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[PsySal]

I like Fun Mechanics and dislike Level Keys (which are in some cases simply door keys; at least they aren't trying to disguise themselves as a Fun Mechanic!), hence the connotations I've assigned to the names I have given to them. However, I don't know about others. What do you think about these two things? Do you like Level Keys in a game?

Wanted to drop in my $0.02: remember that in the original Zelda, level keys could actually be purchased at the store. So if you were stuck on a puzzle, you could buy your way out of it. This was required to avoid breaking the game, I think, partly because keys could be used in any dungeon.

Compare this to the more recent Zeldas and you see that they have really changed this a lot. In WW it was rare to be able to do anything out-of-sequence even within a dungeon, or at least that's how I remember it.

I think this argument is maybe more to do with open ended vs. controlled design. Roguelikes, not just Spelunky are premised on combining different objects together in different situations. This compliments randomized levels very well because you end up with interesting situations that the designer didn't necessarily prescie. Sometimes people call this "emergence".

I think your dichotomy of "Fun Mechanic" vs. "Level Key" is a bit wrong; a less biased way to look at it would be "open ended mechanic" vs. "directed mechanic".

[droqen]

PsySal, you make good points: however I will still assert that a game must have "open ended mechanics", else it becomes not a game at all. That's what defines a game, isn't it? If every mechanic is a "directed mechanic" then it exists only to slide you along to the next directed mechanic.

Movement, of course, is usually the most basic yet important of the "open ended" or "fun" mechanics.


I believe a bit of bias is important, because whatever pure Level Keys do, they don't (alone) bring about fun. There may be a Fun Mechanic built into it (the timing for bombs, for example) or the Level Key may exist to prolong what is hopefully a fun experience (grabbing a key before getting to the door means you travel a greater distance -- hopefully this travel is made fun by the Fun Mechanics in the game).

I suppose there needs to be some blurring of the concepts, but I think that the bias of these terms is quite appropriate upon some further inspection! What do you think?

[Parthon]

Dock made a game that was only about collecting keys and opening doors in order to get out. It was just short enough to not get boring, but the main game mechanic was maze exploration. If it were easy to find the keys then it would have been boring.

In this case, it's not that a level key exists, but in how it's used.

[Problem Machine]

I was thinking about a lot of these same issues about a year ago... I guess I should have made a topic on it then, since it really is an interesting point of discussion.

I call anything which controls access to the world a key; the question, to me, is whether the key has other functions besides that. So we have the spectrum for pure or simple keys to rich or complex keys. I even played around with taking it a bit further, and trying to break down the different types of complex keys by how they granted access to new areas:

x-axis. Denotes keys which provide additional access by increasing horizontal mobility. Ex. Super Metroid speed boost
y-axis. Denotes keys which provide additional access by increasing vertical mobility. Ex. SotN Double Jump
break. Denotes keys which provide additional access by providing ability to destroy barriers. Ex. Metroid missiles
door. Denotes a key with the pure purpose of allowing passage past/through a certain point. Ex. Doom key-cards
area. Denotes a key which provides additional access by allowing movement through a previously hazardous or otherwise untraversible area. Ex. SotN Holy Symbol, Super Metroid Gravity Suit

In terms of interest, x and y axis keys tend to be the most interesting, IMO. Things like double jump and run/dash upgrades add a lot of fun gameplay at the same time as allowing access to new areas. After that are break keys, which unfortunately tend to suffer many of the same problems, as mentioned in the first post, as Zelda bombs. Area keys are somewhat interesting, but usually once you have them they cause whatever special area they allow access to to behave in exactly the same way as standard game areas, so they really don't open up any interesting gameplay. And door keys are the same as simple keys, which is to say boring as hell.

Personally I'd prefer to avoid simple/door keys completely, except perhaps on a per-screen basis (IE find the key and get to the door as a simple puzzle). Spelunky, though it's not really the same sort of game I'm trying to address here, does this particularly well in its sole instance of a literal key, where it's guaranteed to spawn on the same level as the lock it goes to; this makes it an exercise in puzzle solving in a constrained space rather than lugging around something which has no purpose other than opening locks (though, interestingly, Spelunky subverts this as well by making the key one of the most effective throwing weapons in the game).

