How to make your game unpleasant.

I wanted to enjoy Never Alone. It’s beautiful, fun to play, and thoughtful. But I didn’t. My first attempt was on a laptop. I don’t own a gaming laptop, but I do have a dGPU for creative work. It can run games like Rainbow Six Siege just fine, even if I am too sweaty for 60hz. But not Never Alone. The loading screen was choppy and the game was stuttery, leaving me to choose between an unplayable frame rate and an unplayable resolution. Maybe this was some weird power management issue with Microsoft’s non-standard drivers. I’ll pretend that was the case. So I borrowed a more capable laptop - a gaming beast with a gtx 1070. It was playable, but not much more. I was still dropping frames and missing inputs, so I tried a third time on my desktop.

Don’t worry, I won’t be complaining about performance any more (at least not just yet). Once I got everything running smoothly, I noticed a more glaring issue; Nuna is stupid, and her little fox too. I just can’t see why they feel the need to repeatedly kill themselves! Just to be clear, this is not a statement on self-harm. Also, for anyone who is confused, the idle characters have a habit of missing easy jumps. You can try to rationalize it as a statement on difficulty or things that are out of your control, but I don’t think the AI’s failure is intentional. It is, however, endlessly frustrating.

I realize that I’ve kinda been taking a dump on the game. Although I can’t honestly say I enjoyed playing it, I don’t regret it either. I reflected on my play before writing this post and found it captivating. Does it matter what is and is not by design? I think every game delivers an experience that doesn’t perfectly match its intention. None of the AI’s issues change the story of Never Alone. Even if I call it rationalization, there are reasonable and substantive explanations for why this could be purposeful. Intentional or not, the missed jumps caused me to ask questions and changed my play. Would I have reacted differently if a second player made the same mistake or if I did myself? I’d like to think I could never be that bad at platformers, but I also never fail to impress. The bad pathfinding compromised my experience, but I like it that way. I would be glad to play or make a game about crummy AI. Thinking about how we judge ourselves differently than people we know and strangers is more my style than arctic tundra anyways.

On a final note, I think the game's performance and optimization is worth keeping in mind as we continue making games of our own (and working on other projects). You might not have to worry about hardware, but your game still must perform. Games aren’t just design exercises. Part of their significance is the player experience, even if ignoring it (or pretending to) is part of your statement.