Jan 10, 2021

How Supraland puzzles are different from other games

Supraland - DavidM

I wrote about my design philosophy regarding the creation of player abilities in the "End of 2020 status" newspost. I want to expand a bit on that and try to explain the fundamentals of my puzzle corner stones.
I'll name some other games as examples and in case of negative mentions I hope not to offend anyone. They are all great games but just have different design philosophies appealing to different players.

Is there a puzzle at all and if yes, how many?

Pretty much all puzzle games are separated into levels or the puzzles are conveniently separated from the rest of the world.
If you cut the story telling aspects out of Portal, it's basically just a linear progression of levels.
In Breath of the Wild there are lots of puzzle dungeons. What makes this uninteresting to me is that the game tells you "here is a puzzle and these are the parts of the puzzle". I totally try to avoid this by having the puzzles smoothly integrated into the world and also partly overlapping.

I like the ambiguity that you might not even know that there is a puzzle at all. And once you figured out there is a puzzle, you don't know which elements are part of it. The moment when people realize "oh I can use this too" is great. Like when they try to color the ring yellow but don't realize they can just take one of the many yellow crystal lamps everywhere.

And right after that, they know they need a red keycard. It is left unclear if they just need to find it, because that's what the game suggest. But the moment they realize they can use the same trick from the previous level to "cheat" always gives players a great feeling.

Talos Principle is also separated in levels with clearly defined puzzle elements. But the moments in which it shined for me were, when you combined elements from several levels (because they are in an open world). You could elevate an object from one level into the air and then use it for another one. These unexpected out-of-the-box moments feel fantastic. Mostly because the game does not tell you about it at all so it feels like a real achievement.
Similar thing in Portal 2, when you're in the old decayed facilities where the game introduces the different types of goos. In one section you did beat a "level" but from the next section you could still get a peak at one of the goo pipes from the level before. By placing a portal through that gap you could bring the goo from the previous level to the next. That was fantastic.

Not puzzle related, but another upside of an open structure instead of separated levels is that you can "live" in that world instead of it being dead levels. In The Witness and Talos Principle I enjoyed the places but I just could not feel them enough because you were the only being in there. I don't know if it's just me. So I wanted an open world like that but with more life, hence there are NPCs everywhere bringing the world to life.

Skipping steps and hiding hints

Everyone is smart enough to figure stuff out. I wish more games treated people as intelligent beings, that would make games much more fun again.

I'm intentionally skipping steps in the tutorialisation of puzzle mechanics.
If a game explains everything to you, there is never really a moment of pride of having figured something out. The AAA problem of being afraid people might get stuck. The downside being that you get channeled through the game without ever achieving anything.
They explain step 1, then step 2, then step 3. You don't figure out anything by yourself really.

I usually give you a strong hint for step 1 but then skip step 2 entirely. Then it feels great when you make it to step 3 by yourself. And on top of that there should be a secret twist that lets you go from step 3 to step D; some out of box thinking addition.

I'm trying to hint as little as possible but just as much as needed. Knowing what's needed comes from watching lots of people play the game. Then I know where they need just a tiny bit more support.

It's best done in a way that the player does not even realize they were hinted at all, maybe by forcing you to look at something that subconsciously plants an information in your mind. If you don't know you got hinted, you still get to have the feeling of "I figured it out all by myself".

For example this puzzle where you need to stop the moving platform in the middle under the wall by placing your cube in the way. People did not know this mechanism existed, so I needed to help more.

In the section before that, by the pumpkin farm, I added those large tree stumps with cubes on top of them. You can let a platform travel to you, but it will get stuck on those cubes that you have to shoot off first. This is supposed to subconsciously teach you that this is the effect the cube has on the platform.
After that was added, people would solve the following puzzle much more easily. They will feel like they did it all by themselves.
And that's really the goal of all of the puzzles: you should feel really clever solving them.

Shooting cubes would also subconsciously give you a better idea for this puzzle, where you need to shoot a cube from the top to the bottom button. Before the hints players would not know the blaster had an effect on the cube at all.