Another kind of key which is worth noting is a contrived complex key, where there is some sort of gameplay element related to the key but there's no intrinsic relationship between the key and the gameplay element. Most break keys could be considered this way, since it's really rather arbitrary what abilities can and can't break blocks. Another example would be the devil familiar in SotN, which arbitrarily is the only familiar that can open a secret passage for you. This is a utility completely unrelated to his normal function, that of poking your enemies with his trident whenever he gets bored. Contrived keys are better than simple keys, but always ring a little hollow to me and are, I think, best avoided where possible.

Ehm, sorry for my rambling. My thoughts aren't really together right now. Hope someone found that interesting.

[SirNiko]

Some people seem to be confusing actual keys (A key you pick up and unlock a door) and conceptual keys, like a powerup that is mandatory to pass an obstacle and progress.

The Ocarina songs were a let-down, I agree. The same thing for the wand in Wind Waker. The wolf howling in Twilight Princess wasn't the same concept. That was just a mini-gamish memory puzzle you needed to perform to unlock a new power, which wasn't so bad.

-SirNiko

[LemonScented]

Hmm. I think I must be being very slow and stupid here, since I don't follow the terminology that's being used. I understand the concept of a "key" as being an item which doesn't necessarily take the actual form of a key, but is used to bypass specific obstacles in a level (and generally serves ONLY that purpose, and isn't much good for anything else). But I don't think an item you pick up that has multiple uses is a "mechanic", as such - the mechanics are the ways you can use the item (or a skill, or whatever) to interact with the world, not the item itself. Perhaps my definition of mechanic is too narrow, or perhaps it's sufficiently fuzzy but just covering different areas of experience to everyone else. Also, I think designating one type of item as "fun" implies that the other type of item is "not fun", which is a bit unfair to keys... Adventure games, for instance, are basically nothing but an intricate series of keys, but the forms those keys can take (and speculating on what sort of "doors" they might open) are a huge part of the fun, particularly in the more comedic games.

Anyway, my own personal terminology deficiencies aside, aren't both classes of items basically the same, except for in the number of meaningful choices they give to the player? In the examples I've seen here, a "fun mechanic" is an item which can be put to serve several useful purposes, and so there is meaningful choice there for the player for how to use that item (particularly if the item gets "used up" in the process), whereas a "level key" only serves one purpose (or only one really useful purpose and maybe some sub-optimal purposes which don't serve the dominant strategy), so there's no meaningful choice to be made. By this definition, the "fun"-ness (I suppose I'd call it "interesting-ness" or something) of a given item or resource increases with the number of useful things it can be used for, although presumably there's an upper limit to that before it becomes a bit of a Deus Ex Machina.

I suppose if you look at it that way, with "fun mechanics" and "level keys" both being types of item/resource with differing levels of functionality, balancing the game design sort of becomes like a recipe. You need to pick the number of items to introduce into the game, and decide on the richness/variety of uses the items can be put to.

- Many items with few uses each and you get something like an adventure game (or perhaps something like Psychonauts, which had a lot of different "currencies" to collect, each of which could only be spent on quite specific things - they didn't provide much choice themselves, so they existed primarily as a motivation to explore).

- Few items with many uses and you get something more like a puzzle game (Portal could be considered as an FPS with only one weapon, but a staggeringly useful one)

- Many items, each with many uses, I think you'd get something like a particularly deep crafting system like you'd see in an RPG, or perhaps the choice would become overwhelming. I don't play a lot of RPGs, but I enjoyed the alchemy system in Oblivion, where there were a lot of different herbs you could collect, and it took some time and patience to get a feel for what their effects might be when combined in various ways.

- Few items with few uses would provide something with quite shallow choices, so presumably you'd want to focus elsewhere to find the fun gameplay mechanics (like a platform game where the pickups are mostly rings or coins or whatever - the fun comes primarily from jumping around, not from using what you pick up in any particularly deep way).

[siegarettes]

You know in Link's Awakening, the GB Zelda you can use bombs and arrows at the same time to create a flying bomb arrow. That is a fun combo.

Spelunky does the same thing.

[Miko Galvez]

This is exactly what I felt with TMs and HMs in Pokemon.