappointing level, you are giving new players a level that is so information dense they will almost always solve the level by brute forcing the solution. What I’m trying to convey here is that when designing puzzles you need to control the amount of possible states so that you can guide the player to the solution. Now for more advanced levels its fine to offer levels that are more open ended, but you do need to be very sparing with how you do so.

Next up is the number of potential solutions. This category is a tricky one as personally I feel as though levels with multiple solutions make the level harder, not easier. Why you might ask? Well because it means that your players are less guided towards the optimal solution. It means they are more likely to get caught on unintentional red herrings. It also means that if the player wants to get a gold medal for a level, but they have only ever completed the level using an alternate solution that is more move intensive than the planned solution, they could spend way too long trying variations on the “wrong” solution. Really this is a side effect of having too many potential board state permutations, but every now and again its fun to have levels that offer multiple answers. Lots of levels in Kana Quest only have one solution, and lots of levels have multiple, the important thing is using this technique intentionally.

The final technique that I can use to control the difficulty for the player is probably the most important one. And that is complexity of solution. If the solution only requires two or three moves, its not a particularly complex solution. This usually means that the level isn’t super difficult. However, completion critical moves increase the complexity. A completion critical move is a move that if not made, the level cannot be completed.  Of coarse this can then be balanced with previous techniques. For example.

This is a level from world 1. And is in my opinion one of the best levels in that world. This has a very low complexity of solution, but in contrast to the all the levels before it, it has a slightly higher difficulty. But that difficulty comes from a larger number of potential configurations, multiple solutions, and a larger level size. The result is a level that isn’t too difficult, but does force the player to stop and think about the solution. But as the game ramps up in difficulty, ramping up the complexity of the solution is usually the safest way of doing so. Why is that? Well, it means you can control the amount of information you throw at the player to a far greater extent. Remember, you don’t want to overload the player with information, if they do they just start brute forcing the puzzles and have a bad time.  So an example of a good level made by giving the player a complex solution is this level.

The reason this level is good is because it requires a good amount of moves to complete, and there are only two completion critical moves required (using the Slime Kana on the correct Kana), and those moves can be executed by the player at any point. Whereas, here is a level that has gone way too far on the complexity of solution.

This level is way too hard and is to date the most difficult level I have made. And the reason is, that every singe move in this level is a completion critical move that requires being done in the exact right order. If you make one wrong move, you cannot complete this level. The fact that this level has a relatively constrained number of possible configurations is its only saving grace. And I wouldn’t be surprised if I remove, or rework this level before the launch of the game.

I think the real take away from this blog if you are making, or thinking of making your own game is; What are the different vectors for making a game difficult? Are there enough? Are there too many? What are the implications of using one of those vectors? What are the implications of using multiple of those vectors at once? How far can one push any and all of those vectors before a game becomes impossible? And most importantly, at any point in a game, what vectors of difficulty does the situation call for?

Anyway, these are the things that I’ve been thinking about for the last month or so. I’ll see you next month. If you have any questions about game difficulty or you disagree and you want to start a discussion, feel free to leave me a comment and we can have a chat. Until next month, take care.

Dec 18 Kana Quest Devblog

Hi all and welcome back to the Kana Quest devblog!

This last month was a busy month for Kana Quest development because for the first time, we’ve had to deliver to an “official” deadline. There have been unofficial deadlines before, like PAX and AVCon last year, but those deadlines were a bit fuzzier. They were more “make sure your game is in a presentable state by this time” sort of a deal. This deadline was much more concrete.

So what was this deadline? Well as a part of receiving funding from Film Victoria I have to complete milestone reports to prove to them that their money is being well spent and that I am on track to completion. For this milestone I said I would have the game’s art complete, and the game’s mechanics complete. And… we got there. All that remains at this point in time is bug fixing, level design, tutorials and balancing. That’s actually still quite a lot of things but lets not focus on that. Let’s focus on fun stuff. Like the full list of all the different kinds of Kana in the game!

STONE KANA: These poor kana have been turned to stone, and thus cannot move.

 

MYSTERY KANA: Look at these shifty looking Kana. They’re hiding something… Oh wait they’re hiding their true face! Pay attention to what they do and do not match with to discover their true identity.

