Finding good videos of IWBTG:G is difficult. They all seem to be LP videos.
Kayin, since you're here and chatting, I am curious - when designing traps and obstacles for IWBTG:G, do you have any sort of rules or tricks you like to use when planning out how the levels flow? I'm wondering if you have some rule of thumb, maybe, where you put only so many tricks between checkpoints, or you aim for some average number of deaths from a certain obstacle to achieve just the right amount of frustration.
Have you ever put in an obstacle only to take it out when you thought "No, even I'm not that sadistic"?
A lot of it is by gut, since a lot of it is by pacing, but I can share some examples.
So Stage 1-1 has that big long intro where you swoop in for like 30 seconds and ingloriously plop to your death. Now, that's a tricky joke because it can get old REAL fast (for some people "real fast" is "right away" but lets assume the average IWBTG player). Considering the length of the intro, the optimal length for the joke is probably 3 times. 3-5 is probably the limit. 3 pretty much the key number for invoking repetition and kinda the sweet spot here. Originally the first save was located on Hard (default difficulty) where the Comm room would be in Bionic Commando. So, that segment has about 4 gotchas. So optimistically you can assume 5 deaths before they save and stop having to repeat that segment, but it could be like, 20 times or whatever and is probably closer to that. It's also a bit misleading since that segment, once learned, is easy. So moving the hard mode save down past the first crusher was the best choice. You'd get probably at least one fall into the water, maybe one missed jump, and, during their moment of glory, they'd be smashed into the ground. 3-4 deaths and likely to be more consistent than the other way. Also worked better for pacing. Instead of starting the next spot off with a hard grapple and another save point, you get an easy segment, followed by a hard segment, followed by an easy segment which is kind of ideal. Segments with lots of little tricks to increase optimization are the best things to have in the beginning of a segment. Including them at the end is a little silly because that generally means that only hardcore speedrunner type people will really be able to enjoy that aspect. People love finding tricks and while a lot of people might guess my gut reaction would be to remove tricks that make things easier, I intentionally leave them in (or sometimes create them) to give the player more of a sense of progression.
This also means a lot of stuff has to be eyeballed. Like, I can't have rigid plans for an area. A trap or segment may be way easier or harder than expected, so to maintain good pacing, I need to reconsider the next area. Gotta mix the 'texture' of areas. If one part is tight and difficult and kinda claustrophobic or fast paced, something more open, even if it's still hard is good. This is probably true for almost any game. If you put the pressure on too long, the player just defaults into hopelessness. One of the hardest segments in the game is a stretch in 2-1 that ends with you falling down and precision grappling crushing sawblades. At the end of that, most players are "done", even though the segment has multiple saves. The area after is generally more gentle and 'trick' oriented, allowing the player to relax and shoot some enemies, before having Zangief land on them (which tonally shifts things toward Street Fighter and sets up the Sagat gimmick and all that).
Also to talk about repetition, one of the other little tricks there is the guy who bursts out of the floor instead of the barrels. Just looking at it by it's self, that's just a dumb, arbitrary trick... but it was being set up since stage 1-1. Right before that happens, the player has dealt with guys leaping out of barrels exactly 3 times. Even on the 3rd one, they know what's going on (3 is the magic number), but the situation is still tricky. But that last 4th one inverts it, and now the barrel guys are gone. Their joke has been exhausted and that was the payoff. That also sets up for the bigger punchline that is the Zangief drop. The player already GOT the joke and is probably lowering their defenses a bit and BAM, Zangief.
A lot of stuff you can do if you're trying to make a game like this is sorta "magic" stuff. Misdirection and all that. One of my favorite traps in the whole game is you just were running on these red cannisters where the tops popped off and slammed into the ceiling. You get to the end -- on normal ground -- and you see a pit, with 3 spikes over it and a save after that. This is concerning. The player hasn't seen a falling spike in the game yet (unless their first playthrough was on Tuesday when the game was in Curse Mode), but it's concerning. OBVIOUSLY a trap! Then, after a healthy delay, the floor under the player shoots up line the canisters and smashes him. The spikes were just misdirection and the floor takes a good bit to trigger -- just enough time for the player to stop, relax and really look at what's in front of them.
So basically you wanna:
*Have good Pacing
*Be clever so deaths are funnier than they are painful
*Know when a joke might outwear it's welcome and design around that
*Give the player the tools to make them feel like they've beaten you or found clever ways around your traps you didn't expect. Even if you knew about it, it'll make them feel great and a sense of accomplishment is what makes people keep playing.
*Betray expectations by building consistency.
*Try not to be "mean". You wanna basically play "Hard to Get" with the player, not stomp their balls in.
Also keeping the motion/flow through levels and the aesthetic varied and stuff is also extra important. That's game design 101 stuff, but it's a little extra important to have good handle on it when you're in a strange S&M situation with the player and you don't want them to tap out.
As for trap being too hard? No. Most ideas can be salvaged and if they were really bad, they're culled so fast on the first test that I can't remember them. I reconfigure and move stuff around all the time and the exact nature of a segment might be way different then I expect, but rarely do I have to go "Okay, fuck that"! I usually have red flags going off in my brain waaay earlier than that.
I also found my beta testers (who encouraged the original IWBTG to be made at all) to be sadists. Play testing is important, but if the play testers say it's okay, it's probably a bit too hard. My general metric is "If I can do it consistently, it's probably hard and if I can do it easily, it's probably reasonably challenging", but each developer is probably calibrated a bit differently so it's important to understand how good (or bad) you are at your own game. Sometimes the opposite can happen when you even think your game is hard (Because it uses skills you don't particularly use much) and then an experienced player mangles it with ease, which is what happened with Binding of Isaac when I was testing it.
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