“So who writes the story? Who designs the bosses? Do you make the levels? What about skill trees?”

In an effort to help clarify “what does a game designer do?”, I want to go over all the different TYPES of designers. There are designers who are affectionately called “jack of all trades” who dip their hands in all elements of design and sometimes even art and programming, and then there’s specialized roles like “systems designer” and “combat designer” and “level designer”.

The truth is, any general definition of design has flaws because the actual responsibilities of a designer varies depending on the size of the studio, the platform, the genre, the size of the game, the studio culture regarding roles, how specialized people are, and even whether there is a “design department” at that studio. The designer on a first person shooter has very different practical responsibilities than the designer on your next favorite match-three mobile game.

GENERALISTS

Designer / Game Designer

Generic term to mean any or all of the design specializations, used at any size studio, any genre, etc. Most companies just use this term for job titles, while individual designers might still specialize informally. The larger the studio, the more likely they will have specialized designer titles.

Overall, designers are concerned with the rules  of the game, what ways a player can interact with the game, how the mechanics and story work to provide a desired experience to the player. This is the vague description that gets clarified as you read on.

Junior Designer / Associate Designer

Junior or Associate designers usually have less experience, and less creative control. They may spend more time implementing under the eyes of a Designer or Senior Designer. This is often an entry level position, catering to new hires from outside the industry (such as students), those transitioning between roles within a company (from art to design), or existing designers hired into very different scale of games (moving from a 2D game studio to a AAA studio).

Senior Designer

A senior-level position in the design department. Someone who could fill the position of “lead” and usually takes charge of a large system in the game, such as all combat or all levels, and delegates to or guides other designers. They may be the major point-person for a system and work with programmers and artists and the leads to bring it from an idea to a fully featured system.

Lead Designer

Leads translate the Creative Directors vision to the design team (much like the Art Director or Lead does for the art team). They review the gameplay from its macro to the moment-to-moment bits, giving direction and feedback to designers and making decisions regarding the gameplay mechanics.

Creative Director

The top of the game development pyramid who reports directly to the owner of the company and to the publisher funding the game. They hold the ‘vision’ of the game – this is the closest to “the idea guy” that you can get. They are analogous to a film director, and are usually the most visible in the media as the face of the development team.

Creative Directors can come from any department – art, programming, design, or even an owner of the company. Some studios use Director or Executive Producer to describe this role, but Creative Director is the most common.

LEVELS & MISSIONS

Level Designer

A level designer is responsible for the architecture and gameplay in a chunk of physical space – a level. They care about how the player flows through the level, puzzles or enemies or other obstacles they encounter, and implement basic geometry of the level and the moment-to-moment gameplay. They work closely with level artists to get the aesthetics in place, and gameplay programmers for specialized functionality they may need, and the writer and creative director to ensure the level fits within the overall game.

Where do I hide the intel? Where is the next objective? How does the player get from A to B – an elevator or a ladder? Which enemies attack the player in this room? Where is the cover placed? What kinds of puzzles exist? Where are the exploratory spaces? What story elements do I need to communicate to the player, and when?

Multiplayer Level Designer

These designers have the same basic responsibilities as other level designers, but they focus on the unique needs and challenges of multiplayer gameplay. They focus on designing levels that accommodate competitive and/or cooperative gameplay and the placement of any elements specific to a certain mode (flags, control points, enemy waves).

How long is this racetrack, and is it wide enough to accommodate all the players? Where are the control points that players need to take over? How far apart are the flags in Capture the Flag? Where do players respawn and how do you prevent spawn-camping? How many players need to be in this arena to defeat the boss? What architectural features of the level best cater to different player classes, such as a sniper vs. short-ranged melee attacker?

World Builder

World builders are a type of level designer – many of their responsibilities are the same, and someone qualified as one would usually be able to move to the other. The world builder title tend to exist more in open world and MMO spaces – games that don’t have individual concrete levels but rather large areas for the players to traverse around. As such, these spaces usually have multiple purposes (story missions, side quests, activities or minigames, multiplayer hubs) as opposed to traditional level design where the space has a single purpose.

