Before we begin today,
I've got an announcement or two.
First, our wonderful artist Leelee here
has decided that it's time to move on and conquer new lands.
She's been working on Extra Credits for, like, two years now.
We've loved having her on the team, and we wish her the very best.
And, who knows? She may still pop in for an appearance from time to time.
Thank you, Leels, for making so many episodes awesome.
Of course, this left us with a bit of a void on the team.
We needed another artist to help out Scott here.
Well, it just so happens that we've got one, and his name is...
*deep sigh*
Are you kidding me..
This is gonna get confusing.
I would like to welcome to the team...
Dan number three.
This is Dan Jones. Welcome to the team, buddy.
Anyway, announcements over. Let's get this episode going.
Villains in video games tend to be pretty bad.
Let me try that again.
Villains in video games tend to be very poorly constructed.
Today and next week,
we are going to be talking about how to put together a decent villain for a video game.
A lot of this is going to be pretty basic,
and there's a lot deeper one can go if one really wants to study this.
I mean, smart people have been creating great villains for centuries.
But it's surprising how many games would benefit from
applying even the most surface level rules of villain design.
So, if you're game is gonna have a villain,
depending on the kind of game you're making,
you're generally gonna have one of two types.
Mechanics villains or narrative villains.
Mechanics villains exist primarily for gameplay purposes.
They exist to give you a reason to run, jump, gun, or stomp.
They serve to precipitate the action.
These are your Bowsers, your Ganons, your Dr. Wily's (Drs. Wily, actually!).
Narrative villains, on the other hand, are there to drive the story.
To create the drama and to serve as the foil for your main character.
These antagonists can be interesting, complex characters in their own right.
These are your Big Bosses, your Andrew Ryans, your Delitas.
Today, I want to focus on mechanics villains and how to use them.
These guys don't really have to be all that complex.
Functionally, they're more a final boss than a character, really.
They can be comical.
They can be the avatar of pure darkness.
They can be inept.
They can be evil geniuses.
The important thing is that the player feels good about challenging them.
You can often do this with contrast.
Say your game is a lighthearted, fun experience.
In that case, you might make your villain comical and goofy.
Maybe even clumsy, in order to highlight the player's skill.
Like Dr. Robotnik,
Gruntilda,
King K. Rool,
or Pete.
Or, say your game has a more serious tone.
For that, maybe you want a true villain of pure evil
so that the player feels like a hero when fighting them.
Like The Enchantress,
Chaos,
Lavos,
Malificent.
Tom Nook. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Even your average raid boss in an MMO
like World of Worldcraft functions this way.
When the player uses of all their mechanical prowess to overcome these villains,
they should feel like, within the narrative of the game,
that anybody with less skill
than they could never overcome such a malevolent force.
This is why we often resort to unknowable aliens
or supernatural evils bent on humanity's destruction
for this kind of mechanics villain.
Your second goal when creating a mechanics villain
is to make them feel as rewarding as possible to defeat.
They should feel immensely powerful,
so that when the player finally reaches them,
you can create an intense game-play scenario
that requires all the mechanical skills
the player has been practicing over the course of the game.
If you look at Bowser,
he's bigger and more impressive
than any of the Koopas scattered throughout the game.
And overcoming him requires more skill from the player
than almost any other enemy.
Dr. Wily himself may be a weak old dude,
but when you finally reach him when the fight starts,
he's always in a massive attack vehicle or something;
a weapon that makes him even more daunting a threat than any of his robot henchmen.
Even Dracula in the Castlevania series works this way,
and those games are already super hard.
Finally, a good mechanics villain
usually comes with a justification
for why the player can't simply fight them right away
and be done with it.
Maybe they have an army to throw at you,
or a fortress far away,
Or a labyrinth littered with traps,
something you must overcome
before you take the fight with the villains themselves.
Thus justifying the rest of the game's action.
I think that overall, that we're pretty good at making villains like these.
Mechanics villains are functionally,
somewhat unique to games,
and we've been creating them as long as video games have been around.
What we're generally somewhat less good at are Narrative villains.
Narrative villains have vastly different requirements.
Unlike the mechanic villains type I've been describing,
they usually can't just be caricatures
of the force of pure evil
or bumbling comic relief.
They aren't there just to be an end boss or to throw an army at you.
They exist to make the world the player is inhabiting more immersive and believable,
to provide an opposing force to the main character,
and to create conflict and drama in the story in doing so.
This is where our industry often struggles,
because we have a tendency to use mechanics villains
where narrative villains are needed.
We'll get into that problem and talk more into the role of the narrative villain next week.
Dan, thank you very much for--
no, no, not you,
the other Dan, I mean the other Da--
Oh good grief, this is gonna be a problem....