The Stack

In a recent blog post, Edmund McMillen talks about his confusion-and-insanity-themed puzzle platformer Time Fcuk. It’s an interesting read, but the one bit that stood out for me was the bit about the alt levels. Apparently certain levels had multiple versions, chosen at random:

i came up with the idea late one night where i envisioned people playing the game and then trying to look up hints on how to beat a level only to find no one had played the level they are on, in hopes that they would feel “crazy”. this of course didn’t have the effect i wanted…

And yeah, it certainly didn’t have that effect for me. In order to notice the variations, you’d have to either replay the game from the start and notice that the levels were different, or compare your experience in considerable detail with someone else’s. And the player doesn’t really have much motivation to do either: if you like this sort of game, you’ll probably play right through it to the end, and if you don’t, you’ll probably just quit in the middle and not go back to it. The interesting thing is that, while Time Fcuk didn’t inspire this sort of comparison, another recent game did in a pretty big way: Dungeon, a retro platformer by Cactus and Mr. Podunkian.

Dungeon is described by its creators as an “experiment”, but feels more like a prank, or possibly even a troll. The concept was that the game had a number of deliberate problems, bugs, and other causes for complaint, which caused people to post on its TIGSource message board — but different installations would provoke different problems. The game apparently uses a deterministic combination of factors such as the OS version and the current username to produce a consistent experience for each player, even as the content varies among different players. So, some players experience frequent pauses, others get monsters that move far faster than they should, others find a certain jump early in the game impossible, etc. (When I played it, I was lucky enough to get variant #7, in which the only issue is that the level titles are artsy and pretentious.)

The forum comments on Dungeon start off as confused as you might expect, with comments along the lines of “What are you talking about, that jump is dead easy”, but it didn’t take long for people to figure out what was going on. The first clues started coming in when people found that they could fix their “bugs” by running the game in some Windows compatibility mode or other, which alters the OS version seen by the game app. Speculation that the game “modifies its own difficulty depending on the machine or something” started less than an hour after the game was released; by the end of the day, people were starting to compile lists of the variations.

So, I guess the lesson here is that if you want something about your game to be noticed, make it obnoxious.

Well, I’ve managed a least-effort pass through every level in Crayon Physics Deluxe. Overall, I find the balance a bit strange: towards the end, most levels were solvable using the same few techniques. For example, I got a lot of mileage out of creating a large weight attached to a stationary structure (that is, one attached to permanent scenery by two pins), then draping a loop of rope, with both ends attached to the weight, over an obstacle and around the ball, then erasing the stationary structure and letting the weight pull the ball upward and to its goal. My first few attempts at doing things similar to this were more complicated and involved more elements, so if nothing else, repetition helped me refine the technique. Still, the number of places where this was applicable makes me wonder if I was expected to come up with easier but less general solutions first.

In my first session, I had used my usual gaming trackball for input, but the second time around, I came to my senses and hooked up the Wacom tablet. It took a bit to get used to the feel of it — I don’t use it very often — but it’s definitely worth the switch (assuming you already have a tablet, of course). Not only does it make it far easier to draw straight diagonal lines, it’s also more mimetic in this context: a stylus, obviously, handles a lot more like a crayon than a mouse or trackball does. I can imagine a world in which tablets of this sort are included with Crayon Physics as a Rock Band-esque custom controller.

Anyway, I’m putting this aside for the moment, because I’m eager to try other new things, but I intend to get back to it before long. There’s still that final spot on the map to be unlocked before I can really feel like I’m done, but that looks like it’ll be a fairly long haul: unlocking it requires Elegant, Old-School, and Awesome solutions for fully half of the game’s levels, and on a lot of the levels that doesn’t even look theoretically possible. My next post on this game will probably describe the physical mechanisms in detail.