Does this area have large city buildings, highways, shops, mountains, rivers, or flat? How does this area fit in with the areas directly around it? What landmarks make this area unique? What kinds of enemies, architecture, plants, or other features populate this area? How does the player navigate through it? What are the critical paths players take as shortcut, and what are the dead spaces players tend to avoid?

Mission Designer

Sometimes a mission designer and a level designer are interchangeable, but in cases like open world games or MMOs a mission designer usually handcrafts gameplay in a space that already exists, or exists for multiple purposes. Mission designers are focused on what the player is doing during a mission – the gameplay beats, objectives, combat, implementing dialogue and ensuring story elements are communicated to player.

What is the player’s current objective – is it interesting? How does this mission fit into the overarching story? Where does the player traverse to in order to complete the mission? What is the pay-off at the end? Is there any new functionality being introduced in this mission? What kind of combat, puzzles, or other obstacles does the player encounter? Is there appropriate spectacle in the mission to signify its importance in the game?

Quest Designer

Very similar role to the Mission Designer (and sometimes interchangeable), Quests tend to be secondary story-focused gameplay, usually smaller but still using many of the same mechanics as a mission or main story line. You find quest designers in studios making role-playing games and MMORPGs.

Is this quest part of a quest chain? What is the ultimate pay-off of this quest? What kind of quest archetype is it – explore and discover, fetch, combat, or something else? What enemies are involved? Where does the player have to go to get, engage in, and complete the quest? What area of the world does the quest cover? When does the player first get the quest? What story does the quest tell and how does that fit into the overall design of the game?

SYSTEMS

Systems Designer

A catch-all term for various systems design. Systems refers to global rules or things the player interacts with across the entire game, not specific to missions, quests, areas, or levels.  They aren’t focused on the moment-to-moment experience so much as the overall birds-eye-view of the game. To help clarify, a system may be something like “combat” while a mechanic may be “throwing grenades”. They spend a lot of their time in excel sheets and organizing information.

What kinds of slots can the player equip armor or clothing to? How does the player level up, and at what rate? How often does the player get a new weapon? How many pieces of intel are they, and what is their spread across the entire game? What are all the different puzzle mechanics and at what rate do you introduce them to the player? How many quests, challenges, minigames, and other optional pieces of gameplay are there?

Combat Designer

These designers are often at large studios that make games where the main interaction is fighting. Combat designers are concerned with enemies, weapons, bosses, ammo, difficulty balancing, and any class-based combat skills. While they are focused a lot on the combat systems, they also govern the moment-to-moment experience a player has in various combat scenarios throughout the game.

When does the player encounter a new enemy type? What is the optimal combat distance for a shotgun and a sniper rifle? How many bullets is in an enemy volley, how often do they fire, and how accurate is each bullet? Does the game use dynamic difficulty adjustments to the player’s style, or a flat easy/medium/hard setting? How much do you want to starve the player of ammo? Do bosses have weak points and, if so, what is the optimal way to attack them? How much health does a player has, and how much can a medic class heal them for?

Combat designers on competitive fighting games like Street Fighter actually have a pretty unique role that differs a bit from the above. They are concerned with such details as how many frames it takes for an attack animation to play, and dealing with the rock-paper-scissors elements to ensure that each character is extremely well-balanced.

Economy Designer

Economy designers are focused on the design, implementation, and – most importantly – the balance of a virtual economy. This mainly covers how the player earns and where they spend in-game currency. This is rarely a job title on its own but rather a descriptor for a type of system a design may be in charge of. For example, both Valve and CCP have full-time economists on staff, but any game that has loot and vendors would need a designer to oversee this system.

What ingredients are required to craft a new potion? How many experience points do you need to level up? What kind of loot drops from enemies? What are the loop drop rates, and how often do rare or common items drop?  Can players trade items with each other? How does an auction house work? If there are vendors, how does the player interact with them?

Multiplayer Designer

Multiplayer Designers focus on custom  cooperative or competitive gameplay modes and design, such as deathmatch, horde modes, MMO groups, guilds or clans, and leaderboards. They also serve the role of Multiplayer Level Designer where appropriate (depending on the size of the team or style of game).

Is the multiplayer mode cooperative, competitive, or both? What type of modes are in this game – horde, deathmatch, capture the flag? Can players organize their own guilds or clans? How many players can play together in a single match? How do leaderboard work and what do they score on? What, if any, rewards do players earn from multiplayer achievements? How do players enter and exit multiplayer from the singleplayer campaign?

