The Story Told by Mini-Games
I have always played two types of video games. About 10% of them are strategical simulations such as Rollercoaster Tycoon (and recently Parkitect, of course), and the other 90% are local coop games such as Overcooked and Towerfall.
I’ve tried many other games, but never stuck with them in any way. I simply enjoy playing games with others as opposed to alone. To me, the entire point of a game is to have a good time together, especially in modern times when it’s hard enough to meet someone face-to-face.
That’s why I frequently browse Steam (and other channels) for any new releases of cool local coop games. I basically know all such games that came out the past 15 years, and tried a good portion of them :p
We have our classics, of course. Overcooked is amazing. So simple and easy to pick up, such an intuitive theme and gameplay—yet a great challenge in cooperation and quick thinking for any group. I know many people who never play a video game otherwise, but became completely obsessed with Overcooked, to the point of becoming incredibly fast and skilful at cooking certain recipes.
The same for Towerfall. Once a year, or so, I return to that game with my little brother. Every time we’ve gotten better and are able to beat just a few more levels (on Hardcore mode). The amount of coordination, jumping around, handing each other arrows in mid-air, shouting which side we’re covering now … it’s an awesome feeling and the reason to play such games together.
Which is why it saddens me that, in recent times, most of the games to come out were … not as good.
They are clearly inspired by something like Overcooked. It seems like they should work, with a great theme or twist on the formula, and at least decent graphics and work put into them. But they just don’t. The reviews are mixed, they are buggy in weird ways, and they are just meh.
Why is that? I’ve tracked it down to an insidious new chapter in game development: everything has to have a pile of mini-games.
A game about running a warehouse together? Yeah, the actual game is basically just a handful of levels and then side-lined to make room for mini-games! Soccer in the warehouse! Jumping to a rhythm, perhaps in a warehouse! Engage those Twitch viewers by letting them play along in this whack-a-mole mini-game, using forklifts!
Almost every promising local multiplayer game spends 90% of its advertising showing wacky mini-games or whatever high number of extra games-in-games they have. Which is just a reason for me to instantly click away and give up on that game.
I think we all know why this happens, at least on a surface level. Everything has to be shorter nowadays. Everything has to catch people’s attention by being new and shiny, and is only expected to keep that attention for a few minutes. Hence mini-games. You can make loads of different ones—always more content to try!—and they’ll give people a surface level feeling of fun.
The more harmful reason, though, is that the developers probably realize the core game just isn’t that good. They made 5 okay levels, then have nowhere to go! Their core gameplay just isn’t diverse, interesting, challenging, creative enough.
So they try to turn a “neat idea but needs lots of work to be fun” into “a full game with 25 mini-games we can sell for 20 dollars”. They basically reuse the things they already made, such as some characters walking and throwing things, to create entirely different throwaway games as extra content.
And it shows. That’s why reviews are mixed, the game doesn’t sell well (despite maybe looking great or promising), and people claim that “nobody buys coop games” and “there isn’t enough market to warrant making one”. There absolutely is. Statistics repeatedly show that if you make any reasonably good local multiplayer game, there’s a huge crowd of people like me who will be waiting for it.
But a bad game is a bad game.
And I feel like I can say this, because I’ve made this mistake too. The first few times I tried to make a commercial game, my thoughts constantly drifted to adding “other stuff”. Whenever I was bored refining or testing the actual gameplay, I’d start adding stuff that basically amounted to mini-games. Or, at least, I’d start imagining adding that stuff later when the game was nearly done.
It just never works. It’s a sure sign that your core gameplay just isn’t good enough and doesn’t stay interesting long enough to support a full game. Those experiences taught me to separate unique ideas into unique games.
I do not want a half-baked coop warehouse game smashed into a half-baked soccer with boxes game. Especially not because this is sure to lead to messy code and weird bugs.
I want a great Overcooked-inspired run-an-Amazon-warehouse game. And then a separate great local coop silly sports game.
That’s the main lesson or advice I want to convey in this article: don’t add mini-games until your game itself is actually done and fun. They’re the cherry on top, not the actual pie. If you start thinking about it, that’s a sign your core gameplay needs some big changes.
Now, if you know games like Overcooked, you might say: hold on Tiamo, they also have some sort of mini-games! You can play in different ways! Against each other, instead of competitive. With modifiers on or off. With extra randomized challenges or hardcore mode.
Yes, that’s an entirely different thing called game modes. And that is the thing into which I’d actually recommend investing your time.
Whenever you make a game, you’re bound to come up with slightly different ways to play it. When playtesting that game, you’re bound to run into players who want just a slightly different experience from it. That’s very natural and can be used for good by having different game modes.
