CONTEXT - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 99

Fotonica also uses a sudden change in the texture of a scene's sound to great effect. It uses
sound to strengthen the player's empathy with the protagonist, to help her better inhabit the
game rules. When the player is performing well enough, maintaining a fast enough speed as
she runs, a golden haze falls over the screen and the scene's musical score becomes muffled.
The running and jumping sounds that accompany the player's movement, always present
though normally quiet, now come to the forefront. The effect is something like a runner's
high—a feeling that's sometimes called “flow,” a concept we return to in Chapter 6, “Resis-
tance.” In this condition, the player's speed is greatly increased, and those elements of the
game's audio not important to maintaining that speed recede. This change communicates
something: the player wants to be in this state for as long as possible, to maintain her speed
and to attain this high.
Certain scenes of Shaun McGrath and David Kanaga's game Dyad (2012) also use sound to con-
vey the game's rules. A siren begins, faintly at first, and becomes louder as the player's energy
approaches exhaustion. Ultimately, it becomes overwhelming, drowning out the original
musical score of the scene entirely. The goal is to communicate to the player not only how close
the player is to “death,” but a feeling of increasing nearness to death, to cause panic. When the
player performs the correct action—lancing a target with a special attack, for example—the
siren fades somewhat.
Real Talk
Nicklas Nygren's Knytt Stories (2008), discussed in Chapter 3's end-of-chapter group activity,
is a game-making tool and spiritual sequel to Knytt , mentioned in the previous section. I've
engaged with Knytt Stories both as an author and as a player. Having for several years followed
the small community that has arisen around Knytt Stories , I've noticed a lot of similar mistakes
committed by amateur authors. A lot of these mistakes are of design—scenes that are simply
too hard, or built around objects whose behavior is unpredictable—or they're technical—a sur-
face is too jagged, and the protagonist, Juni, gets snagged while trying to climb it. But there are
also mistakes of communication: the appearance of a scene or piece of a scene gives the player
unclear expectations about the game.
A surface in Knytt Stories can look like anything: an author can import her own images into
the editor, and those can become walls, floors, ceilings, and surfaces. But the editor comes
equipped with 256 sets of graphical tiles, and many amateur authors choose to use images
from those tilesets when constructing their worlds. (Handily, a bunch of those tilesets are con-
sistent in style, making it easy to construct a whole world of different terrains that look like they
could occupy the same planet.)
Miscommunication can arise when the author uses a tile in a way the artist didn't intend. Often
tilesets contain both tiles that are intended as foreground tiles—as walls and floors and sur-
faces that the player can touch and interact with—and ones that are intended as background