Puzzle Designer

Puzzle designers are kind of the mirror of a combat designer, except that the obstacle is not an enemy but a piece of logic, like a locked door or a series of scrambled letters. Puzzle designers are often a level designer, such as in Portal or any sokoban style block-moving game. However, the role extends to puzzle games that are not based about hand-made stages – they also include balancing games like Candy Crush Saga or Bejeweled.

What new mechanic am I teaching in this puzzle? How can I re-use the same mechanics, such as a switch and a door, in different ways that feel new to the player? Does each puzzle become progressively harder? Does the player have all the necessary information to complete the puzzle? Is there a timer and how fast does it count down? In this gem-matching game, what is the bonus mechanic for matching 3, 4, or 6 gems in a row?

Narrative Designer

Narrative designers are concerned with gameplay elements or mechanics that allow the player to interact with the story, whether that’s in a linear fashion or through meaningful choices that result in branching stories. While they certainly deal with some level of writing (which varies by studio), they mostly focus on the design and implementation of narrative-related gameplay. While many studios hire writers (because most games, particularly AAA titles, have a story), narrative designer roles tend to exist at studios that specialized in story-oriented games, like Bioware or Tell Tale.

How does the player interact with story elements – through dialogue options, quick time events, or text input? Is the story linear or branching? If it branches, how many branches are there and do they always branch or do they loop back together at key moments? Is there a morality system tied to player choices? How do you communicate that a choice is meaningful?

CROSSOVER POSITIONS

Crossover roles are usually a hybrid of design and another specialization, so they may exist in the design department or not.

Monetization Designer

A cross between design and business, a monetization designer deals with how to take gameplay or aesthetic (non-gameplay) elements and sell them to players for real money, and how much these elements should cost. These positions exist at mobile and social games companies,  studios that make free-to-play games (like Riot’s League of Legends), studios that make MMOs (like Blizzard), and at large publishers that have microtransactions and small DLC packets in their games.

Normally your regular developers at large studios don’t worry about money or costs – that’s the job of producers, upper management, and business people. Since monetization designers deal with revenue so much they usually have a business or marketing background and come from upper management rather than up through design.

Technical Designer

Usually qualified to be a software engineer or gameplay programmer, tech designers actually bridge the engineering and design departments. Sometimes this means they take the specs given to them by designers and work with the programming department to implement them. This can be full coding and the development of new features, or it can be using scripting languages to set up gameplay such as missions and then pass them to the designers to make modifications (depending on the studio’s needs and the tech designer’s skillset). You find this role at larger companies, open world studios, and few other places, but it’s not particularly common as a job title.

UI Designer

This person is usually part of the User Interface team, not part of the design team, but has a lot of crossover responsibilities so it’s not unheard of for them to be considered a designer. Their job is to organize and present information to the player in the form of HUDs and menus – any of the graphical elements that are displayed on screen for the player. These elements include health indicators, objective text, tutorials, button prompts, inventories, maps, and crafting interfaces.

Writer

Writers focus on the overall narrative of the game, which is informed by the creative director’s vision as well as the needs of individual designers (jn the case of a mission or level-focused game). They also write the text, descriptions, names, and dialogue throughout the entire game and work with (usually external) teams to localize this text into other languages.

Sometimes writers exist on the design team, since they work very closely with them, and sometimes narrative designers may take on writing duties.  At very small companies, there may be no on-staff writer and this position maybe filled by a designer. But typically if you want to write for games, you need to be good at writing not at designing.

Design Support

This role is a low-level design position that focuses mostly on implementing tedious grunt tasks, freeing up other designers to concentrate on bigger issues. They may go through and populate the world with crates or fish, or use scripting to trigger FX explosions as the player fights in a big battle. They may place volumes or clues around pieces of cover that tells the game how AI can interact with them, and then place those volumes throughout every combat scenario in the game.

I know this role exists at my studio and at least a couple other places, which is why I am including it (we technically call it QA Support, as they are all QA people we’ve brought into support roles to help designers). This role might be that of an Associate or Junior Designer, depending on the company, or fall into a more generalized “contract work” temporary hire.

