What Knytt Stories taught me.

Finally, back to the blog after a scandalous amount of procrastinating…

Our first assignment of the year was to build a level in a game called Knytt Stories. It’s a platformer game with a minimum amount of mechanics that is easy to grasp and play. This game also has a very simple though limited level editor that the students were required to use for the construction of the level. The assignment itself stated that we had to convey a dramatic narrative without using any words.

I feel that the delivery of my group was satisfactory. But during the time we worked on that assignment and during conversations with fellow students about this subject I realized some interesting things. I thought it might be fun to put these on (digital) paper. And some pictures of our level.

The distinction between the functions of the tool and the actual need for a specific function of the tool.

In other words, if you are handed a hammer and asked to hammer some nails,  you could go and start smashing people’s heads, but you should focus on hammering the nails.

In our case, I think this was the treacherous part of the assignment. If you were to give a bunch of game designers a tool that is good at building puzzles and challenges and asked them to build something completely different, they will probably end up building puzzles and challenges anyway. Sorry to toot my own horn, but I was very aware of this the whole time. That’s why I told my partner to just forget any puzzling and just focus on the visual part. But there was a general problem of people investing too much time in the construction of the puzzles rather than the stories.

Identifying drama is not a universal human skill.

So, back in the days of my language studies, we had a very mixed curriculum. Part of the lectures was taken up by the analysis of classical Russian literature works. I suffered through those, to be honest. I hated how novels and poems were dissected to reveal patterns, tropes, and methods of storytelling and writing. But in the end, I think, I should be thankful, because those lectures helped me to be more familiar with the ways the narrative worked. And I was clearly taking that for granted, as it turned out that the ability to identify and reconstruct dramatic narrative is not something everyone has or knows how to utilize.

This whole scenario just in a way confirms how everyone perceives things differently. Something that is apparent to a writer may not be apparent to a programmer and vice versa.

Narrative without the words is a bia-a-atch.

Imagine that you are good at constructing a narrative and then you are asked to create a story that has no words, but only images. A cheap way out of this situation is to turn to the tropes. Those things are so imprinted into our consciousness that there is a little chance for miscommunication. But you are also discouraged to use tropes because that is too boring. So, you are stuck with a shitty level editor with a limited amount of editing possibilities. And here is an interesting thing: even if you trope the hell out the assignment or try to be original – as long as you don’t make a level that is a puzzle, but a resemblance of some story, you are good. Because the limits of the editor in the visual convenience and the ban on using word narration obscures the semiotics of meaning enough to blame any misunderstandings on the difference in people’s perceptions.

P.s. Try to figure out the narrative of our story from the pictures =D