For example, a local multiplayer game that can be played both cooperatively and competitively. Or one that can be team-based or solo. Or one that can be stressful and under a time restriction, or casual and more freeform.
These are game modes, and not mini-games, because they’re still the same core gameplay. They are tightly connected to each other, still feeling and playing like the exact same game, just with simple tweaks to provide more tailored experiences.
I wouldn’t call them “surface level tweaks”, because the differences between game modes are usually actually quite stark. That’s the whole point. You grab the core gameplay, look at the handful of rules or systems that it entails, then rip out or turn on its head one of them. It’s still the same game, though, because all the other core gameplay is intact.
Surface level tweaks, such as “hey walking speed is now +20%”, are more like powerups / modifiers / variable setup. Which is also great, by the way. They’re a cheap and easy to understand way to always create variety and diverse challenges. (And if they can be turned on/off easily, that’s even better.)
In Overcooked, you are doing the exact same core gameplay for many many levels on end. That’s the entire content of the game, no extra mini-games or games-within-the-game. But it doesn’t grow stale because the gameplay is good. The core rules and actions are good on their own, which means repeating them is actually fun. You want to keep repeating those 5 seconds of fun, instead of being distracted by, I don’t know, suddenly playing Flappy Bird while chopping onions.
The same for Towerfall. It took us years (of extremely infrequent gameplay, mind you) to beat all the levels of the main game, and then all of them on hardcore mode. We never tired of it for long, we never longed for anything else, because the core gameplay is just that good. And all the other content in the game (and expansion) just, you know, expand on it with different modes. Not mini-games where you suddenly, I don’t know, have to do an endless runner with the same controls and archery mechanics.
Then we can look at the other side. To name a specific game that disappointed us so much we only played it once (if I recall correctly): Tools Up!
By the fourth or fifth level, you’d basically seen all there is to see. Bring paint to where they want paint, move furniture to where the furniture needs to be, clean up all the mess indicated on the floor. The only “challenge” comes from wonky physics.
It’s a paint-by-the-numbers challenge. It’s the actual drudge work of moving or home renovation, instead of what games should be: only keep the fun parts of reality and eliminate the rest.
The gameplay wasn’t inherently fun, no, we kept playing because each level up to that point introduced something new. And, well, humans like shiny new toys! But once the game is unable to keep introducing new challenges from the core gameplay, it stops being fun. Or dives into the trap of “lets add loads of content so they forget the core doesn’t work”.
But the idea was great! The game, its trailers, its premise all looked really promising to me when it launched! As a developer, my brain immediately said: “man, such a good approach to local coop, that should be great—and I wish I’d come up with it!”
And that brings us to our final lesson, I guess. Just providing a “challenge” or “problem to solve”, does not automatically make a game fun. It has to be an interesting challenge, a problem of which the solving is fun. And that challenge needs to be flexible and multifaceted enough that you can keep approaching the challenge in exciting new ways for 20+ levels.
Many developers take the wrong lessons from Overcooked, perhaps. They think that they will get a great local coop game for free if they just:
- Give timed, stressful, specific instructions to players. (“You need 5 Blorp delivered to location Buba before the timer runs out!”)
- Then make it really annoying, mostly due to physics or an overwhelming amount of stuff, to complete that. (“Your characters will randomly bump into each other, and oh, all the doors are heavy swinging doors that you’ll randomly get stuck on!”)
Whereas what really made Overcooked great is the smart level design and the endless tactical depth of how to cooperate, plan orders, and execute them. In fact, reviews/opinion dipped a bit when they added a few more gimmicky physics levels later on.
I want to see more great local coop games for people to play together, in real life, in the same physical space, on the couch. I strive to make those again once I get a functioning computer and my other circumstances improve.
But when you do make such a game, please invest your time in creating great core gameplay that will keep challenging and exciting players for 20 levels. No mini-games, no tricks and gimmicks, no endless costumes or surface level stuff—nothing else. When you start thinking about adding mini-games, you’ve already lost :p
Just giving players annoying physics and timed arbitrary problems does not make a game. Design your interactions, from top to bottom, to require and reward cooperation. Make the core problem that you’re solving, over and over and over each level, the fun thing. Make the core thing they’ll be doing, which is most likely movement + interaction with buttons/objects/each other, the fun thing.
Make it hard to win the game because your game mechanics rely on good communication, roleplaying and strong cooperative strategies. Not because you just overwhelm the players with stuff to do or keep track of. And then, when you realize this isn’t fun after 3 levels, creating 10 mini-games and 50 outfits for the players to wear instead, calling it “content”.
Anyway, those were my thoughts after another recent stroll through all local coop offerings,
Pandaqi