NOT-DESIGNERS DESIGNERS

These are roles that have “design” in their name but are not traditionally considered part of the design team at a game development studio.

Graphic Designer

A term for an artist that specializes in 2D art such as UI buttons, forum icons, web design, logos, splash screens, and similar graphic elements. They do not typically create any in-game content unless they are part of the user interface team, at which point they are usually called a UI artist and not a graphic designer.

User Experience Designer

Also sometimes called UX Designers or Usability Professionals,  these people are usually not directly developing the game. Their job is to take the game in various forms – often demos or larger chunks – and put it in front of potential players in focus groups to test it. They’re concerned about whether players understand the game, are engaging with its mechanics,  and where communication is breaking down – and then passing that information on to the rest of the team. This kind of testing is not about identifying technical bugs, but about poor or misleading design.

UX Designers often work for publishers like EA or Activision, large developers like Blizzard, or hired on a freelance basis. Smaller studios will rely on their publisher to organize focus tests or usability tests for the game.

Sound Designer

Part of the audio department, a sound designer deals with the sound effects found throughout the game world (from the player’s footsteps, to the firing of a gun, to the ch-ching of money earned), in its user interface (button clicks, new objective dings), and the music that accompanies it. They may create their own sound effects, or choose effects from a sound library their company subscribes to and modify them to fit the needs of the game.

Software Designer

A software designer is one of many terms to describe the role of a programmer. Despite the name, this is not a design position.

Hardware Designer

This is a pretty specialized role that exists at companies that deal with hardware – console manufacturers such as Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Valve, for example. There are also companies that deal with peripherals, such as the belated RedOctane and upcoming Oculus Rift. You may also find these roles at toy companies that create electronics for kids, which may also use the terms Toy Designer and Product Designer.

Game Architect

Despite architecture and level design having a lot of shared elements, a “game architect” is actually a highly technical and senior role in the programming or engineering department.

EXCEPTIONS

Oh boy are there a lot of exceptions, but I think if you internalize this list you’ll be 90% of the way there. Remember that titles and roles usually share a lot of responsibilities. For example, on one project I was a level designer and mission designer for a one-hour chunk of gameplay, while also juggling systems design for skill trees/perks/leveling.

One of the big exceptions is that some companies still use different titles than the ones listed above, so there are still some weird cases out there that you might not recognize. For this article, I looked at a bunch of job posting at AAA companies and found titles like “Lead Gameplay Designer” and “motion designer” and an “industrial designer”. Some of these reflect unique jobs that don’t exist everywhere in the industry (ex: Valve), and others are just quirks of the studio’s organization, often reflecting specific gameplay experiences they deliver (ex: Bioware).

Reposted from: http://www.lizengland.com/blog/2014/06/types-of-designers/

This is an article about the design process behind a•part•ment: a separated place, which is now nearing the end of its Kickstarter campaign. It was written by The Elsewhere Company’s Robyn Gray and Richard Emms, with collaborator Raghav Bashyal. a•part•ment is currently in production. You can find out more on our website.

 

 

a•part•ment: a separated place is a game about relationships. It’s an interactive narrative with an emphasis on conveying story through text and using different, character-centric mechanics. The main character, Nick, mopes around the apartment he shared with Madison, his now ex-girlfriend. The player gets to experience Nick’s reflection on his time with Madison and his journey through the post-breakup process.

But Nick is not alone. About half the game takes place within his apartment, while the other half explores the lives and relationships of Nick’s neighbors. The neighbors are all at different stages of life and have different relationship-related issues. There’s a struggling pair of newlyweds, a man who feels detached from society, a widow, and an estranged father and daughter.

After a failed experiment in almost purely branching dialogue, we moved in a character-driven direction. We chose an immediate impetus for our players — you just got dumped, now what do you do? The characters in this apartment complex had already been designed and developed thanks to the previous game iteration, so we decided to create short interactive experiences reflecting their individual lives. We structured the game with Nick’s breakup at the center and the neighbors orbiting (and reflecting) his situation.

a•part•ment is a collection of interactive vignettes. Nick and Madison’s story and environment serves as an anchor or hub to the game’s narrative. Each neighbor’s story is told through a number of different interactive vignettes. Upon completing a Nick and Madison portion of the story, players then enter a neighbor’s vignette. On completing that vignette, they return to Nick and Madison’s story and so on.

