Hi, this is Mark Brown with Game Maker's Tool Kit: a series on video game design.
Let's say you're making a game where the player can chop up enemies, as a more efficient way
of killing them. How do you teach the player that they can do this?
Well if you're making Dead Space, you might write CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS in blood, then pop
up a screen that says "shoot the limbs off of enemies for extra damage", then provide
an audio log that says:
AUDIO LOG: Listen! Forget about shooting them in the body. You gotta cut off their limbs.
Then have another character call in and say:
ZACH HAMMOND: Shooting them in the body didn't seem to work. Go for the limbs! Dismember
them. That should do the job.
And then pop-up a screen that says "cut off limbs to kill quickly".
At that point, the player might just start to catch on. Or, they might feel like they're
being treated like a baby.
Four year before this, Half Life 2 managed to explain the same thing using just two moments
and zero words.
When you first enter Ravenholm you see this: a dead zombie, chopped in half, with a saw
blade in its stomach.
Then, you notice that the doorway to the next section is blocked by this table and these
blades. You pluck a blade out of the wall with your gravity gun and at that moment,
a zombie wanders into view. You instinctively hit the fire button and wa-pow! - you chop the sucker
in half.
And that's it! In about ten seconds, Valve has taught you that saw blades are an effective
weapon against zombies, without making you read anything and without treating you like
an infant.
This is the sort of subtle design that makes Half Life 2 so special, and has given the
game such an enduring legacy amongst fans.
Throughout the whole game, Valve expertly directs the action and the player, and - without
ever taking control of the camera - manages to make you see something, feel something,
make you jump, or make you laugh.
ALYX VANCE: Oh, back so soon?
But for this video, I want to focus on the way that Valve's invisible guiding hand is
used to make you learn something, and the way that Half Life 2's designers teach you
about the game's mechanics, weapons, enemies, and puzzles, without beating you over the
head with pop-up explanations.
From the very beginning of the game, it's teaching you how to play without using obvious
tutorials. When you're escaping Barney's back room, for example, you need to learn how to
pick up and drop physics objects to advance.
And when this chap says:
COMBINE: Pick up that can
The more defiant players will immediately learn how to throw objects.
Valve continues to do this throughout the game. Take the barnacles, for example: these
are monsters who draw you up with their tongue and chew you into tiny bits. But you're not
told this, you're shown it. Look how you're introduced to these jerks.
Now you know exactly what they do, and that you should probably avoid them in future,
A little later on, you have to squeeze through a narrow gap and you end up knocking down
some barrels that are in your way. They slide down a hill and get caught by these barnacles'
tongues, teaching you that you can use objects to bypass this enemy.
And then just around the corner you get some explosive barrels and a whole host of barnacle
tongues and you think to yourself, I wonder if I can do this…
And now you know how to avoid and fight barnacles for the rest of Half Life 2 and its episodes.
Like the barnacle, almost all the enemies in the game are first shown to you in a safe
environment. The first zombie you see is behind a fence, so you can see that it's able to
throw objects, but you don't actually get hit.
And when you first see a combine zombie...
ALYX VANCE: That's, that's like a, erm, a Zombine. Right?
It shows you that it can blow itself up with grenades, but it does so from behind bulletproof
glass.
You're also taught how to kill these things. You come up from behind the first sniper in
the game, so you can safely practice lobbing grenades at them, before you have to fight
the real deal.
And before you battle the chopper in Episode 2, you have to use your gravity gun to remove
this mine, which should help you figure out how to fight the helicopter itself.
And when you finally meet the rollermines along the coast, maybe you'll think back to
how you threw Dog's ball around at Black Mesa East.
That part happens during a sequence where Alyx and Dog explain the ins and outs of the
gravity gun. So yes, more traditional tutorials do crop up in Half Life 2. When you're
learning about the sandtraps, the beacon radar, the rocket launcher, and the Magnuson devices,
characters literally explain the mechanics of the game, and sometimes provide a place
to practice too.
But at least it happens inside the world, in a believable space. And these moments can
offer a nice change of pace, and provide a bit of humour or backstory.
ALYX VANCE: Gordon, this is Dog. My dad built him to protect me when I was a kid.
Valve uses a lot of tricks to help guide you through the game's puzzles, but without providing
traditional hints or just giving you the solution. Like take this physics conundrum where you
have to weigh down a plank: maybe you'll think back to the children's seesaw in City 17.
It even has the same cinder blocks next to it.
And this simple puzzle teaches you both about counterweights, which are used later in the
game. And also that you should follow bits of rope or wire to find the next part of the
puzzle which is something that happens time and again in Half Life.
Other puzzles hint at their solution through the world design: this one, which involves
using a grenade to fling yourself up to this balcony, has a big box of grenades in the
corner, a wire that runs up to green button, a scorch mark under the flap, and even a dead body
up in the rafters.
And sometimes, puzzle mechanics are layered on bit by bit. At the beginning of Episode
One you get this very easy puzzle to show that you can plop energy balls into connectors.
Then you do it again, and then you do it with an obstacle, and throughout this section in
the core the same puzzle is repeated but the complexity ramps up just one notch at a time
so you're never overwhelmed.
Valve would go on to use this style of puzzle game training in Portal, which maybe we'll look
at in a future episode.
Half Life 2 is, of course, not the only game to explain itself without the use of tutorials.
Classic games simply didn't have enough room on the cartridge for explanations, so were
forced to show their rules during gameplay. Check out the description for a link to Egorapter's
popular video about the ways Mega Man X does this, if you haven't seen it.
And in the modern era, games like Resident Evil 4 and Super Mario Galaxy have done a
good job of teaching players in an organic, understated way.
But it's still uncommon, and today's games far too frequently fall back on the bog standard
teaching mechanics that either break the flow of gameplay or completely patronise the player.
Yes, some games may be too complicated or open-ended to copy Valve's solution. And not
every developer has the luxury to spend years on play testing. But I hope that more developers
are influenced by the way Valve teaches it's players and not just its physics puzzles,
its dystopian future, and those damn tram ride intros.