Continuing into the Steam indie pack, I first made some failed attempts at getting The Path to work on my machine — I’ll have to return to that one later, perhaps after my next system upgrade. Giving that up, I proceeded to Crayon Physics Deluxe, a physics-puzzler based on the novel idea of letting the player add arbitrary objects to the scene by drawing them with the mouse pointer, and deducing their physical attributes from how and where they were drawn. (I described Blueberry Garden as having a hand-drawn look, but allowing the player to draw things really takes that idea to a new level.) I remember trying the prototype of this, Crayon Physics sans-deluxe, when it was new. It wasn’t clear to me then how the simple mechanics could be extended to interesting puzzles. It seems to mainly manage it by adding more types of things you can draw. For example, at one pivotal point, your repertoire expands to include pivot points — drawing a small circle inside another closed object provides a nub that forms the basis for pendulums or levers.

As is fairly common in level-based puzzle games, CPD doesn’t require the player to complete every level to advance. Levels come in batches (depicted as islands on a map), and each batch is unlocked by obtaining a certain number of stars. Each level can yield two stars. The first is granted for simply beating the level — the level’s goal is marked with a star to make this clear. ¹ The second star requires the player to meet three challenges: an Elegant solution (meaning you only draw one thing), an Old-School solution (no pivot points — that is, a solution that would work in the original Crayon Physics), and an Awesome solution. The Awesome solution is of particular interest, because it’s done on the honor system: players are expected to decide for themselves whether or not a particular solution is awesome.

The Awesome criterion is a peculiar, and somewhat controversial, choice for a puzzle game. Generally speaking, puzzle-solving involves a mode of mind in which all you’re trying to do is satisfy the puzzle’s constraints. Critical evaluation of your own work on the basis of its aesthetic merits isn’t part of the puzzle-solving mindset; it’s more part of the Artist or Designer mindset. So the author of CPD is essentially trying to break us out of puzzle-solving mode and put us in a more creative frame of mind. Some people don’t see the point of this, or perhaps see the point but resent it, preferring to stay in puzzle-solving mode, do the minimum, and just arbitrarily check the Awesome checkbox whenever they need to. But such people miss the point of the game. I say that with some confidence: the author has made statements about the game’s point, and why he added the Awesome criterion in the first place. It’s basically because he saw people doing the bare minimum to complete the puzzles and wanted a way to encourage them to do otherwise.

Personally, I’ve never met an honor system I didn’t want to honor. And that applies even moreso in games, where cheating just means cheating yourself out of the satisfaction of winning honestly. Completing this game requires more stars than there are levels, so if I want to get it off the Stack, I’ll have to perpetrate some Awesomeness. I haven’t marked anything as Awesome yet, but even so, I’m finding that my approach to solutions is colored by the mere anticipation of it. Cheap answers just don’t satisfy.

1. Actually, I’ve seen a few levels that have two stars in them, marking two goals. Beating such a level requires hitting both stars. It seems like you still get only one star for beating it, though. [↩]

After you reach the ending of World of Goo, there are two avenues for pursuing perfection. First, each level has an “OCD”¹ challenge associated with it — usually of the form “rescue N goo balls”, but sometimes it’s “finish in N moves” or some other variant. I managed to pass a few of the easier such challenges in the smaller levels without meaning to, but I don’t intend to make a serious effort at it. It reeks of frustration.

The other optional challenge is one I’ve mentioned before: freeform goo-tower building at the remains of the World of Goo Corporation campus. This, I spent a considerable amount of time at, both after finishing the game and during the process, mainly while progress was slow. There are in-game suggestions that there’s something to see if you build high enough, but the end cutscene seems to suggest otherwise, that no matter how high you build, you’ll still be striving at the end. At any rate, I found this challenge fairly compelling, and spent a lot of time on it when I finished the game proper.

The next day, while at work, I noticed a unexpected variant on a familiar mental phenomenon. It’s not unusual for the quick but intensive training provided by a game to cause people to see patterns from the game in real life, especially if the patterns are strong, simple patterns that one has never had a reason to notice before. Many people have reported this happening to them with Tetris, and I’ve spoken before about experiencing it with Puzzle Quest. But this was a little freakier: I started seeing the slow wobble of a large goo structure in the unmoving windows on my desktop. (Source code looked particularly unstable, because of the slanting indentations.) I don’t recall experiencing anything quite like this with any other game. Seeing patterns where they actually exist is one thing, but this was seeing illusory motion just because my mind is primed to see it, like a long, slow afterimage.