Not progressively getting more complex

Maybe you're the type that likes to grind through super hard puzzles. Not me. I like figuring out interesting ideas. Where games lose me is when they introduce a mechanism and then just keep making that mechanism progressively more complex and convoluted. I'm thinking of Talos Principle and Baba Is You. Baba overwhelms you with incredibly creative ideas at first but then it quickly turned into extremely complex and hard to crack nuts that were not really that creatively interesting to me anymore but just very complicated.
Portal 1/2 did it just right in my opinion. They introduce new mechanics and used them just a couple of times, and just before they could get boring they did something new. You never got tired of anything.

The Supraland puzzles are always based on one very simple idea and you just have to figure that one out. It might seem complex at first glance sometimes, but apart from one case (the one where you create the chain reaction in front of the blue castle) they are essentially very simple.

In Talos Principle you were still redirecting lasers after 10 hours, just as in the beginning, just in more convoluted ways. It felt like the designers thought of yet another way how to change the core mechanism a tiny little bit and made yet another level for it. It makes sense, but my approach would be to cut 75% of these and just keep in the ones that are significantly different from each other.

Idea over Execution

The most fun moment in Supraland's puzzle solving is precisely when the light bulb goes on in your head and you get the idea! This also made it hard to make a cool trailer, because the best moments are in your head and not something you can watch on the screen, so it's hard to pick interesting footage.
Getting the idea is the great moment, not so much executing the puzzle. Therefore I try to always make sure the execution is very painless and quick once you got the right idea.
I painfully learned this in Toki Tori 2. While being a very interesting game, a metroidvania where you get more knowledge instead of actual abilities, I spent so much time trying to solve puzzles long after I knew how to do them. It was often such a long process and if you made a little mistake you had to do it all over again.

I tweaked tons of puzzles to make their handling easy. You might have noticed all those points where the cube snaps into a perfect position. Previously it would be pretty messy and you would need to replace it 3-4 times until it sits right. The same was done in Portal where the portals would snap into perfect positions on several panels.

If you remember the puzzle in this image, it's one of the cases where I failed. I still love the idea, magnetising along the jumping metal balls, but execution is just so clunky, you'll hate having to repeat it 10 times. In the earlier version there were fire spewing pipes under you, so you would also die if you failed. I at least made that friendlier.

Multiple ways to solve puzzles

Well, let's be honest. I only ever have one way of solving something in mind but it's not so easy to contain all the abilities you're given. I know you all enjoy glitching puzzles... and that's what it is. It is the result of imperfect level design.
The problem I have is, that I cannot reproduce this fun aspect in a reliable fashion. If I get too good at the puzzle layouts, these happy accidents will disappear. I'm not entirely sure how to handle this in the future. But it will probably happen time and again, and if it's no big problem I'll just keep these glitches in.
What I do try to do as often as possible is that every contraption in the game can be used for multiple goals, but every goal has just one intended solution.

You can get to so many secret areas with just this one thing here!

Did you notice any of these design choices consciously?
Would you recommend other games that break these conventions?

- David

Dec 24, 2020

End of 2020 status

Supraland - DavidM

I know, you're only here to hear about the hot future Supraland stuff. You want the release dates! I know, but for a moment I'll bore you with what happened in 2020, before we get to the upcoming games!

Crash
In July 2020 we released the "Crash" DLC. It was supposed to be a little thing, but turned out to be another 10 hour adventure, because we fail at keeping things small and keep adding more and more ideas. The concept for Crash was very experimental and you and I pretty much agreed on what's problematic about it. If you missed it, my postmortem of Crash is here https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/813630/view/2596838746238082040
It's selling okay-ish but I'll get to that in a bit.

Crew
Also in July 2020 hardcore Supraland-Fan Stuart Baron joined our team. Instead of putting tons of effort into elaborate speedruns, he's now putting lots of effort and enthusiasm into future Supraland content. It's great to have him there. Great work and everyone loves him!

