03/11/2017

Three Lessons From Cuphead

Pacing
Pacing is an incredibly important thing in game design. Cuphead has been designed with an incredible focus on pacing and controlling the speed the player can move through the level at. If no enemies respawned at regular intervals, a player could move through the level slowly, dealing with the threats and effectively reducing the difficulty at the cost of fun and enjoyment. Leaving a negative reward system like this in would be bad design; so Cuphead has several design decisions devoted to keeping the levels threat apparent and constant; pushing the player towards the end quickly. It has enemies that respawn at regular intervals (the first levels sunflowers), it has certain enemies that can be merely knocked down as a pose to killed (the blueberry/slime/waterdrop enemies), it has enemies that simply cannot be killed (the... helicopter plants? that come out of the pits), and even respawning non-enemy threats that shadow the player (the first levels acorn enemies).

The Effect Of Mechanics
You have to be aware of what mechanics and design mean or the effect they would have in the game. For the Cuphead example; it has an incredibly cluttered design. Enemies are everywhere, parts of the scenery move, projectiles move slowly bullet hell style, its a mess. But this is a purposeful mess. The cluttered design was intentionally engineered by the creators because they knew that the sort of experience they wanted to craft required the player to fail, fail, fail again. They knew a cluttered design would make it difficult to focus on all the threats, so they played it up, dressed it up and rolled with it. Now, i'm not saying 'make bad decisions so long as you know what it'll do', but simply highlighting how important it is to understand how each mechanic, design choice or element influences play and how you could use that to create a better experience for the player.

Balancing Multiplayer
One of the constant difficulties of game design is how to balance the amount of participating players to the difficulty of a PVE (player vs environment) environment. Some games simply decide to watch the player struggle, some games modulate the difficulty dynamically (Borderlands 2), some games just stick you with a half-braindead AI companion (Resident Evil 5, for one of many, many examples).

Cuphead has a frankly brilliant way of dealing with the issue; they don't change the levels or difficulty one bit, they simply make the other player a threat. Now, I don't mean the sort of grief-enabling systems that games such as the 'lego' series provides, but I mean in a sense relating to the visual design. As I've said, the visual design is exceedingly cluttered and busy; everything happens at once and if you're not paying attention then its going to kill you. Well, having another player bouncing around the screen, shooting rapid fire projectiles constantly just adds to the visual discourse. When I was playing it in the lesson, I kept finding myself confusing which of the Cup/Mug brothers (or I guess it would be the 'Man' brothers, if their names are anything to go by) I was controlling, just for a second, and I cannot help but feel that this was an intentional effect of multiplayer.

Moodboard Of Endless Games (Or Single Level Games)