At any rate, it’s a pretty neat game. Although many of the puzzles are basically variations on building a bridge or tower, it does a good job of always approaching it in a new way. Sometimes it’s the terrain that makes it different, sometimes it’s the available goo types. New goos with different properties keep on getting introduced until very near the close of the game. There’s inflatable balloon goo that can be attached to your structure to help it resist gravity, water-droplet goo that only attaches to one vertex and hangs down (potentially forming long descending chains, if that’s what you need), highly flammable matchstick-goo — come to think of it, all it needs is an earth goo to complete the elemental tetrad. I suppose that niche is taken by the stone blocks in world 4.

The stone blocks are not goo, in that they don’t move of their own accord and you can’t attach them to a goo structure, but they have two attributes found almost exclusively in goo otherwise: you can pick them up with your mouse and reposition them, and they have eyes. Little cartoony ones. Eyes of this sort are the lazy approach to anthropomophizing: I’ve seen them applied to things as unlikely as Tetris blocks and Pong paddles, game elements that really don’t need to be anthropomorphized. And it always seems to be accompanied by incoherent chirps and squeals from the creatures made anthropomorphic. So, yeah, I’m far from a fan of this aesthetic. But then, I look at this game and I ask myself what it would be like without the eyes and the squeals, and I have to admit it would be pretty dry — it would be a lot like Bridge Builder, in fact. Perhaps 2D Boy has actually figured out how to do this style right. It remains to be seen if the secret can be articulated clearly enough to recapture it in another work.

1. ”Obsessive completion distinction, according to the game. [↩]

Almost done: I’ve been through all the levels except the epilogue. The epilogue apparently has only three levels, but from what I’ve seen, they’re doozies. (The word “doozy” isn’t one I normally use, but World of Goo inspires that sort of vocabulary.)

There’s a running plot thread, communicated mainly through clickable signposts throughout the levels, about the World of Goo Corporation’s mysterious “Product Z”, which is supposed to change the world forever. It turns out to be (SPOILERS!) the Z axis: “World of Goo is now 3D!” This seemed like a really bold move: could the game really make the jump from a 2D interface to a 3D one three-quarters of the way through? It was at this point that I realized how strong my faith in the author was. I trusted this “2D Boy” (ha ha) to pull of the transition well. However, the whole thing immediately turned out to be a lie. There is no 3D, in or out of gameplay. There’s a shift to an “information superhighway” theme, with the World of Goo Corporation Headquarters (where you build your tower) temporarily turning into “My Virtual World of Goo Corporation” until you finish world 4, but unless computers are just supposed to connote 3D somehow, I don’t see why it was even mentioned. I’ll note that the next level is actually set on the ruins of a disused information superhighway, so apparently a lot of time passes between worlds 3 and 4. Maybe the entire 3D era came and went between levels — a commentary on the fate of big-studio games?

Also, the whole computer-themed world passes by without making any puns on “GUI”. I can’t decide if this is a wasted opportunity or a sign of an admirable sense of restraint. Thinking about the other jokes the signposts crack, though, I don’t think I can really believe the latter.

Over at rockpapershotgun.com, there’s a spirited dicussion of the recent PC release of Braid which turned in parts into an argument about whether or not it’s a better game then World of Goo. There is of course no real reason why a player has to pick one over the other — you can play both, for goodness sakes! — but they both occupy the “indie puzzle game” niche and were released in the same year, which means that they were up for the same awards. The Rock, Paper, Shotgun staff itself has been been a hotbed of pro-goo sentiment since before its release, periodically bringing it up in reviews of other games in an offhand “why can’t they all be this good” way.

My own feeling is that Braid is more compelling. I mean that in a simple and objectively-measurable way: Braid inspired me to keep playing until I was finished, while my WoG sessions have been relatively short. Whether that makes it a better game is a matter of opinion. It may just mean it’s an overall shorter game, and the prospect of imminent completion is enough to keep me going. (Compare my recent lack of progress on the other two games I’m in the middle of: both are JRPGs, the canonical weeks-of-padding genre.)