We're now 5-7 people working fulltime on Supra stuff.
We're still looking for someone who can model stylized 3d characters for Supraland 2. If that's you, let us know!

Consoles
In October 2020 the console versions of Supraland got released. It took Humble Games and the team of Garage 227 about one year to port the game. I think the most work went into performance because especially the Switch is really weak compared to all other systems.
We don't really know yet how well the game is doing on the consoles as it takes long for the numbers to come in, unlike on Steam where you see everything immediately. But we know hundreds of thousands of people enjoyed Supraland on Gamepass, so that's great! The first sale on consoles only started now, and as we all know people are not buying anything if there is no sweet %-sign at the price.

To answer a frequently asked question: the first DLC will probably not make it onto consoles. The effort would be ridiculous, because PC and console are both on completely different versions of the game. The DLC is just not compatible. The console versions are based on a Supraland version from late 2019. The Steam version received many improvements and some more content in the meantime.

But the bigger problem is that DLCs are a terrible business model if you actually put effort into the content, like we do. Roughly 10% of players (who bought the maingame) buy DLCs, so they are only worth it, if they are done in a very half-assed fashion. I guess this explains the many AAA DLCs you're thinking about right now.
In our case 7.5% of Supraland buyers also bought the first DLC. Yeah, that's not great.

Supraland 1.5
Therefore I made a significant change in the plan for DLC2. This little 3 month game jam by our then new recruits is now in the making for the 15th month. There is significantly more effort in it than in the main game and it would be a financial loss if we released it as a DLC. In general people are not very interested in DLCs, especially if they come out long after they finished the maingame. Understandable. Therefore it will come out as a Standalone game. It will simply be "Supraland Six Inches Under". You can consider it to be something like Supraland 1.5.

We also thought about going standalone with DLC1, but it was from the ground up designed for people who finished the main game. The puzzles were a lot harder and abilities were not explained. It came down to the question if we do "the right thing" or if we wanna squeeze out some more money but damage our reputation. So it was no viable option to go standalone with DLC1. DLC2 however should work very well standalone, also for beginners. We have to add some tutorialisation here and there but that's no big deal.

We're currently closing in on having a version that can be played from start to finish. At first only for developers, and then we'll bring in the early access testers. Since we're going standalone, we also have the option to release this as an early access game on steam, so everyone else can buy their way into the testing phase too. Is this something you would be interested in or would you rather play the polished and (mostly) bugfree version when it's done?

I know, all you wanna know is the release date. But I dunno. I can only guess. Since we expanded the scope of the game, we will spend much more time balancing, polishing and bugfixing. I only know what's left to be done, not how long it takes to get it done. I'm not setting deadlines for the team and don't want anyone to crunch. But my guesses are: Early Access in Q1 2021 and Release in Q2 2021

What's going on in Red Town??

Supraland 2
The development of the actual 2nd Supraland game will start when Six Inches Under is out of the door.
I'm in preproduction right now. I put together a completely new set of skills and I'm trying to figure out how we could combine the different skills in surprising ways. The abilities were the backbone of Supraland 1, and they will be for Supraland 2 of course.

The challenge is,
a) to have abilities that feel unique (not the usual ones that are in literally every metroidvania out there),
b) to have many different uses for every ability (instead of just one use case that you keep repeating; which turns abilities into nothing more but a fancy key; like a red shot that destroys red blocks... meh)
c) and to have lots of interactions between the different systems (I loved how you could for example attach the beam to your cube, shoot with the blaster through the beam to change the color of your projectile and use that to turn your translocator from green to purple).
d) When you get a new ability the world should be recontextualized. Like when you got the floating buckle in the first game, and now everywhere you see metal things that you didn't see before. I don't like it too much, when you see lots of things that you will be able to use later and you even have a precise guess, how you will be able to use it. Then it's just annoying to not be able to do it right now.

