Script sneak peek (Patreon)

Hey everyone. Okay, so this is the script for my next video. It's about Nintendo's design philosophy. If you'd like to, I'd really appreciate it if you could read the script and offer some feedback. Some things I'd like you to think about when reading - What do you like, what don't you like? - Is there anything you don't understand? - Is there anything I should go into more detail on? - Do you have any examples I might have missed? - Any other feedback Obviously, if you'd prefer to watch the episode without "spoilers", ignore the rest of this post! The video should be out before the end of the month but may slip into November. I'm pretty pleased with this episode. It's a topic near and dear to my heart and I learned a lot about Nintendo while I wrote it. I also really enjoy doing episodes on the processes and philosophies of our favourite designers - including Jon Blow and Fumito Ueda - because they offer advice that works for all kinds of games. And other things in life too. And let us see their games (and the games of others) in a new light. Okay, here we go. Asterisks and forward slashes help with me with emphasis when reading, and the two slashes denote when there'll be a quick break into music and video to transition into another point. Like this one! // If you want to know how Nintendo makes games, I think you first need to know why Mario jumps on his enemy's heads. Because while that now seems like a pretty standard element in a lot of platforming games, there was, of course, a time before that even existed. I mean, even Mario didn't start out by jumping on stuff - he jumps *over* barrels in Donkey Kong and jumps *into* turtles in Mario Bros. And if you go back and play Mario Bros today you'll probably try and jump on a turtle and die and say "What?!" because *Super* Mario Bros changed everything. In Super Mario Bros you don't just jump on *enemies* - you jump on, over, and into *every single thing*. You leap over gaps and pipes and platforms. You jump into bricks to break them and into blocks to unleash power-ups. Including the fire flower which shoots at an annoying 45 degree angle meaning you have to jump to get a good shot. And the flagpole at the end of each level is always one block off the ground because you *have* to jump to clear the stage. And you're given a bonus if you can hit the top. Jumping is the way Mario solves every problem in Super Mario Bros, and everything in the game is there to test your ability to control Mario's springy leap. It's not a game /with/ jumping, but a game that is fundamentally /about/ jumping. Creator Shigeru Miyamoto said "I wanted to build upon our tradition of games where you controlled a guy and had to jump a lot to overcome obstacles. We were the first to come up with that genre, and it was a goal of ours to keep pushing it". And while Miyamoto planned to have other types of stages, including a shoot 'em up level, "we dropped it because we wanted to focus on jumping action". And in a game about jumping action, and a game where Mario's basic means of interaction is to jump, it makes perfect sense for Mario to defeat his enemies by jumping on their heads. This is how Nintendo makes games. The designers come up with some clever nugget of interactivity - like throwing Pikmin, shooting water, drawing rainbows, or just jumping - and then build the entire game from that seed - using that mechanic to solve design problems and ensuring every element speaks to that fundamental idea. "That’s how we make games at Nintendo," says Miyamoto. "We get the fundamentals solid first, then do as much with that core concept as our time and ambition will allow." I guess... you can turn the video off now. But stick around. There's more. // By knowing what the player can do, the next step is to come up with obstacles, enemies, and level layouts that push back against the player's abilities. To let them show mastery of Mario's jump or Luigi's vacuum cleaner or whatever. I love this quote from Kenta Motokura, the character artist on Super Mario Galaxy, who says "there's a side to the enemy characters where they exist just to be defeated by Mario". He's actually talking about how monsters in Nintendo games are drawn after their function has been decided. So enemies you can't jump on are lined with spikes, enemies you can only stab from one side have hard fronts and soft backs, and enemies that stop when you look at them cover their eyes and blush. And whenever Nintendo re-releases Mario Bros, the turtles are replaced by spinies to stop you trying to jump on their heads. It's a process of deriving form from function - a design philosophy likely picked up by Miyamoto when he was studying industrial design at college. Or maybe his mentor, the late Gunpei Yokoi, who said "when I make characters I try to design them in a way that teaches players how to play the game. The player won’t need to read the manual or anything to know "oh, I’ve got to avoid this guy". It's not just enemies that must speak to hero's abilities, but everything in the game is designed around the character's simple set of actions. That's probably why Samus shoots doors to open them in Metroid - how else would you open doors in a game about shooting? And why Luigi's vacuum cleaner can be used to interact with just about everything in Luigi's Mansion. And, of course, that finishing line flagpole in Super Mario Bros which continues to crop up in his platformers. When talking about New Super Mario Bros. Wii, producer Hiroyuki Kimura said "the higher you grab onto the pole, the more points you get. That's a logical way to do it with a jumping game, so we couldn't think of any better method". By having everything in the game be an extension of the hero's abilities, the player is taken to a world made explicitly for them. A place with no confusion about what is interactive because the answer is, well, /everything/. And by making a huge number of obstacles and enemies that can all be overcome by using some variation on the game's main mechanic, Nintendo can derive complexity... from simplicity. One or two verbs can be used to deal with all manner of challenges - and without endless tutorials, because