When there’s a problem with your game, there are four questions you need to ask:
Can I solve the problem?
Is the problem worth solving?
How do I solve the problem?
How do I communicate the solution?
Here’s a look at an issue with Tokyo 42 and how its developers, Sean and Maciek at SMAC Games, attempted to deal with it.
We posted a really significant update to the game yesterday. Here’s a video:
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This update takes a meaningful step to address one of the most common criticisms of the original game. I’ll let a selection of reviewers and users describe it:
“I’ve died many times purely because the camera got in my way.” (Alec Meer, RockPaperShotgun)
“…an intentional desire to make the camera a bit of an enemy” (Christian Donlan, Eurogamer)
“The problem is that the architecture is sometimes structured in such a way that there really isn’t a decent angle from which to view the action. This is a particular pain when you’re in a hurry, since your fingers are too busy making your character run around to try and turn the damn camera at the same time.” (jfictiony, Steam Review)
“you cannot figure out how to swivel the camera 90 degrees to see what is blocking you from moving forward” (transentient, Steam Review)
“Unfortunately, the artsy camera angles/controls make missions which require speed and precision unplayable.” (mrmeeseeks, Steam review)
..and so on
When you have expended a significant amount of thought on a feature, it’s easy to be extremely defensive in the face of criticism. Having been along for the ride on Tokyo 42 for a couple of years, here’s what I would say if I gave into that temptation:
“I have read ‘you need to constantly rotate the camera’ many times in both press and Steam reviews: this is patently false. You do not have to rotate the camera constantly to play the game: you often need to pick an angle and leave the camera there for a while, then make a specific choice to rotate it again later. “Constantly”, or a similar adverb here, betrays a fundamental lack of appreciation for the game’s basic mechanics, and so any related criticism can be dismissed out-of-hand.
The camera controls are demonstrably not “fiddly” or “dumb”: I challenge anyone to come up with something more intuitive than the defaults. I have seen, in person, players across a wide age range grasp the camera controls within a couple of minutes. For those who want (or need) to reconfigure those controls, we added key remapping. Camera rotation is also available as an option on the mousewheel on PC. You cannot complain about controls being fiddly when the defaults have been thoroughly worked through, and there is the potential for customisation, therefore there is no value in this opinion.”
But here’s an enormous surprise: being defensive is always the wrong approach to feedback of any kind.
When looking at qualitative feedback on a game (or indeed anything), there are Two Big Rules:
Search for trends
Feedback shows you the question but not the answer
This isn’t to say that individual feedback independent from trends is worthless — far from it. Occasionally, specific testers will spark a thought or make you aware that of something that may eventually become significant: it’s always important to listen.
There’s also the vital human element of small-scale game development: sometimes you’re able to do simple things which have a big personal impact on a very small subset of players. This is especially important when it comes to accessibility: stories like this one abound in indie game development.
I’ve seen people use “feedback won’t give you the solution” almost as a mantra. My concern with that is that, very rarely, a tester will hit upon the correct direction. Sure, they definitely won’t present a nuanced understanding of the pro’s and con’s, and they won’t be able to tell you how to precisely configure your solution. But marching straight past someone who has a great direction in mind wearing a t-shirt that says ONLY I CAN SOLVE THIS will not set you on the path to great wisdom.
There are also, of course, cases where a problem seems complex to you but is genuinely simple and has an obvious solution. There’s a very human tendency to believe our problems are uniquely arcane, when in fact they are startlingly generic. It’s always worth watching out for this!
With that in mind, focusing feedback on identifying a problem is the best thing a player can do. Explaining the issue clearly and expressing how it affects your play gives the developer the highest quality information possible. As soon as criticism becomes vague, incoherent or vitriolic (“the camera is dumb”), it becomes a lot harder to parse and easier to ignore. Ideally, players would approach feedback in the same way they would attempt to help a friend — raising a problem in a sensitive way, listening, and then discussing solutions at their instigation. Unfortunately, the internet favours forms of communication which divest participants of all recognisable forms of human empathy, leaving us only able to express ourselves through flailing appeals to subjective emotion, so that’s never going to happen.
Can it be solved?
So, Tokyo 42 had a problem with its camera. But was it fixable?
There is an expectation among players that devs will attempt to solve every problem with a game.
Unfortunately, in a lot of instances, this just isn’t possible. Sometimes, problems are genuinely innate to a game: game design is about compromise, and compromise embraces downsides. The opacity and difficulty of Spelunky’s new player experience, the mind-boggling complexity of Crusader Kings’ UI, the feeling of random unfairness in your first few Hearthstone matches, the sponginess of Destiny 2’s enemies: you simply can’t iterate those away.
Here are the devs on their original vision for the game:
MACIEK: Our very first prototypes were 2D isometric in the style of old school games like Command and Conquer or Syndi