 

ONE DIRECTION KANA: These Kana can only be moved in one direction. They have a big arrow on their head showing which way that is.

 

ICE KANA: These Kana have been encased in super slippery ice. They will keep moving until they can’t. Getting them to go where you want can be challenging.

 

GHOST KANA: These kana have lingering regrets. Mostly not wanting to pass onto the other side. But that’s no problem, you can bring them back to life if there’s enough friendship to go around. Make a chain of Kana the length of the number on a Ghost Kana’s head and they’ll come back!

 

SLIME KANA: These gooey Kana don’t like to make friends. But they do like helping other Kana! Attach one of these Kana to any other to change their vowel sound!

PARALYSIS KANA: These Kana are sick! You can move them once before they turn to stone!

 

BLUE SLIME KANA: These Slime Kana are a bit picky in which Kana they help. They will only help Kana with an “i” sound. But once they are attached the affected Kana will have two different vowels to match with other Kana. This mimics how the “y” sounding letters in Japanese attach to “i” ending kana to create blended sounds.

Eg. (yo) よ + (ki) き = (kyo)きょ (as in Tokyo)

 

SHAPE-SHIFTER KANA: These Kana can become anything! Whatever you need them to be, they can be it!

 

EVIL SLIME KANA: These Slime Kana nice like the others. They are angry and will stop you from completing a level unless they are attached to another Kana. But they make it harder for you to match with other Kana. This mimics the tenten and maru symbols in Japanese. You attach these symbols to letters to change the consonant. E.g. a (ta) た becomes a だ when you attach those two dots called tenten to it.

 

JERK KANA: This kana is called “n”. “n” for “n”obody likes them, because they are a jerk. They’re mean, they call the other kana names. They are so unpleasant that other kana cannot be happy if there is one near them. Fortunately there is a way to get rid of them. Move a jerk kana into this little portal thing and they will GO AWAY. Where do they go? Don’t worry about it.

 

And that is all the Kana! Its been a long road getting all of these in the game, and I can’t wait for you to figure out all the puzzles they are going to make.

Anyway, I’ll see you in the new year! Have a happy and safe holiday season, and from me and the Kana “明けましておめでとう” (Happy new year in Japanese)

 

Kana Quest Devblog November 2018

Hi all, welcome back to the Kana Quest Devblog!

A whole lotta stuff has been happening for Kana Quest this month so lets get to it!

Firstly is THE NEWS. There is only one really big piece of news and it came at the end of Melbourne International Games Week last month. Now I had known about this for a while, but I am now officially allowed to talk about it. Kana Quest was successful in receiving Film Victoria Funding in the most recent funding round! I’m really proud of myself for getting this funding, there were a lot of awesome games asking for funding in this round and I was one of the lucky ones to get through.

Here’s a link to the official announcement: http://gamesweek.melbourne/film-victoria-games-investment-greenlights-14-new-projects/

But enough tooting my own horn, onto the new stuff! And as of this month, I can say that Kana Quest’s background art is now 100% complete. Last month there were two more worlds needing to be completed. Well, they’re done now!

So this is world 12 in the game, showing off the parallax effect. So the idea behind the last three worlds was a three part story of a Kaiju (Godzilla type monster) coming to Japan, getting into a fight with a big Mech, and then the aftermath. World 12 is the the fight with the Mech. A couple of small details with this piece. The buildings in the background are the same buildings that appear in World 9 which were based of the main street in Akihabara. These buildings though were scaled down, had their colour changed and had a bunch of bits torn out of them to show the impact the fight was having on them. Also the Mech has a カ on its chest with is the Katakana for “ka” and the Kanji for power (Chikara). I was also going to give the Mech and the Kaiju simple idle animations, but the animation for them and nothing else looked weird. I also chose this colour pallet to make this world feel dangerous and scary. A lot of villains from TV shows have a purple and green colour pallet so I decided to lean into that. Also this world is the first time I’ve used outlines in Kana Quest’s backgrounds. Choosing if you are going to outline in pixel art is one of the biggest stylistic choices you can make, and I decided pretty early on that I wouldn’t use them for the majority of the backgrounds. But As I wanted to draw attention to the Mech and the Kaiju in this world I broke my usual rule.

