Field Notes from the Lone Pine Dev Team — Devlog #5

Quick Updates

Firstly, if you haven’t seen us for a while, it’s because we’re cooking up some great stuff at Lone Pine! We’ll have some exciting new previews and announcements coming soon. In the meantime, we’ve put down some of our thoughts on game and level design, and how we apply that to Lone Pine.

Designing Environments

Making a game set in a national park is difficult, especially for a 2D adventure game with a lot of puzzles, because there are only so many things you can interact with. You can look at trees, and pick up rocks, and uh… rummage through the bins. Lone Pine isn’t a 3D game, so you can’t hide things behind trees and in tucked-away caves. Sometimes it can be difficult to design new areas and puzzles.

Here’s a cycle that repeats a lot: because of those limits, I’ll really try to stretch what we can squeeze into a scene and what Izzie can do.

I come up with a lot of goofy ideas, and the team does their best to decipher what I’m on about. A lot of times my stuff just doesn’t make sense for the world of Lone Pine, and they have to gently put a hand on my shoulder and get me to re-think.

The team, to Lachie, at most storyboard meetings.

A lot of times when you come up with an idea for a new puzzle or story beat, the broad strokes are there, but you don’t think about the sticky details and logic behind it. And the team has a great eye for things that don’t make sense—they really push me to think everything all the way through, because those details are important.

Then, I refine it and show it to the team at another storyboard meeting. They pick it apart further, and we always end up with a much better area than we started with.

Lara will then go away and turn our crude sketches and red lines into a proper Lone Pine environment, always adding a bit of her own ideas based on real-life places she’s visited. It usually comes out looking very different to the sketches Sam and I make, but the core of the level is always there. The details she adds makes the scene more realistic and/or plausible, and it’s amazing every time!

The core of the level is always there. What Lara adds in between is the magic.

Designing Puzzles

We try to avoid having the player just go through the area from left to right until they’ve solved everything. There should be reasons to move around a space in different ways, instead of left to right, interacting with everything in the order it appears. Then we see if we can add any verticality to add more variety.

Sometimes we try to throw a curveball at the player. Something that won’t make sense until they’ve explored the area more, or a red herring. It can be something simple, like the license plate on High Ridge Lookout, which looks like it might be the code for a locked laptop that’s also in the scene.

So the basic outline of a puzzle:

• The player should know what to do, but not necessarily how to do it. Even something as simple as a chest up high or on the other side of a wall can be enticing enough to pique their interest.
• (Sometimes) present a plausible but incorrect solution.
• This leads the player to figure out the real solution - aha!

If it’s too easy, your brain powers down and there’s no engagement. If it’s too hard, you get frustrated and lose motivation.

I tend to err on the side of slightly easier, because when I play games, I still find it satisfying to solve puzzles that aren’t actually that difficult. But of course, as the game progresses, you want the difficulty to ramp up. I think the Resident Evil games are generally a good benchmark for this.

If you can’t go any bigger or more powerful with new mechanics, try to ‘externalise’ them. Constantly introducing new things throughout the game keeps things fresh, but to avoid power creep, or movement creep, power up laterally. The most recent example I can think of is DK Bananza. For example, a new tool or ability that’s specific to one area or type of puzzle. We did this recently with the dictaphone. We can’t have Izzie climb up and down and hack through the jungle or paraglide around, but we can introduce other new elements as we go.

Something in the ravine is worth recording.

I’ll leave you with one of my favourite resources for designing puzzles and game mechanics: a 2014 GDC Next session called Practical Creativity.

What’s Next

As I mentioned above, we have our heads down and are working hard on Lone Pine at the moment, but we’ll have some exciting announcements coming very soon!