Beyond that, it should be noted that the two games are trying to produce different experiences. Braid aims to be thoughtful and sad, with touches of the uncanny. “Here’s a piece of your childhood”, it says to the player, “only now it’s grown up and disillusioned.” WoG’s ambitions are in a wackier direction, with over-the-top dark humor: its message to the player is more like “Oh no! The cute little goo balls are being SOLD AS FOOD!” Braid’s art is impressionist-influenced watercolors; WoG’s is cartoony ink sketches with a sort of Tim Burton/Dr. Seuss look. Braid’s music is heavily cello-oriented (even some of the bits that don’t sound like cello are cello); WoG kicks off with a polka. So to some extent, it’s a matter of taste here, of which of these two styles you prefer.

There’s one really major difference in the philosophy of the gameplay design: Braid’s puzzles have more definite solutions than those in WoG. That is, Braid’s puzzle-solving primarily involves leaps of intuition — what the DROD community calls “lynchpins” — whereas the WoG puzzles are more about execution: most of the time, you know what you have to do, you just have to create a structure capable of doing it. Any such structure will do, as long as it works. By contrast, alternate solutions in Braid tend to be just slight variations based on the same insight. Again, some like the one, some like the other. I’ve waxed rhapsodic before about the “moment of realization”, and how it’s one of my main sources of enjoyment in games. But puzzles based on that sensation are ones where the player gets stuck, with no idea how to proceed, until they have the crucial insight. And some people really don’t like that.

And while we’re on well-regarded indie puzzle games, I might as well pull this one out. 2D Boy’s World of Goo has gotten enough good press that I didn’t hesitate to purchase it off Steam a few weeks ago when it was on sale, but didn’t have the time to start it. That’s happening a lot lately. Every weekend, Steam puts a large and temporary discount on one or more games, and it’s going to be the ruin of my attempts to reduce the Stack.

My first impression of the game is that it’s Bridge Builder crossed with Gish. Which is unfortunate, because those are both obscure enough titles that I’m going to have to explain them now. Bridge Builder (and its sequel Pontifex) is exactly what it sounds like: a heavily physics-based game in which you have to design river-spanning bridges that don’t collapse under their own weight under various physical and budgetary constraints. Gish, which is on the Stack still, is a gothy 2D platformer about a sentient blob of tar. Coincidentally (and somewhat oddly), these two games were made by the same team. Or perhaps it’s not coincidence: I’ve detected what may be shout-outs to Bridge Builder in WoG’s first world, suggesting that 2D Boy is a fan of theirs, or at least aware of them.

But to this a third influence must be added: Lemmings, with its chirruping doomed wee creatures that need your help to escape. The goal in each level of WoG is to help the roaming goo balls to reach an outflow pipe, usually by building a bridge to it out of their living bodies, which are most easily connected in triangular grids. Some species of goo can be detached and reused, others are effectively killed the moment you join them to your expanding structure. All survivors are sent to a special area with a competitive metagoal: build as tall a tower as you can, while clouds representing the tower-heights of other players on the net loom tauntingly overhead.

Even though I’m still in the lower ranks hieght-wise, I’m finding it gratifying to look at the details on those clouds and snicker at how much less efficient they are than mine — “He has twice as many pieces as me, and he’s only just a little way above me!” I only wish I could see their structures, rather than just their stats, because I’m curious about how other people are building their structures. (I suppose I should try Google. People must be posting screenshots.) My own best efforts are Eiffel-Tower-like: I start by making as large and as regular a triangle as I can, then when it’s thick enough, I start mining out the middle bits that aren’t needed for support any more, and put them up top. The broadness of the base, even when it’s reduced to a pair of legs, tends to minimize the structure’s wobble.

And yet it still wobbles. Wobbling is pretty much the point of goo; the whole game is built around what’s been called “jell-o physics”. For this reason, screenshots really don’t communicate the gameplay very well. You can look a picture of a nice slim tower and not realize that it’s swaying back and forth with an arc larger than the screen.

In a some ways, Braid is 2008’s Portal. Like Portal, it’s a puzzle-platformer that’s a critical hit despite being completable in a matter of a few hours (and despite being a puzzle game, for that matter), but in both cases, this is because there’s so little repetition and filler. Also like Portal, it’s a game based around grasping the unintuitive consequences of one simple idea. In Braid, that idea is control of time.