One of our biggest questions when we approached a•part•ment was how we could take an everyday story and make it compelling to play. It’s common to make a game “fun,” but we didn’t intend for a•part•ment to be action-packed and skill-based. It’s also common to write a dramatic script, but adding interactivity begs so many questions that don’t have definite answers. What should players be doing as the story unfolds? Should they be controlling how the story reveals itself, have agency over the lives of the characters? Who is the player in this situation? Our game’s premise was very different from most games we’d encountered. We realized we had to do some deep narrative and gameplay exploration to figure out how to do our characters’ stories justice in a game.

Tugging at the Heart Strings

a•part•ment is a game about relationships, a theme that is only recently emerging in the game development community. The relationships we have in life, even the ones that end poorly, shape us as people. They can change how we think and the way we do things. They can introduce us to new ideas, new hobbies, new tastes. Even if a person exits your life, they leave footprints behind.

Nick and Madison’s story and the stories of their neighbors revolve around this concept of footprints — about the ways your relationships irreversibly change you. a•part•ment is not only about romantic relationships: it’s about the universal feelings and experiences we share in all kinds of relationships. We wanted to design mechanics that would evoke strong emotions in our players and allow them to relate their own experiences with those of our characters.

Translating feelings and moments into playable experiences is a challenge. After we scrapped our original branching narrative approach, we decided to play to our strengths. In this case, that meant rapid prototyping. The previously developed cast of characters was our primary constraint. We wanted to design narrative-centric prototypes that strongly conveyed each character’s emotional state.

Step Into Their Shoes

The best thing about prototyping — and why a•part•ment eventually evolved to have a modular structure — is that this approach gave us absolute freedom to develop different experiences for different characters. Each of our characters has a different background, relationship, and problem — it was only right that their individual vignettes reflect these differences.

When initially developing these characters we created biographies, concept art, and short stories. Some of these pieces were about the playable relationship-related moments in the game, while others were explorations into other times in their lives. These explorations allowed us to flesh out their personalities further. Our writing exercises helped us define who these characters are outside of their relationships. Defining their histories informed our narrative design process, so we could craft mechanics and aesthetics that reflected who the characters are and how they react to their experiences.

For example, Rose is a novelist. The fact that she is a novelist is one of the causes of her relationship woes, but not the direct cause. It is part of her identity but it is not the focus of her story in a•part•ment. It did, however, serve as the inspiration for the mechanic behind her first vignette.

Rose Wright: The Uncertain Newlywed

Rose’s first vignette was the second prototype we created for the game. This part of her story was inspired by two key facts:

• Rose is a novelist.

 

• Rose has difficulty balancing her time between her spouse and her career.

 

The process of writing is wonderful and horrible. Moments of flow where the words just come to you are magical; writer’s block, on the other hand, is awful. But the moment when someone — your mom, your child, your significant other — interrupts what you’re doing (even if it’s just to ask if you want a cookie) is the worst.

Rose’s first vignette was originally a two-part design. We wanted the player to be Rose while she’s writing her next great novel. That meant coming up with a mechanic for writing and a mechanic to mimic flow.

In Rose’s first vignette you literally type her novel. You are shown a few shadow letters ahead, giving you a preview of what to type. The more accurately you type, the more characters are revealed. After typing a sentence or two you’ll hit the “Return” key and an entire paragraph will fade in, finishing the passage for you and rewarding you with content. With playtesting, we managed to find a good balance between the amount of typing and the story payoff.

But we didn’t want to just create a sense of in-game writing flow. We also wanted to interrupt that flow. Rose’s loving but off-screen spouse is a steady interruption. You’ll be typing away, getting into the task and the story you’re writing, when suddenly —

Alex kindly offers you a sandwich. No, I’m writing a novel! Go away! In order to dismiss the interruption we force you to take your hands off the keyboard, grab your mouse, move the mouse to the outlined red button (its location changes each time an interruption occurs), and click on it from anywhere between one and six times.

Intertwined with the typing and interruption mechanic are two concurrent stories. There’s the story you’re writing as Rose — a romance about a woman deciding whether or not to marry her current beau — and the story of Rose and Alex. About halfway through the experience, an additional twist to the Rose and Alex story emerges in the form of simple text messages. It alters the thread of the novel Rose is writing but, more noticeably, alters how players view Rose and Alex’s story and the way they treat the two characters.