all you need to know is the basics. "The basic action that you conduct in the game is very simple," says Miyamoto, talking about his gardening game Pikmin. "It's a matter of simply throwing the Pikmin at tasks and calling them back. And yet with the Pikmins’ abilities and the breadth of strategies available, it opens up broad possibilities of how you can approach the gameplay". // The fundamental gameplay at the heart of a Nintendo game touches everything. It dictates the presentation - the late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said "the role of artists is to pursue the best possible visual representation in response to the kind of game that the developers want to create". It dictates the characters. "I always start with creating new gameplay," says Miyamoto. "After that gameplay becomes more concrete, we look at which character is best suited to the gameplay". Probably Mario, to be fair. It dictates music - Koji Kondo threw out his first Super Mario Bros soundtrack when he saw it didn't fit the bouncy rhythm of the game. And the locations - Mario Sunshine is set on a tropical island because the water pistol mechanic made the developers think about summer. And even the story is driven by gameplay. Sorry if you thought the Zelda narrative is all part of some grand plan but "the storyline of a Zelda game is created to bring out the best of the fun and interesting gameplay elements", says Iwata. So the artist antagonist in A Link Between Worlds is there because "we needed a story for why Link becomes a picture", says director Hiromasa Shikata. And even Ocarina of Time isn't immune - Miyamoto wanted both young and teenage Link in the same game so the writers had to come up with a time travel plot to make it happen. And while this might sound like a slightly bizarre way to come up with stories, it does mean that the narrative often resonates strongly with the mechanics, meaning there's no awkward disconnect between what your character does in game and what he does in the cutscenes. And you get games like Yoshi's Island which has a story about protecting baby Mario... and gameplay about protecting baby Mario. Sweet! // Nintendo makes almost every game in this way - by "making the action structure and the interaction elements become the starting point for everything else", as Iwata puts it. And we can see that in every barmy gimmick at the heart of every Mario or Zelda game. But we recently got to see the whole process when Nintendo made Splatoon - the first entirely new game it has made in years. The game started out as a black and white prototype about cubes shooting ink to steal turf, and hiding in ink of the same colour. "The first point was that it needed to be fun to play," said producer Hisashi Nogami. "Once we’d achieved that, we then conceived the characters and the world vision to match perfectly with the gameplay". When coming up with characters, the team tried rabbits, but that didn't feel right. Then squids, because of the ink connection. Almost there. And then the transforming squid kids we see today, which better divided the inking and swimming gameplay. And the mechanics of shooting ink and swimming in the ink dictated everything in the game. It lead to the different guns - this is the only shooter you're going to play where you can squish opponents under a paint roller. It lead to traversal, as you shoot ink up walls and then swim up them. It dictated the way you reload your gun, as you must swim in ink to quickly recharge your blaster. And shooting ink felt a a bit like spraying graffiti, which was the catalyst for the punk rock soundtrack and the 90s aesthetic. // As I did the research for this video, I couldn't help but look at games made by other developers and think that they're almost being made... backwards. So many game developers seem to make games around a story or a character or a clever premise, and then retrofit gameplay onto that. And that can lead to a hodgepodge of disparate mechanics that don't fit together. Or game previews that leave players asking, well... "what do you do?" Iwata once said "I get to see a lot of design documents, but when you get those that have these passionate ideas for characters or worlds without touching on the game systems at all, I bet they’ll start running into problems after development begins". You also see a lot of games that "take the same basic elements from older games, but slap on characters, and improve the graphics, making games through a process of ornamentation". That last one wasn't me - Gunpei Yokoi said it in 1997 but it still works today. There are exceptions, of course. With game jams and more creative freedom, indie developers are more likely to start with some unique way of playing and branch out from there. I also loved how the new Doom seemed to harmonise around the melee attack. It's at the core of the combat system, it lets you get health, it ties into movement, and it's even used to open doors. It's the most Nintendo game that Nintendo would never, ever make. And then you get a game like Portal, which is so beautifully built one super smart bit of interactivity that it's no surprise that Miyamoto has said that game was "amazing". // It's also important to say that this way of making games doesn't mean surefire success for Nintendo. It can be accused of relying on gimmicks. Trying too hard to tie a core mechanic around a new piece of hardware leads to duds like the Wii Motion Plus mess Skyward Sword, and the Wii U gamepad flop Star Fox Zero. And Miyamoto's focus on gameplay over story has basically killed the Paper Mario franchise. But you can't deny that Nintendo also has an enormous collection of incredible games. Games that defined genres, inspired other developers, and will go down in history as some of the best ever made. So even with missteps and miscalculations, I think this philosophy of making everything harmonise around interaction is, at least, *one* reason why we still care deeply about Nintendo, and why we trust that they'll continue to make games that are playful and inviting. Easy to get to grips with, but filled with Imaginative challenges. And some of the most elegantly designed games in the industry.