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GDC Talk Notes

Designing for Mystery

  1. Intro (5 minutes)

    • We’re Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy. We’ve been working together on new media art projects in the context of live performance, installation, and browser-based artworks since 2005 or so. A few years ago, we started developing this game, “Kentucky Route Zero.”
    • The project is a very close collaboration: we both work on programming, design, and storywriting. Tamas does all the art & animation, and Jake writes the dialog & does sound design. We also work with a composer named Ben Babbitt who writes and records the music.
    • When we started working on KRZ, we imagined it being a side-scrolling platformer in the style of Super Metroid, but with conversations instead of gunfights.
    • (Demo early movement prototype)
      • Input was with the mouse, and jumps were completed automatically; the game wasn’t about reflex or skill.
      • The original art style was more naturalistic, it evolved to become more illustrative & graphic, as we’ll see later.
      • Companion characters in this game behaved as keys for locks in the world; this relationship also changed.

  2. Puzzles vs. Mysteries (5 minutes)

    • So our early imagination of what KRZ would be was based on puzzle design: encountering locks and then working out the keys for them.
    • Where we’re at now with the game is less like a puzzle and more like a mystery.
    • Our use of those two words in contrast is inspired by some writing by Gregory Treverton.
    • Treverton says simply that a “puzzle” is something you could solve if only certain information wasn’t being withheld. With a “mystery,” you have too much information, and there’s no guarantee that any of it is relevant. He says puzzles can be solved, but mysteries can only be framed.
    • We often approach game design as a puzzle-crafting process: devising locks and keys that enforce a certain pace through our stories, or that are pleasurable, compelling, and engaging on their own.
    • But as Treverton says: “Puzzles may be more satisfying, but the world increasingly offers us mysteries.”
    • These are things like credit default swaps, and other precariously complex machinations of financiers that express themselves in predatory lending behavior. Treverton uses the example of healthcare – we’d like to think that healthcare is a matter of solving puzzles to find cures, but really our health is a dizzyingly complex interaction of habit, environment, genetics, and so on.
    • We didn’t set out to shift our design thinking from puzzles to mysteries, but as we began to take on more of these complex situations as our subject matter, our values and approach changed to match. The “puzzle/mystery” dichotomy is an explanation that we’re borrowing, but it seems to fit (if a bit loosely).

  3. Pacing (4 minutes)

    • Without locks and keys to enforce pacing, we had to pay more attention to other pacing techniques
    • We use multiple forms of movement through the game’s spaces: walking, driving, the mine tram, limping after Conway’s injury.
    • We write deliberately-paced, “linear” dialog instead of hub-and-spoke or encyclopedic characters & texts.
    • Beyond utility, weird pacing is its own reward.
    • Some of our favorite filmmakers are Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch, and Akira Kurosawa. These filmmakers all use pacing in either very deliberate or very experimental ways.

  4. Layered spaces (7 minutes)

    • Our environmental design process is modeled after theatrical set design practice from the 20th century.
    • (TODO: break down env. design process)
    • We started by looking at set design from modern American tragedy like Death of a Salesman.
    • Later we started researching some more experimental set designs by people like Beowulf Boritt.
    • Revelation of the secret shapes of spaces through light & camera movement
      • Horse gas station
      • Z-space layered farmhouse
      • Spoke shape in mine

  5. Peripheral information (3 minutes)

    • Back to Treverton & puzzles/mysteries: puzzles result when a piece of information is missing; in mysteries there is too much information
    • Strange, apparently disconnected places on the highway
    • Unseen speakers & unheard speech

  6. Conclusion (1 minute)