The best part of this system is how genuinely players react. As they get closer to the vignette’s finale (and the end of the story Rose is writing) they get more agitated. They click that “NO” button as fast as they can. We’ve had players confess that they felt guilty because Alex is clearly trying to be nice — but damn it, they were trying to write a novel!

Jim Spencer: The Displaced Loner

From the outset, Jim was always a lonely character. When we began writing and working on a prototype about him a lot of our classmates, including us, were in a similar position to him. We’d uprooted ourselves from our previous homes to begin our graduate program at USC. Jim’s story captures moments we experience when we’re trying to carve out a new place for ourselves.

Jim’s first vignette was our first prototype for a•part•ment. His story is one of isolation and the depressive state that can come from it. We needed to find a way to evoke in players the weight of detachment and a creeping feeling of disquiet.

To create a strong sense of isolation and disembodiment we adjusted the first person controls. You feel like you’re floating, weightless, through the hallways of a darkened apartment. You don’t quite feel like a person — more like a ghost peering in on Jim and his troubles. We adjusted the first-person mouse and keyboard controls to slow everything down, encouraging players to read and reflect. The weight of the controls is unique to Jim and closely matches his lonely, depressed emotional state.

Visually we created a hollow aesthetic using a dark, desaturated palette. We draw attention to story beat locations with brighter colors. The sink, which contains the first mandatory piece of story, is light gray and directly visible at the end of the first hallway.

We also put in a dense pink fog far away from the player, inviting them to distant areas with a slightly warmer, brighter hue. It promises a relief from the oppressive darkness of their immediate surroundings, but the fog always clears as they approach to reveal the same dark spaces no matter where they visit.

Aurally we peppered the soundscape with sparse piano and guitar riffs. This creates a sense of emptiness with its pacing and a sense of melancholy with its somber tones. We also used music in space as a mechanic to direct player attention. We found these 3D audio cues were vital to guiding the player’s focus and informing them that new text had appeared.

All of this is in direct contrast to Nick’s apartment, where we use a range of colors and music is playing constantly. This really brings home the lifelessness in Jim’s apartment, and makes returning to Nick’s apartment a breath of fresh air. Nick’s environment reflects his strong feelings over the end of his relationship, whereas Jim’s environment gives the sense that he really isn’t feeling much more than a dull emptiness.

Words fade in and out of existence on the walls and floor, presenting Jim’s memories and feelings as you travel through his space. The word “drip” appears accompanied with a dripping sound — a noise that plagues Jim. We mimic how terrible the sound of a drip in an empty apartment is, how it rings through and holds power over your mind. “Drip” appears in your view with a regular, unending cadence, haunting the player in the same way it haunts Jim.

About halfway through the experience players find the source of the drips: the sink in Jim’s kitchen. The word and sound cease as players turn off the faucet, a satisfying moment of resolution. But later the dripping returns —

“Somewhere in the space his sink dripped, a sound that plagued him beyond irritation. It seemed, instead, to feed the empty feeling.”

This time players can again see the drip appearing in front of them, yet there’s no audio accompaniment. Is the sound just in Jim’s head? Is it a sound he’s merely anticipating? It’s a moment we’re familiar with, when we strain to hear this chronic sound of annoyance that just won’t happen.

We’re shown Jim’s innermost feelings throughout the entire experience but everything is written in third person, letting us know that we’re not Jim. The entire vignette culminates when he appears while you’re looking at a dead-end corner near the final part of the experience. When you turn around he’s suddenly there, curled up and motionless, ignoring your intrusion. Jim is no longer just a collection of thoughts or an empty apartment. He’s suddenly a physical presence sharing this space with us. The feelings we have been ruminating over for the entire experience are given an owner, which makes them suddenly quite overwhelming. No sooner do players join Jim, then they’re forced to leave him behind as the vignette ends and they are returned to Nick’s apartment.

May Tipton: The Grieving Widow

May’s character is loosely based on Robyn and Raghav’s grandparents. She is 80 years old, lives in an apartment by herself, and is dealing with the death of her husband, William, after a 60-year marriage.

