In the beguiling indie game What Remains of Edith Finch, released earlier this year, you can swing on a swing, fly a kite, conduct a frog, swim as a shark, fly as an owl, reach with a tentacle.
There’s fish-slicing, picture-taking, holding a hand out of a speeding car’s window, and a lot more, all within the space of a game that takes perhaps three hours to play from start to end. Oh, and there are full first-person controls, too, for Edith herself.
[NOTE: MANY SPOILERS FOLLOW]
All in all, this one game has something in the order of 30 different control schemes, depending on how you categorize them. And yet there are no tutorials. You play instinctively, exploring the controls as you go along.
"A big part of how the game works is finding a good balance of that complexity, where it feels like you're being asked to do ridiculous, complicated and unusual things and yet you're succeeding, succeeding at a rapid pace, so when you look back even over the last 10 minutes, it's like, 'Oh! I was flying a kite and now I'm chopping fish and it feels like Alice falling through the rabbit hole,'" creative director Ian Dallas says.
"Whatever you thought should be the way it works will be the way it works for you."
Getting the game to this frictionless point was as hard as you imagine it might have been. It took many iterations of its various elements as well as various creative solutions for taking player inputs.
Whole sections of the game hung in the balance as developer Giant Sparrow, which had previously made first-person painting game The Unfinished Swan, struggled to marry narrative-bearing gameplay with seamless controls.
If there's any kind of neatly packaged catch-all solution to the challenge Giant Sparrow set itself, it was to try to make the game work in the way people expect it to. On the small scale, that meant helping players by assuming what they want.
"Whatever you thought should be the way it works will be the way it works for you," says Dallas. So if you need it makes most sense to face a ladder and push up to go down it, or to push down, the game takes whatever your first input is and remaps the controls, assuming that's how you expect the controls to work.
Not all games can make assumptions about player intention like this, but What Remains of Edith Finch's environments and interactions are carefully constrained, with player input restricted to two analogue sticks and the trigger button. The aim was to create trust in the player that they’d never be asked to do anything outside these three inputs.
"Hopefully for players that means that once they identify that pattern and they trust those buttons. Discovery and surprise comes from how using the same buttons gets wildly different responses back from the game," says lead designer Chris Bell.
"There's no meter or explosions when you do it perfectly. We’re asking for very different things in each of the stories."
Securing that trust in all players wasn't straightforward. Dallas remembers during playtesting how players would mash all the buttons when they got frustrated. "There's some kind of triumph of the human spirit thing in there, so even though pressing triangle never did anything, people are like, all right, this is the time triangle is going to save me," he says, laughing.
At the same time, they'd notice when players did relax into the controls, they'd sometimes go too far and not realize other inputs were also valid. That was true for Calvin's story, in which players use the two analogue sticks to move Calvin's left and right legs to help him swing. Only by using both sticks could they generate the speed the sequence required, but they'd get enough feedback from using one stick that they'd keep using it without trying the second to see if it also did something.
The solution was to reduce the extent to which players would swing when they used only one stick. "People were thinking, 'Maybe I can do this just a little bit better'," says Dallas. "Because there's no meter or explosions when you do it perfectly. We're asking for very different things in each of the stories."
<iframe title="Embedded content" src="https://gfycat.com/ifr/SereneKeyAntipodesgreenparakeet" height="360px" width="100%" data-testid="iframe" loading="lazy" scrolling="auto"></iframe>"We tended not to worry at all about the story or the character or anything until we had a clear beginning, middle and end for the gameplay progression."
Calvin's story was otherwise one of What Remains of Edith Finch's more straightforward sections. Like most, it came from an idea for interaction: the experience of being a child on a swing. This was then passed to a designer -- Ben Esposito, developer of forthcoming physics toy Donut County and many other artfully playful games -- who developed several prototypes in Unity.
Early on, the team focused on the idea of each stick controlling a leg, and then it was a matter of tuning. "We tended not to worry at all about the story or the character or anything until we had a clear beginning, middle and end for the gameplay progression," says Dallas. "Once that was working, we thought about who this event would occur to."
A far more tortuously designed story was Lewis,' in which players are asked to cut fish heads off with one analogue stick while simultaneously moving a character in a separate 'imagination' world. It's the game's stand-out story, situating an affecting narrative in perfectly complementary interaction. The trouble was complexity.
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