Baby Steps
is a videogame by Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch and Bennett Foddy, i've been playing it! i like it!
it's a game which, like Bennett's previous game QWOP, asks you to walk by moving each foot manually. except this time, in a realistic 3D world, and also there are characters and jokes and other things. it's a much bigger game. stop thinking about QWOP now.
i started by figuring out the controls at all, placing each foot with great uncertainty. then i got a bit more practiced, and graduated to a kind of march - lift foot, move forward, drop foot, repeat on the other side. after an hour or so this was working fine, it had become muscle memory and i was making steady progress so long as i didn't try any tricky scrambles. but my thumb was getting a little sore from pushing the stick forward so frequently. every step, i'd be flicking it up from neutral. then i discovered you could push forward on the stick, holding it there while quickly alternating the feet lifts. even faster walking, and no thumb pain. the only problem is that it required a rhythm i could not manage - and presumably it also requires some expertise in adapting that rhythm to the current terrain. i've not given up yet, thought - on easy ground i'm doing it a bit to rest my thumb, but it does mean the character keeps falling on his face.
which makes me think about the funny shift between discomfort for the player and discomfort for the avatar. i'm shifting discomfort from my thumb to failure for the character. constant "shit"s and "oh no"s and "aww"s. reminded of the bit about how games are the only artform where a review of them can shift fluidly between third ("Lara Croft then discovers this room in the temple"), second ("where you have to jump off the ledge and catch the bit on the other side") and first (" - but i keep fucking it up and dying") person perspective within a single sentence.
i admire the character physics in this game a lot. thinking about how Bennett made QWOP amongst a number of other flash games, and how much of his career has been defined by failure and movement since. a case of someone not trapped by their success, but using that success to tunnel deeper into an interest, finding new ways to express it each time. and maybe it takes that depth of expertise (which i'm sure is also very practical, dealing with instability in physics solvers etc) to make a control scheme as simple but as rich as this. like, that improved form of walking i can't master? i feel like real walking works this way - when we walk we are constantly arresting a fall. and when babies start to walk - this game is called Baby Steps - when babies start to walk, they do a little march, three steps and then they overbalance and fall on their arse.
thinking too, of the multiple paths you can take within Baby Steps. how much world there is, and how the level design is much looser than the typical Foddy game. sure, some bits are placed with immaculate care - there's some rock climbing bits i've noticed at even this early stage, and which ask you to demonstrate some specific tricks. but the game it makes me think of is [fr0g] clan official server 24/7 zk map (for stranger), which incidentally i found out about when Bennett recommended it on his old game-recommending blog. let's quote from his writeup:
You do a lot of downward climbing in _zk map, but the core activity is route-finding. You look across a haphazard pile of shapes, and your eyes trace possible ways down, imagining the lines of sight and obstructions along each meandering path. Route-finding is one part forward planning and two parts 'dead reckoning': making a choice and then figuring out how to get yourself one step out of the mess you just made. There is something magical about route-finding in a videogame, since videogame worlds are untrammeled, immaculate spaces. Every unguided turn you take is yours and yours alone.
The thing about making a game involving route-finding is you can't really get there by designing great routes. No matter how good your level design skills are, if the player is following a path you laid out for them, they aren't really route-finding at all. The player becomes too aware of your intentions, and their own autonomy becomes subsumed in them. As mkapolk explains:
My process for making the levels was to scatter geometry more or less randomly and then try to traverse it. Sometimes when I was going down a map if I thought that an area shouldn't be a dead end I'd add some more stuff to it, but that's about as far as it went.
You can construct a level that players can route-find through, but you can't design it... or to put it more precisely, you can't crack out the Good Game Design if you want players to experience route-finding. To pass through a well-designed level is a hike, not an expedition.
yep, that seems to accord with (parts of) Baby Steps.
anyway, i'm not that far in! gonna post this and play some more.