In general I try to get away from abilities that just add verticality to your movement in different ways. It's a bit boring to constantly just get to a higher place or to open doors. There are so many more interesting ways for the player to accomplish certain goals. Like when I let you make a guy appear holy by faking a halo and holding it over his head. You know, there are lots of ways to get you to think in more creative ways and I think that's what makes Supraland fun (and of course finding chests out of bounds). Meanwhile the puzzle genre mostly seemed to just settled for putting some sort of cube onto a button to open a door. We should have been done with that by now. But please let me know in the comments what you think makes Supraland fun. My perspective might be totally skewed by being way too close to it.

And this time I plan to have even more abilities and half of them will be completely optional. It's cool finding hidden chests, but if the content is too common, you're losing the fun finding them. I want your mind to be blown when you find secrets. Not everytime, but now and then!
And we'll put more work into actually planning out legit sequence breaking. In the first game everything was in essence totally linear, there was only an illusion of freedom. SL2 should deliver more.

I dunno if you knew it, but the idea of Supraland being a miniature world was not planned from the start. When the game was half done I decided to make it stand more out by putting it into a giant sandbox. You can partly see, that things don't look exactly miniature quite often and besides the visuals it made no real difference for the gameplay. In Supraland 2 it will be way more meaningful and the interactions between the tiny toys and the giant people will be significant for the gameplay.

- David

PS: to speed up development you need to press the like button

Oct 30, 2020

DLC2 Dev Blog 2

Supraland - 🍪 Anna

Hey everyone! I’m Anna and I’m one of the developers on our second upcoming DLC: Supraland: Six Inches Under!

It’s been a while since we talked about it, but it’s time to change that! Since the last dev blog we have made some big improvements, and in this post we’ll cover the same points as last time but highlight all the exciting updates.
Economy and Balance:
We have significantly changed the game’s economy over the past few months. These changes account for new rewards from chests (more about this later) and the introduction of lots more combat. We feel we have struck a good balance between teasing you with new upgrades and actually obtaining them!

Chests

For chests, we tweaked how they function to ensure they are always exciting and give you cool stuff. In order for this to be the case we’ve made some big adjustments. For example: if a chest gives you increased health regeneration, we’ll make sure you actually have the base upgrade before giving you the new one. This prevents you from getting upgrades that don’t help you and ensures you keep getting useful stuff!

We’ve also gone ahead and hidden some of the best surprises inside chests. You’ll really want to explore every nook and cranny in Supraland: Six Inches Under... There might just be a secret, inside a secret, inside a secret, inside a secret...

Combat

A key focus for the last couple of months has been the introduction of more combat to the DLC. For Supraland: Six Inches Under we’re taking a completely different approach to combat than in the base game – or in Crash.

Supraland: Six Inches Under will feature completely new enemies, some of which will require new strategies to beat. Improvements to the game’s combat include a completely new gun that works very differently from the gun you’re used to!

A lot of this new combat work has been undertaken by our newest team member, Stuart! We’re delighted to have him on board :)

Clear goals

Another big change to Supraland: Six Inches Under revolves around the player’s goals within the experience. We have gone over the entire DLC and streamlined the dialogue, as well as implementing first iterations of the game’s bigger cutscenes. Every area has been passed over and adjusted so it feels just right. We’ve moved puzzles around, increased some areas in size, decreased others – countless elements which should help you find your own goals and have fun.

Console releases

As you might have noticed, we released Supraland on Playstation 4, Xbox One (including Game Pass) and Switch last week. This has also taken quite a bit of work from a programming perspective, and we’re still working on getting the PC Game Pass version ready. This has also forced us to upgrade our engine version, which allows us to use some of the newer features. This may also give you a (small) performance increase when the next update comes out.

Please note that, at this time, the DLCs are not included in the console versions. The codebase used for the console versions branched off from our main development base almost a year ago – it is now nearly impossible to make the DLCs compatible with this version. Our apologies if this is a disappointment for any of you.

Playtime estimation

We don’t really have any updates here. As we’ve been working to improve various aspects of the game, we haven’t had a full playthrough of the DLC in a while.