And here we have, THE FINAL WORLD. So the conclusion to the three world “story arc” is that the Mech has defeated the Kaiju and stands victorious looking to the sun. But in the foreground we see the destruction that the fight has caused. A couple of notes, this scene was definitely inspired by FLCL and the scene where Haruhara Haruko leaves at the end of the series. It had everything I wanted from the final world, it had dramatic imagery and it was used to close one of my personal favourite shows (don’t watch the second season though, its awful).  I also decided to change the sky for this world. Every previous world has had a gradient for their sky. And that gradient was achieved with dithering so I could keep my colour count low. But for this final world I went with a flat off white with a bright red sun in the middle of it so that it would look extra unsettling next to the other worlds, but also to mimic the Japanese flag. I also talked briefly about how I have generally avoided outlines in the backgrounds. In this world I deliberately broke that rule to further hammer home that this world is not like the others. The final little detail that I put in here is the dog at the front. He is my actual real life dog. He always looks very dramatic so I thought he would fit right at home in this world.

Next up is how the game is progressing in terms of Mechanics. And I can say, now that Reuben has been working on the game for a month, very very well! Since coming on board he has cleaned up a bunch of code behind the scenes, added in FIVE mechanics into the game. This brings us up to 9 out 13 mechanics in the space of a month! And now that the world art is done I have even started making art for some of these mechanics.

This is a Ghost Kana. Ghost Kana, cannot move or match with other Kana. Also you might have noticed, they don’t have a Hiragana/Katakana on their head. This is because once you make a group of Kana with a size equal to a Ghost Kana’s number, they will come back to life as a normal Kana. This is got some great play to it especially when you add in some of the other mechanics. Once all the levels for this mechanic’s world are done I’ll do a break down of this mechanic on how it can be used and how much depth it adds to the game.

So anyway, that’s basically all I have for this month. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. Until next time, take care of yourselves and have a good month!

 

 

 

What’s this? It’s the Kana Quest Devblog for October!

Hi all, I’m Theo, the lead designer of Kana Quest. I’d like to introduce/reintroduce you to the Kana Quest DevBlog.

Why do I say “introduce/reintroduce”? Well the answer is this is the first Devblog I’ve done for Kana Quest in a while. And Secondly this will be the first Devblog that I will be sending it to everyone who has signed up to the Kana Quest mailing list. Which is something I am going to be doing from now on. And because I am going to be sending these blogs out on the mailing list, I am going to be making a few changes. Mostly being that I am not going to be posting these weekly like I used to. I don’t want to spam the inbox’s of people, and doing one a week was too much for me. So from now on, there will be a new Kana Quest devblog on the second Saturday of each month.

So for those who are new here, what can you expect in these devblogs? You can expect updates on how the game is coming along. Bits of news, interesting things that I’ve learned from making this thing, new features, and my general process.

So I’d like to start with the news. Lets get the bad news done with first, unfortunately Kana Quest will not be exhibiting at PAX Aus this year. Which to be honest is really bumming me out. What happened was that I was waiting for an inflow of cash before I booked a booth this year. And by the time the money came in, all the spots had been taken. If any of you were looking forward to playing the game there, I’m so sorry to have let you down.

But with the bad must come the good! And the good is that Kana Quest is no longer a solo project! I have my team member to come onto the project and I couldn’t be happier. As of this week the wonderful Reuben Covington is now the lead programmer for Kana Quest.

Here’s Reuben helping me set up for AVCon (Anime Vid Con in Adelaide) earlier this year.

Reuben is an incredibly talented designer and programmer whospecialises in Collectable Card Game designs (and is also currently working on Infinity Heroes which you can check out here –> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elphie/infinity-heroes-competitive-card-game-for-mobile-p ). The reason why I think was my choice was because he has an incredible knack for bottom up design work. This is the sort of design that starts with a mechanic and iterates onto it to create great gameplay for the player. Whereas I am a Top Down designer. I start with a desired end goal and create mechanics to achieve the desired end goal (e.g. Wanting a puzzle game that teaches Hiragana/Katakana without any rote learning or pop quizzes). Both of these approaches I believe are super important, but they both have their drawbacks and strengths. Because of this, I am certain Kana Quest will be a better game with Reuben’s input. And hopefully, with his help, Kana Quest will hopefully be finished far sooner than later.