In other words, it’s the same underlying concept as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. But PoP:TSoT was an action game, and thus had a reason to limit the use of time-control capabilities, lest it make the action too easy. Braid is a puzzle game, and lets you rewind as much as you want. Ironically, this means that Braid can contain action sequences far more intense than any you find in PoP. There are bits toward the end where I was constantly doing fractional-second rewinds in order to get things just right. It’s crazy how fast you get used to that. But when you think about it, playing a conventional action game also involves frequent irregularities in the flow of game-time, in the form of quickloads and reversions to save points, and the player usually isn’t bothered by this. The difference here is just a matter of degree.

Mind you, PoP’s rewind system wasn’t very well-suited for puzzles: it let you go back in time and change stuff, but only in the simplest and most consequence-free way. To make puzzles, you need variations on the theme. The first and simplest variation in Braid is that some object aren’t affected by your rewinding, and keep on moving forward. The freakiest variation — and my favorite — is the series of levels where the flow of time for everything other than the player character is a function of your position: move rightward and time advances, move leftward and it rewinds. Notably, this really throws a monkey wrench into the ingrained habits of 2D platforming. You can’t just stand there and wait for things to get into the right position for you, and in particular, if something is in your way, you can’t wait for it to move. It won’t move until you do.

If you take away the temporal weirdification, it’s a 2D platformer with mechanics that greatly resemble Super Mario Brothers, and the game runs with that, giving us monsters blatantly modeled on goombahs and pirhana plants, a princess who’s eternally “in another castle”, and so forth. SMB references seem to have become to indie games what Winsor McCay references are to indie cartoons: a way for the artist to establish cred by showing an appreciation for the true classics of the medium or whatever. Braid plays around with the princess premise in its between-levels text, first making it mundane, portraying (the player character) Tim’s pursuit of the Princess as occurring in the aftermath of a failed relationship with her, but then after a while turning it into something more abstract. The Princess is the eternal and non-specific object-of-pursuit, the thing which will make everything better once you find it, and which you therefore take terrible risks to discover, despite the uncertainty of your success. (In the epilogue, this is linked to science, and the development of the atom bomb, leading some to conclude that Tim is a nuclear physicist and the whole game is his guilt trip about his work on the Manhattan project. But I think that’s an over-literal reading of one example, among many presented, of where the generalized pursuit of Princesses leads.) The strangest part is that there’s a point where the stories of the mundane and eternal princesses overlap, where Tim leaves his significant other because he feels driven to go and find the Princess. Some have interpreted this as simply indicating that the woman he leaves here isn’t the one referred to earlier as the Princess, but I think the idea that he leaves her in order to find her fits well with the time wackiness. Sometimes Tim does things backwards.

And besides, the whole thing is driven by dream logic. The text is very clear that Tim is confused and his memories are blurred (as you might expect from someone who keeps changing his own past). The backgrounds are blurry in an impressionistic way (which makes the parallax scrolling look really nice for some reason). The level-selection areas are clouds, for crying out loud. Apparently there’s been something of a backlash against the pretentiousness and vagueness of the story, but I think that’s taking it all too literally. Some people seem to resent what they see as the author forcing the audience to make up the story when that’s clearly the author’s job. But I don’t feel like I’m being forced to do any such thing, because this is not a story-driven game. The story fragments are there as a frame, and do a nice job of providing things for the gameplay elements to be metaphors for, but its clear that the game came first and the metaphors were chosen to fit it. The big exception is the final level, where the gameplay comes to comment on the story quite directly, turning the rescue its head. Well, we’re told in the very beginning that the Princess’ captivity is Tim’s fault, the result of a mistake that he spends the entire game trying to go back and correct.

OK, let’s try to analyze this a little. The Next Tetris practice level 19, “Zipper”, has the initial layout pictured here. There are seven rows of garbage squares. Only the bottommost row — the grey one — counts for completing the level, but the gap in that row can only be accessed by fist getting rid of the row above it, which in turn needs the row above that deleted, and so on. The level is supposed to be completed in nine moves, which means adding 36 squares to the board. There are 18 empty spaces, which leaves 18 squares to lump up on top. The board is 10 squares wide, so at most one additional row above the initial garbage can be filled, leaving 8 squares left at the end. One of the big questions here is whether it’s worthwhile to try to complete such an extra row.

