The Happy Medium

A tiny collection of pixels that usually don’t live

Noonat’s games are crammed with ideas. Queens (a game made for the Ludum Dare game design challenge based on the theme “domestic abuse”) gives you a new character with a new name every time your avatar dies. It’s a kind of twisted incentive to be better at the game and, in an uncomfortable way, helps you understand the obsessively abusive King antagonist. And then there is the classic plumber/princess dynamic that is present just enough to make you feel nostalgic and uneasy.

Deathbeam is kind of like Pixeljam’s Dino Run. It has the same impending wall of doom gameplay (this time in the form of an alien mother ship with deeply unsettling sound) but adds beatifully minimal visual design and lightning-quick moral decisions. It’s an excersize in capturing tension in game design, and it works (painfully) well.

Noonat discusses design with a comfortably assured vision, and it comes across in his work. I’m a big fan the games he’s made so far, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.

THM: What are your influences?

Noonat: I’m a huge fan of games that tell stories through gameplay, especially when they give players their own stories to tell. I try to apply that to my own ideas, but I’m never quite sure if I’ve been successful with it. I’ve seen people telling funny stories after playing Queens, so that makes me really happy.

In the mainstream market, I think Shadow of the Colossus and Left 4 Dead are two great examples of story through gameplay. I think indie games are doing it better than most. Braid and Don’t Look Back were both excellent, and Pixeljam does it wonderfully with all of their games.

There are some games that wouldn’t normally be considered in that category that are also good at it—Battlefield 2, for instance. It doesn’t really have any story to speak of, in the traditional sense, but players are overflowing with their own stories after an hour or two of playing and love telling you about them.

What do you mean by “funny stories”?

Oh, there were a few comments on posts about it that made me laugh. “Fair Queen Souplice, you may not have the fairest name in all the kingdom but you only had the strength to survive the evil king’s dungeon.”, or “Queen Wimarca, a scrappy, short-haired brunette tomboy sort of girl finally managed to escape the king’s clutches.” I found it interesting that people remember the queens by name and imagine backgrounds for them, even though they’re just a tiny collections of pixels that usually don’t live for more than 30 seconds.

Your sound design is very effective—lot’s of brutal sounds that help reinforce fear. What can you tell me about the sound process for your games?

Hah, luck of the draw? I love sound, but I know next to nothing about creating it. It’s usually the last thing I do—mostly due to the time constraints of Ludum Dare—and at that point I’m usually just hitting randomize and mutate in sfxr until I get something that sounds right.

That said, I think I have a pretty good idea of what emotion I want different parts of the game to convey, and try to find sounds that represent that. I’m curious, what sounds jumped out at you the most in the games?

In particular, I thought the looming, vibrating spaceship sound in Deathbeam was unsettling, especially in contrast to the near silence of the game. And in Queens, the sounds were crunchy—really low-bit, broken sounds that drove home the brutality of the situation.

Yeah, the mother ship sound was the one sound that was really intentional. I don’t think the beam would be nearly as overwhelming with the sound off. I kind of wanted the fourth room in Queens to be the same: just loud, and crushing, and full of noise. That room is supposed to represent the hopelessness of the situation, and the contrast once the sound stops kind of fits with the story I think.

Did you feel a lot of pressure taking on a theme like domestic abuse?

Yeah, definitely more pressure. With this one, I was only going to do it if I got an idea I thought really fit, whereas with other themes one might be more willing to half-ass it with something that doesn’t really fit. Once you get an idea I don’t think it’s any harder than other themes.

I do think games can deal with deeper issues, but I personally prefer when it’s done through allegory. I think it has a deeper impact on the player when they have to think about it for a bit. That approach can also allow the game to focus a bit more on being fun, which should really be the end goal regardless of what other themes you’re trying to convey.

The games that you mentioned previously, what is it about their storytelling that appeals to you?

I think it’s similar to a good storyteller in face-to-face conversation. Most people, when they’re telling you about something, tell their story without really involving you as the listener. “Man, you should have seen the guy that showed up at the party… he was kind of stinky.” It tells you what happened but it’s all facts, things that happened to someone else, somewhere else.

Good storytellers throw in bits that pull you into the story to see it through their eyes. “So, I’m standing there with my drink, and out of the corner of my eye I see this ratty guy walk in. At first I thought he just looked a little scruffy, but then the smell hit me—whoa! He must not have bathed for a week.” They give you just enough hints to let you feel what they want you to feel.

For games, the gameplay itself brings out the most emotion in the player, and storytelling should take advantage of that. You could tell the player a great story without it, and that would be fine, but they could have just watched a book or read a movie. People play games to be involved in the story.

I might take flak for using this example, but I think Metal Gear Solid 4 was possibly the worst example of storytelling in a game that I’ve seen. The game should have been good, but I was so detached from the story as a player that I just wanted the cinematics to be over so I could play. At one point I looked at the time and realized I had been sitting there with the controller in my hands doing nothing for half an hour. I was more emotionally invested in the story of Donkey Kong.