Speaking of Kana Quest being finished, when is that going to be? Well I know at PAX Aus last year I said that it would be in 2018. Sorry that’s not going to happen. But I wasn’t far off. The plan is to essentially finish the game in the first quarter of 2019. And now with Reuben’s help, I’m more than confident we can bring the game to you then!

What makes me so sure I hear you ask? Well for one thing, in terms of art assets, the game is a little over 80% complete! And for me, the most time consuming art assets to produce are by far the world art that go behind the puzzles. As of this week I have finished 11 out of 13. At my current estimates I am planning to have finished all the art by the end of October, or by early November at the latest. Speaking of art, here’s the world art for worlds 8-11.

This one, was inspired by John Brack’s Collins St, 5pm. And you know… rush hour in Japanese train stations.

Oh and this one is of the main street in Akihabara (The nerd capital in Japan). Along with some not so subtle Vaporwave jokes.

This one I mostly wanted to capture the feel of how lights reflect at night in big Japanese cities.

And this one is the obligatory reference to Hokusai. Fun fact, all games set in Japan by law legally have to include some reference to the Great Wave. *previously stated “fun fact” is in fact a fabrication*

I’m really proud of all the art that I’ve made for Kana Quest so far and I feel like I’ve come a LONG way as a pixel artist since I started. And I can’t wait to show you all the last two worlds. I am going all out for them.

But speaking of my pixel art coming along a long way since I started. For some of you who might have seen Kana Quest at PAX last year you might not have seen that I have changed the logo. Why is this? To those of you who’ve seen the game at an event this year, this will be the same logo that you’re used to. And if that’s the case, no I’m not going to upload the old logo because I don’t like it, and I like this new one much more.

See, isn’t it pretty? I know I should be humble, but this logo was a lot of work and revision and I’m still kinda amazed I made something this cool.

This basically all I wanted to share with you all today. If you have a question about anything to do with the development of Kana Quest, please feel free to ask about it. I’d love to answer your questions. If you’d like to see more regular updates, you can follow the development on these social media channels:

• https://twitter.com/NotDeadDesigner
• https://www.instagram.com/kanaquestgame/
• https://www.facebook.com/KanaQuest/?ref=bookmarks

Until next time, take care and have a wonderful day.

 

Learning to Draw Low-Res Pixel Art People: Kana Quest Devblog 4th Aug 2018

Hi all! Welcome to the DevBlog for Kana Quest, where I document what I’ve been working for the week, and what I’ve learned along the way.

This week I did something I’ve never really had to do for Kana Quest before, and that is draw people in pixel art using very limited amounts of pixels. So this week we will go through the things I made and what the process for doing so was.

But firstly let me give you some context on what I’m making this for. So each world in Kana Quest has its own unique layered background art that repeats so that I can make use of parallaxing. I’m currently working on world 8 which is a homage to John Brack’s 5pm Collins St.

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You can see in the original there are two rows of people. I’ve finished the first one, and am up to the second. And this is where this weeks topic comes in. See the people in the second row are going to be much smaller than the ones on the foreground and thus I have way less pixels to work with.

 Each of these people range from 21-39 pixels wide and 61 – 88 pixels tall. In other words they are all way smaller than any of the people at the front. Quick heads up, I’m not going to go over how I arrived at my pallet for these people. I’m going to focus on the drawing aspect for this week.

So where did I start with these? Well I started each with an idea of what the person should look like at the end. I know this sounds silly but just having an idea of what you want them to look like will help. I also made a conscious effort to make sure they would all look different from each other. But once I had an idea of what I wanted I would start with the head.

I wouldn’t go for anything super detailed, just a roughly head shaped blob. Then I would figure out what shape the head should be using what I was planning and using reference photos. Always use reference photos, if you are anything like me and have the imagination of a gold fish they will be your best friend. For this blog we are going make a caricature that you will probably recognise from sailor moon: the nerdy schoolboy with massive glasses.

Gurio Umino from Sailor Moon

For this character, I figured he would have a pretty large and round head. Which also helped create room for his big glasses. I also gave him a bowl cut to make his head even more ball like. Something that I noticed very quickly making these characters is when you have this few pixels shape is really important. You have to express as much as you can from the rough shape of things. This is why I chose glasses boy here as the example for this blog.