Here are the nine pieces, in the order they appear:

(Recall that color is significant. Blocks of the same color fuse together and fall as a unit, while a piece composed of multiple colors will break apart upon first coming to rest. This has some non-obvious consequences. For example, if you drop the first piece here the opposite way up into one of the gaps on this board, it’ll stay the shape it is until you delete the first row, at which point the right side will fall one row farther than the left side, and the red squares on both sides will stick together, forming a unit two squares wide.)

Now, all of the gaps in the initial layout are one square wide. Of the 36 squares that compose our nine pieces, 11 have a horizontal neighbor of the same color no matter how they’re rotated, and thus cannot possibly fit into a one-square-wide gap. Let’s call these “blocker squares”. Another 11 squares are directly attached to blocker squares of the same color. If these are placed in a gap, the adjacent blocker square will have to be above it, preventing access to any further gaps in that column, unless you can complete that extra row and delete it. The remaining 14 squares are detached units or straght columns that can be used to freely fill in whatever needs them, provided they don’t glob onto something else of the same color and get stuck.

The obvious thing to do with the straight piece (or “I” piece) is to put it in the 4-deep straight hole on the right. But obviousness is no guarantee of correctness — the I could also very well fill the vertically-arranged four gaps in the very middle. This works well with the level’s name — the I is like the zipper that pulls downward through the middle and tears the whole structure apart. Also, the I is a color that isn’t used in any of the other pieces, which makes it more useful in the middle, where it helps to keep things from getting stuck to each other. But if you put it there, you’ll have to come up with some other way to fill in the straight gap, and nothing else fits quite as easily. Filling an extra row is almost necessary in such a scheme.

Two other pieces are of special note. The 2-by-2 block (or “O”) is composed entirely of blocker squares, and is of no use whatever for filling gaps in the garbage. It’s also composed of a color almost unused otherwise, so it isn’t much use as a complication either: just throw it to the side and it won’t interfere. This makes me think that it serves in the puzzle to help complete the extra row. At this point, there’s so much circumstantial evidence in favor of the extra row hypothesis that I’ll be really surprised if it’s wrong.

The other is the final piece, the green “S”. Because it’s the last piece, it has to either fill in the final gap, or trigger a cascade that fills it in. On purely aesthetic grounds, I suspect that a final cascade won’t involve only part of the initial layout. Either the garbage above the goal row will all be gone by the time this piece is placed, or it’ll all still be there. In the latter case, there’s some difficulty in placing the S. This scenario requires all but one of the gappy columns to be capped with a tower of pieces waiting to fall into place. The only original gap that could possibly accommodate the S in this situation is the straight pit on the right, which would have to have three pieces in it already and have nothing on its left to keep the S out; this could clearly only happen if an extra row had been deleted. Alternately, the S itself could complete the extra row.

So, I’m coming to the conclusion that there’s probably an extra row to be built and deleted, and the I could plausibly go in the middle. I’ll have to try things along these lines the next time I play.

Well, I’m still stuck on that last practice level. It’s a toughie.

The puzzle title is “Zipper”. It features filled and unfilled squares in a checkerboard pattern, which means that whenever you use a piece that’s more than one column wide (after taking splitting by color into account), you’ll wind up with an overhanging bit that prevents you from filling in the space beneath it. Recall that pieces (or piece fragments) of the same color stick together, potentially fusing into a piece that’s more than one column wide after you’ve placed them. This makes this puzzle unique among the practice levels in that the challenge has a lot to do with not just making the most of the pieces you’ve got, but also finding ways of getting rid of the ones you don’t want.

At one point, I was about ready to give up on this one. I hit Gamefaqs, hoping to find a nudge in the right direction. And indeed there is a guide to the practice levels there! It even features nice gentle hints, describing the general approach you have to take for each puzzle and letting you work out the details yourself. It’s always a relief to find well-written hints. Far too often the hint-writers just give everything away. Unfortunately, the person who wrote these hints couldn’t figure the last puzzle either, so it’s not a lot of use to me.