May’s story is told in three vignettes. Her vignettes are simple in gameplay; in each one, you walk through a series of scenes in a linear fashion while reading text along the way. What’s interesting about these vignettes is that the transitions between the scenes are cuts.

In this example, the game cuts from a scene where you’re driving a car to a scene where you’re walking in a snowfield.

Each of May’s vignettes explores different ways to create cuts in games. May 1 cuts back-and-forth between first person and third person. May 2 cuts between first-person scenes. May 3 cuts between third-person scenes. The main challenges were figuring out how to cut from scene to scene without:

1. Jarring the player’s focus
2. Making the player lose control of the character
3. Confusing the player about the narrative of each vignette.

Raghav developed several scene-cutting techniques to solve these problems and implemented them in May’s vignettes. You might be thinking, what’s so cool about cuts? It turns out they’re a very versatile tool. Cuts are useful as a transitional tool for taking the player from one place to another without making them take the time to walk, or use an ill-contrived door.

How can we cut from third person to first person?

During this scenario the player starts an action in one scene and continues it into the next. In this case, they are moving forward in the first scene and continuing the motion into the second scene. It is notable that, though the control scheme differs between the two scenes, the button that moves the character forward is the same (the W key). You can read more about this and other techniques in Raghav’s thesis paper linked below.

Cuts are also useful for creating powerful or delicate emotional moments from the juxtaposition of two scenes. Take, for example, this cut from May 1.

The player is driving, then suddenly walking in a graveyard. Notice that the signpost fills the screen, serving as a wipe before the cut occurs.

If you ever sit down to watch a Twitch stream of this vignette, you’ll notice that the chatbox erupts in morbid understanding right after this cut. The streamer will wince. “Oh no…” they’ll say, “he’s dead.” The use of a cut here reveals information in a way that surprises and shocks the player.

So why are cuts so central to May’s character? Her story covers a large swath of time — 80 years — and cuts allow us to cover that amount of time efficiently. They also let players experience May’s thoughts the same way she experiences them — jumping from one moment to another.

May 1 is a rumination: a dreamlike collection of flashbacks that illuminate May’s relationship with William. This dreamlike quality comes in part from the painterly visuals (May herself being a painter) and in part from the cuts, which allow each scene to take place in a different time and location.

May 2 is similar to May 1 in that its scenes are dreamlike, but differs in that the scenes are not memories: they take place in the present. It does not tell a story so much as it tells a poem. The player walks around in first person reading May’s thoughts as she travels from her apartment, to the roof, to the forest, to her bedroom. The vignette mimics a lonely consciousness. The cuts are softer — each scene takes time to dissolve into the next, giving the vignette a slow, surreal quality that reflects her loneliness.

May 3 utilizes the power of cuts to the fullest. The vignette was a response to the prompt, “70 years in 7 cuts.” The final version of the vignette contains a few more cuts than 7, but succeeds in taking the player through May’s childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, her loss of William, and beyond — a look at her entire life in a span of 2 to 4 minutes.

Their abilities to transcend time and space make cuts a unique tool both in the designer’s toolbox and in the storyteller’s. Cuts give May’s vignettes their distinct flavor — they feel like dreams or memories: the gameplay equivalent of watching someone’s life flash before their eyes.

To read more about cuts in videogames, check out Raghav’s thesis paper titled No Jump Cuts.

Tying the Threads Together

Developing a•part•ment has been unique because each vignette’s design process has been different. We’ve only outlined some of them here. The overarching modular structure of our game offers us the freedom to give every vignette a unique format, allowing us to tell each story in the way that suits it best. Each vignette can be a standalone piece, yet the experience is strongest when the game is played as a whole.

“By weaving these other threads into Nick’s story, a•part•ment seems poised to be about more than just one person’s breakup. It seems to be concerned with how contemporary life can make any of us feel stuck in separated places, and perhaps in exploring and illuminating our shared isolation, it can suggest a different kind of connection.”

– Carolyn Petit, “Separated Places”

a•part•ment: a separated place will be released on Steam in Spring 2016. We’re currently approaching the end of our Kickstarter campaign, which you can check out below. We hope this article on our design process is helpful. Thanks for reading!

Kickstarter | Demo | Website