So I’m playing Republique, a stealth game where you’re trying to evade various guards and escape from this compound… and one of the guards sees me, and catches me, and I’m like, crap, I gotta do the level again– –except, I’m still, much to my surprise, in control. The game hasn’t restarted.

So I pepper spray one, but another guard grabs on to me soon enough and starts to escort me back to my cell. And I’m still in control. I manage to play along with being escorted long enough to get to a doorway, and close the door between me and the guard and lock it, and run away to safety. I got out of a tricky bind, and it was a weirdly satisfying experience. I never failed. The game never said

YOU LOSE

in horrifyingly large-point text; it never showed my gruesome impaled-on-whatever-pointy-thing’s-nearby death, it never faded to black and made me start over. And I really loved that. It let me see that I was about to fail, and gave me a chance to correct it.

* * *

Repeated failure is one way to teach a player the skills needed to get through your game. I tend not to like games where the player is expected to die over and over. I just find them, well, annoyingly repetitive. It’s like trying to have  conversation with a teacher who has a two-word vocabulary: try again.

Other games teach through explicit written or verbal prompts. They can be integrated to the game environment in fun ways, but there’s something kind of sterile about that approach.

Usually, my favorite approach is education through level design: you get a new item, and you’re immediately presented with an escape-the-room type puzzle where you have to use your new item in a specific way to progress.

I don’t think I want any of these for Tinselfly.

* * *

So I’m trying out Guild Wars 2 and I get totally clobbered by a monster. And I don’t respawn. I fall to the ground, and, for a short time, I can try to delay my inevitable defeat by throwing rocks at my opponent and flailing a bit.

I am dying.

It’s a fairly protracted death, and there’s something really interesting about that. Most games, you live; you die; you restart; you are never dying. You never dwell on it.

* * *

If you die over and over in Tinselfly, I guess that’s ok. Your character has an overactive imagination, and a maybe little bit of survivor’s guilt. I could have her die over and over, because she could be, in some ways, obsessed with death. I’ve been exploring the idea of having my climax be a puzzle where you’re trying your hardest to get your character to not gleefully sacrifice her life for her country. It’s a little bleak.

That’s a direction I could take the character. But I’m not sure if that’s really what I want for the character or if I’m just trying to shoehorn the character into that dying-a-zillion times video game trope. Like I said, I tend not to like games where you die a lot.

I’d prefer my character to be fairly ordinary, with ordinary dreams and ordinary roadblocks. Few moments of the game should be life-or-death situations for her, and I don’t want anything overly melodramatic in her past: no dead parents; no traumatic childhood. I would actually like her to exist in a reasonably nice, supportive environment. I want her problems to be relatable.

If you mess up, I’d like it to be like Republique, where you have an opportunity to make things right before the game says, nope, it didn’t happen. Try again.

* * *

Tinselfly is supposed to be my attempt at a character-centric, but still fundamentally action-based game. To that end, my plan to solve the problem of teaching the player game mechanics was to have the lead playable character teach you the mechanics–she will talk to you sometimes–through a game-within-the-game with identical mechanics as the game proper. She well tell you the basic controls within the context of this sci-fi video game she likes, while at the same time giving you a sense of her character and how she engages with this game universe, which is pretty plot significant. It occurred to me, however, that there were also other techniques I could use. I’m not sure I’ve seen it done, but I’d like to have non-playable characters teach you some mechanics by example. Your character is not supposed to be a lone warrior. She’s part of a small ship crew, with some experienced members and some new people. Thematically, the NPCs-as-teachers thing would be really great if I can pull it off, if I can have your mentors in the game function as mentors. Having said that… I need concrete examples of how this might work. So here are a few thoughts:

• NPCs can show you where it is safe to go by, well, going there.
• NPCs can communicate places that are unsafe by stopping abruptly before hitting dangerous spots, or hitting dangerous spots before you do and visibly reacting.
• NPCs do routine tasks you also have to do: using consoles, applying combat dressings.
• You can watch other engineers fixing things.
  • Maybe you could tell who fixed something by the neatness of wiring in various places.
• You can watch other people swordfighting.
  • Your character could comment on specific techniques they’re using. Yes, it’s explicit verbal instruction, but it could be done in a way that is both instructive and revealing about your character.

All of this depends, of course, on my ability to animate NPC interacting with things in meaningful ways, which I’m not sure I’ll be able to do. But hopefully, if I approach NPCs with this sort of mind set, both they and the playable character will feel more real and interesting.