Final exam season has begun at Cornell. Unfortunately, Facebook has also released a new games feature integrated into Messenger. This feature embeds a leaderboard directly into any group message, and allows you to quickly play a game from the chat window. It’s very nifty as well as very distracting, and it’s a little surprising that it took Facebook this long to make this into a feature.
The game that I’ve been playing most during my study breaks is called Endless Lake. It’s an endless scrolling platformer where your character follows a predetermined path and you have to jump to not fall into the lake. On occasion your character splits and each clone goes onto separate paths, which makes synchronized jumps more difficult.
Here’s 12 minutes of gameplay:
There are charming cartoon characters rendered in the low-poly isometric art style that’s currently popular for mobile games. You also collect coins to unlock different characters; again, another popular mobile game convention. Nothing of note there. What most interests me is the use of patterns.
Play for even a short amount of time and you’ll notice that the layout of the paths follow patterns. There is a four-lane pattern where each pair crosses three times, a four-lane pattern that merges into three lanes before merging into one, a three-lane pattern that repeatedly makes elbows over short gaps, and so on. Below are some examples of patterns:
The order in which these patterns appear is random, but once you identify each pattern, you know exactly how the course is structured for the next five to ten seconds.
This type of gameplay seemed vaguely familiar to me until I remembered another (much more difficult) game I used to play that utilized the same structure:
While Super Hexagon has six different difficulty levels and Endless Lake just has one, they are both structured similarly. There are patterns, which are always the same, and they are presented in random order.
How does this affect gameplay? It presents an approachable but nuanced difficulty curve to the player. At first the player has no sense of the patterns and plays purely on reflex alone, which allows them to master the game mechanics (ex. jumping in Endless Lake, moving side-to-side in Super Hexagon). Over time they become aware of, then accustomed to, the patterns. At this point the player is well-versed in the mechanics of the game, switching their focus to a pattern-identification mindset as opposed to a reflexive one.
The beauty of this model is that it provides an approachable learning curve in several ways. With frequent initial feedback (i.e., dying repeatedly on their first few attempts) the player can quickly master basic mechanics without having to think about overarching patterns. Only after the player proves some competence in basic mechanics do they progress far enough to start observing patterns, giving them an higher-level layer to consider while still giving them the challenge of actually executing basic maneuvers. Finally, once the basic mechanics are practically unconscious, the player can pay full attention to optimizing their response for each pattern.
This is where Super Hexagon shows its superiority. By having different difficulty levels, each with different speeds and sets of patterns, it offers higher levels of mastery for players to aspire to. Endless Lake has a low difficulty ceiling; while playing for extended periods of time inevitably leads to mistakes, it stops feeling challenging and starts feeling boring, which kills player engagement. In Super Hexagon, players can choose harder levels to push their skills to the limit or easier levels to practice in a low-pressure environment.
Lessons learned:
- Structure a game around both basic mechanics and higher-level patterns. This allows players to quickly familiarize themselves with how to play the game, but gives a lot of depth in terms of mastery.
- Extend the difficulty ceiling. I am by no means good at Endless Lake (although I do hold the #1 spot on the leaderboard in a group of six friends with 4,033 points), but I feel as if I have almost exhausted its potential for fun after only a day or two of playing. Super Hexagon, meanwhile, occupied me for the better part of a month.
- Integrate competition. Despite Endless Lake being a simple game with simple mechanics, I played it very frequently. Why? Integrating the scoreboard into Messenger let me know when friends came close to (and, on occasion, topped) my high score, and it was very easy for me to dive back in and try to reclaim my ranking. Similarly, Super Hexagon displays record times prominently in the level select screen, allowing for easy comparisons (and encouraging further play).
From thinking about this:
- Make some patterns more common than others? What if patterns were distributed by tiers? Or some sort of log distribution? Or based on how long a player has been playing, or how far they have gotten? This is similar to the multiple difficulties of Super Hexagon, but it essentially gives players periodic (and increasingly spaced out) bursts of novel patterns.
- Incorporate antipatterns. Part of the fun of mastering these types of games is training your brain until it can recognize patterns incredibly quickly. It is quite satisfying seeing a particular configuration of paths (for Endless Lake) or walls (Super Hexagon) and instantly knowing exactly when to jump or which maneuvers to complete. To make this more difficult, perhaps having (at higher levels) patterns that look similar but require entirely different actions (such that misidentifying the pattern would cause the player to lose) would allow further mastery.