Once I had the rough shapes blocked out (the face, hair and glasses) it was just a matter of shading everything to give him depth. Now I am not using hard outlines for these people. You are free to do that for your own pixel art if you like, I’m opting not to because it is not in style for Kana Quest. Another thing to pay attention to while shading is to use your shading to imply shape and texture. For example on the glasses I use shading to show how thick and bulky they are. I also use skin shading to show the curvature of his face.

But of course this is just the face. As I said before, for each of these characters I started with the head and worked my way down. The reason I did this is because by starting with the face I can get a good sense of what sort of personality I want to depict. In the case of this one, I wanted him to be pretty stiff and awkward looking. I also wanted him in the classic Japanese School uniform winter blazer. So what I did is I created a basic shape of his body; in this case a rigid rectangle. Then I placed where the hands and feet would go. It’s always easier to place where you want the hands and feet to be and work back towards the body than the other way round. In this instance the hands and feet were just straight next to his body, so it would have been pretty simple either way. Then I drew in the outline of his blazer and finished with shading. Once again keeping in mind that we need to use shading to help the viewer infer what the shape of everything is.

And there we have it! A finished person. Now if you excuse me I have another five of these things to make before I can finish making this world.

Anyway I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s devblog. I unfortunately wont be uploading a devblog next week as I will be exhibiting Kana Quest at this year’s Animaga in Melbourne. If you are coming, please come find me at in the indie game section, say hello and give the game a shot! But until next time, take care and have a great week!

New Logos, World Art, and Bug Fixes… Oh My: Kana Quest Devblog 14th July 2018

Hi all, bit of a weird devblog this week. I didn’t get to do any big stuff this week, but really just a bunch of small stuff. So we’re gonna cover a lot of ground, just without going in too deep on any of it.

 

First up and the biggest thing from this week is that I have revealed the new logo for Kana Quest. I’ve talked at length about the problems with the original logo before and I have actually had the finished logo since April when I wrote The Challenge of Pixel Art Logos. But I’ve been sitting on it until I had proper legal protections around it. But without any further ado, here it is!

I’m actually really proud of this logo, it looks so much nicer than the original, its clear, its readable, it clearly references Japanese logo design principles and its far more thematically relevant to Kana Quest. Anyway, I hope you like the new logo as much as I do.

 

Next up this week is I started work on world 8! I don’t have a lot to show for it so far. All I have is a pallet, which will almost certainly go through many revisions before the end product.

This is going to be the most ambitious world I will have done to date. It’s also going to be the difficult in terms of subject matter. See with the worlds I try to take small snapshots into different mundane parts of Japanese life, the first four worlds were the seasons, the fifth was about the summer festival, the sixth was the school sports day, and the seventh was Japanese shopping districts. However the eighth is going to be based on the morning commute, with inspiration from a classic piece of Australian art: John Brack’s Collins St, 5pm.

The rush hour in Tokyo (or any big Japanese city) is a ubiquitous part of daily life, and Collins St, 5pm is a ubiquitous part of Australian art history, so why not combine the two? I’ve been planning on doing this piece for ages now, in fact it was going to be world 5. However if I had done so, it would have been the first instance of me depicting Japanese people in Kana Quest. And I wanted the lifelessness of the people within to be seen as unusual, and not the norm. I actually hate western reporting about Japan. They love to run stories about how everyone in Japan is depressed, or the need for women only carriages during rush hour and other stuff like that, all while ignoring that the depression rate in Australia is pretty comparable, and at least the government is willing to actively do something to improve the safety of women beyond telling women “don’t walk alone at night”. As a result I feel like a lot of those stories have pretty racist undertones. So I’m going to try to make this piece in a way that doesn’t perpetuate those stereotypes. And if I feel I’m not going to be able to do this world art respectfully I am going to give it the axe, or as I would say in Japanese 首になる (it effectively means to be fired, but literal translation is to be beheaded).

The third and final thing worth talking is I am going to be at AVCon again this year and as a result I’ve been doing a bunch of small fix ups. Fixing bugs, updating level numbers, creating a demo version. Stuff like that. This is the sort of thing that I hate doing as a game dev, but is super important because otherwise your game looks like its falling apart at the seams. I mean Kana Quest kinda is falling apart at the seams but I don’t want the player to actually REALISE that.

