One of many reasons I wanted to start a blog was to talk about specific video games, and what drew me inspired to make them in the first place. From Software through Demon Souls an Dark Souls has spawned a huge foray of "Souls-like" games from other developers. But they often never quite hit the nail on the head for the Souls fans. As one myself, I fundamentally believe World Design holds the answer to all of it.
World Design is a broad field of video games. I like to think of it as both the world of the video game, and how the player feels throughout it. It'd be easy to describe it entirely as what the player can see, do and listen to, but there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than that.
We design for the senses and then get some emotion coming out from players. When you defeat a boss in Dark Souls, you see its life bar is gone, the game's dead enemy sound plays, loud non diegetic shimmer of magic nothing sparks to life. You see a dying animation play, and in big bold worlds "VICTORY ACHIEVED". All of those moments, I would call as part of the world design. The world makes a big deal out of the boss you just defeated, because that's your one goal in the game. Find an enemy, fight it, maybe die, and move on to the next big enemy.
There are plenty of other examples to other degrees. You get similar feedback when defeating enemies, some tougher ones make a more distinct sound, you unlock big heavy doors, you step into boss arenas through a daunting fog gate, music kicks in and then you feel the size of your next venture.
THE ROLE OF THEMES IN WORLD DESIGN
So why does From Soft's games do this so well? We see an early version of it in Demon Souls, and a crap ton of it in Bloodborne. This is all part of the world design.
What kind of world you're in exactly, gets shown to you the whole game. It's almost like a recurring theme that the game hammers you over the head with. Let's take one theme from Dark Souls. Dire/Dread. You're a corpse in a prison cell. Dire. You run past people that look like you, but have clearly lost their mind. Shit's dire. First thing that interacts with you is a boss. Shit's really dire. Unless you've played it a whole bunch, you probably won't fight it, you'll have to run. The game literally makes you feel like this is a dire situation, and you need to bounce. The first NPC you meet is crestfallen. The first other parallel you meet to what you act like, has given up on the mission you're about to go on. Second boss you fight, literally walls you from the path forward. The game's telling you this is your life now. After you manage to kill it, instead of rewarding you with an immediate checkpoint, it gives you the uncertainty of having to go look for a safe spot. If you mess that up, it's likely you got toasted by a dragon around the corner. I can go on forever, but this is a core part of the game's world design that incites this feeling of dread in you. You're always on your toes, and that's the way the world is. You're meeting characters that suffered the same fate, people that betray and monsters that borderline cheat you. You will never meet a Souls player who doesn't examine every chest before opening it.
For a game to successfully rope you in, you need people to live and bask in this emotion. It can't be fake, or shallow like putting skulls on everything. It's the result of careful level design, and laser sharp focus. The game never strays from this theme, and as a result you get a super concrete experience from players.
The next question is, how do you design a world like that? There are a couple of games that come to mind, Hyper Light Drifter and Super Meat Boy. The latter will make sense when we get to it.
HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER
Here is a game that nailed down it's emotion. It tells you almost nothing outright, it tells you exactly what's up with your character, and never lets go. Your character is sick, they get some kind of vision, and then they go back to fighting. The world's levels pose a challenge of dashing mastery, combat proficiency, and the game's reload mechanics encourage you to act like a badass. And badass is what the game wants you to know about it. The dashing ability is cool, attacking takes timing and reflexes, shooting takes mild precision, and movement is key. The game has you doing magic with your hands to play well.
But the game paces itself, because you're entirely in control of the pace. Your objective is self-driven, the game gives you clues on the map to go to the four corners of it, and deal with what you see there. That's about it. You find out what is a collectible on your own, you find out what those mean for your progress, and each side of the world has a little story to tell. Through the setting, the giants' corpses and the actual enemies you're fighting. Desperate things happened here.
None of the game's world design would work if things were blandly explained. There's intrigue in the quietness of the game. The ambient-style musical scores drive that into your brain with their unique character. Your character only coughs, NPCs speak in foreign symbols, the whole game speaks through them. The music is slow paced, loud, descriptive singular notes. Much like the game's symbols. All pointing to the calmly serene contemplation about this game's story that you're making.
Basically, the game's choice of gameplay, music, storytelling and level design all point at the same theme of Bladerunner-esque intrigue. That idea is clear from the start, it's got character and style, and the whole game reinforces that. That's the feeling of lonely mystery you're getting when playing this game. This desperate journey will end on a bitter sweet note.
SUPER MEAT BOY
I wanted to use a rather drastically different game style to describe this concept of world design. It shares similar tones of futility as Dark Souls and Hyper Light Drifter, but we can focus on another theme. And that theme is GO.
You've gotta go, go, go! Cutscenes are short and sharp, you enter each level, you run at the wall, fall and die, splat back to life and go again. The game wants you to be fast, and you can feel it. You feel bad at the game when you go slowly. Even if you complete the level. Every time you complete a level, you can watch the replay. Here's where you can see all the times you go'ed. And if you go'ed slowly, you can cringe as your last, living meat boy edges to the cliff and does the saddest hop you've ever seen.
It's almost literally a flash game. The game describes moving fast as being good at the game, and tells you that you will feel good too. Meat Boy leaves a slick trail of blood that you love seeing paint the floor and walls, the jumps are squishy, snappy and satisfying, levels are designed to be solvable if you keep your momentum, and some of the game's obstacles force you to go fast.
The game doesn't only do that through it's gameplay, like I mentioned the story gets told rapidly, animations happen in a blink, the soundtrack is upbeat and gets you in a groove. Having this sense of speed is what makes you believe in the motions, and contraptions of the game. As crazy as Super Meat Boy is, you can believe these things exist within the context of the game.
CONCLUSION
For a game to succeed in World Design, you need consistency in your game's ideology. What ideas could you train players into thinking so much, that they crave it in every other game they play?
Dark Souls decided to let players drive themselves forward out of sheer will, multiplying the feeling of rewards and making exploring new corners invigorating.
2D Platformers need slick wall jumps and slides because of Super Meat Boy.
When making a video game where world design is your primary driver, what is the consistent emotion you want players to feel?