“Sneak” peek

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_AZNXMtjvs

Further updates

To stay updated about everything SupraGames is doing, click the "Follow" button on our developer page: https://store.steampowered.com/dev/SupraGames or join our community Discord page: https://discord.gg/Ccd9ZT9

We can’t wait to share Supraland: Six Inches Under with you once it’s ready to release!

Thanks for reading!
- Anna

Aug 9, 2020

DLC 2 Dev Blog

Supraland - DavidM

Like DLC1, DLC2 was planned to be a much smaller thing. I wanted our new recruits to build a little adventure on their own within 3 months, so they could get used to the supra tools and I could see how they work. I very quickly and happily noticed how very capable they all were and we subconsciously kept expanding the scope of DLC2 and new gameplay mechanics were built all the time.

The third Supraland adventure will be called Six Inches Under. I'm sorry for using a non metric unit, but it was the only way to make the pun work.

Now, after about 9 months, the critical path and tons of bonus stuff is done and fully playable. I was involved in most the planning, but since I was busy making DLC1 I didn't know most of the things. So my first semi-blind playthrough of it took me about 9 hours or so. I knew a couple of things in advance, so it would probably have taken longer otherwise.

It's really cool and I'm sure you will love it. There are 6 main areas. They are really cool places with a special vibe, lots of interesting puzzles, lots of NPC folks making the places come alive and there are so many secret areas to be found. It's clearly Supraland. But we pinned down some aspects that still need major work. The lessons learned from the DLC1 postmortem play a big role in this too of course.

The problems we're fixing:

Economy and Balance

The game needs to hit the sweet spot when it comes to presenting you certain items that you want to get, but you don't quite have the ressources for, but feel great once you get them and are able to buy the thing. This also involves the process of getting certain resources which often felt way too annoying. This is the part that especially the beginning of the main game pretty much nailed and sucked most of you in.

Exploration needs to be rewarding

Part of the core Supraland fun is finding secrets, but the biggest part of the fun is not knowing what you will get and you being able to get really cool stuff unexpectedly. This worked well in the first half of Supraland; not so great in the second, because you were overpowered already.

I keep repeating myself with this, but you can barely come up with tons of cool upgrades if they are not centered around combat. This DLC was planned to be completely combat-free but it just creates too many problems to not have combat.

But we came up with a great plan on how to add combat, that we're all excited about. The way it will be implemented will add motivational aspects to the player and we also designed a whole new combat system with completely new enemy types and mechanics. It should fix all the issues the base game had combat wise.

The lack of a threat also takes away from the adventurous feeling. It doesn't need much of it, but if it's not there at all, it all just feels a bit unspectacular and not like an adventure. My personal main issue with almost all of the other first-person-puzzle games is how empty/dead their world is, because you're all alone, and I don't want that to happen in Supraland.

Our solution to this also solves a bunch of other problems we currently have, including the economy one and motivational aspects.

Clear goals

We have too many cases where NPCs tell you to do something and then your quest changes. You're just pushed around and aren't doing what you wanna do but just do what they tell you. We'll dial that stuff way back and limit it to defining the overall goal and let you figure out how to get there. It feels so much better to have a lot of agency and figure stuff out without being told about it.

We basically create conditions in which you're driven and motivated to set your own goals. It is so much more satisfying to accomplish stuff when it was not explained to you in detail (which is why AAA games are all so boring now and why you're reading this text I guess. AAAs are so afraid of someone being stuck for 1 second so they make sure their games play themselves).

Luckily our solutions to these three problems elegantly fit into what we have already in place and no major restructuring is necessary. But lots of new things have to be built now and it will probably take 4 months until we can let testers in. I doubt a 2020 release would still work, considering how long the QA phase and translations take.

My playtime estimation:

With pre-knowledge it took me 9 hours to finish, so other people will take a bit longer and we're adding a new major section that will also take some more hours. So we will probably land between 12-15 hours. But I have to be careful because my estimate was too high for Crash.

To stay updated about everything Supra Games is doing, click the "Follow" button on our developer page: https://store.steampowered.com/dev/SupraGames

- David