So yeah, that’s all I’ve been working on so far this week, we will be on a break next week as I will be at AVCon and thus will not have time to make a devblog. But you can expect a post AVCon Dev Blog on the 27th!

Anyway, until then have a great week and take care of yourselves!

Step by Step of Making Kana Quest World Art: Kana Quest Dev Blog 30th June 2018

Hi all, this week I finished illustrating the art for World 7 in Kana Quest. And I’m pretty pleased with the end result. So I thought I would go through each of the “work in progress” images and talk about the things I did.

So here we have stage one. I wanted this world to be based around yellows and reds but then balancing it with light blues as the contrast colours. I also try to centre each world around something different, and I hadn’t done Japanese shops yet so I started with the central theme of the world from there. A couple of small details I put in here is the convenience store says Konbi 2. The word for 2 in Japanese is “ni” and “konbi” doesn’t actually mean anything. But if you add them together to make “konbini”, you get the word for convenience store. And on the billboard above, it says “Wayward Strand Coming 2019”, along with a QR Code to their website. I’m putting in a reference to this game because the Art Director (Goldie Bartlett @GhostTownGoldie) helped me out a bunch when I first started working on Kana Quest, and I wanted to acknowledge the help she gave me beyond the credits. The final little detail here is the drive through restaurant is called Zukina and is blatantly ripping off Sukiya a popular Donburi chain in Japan.

 

Here’s the next stage. The biggest change here is the massive change of the colour pallet. I mentioned earlier that I wanted to have the yellows and blues contrasting, but the yellows I was previously using were too green, and thus they ended being complimentary with the blue. So I redid the pallet, grounding the shading with a nice warm purple which gives everything a beautiful looking away from a sunset sorta feel. Apart from a couple of small alterations these colours stayed the same until the end. And I feel as though, you should be fine with deciding to change your colour pallet if the current one isn’t working. Every time I’ve done so has resulted in much more striking scenes. Of course if you have too many colours doing so might be a bit tricky, so maybe stick to a few colours to start  with, then change them as needed until you are happy and then use as many intermediary colours as you like.

 

Once I was happy with the foreground shops, and colour pallet I moved onto making the background buildings. I have a fair bit of trouble with things that are not in the foreground because you need include less detail, but because it’s pixel art, you need enough detail to properly convey what it is. And to be honest I don’t think I’ve mastered this yet. I probably included too much detail on these background buildings. Also a small quirk about how I make these scenes, because each layer is parallaxing (foreground layers scroll faster than background layers) I have to make sure that the art for the background buildings extends to the lowest point in the foreground shops, otherwise there will holes. But the result is a bunch of artwork that just isn’t seen 80% of the time.

 

Next up was completing the shading on the background buildings. There’s not a whole lot to say about this stage, its just a slightly more developed version of the previous image. Except that in this one, I’ve repeated the background buildings so they take up the whole screen. I do this to get a better idea of how it will look in game.

 

Next up is the foreground. This is the first time I’ve had an actual person in the foreground. I had people in the stalls in World 5 and some students in World 6. But noting this front and centre. The main reason is lack of courage. I started learning pixel art specifically for Kana Quest. But I finally stopped putting it off and did it. My process was as follows. Create a rough sketch of the outline of the character. Then clean up the lines so everything looks nice and neat. Then block in large areas of colour going over the previously created line art. Finally add in small areas of shading and detailing.

 

Last one! There are only two main changes here. Firstly I finished the sky to have the same dither effect used in all the other worlds, and then I gave my young boy a baseball cap. What team is it for you ask? Why, it’s a cap for the Hanshin Tigers: the team of choice in my area of Japan. I decided to give him the cap because he looked like a kid who’s a part of the baseball club at school, and thus would totally be all about his local team.

Fun fact about the Hanshin Tigers, they haven’t won in decades and its all because they got cursed by Colonel Sanders. And no, I’m not making this up. When they last won the championship, their supporters threw a Colonel Sanders statue into the river next to the stadium. Why? Because they thought it would be fun to find lookalikes of team members in the crowd, and then throwing them in the river in celebration. But the Hanshin Tigers had one American player. And they couldn’t find another westerner, so they just threw in a Colonel Sanders statue in instead of a fan. But the following years they went from being the champions to 18 years of ending in last or second last place. So years later they went in and pulled up the statue. But they only found the top half, and the Colonel’s hand was missing. But their performance improved a bit. So a few years later they went looking for the other half, and found it. Once again the team’s performance improved again. And they were now one of the better teams but they kept getting unlucky losses towards the end of the season. So there is a huge bounty on finding the missing left hand, but alas they are yet to find it. The found parts of the statue actually now rest inside KFC Japan’s headquarters.

Look upon the destroyer of Hanshin Tiger’s fan’s hopes and dreams.

 

Anyway, that’s all I got for this week. Until next time take care and have a great week!

Anatomy of Pixel Art Style: Kana Quest DevBlog 23rd Jun 2018

Hi all, welcome to this week’s Kana Quest Devblog. This week I started work on World 7 in Kana Quest, and as a result I have been looking at a LOT of reference images. And looking at my references, made me start breaking down the different stylistic patterns I was seeing. Then in turn I started thinking about how those patterns affect the feel of a piece. So today we are going to look at a two different techniques/styles in pixel art, and what feelings they convey.

The first technique I want to talk about is the use of outlines. A lot of character art will have strong lines around the character as well as components of the character it’s self. Compare these two pieces of character art.

ドット絵　トリオンの蟲惑魔 pic.twitter.com/FS9C3xzgga

— いち (@ichi_et) December 7, 2014

Managed to make some time to join the @Pixel_Dailies yearbook! I could not leave my pup Pixel out of it 🐶 #pixel_dailies #yearbook pic.twitter.com/TKB14HbOYT

— Lu Nascimento @lunascimento.art on bsky (@viiolaceus) June 22, 2018

They both utilise an anime an anime-esque aesthetic but the end result and feel from the two is massive. And the pattern that I’ve noticed is that the lack of borders make a piece of pixel art feel more mysterious. While the inclusion of borders make the piece more concrete.  The piece that really illustrated this to me though was this one.

Edwin Sylvaro and the beasts of the forest#maroon #pixelart #pixel_art pic.twitter.com/RHoBiI8ieP

— RareThistle (@Hainsaw) June 20, 2018

I love this piece. The reason this piece is so evocative for me is the incredible use of both bordered and border less pixel art. The silhouettes of all the creatures is clearly defined by the borders but the shading is done without. This creates a wonderful push and pull of between the known and unknown. Of course the use of mono directional dithering (seen in the clouds and the antelope monsters fur) further adds to this feeling.

 

Which brings me to the topic of dithering in general. Depending on how you use dithering it can change the feel of a piece dramatically. In this piece the use of irregular dithering makes the scene even more surreal and mysterious.

 

 

 

 

Source: https://sky-burial.deviantart.com/art/Mossy-Robo-594919677

And yet, dithering can also cause a piece to be almost “too real”.

I tried to find the source of this one, but I couldn’t find it. If you know the source please let me know so I can edit it in!

And I think it all comes down to the type of dithering being used, and the extent that its implemented. What I mean by “the type of dithering” is if the dithering follows a consistent linear progression (as seen in the second image) or if its irregular (seen in the first). Also you can see that in the first image, the use of dithering is far more restrained, whereas the second image uses it basically everywhere. When I first started doing my art for Kana Quest I was definitely using dithering way too much. And I’ve come round to the view that your dithering should be used to create the texture of the piece. In the case of the mossy robot the dithering makes the texture feel kinda chunky and bumpy.

Anyway, while writing this I realised that everything I talked about has a consistent theme. Each of these techniques creates a tension between what is “realistic” and what is “abstract”. Using dithering over flat colours; more abstract (usually). Using outlines and borders makes pixel art more abstract, but more easy to define. And I think something that I want to be more conscientious about going forward is how abstract I’m willing to push the art of Kana Quest.

But before I go check out the progress on the art for  World 7 in Kana Quest. Its coming along nicely so far, though there are a few things I think I’ll have to fix up. I’ve also had a blast hiding as many little references into this one as possible. See if you can find them all. There are three so far. Anyway, until next time have a great weekend!