[ad_1]
“I think immersive sims started to believe their own marketing material. That never fosters creativity,” says Mosa Lina developer Josh Hollendonner, explaining why he felt compelled to create what he describes as a “hostile interpretation” of the genre.
Hollendonner, who also goes by the moniker ‘Stuffed Wombat’ in development circles, launched Mosa Lina in October in response to the current trend of predictable “lock and key” immersive sim design.
Here, there are no premeditated solutions for players to find. Instead, they’ll need to experiment with abandon by combining objects in nonsensical ways to overcome a series of physics-driven platforming puzzles across randomly generated levels. Though, as Hollendonner points out later, each stage was built using a randomly selected combination of hand-crafted content rather than procedural generation.
During an email Q&A with Game Developer, Hollendonner explained he wanted Mosa Lina to “push back” against design sensibilities that often lead players down a preset path. “[In a lot of immersive sims] I see a door and I just know, deep in my gut, that I can open it somehow. I just need to find the correct item or purchase the correct upgrade and I just get tired. It’s all mapped out for me, like a choose your own adventure book,” he says.
“Instead of asking you to choose between two doors that lead to the same room, I wanted to make a game that forces you to get truly creative. So it’s an ‘aggressive interpretation’ because it takes a direction I don’t like and attacks it, trying to show that there is so much more cool stuff we could be doing.”
Crucially, Hollendonner says he wanted Mosa Lina to feel “completely intrinsic.” That’s why he chose to shun extrinsic motivators such as meta-progression systems or in-game rewards, and notes he spent years trying to create something “people want to play with, just because they want to play with it.” Mosa Lina, he says, was the first successful attempt.
The building blocks of chaos
Breaking down the fundamentals of Mosa Lina, Hollendonner explains the title works by placing a random level before players and then asking them to solve it using three random tools. That’s it. That’s the hook. It’s a formula that could result in the creation of painstakingly simple levels or others that feel (and might actually be) impossible to overcome. For Hollendonner, however, that unpredictability is a thing of beauty.
“When the game launched, I genuinely didn’t know how many of the levels were unbeatable with specific combinations of tools,” he says. “I just never bothered to check. That’s the magic. That’s what allows you to experiment and to get creative. There’s no need to feel inadequate just because you couldn’t solve the world’s smartest man’s most convoluted riddle. There is no right, there is no wrong. There is only your idea, your execution, and the harsh reality of my shitty code.”
There are some threads that connect each of Mosa Lina’s topsy-turvy levels. The game was built using open source 2D physics engine, Box2D, and that ensured a sense of commonality amid the chaos. “At a basic level, all of this is shaped by the affordances of Box2D. The most basic shape of that physics engine is a box, so that was the first tool I prototyped. You can apply directional and rotational forces to objects without a lot of work, so that’s what a lot of the tiles are built around. It’s really easy to connect a bunch of circles with rotational joints, so a lot of the obstacles are based on that,” continues Hollendonner.
“The more complicated tools were created using a technique I had developed during the work on qomp. Apparently it’s called a morphological matrix, but basically, you just look at everything as either an ‘action’ or a ‘reaction'”
For instance, if ‘player presses button’ or ‘player character touches floor’ are actions, then ‘box spawns above player’ or ‘player character is teleported to specific position’ could be reactions. Hollendonner explains he simply mixed-and-matched actions and reactions to create specific mechanics, noting he could “probably build you a normal puzzle game out of those four blocks of logic, [so] the hard part was to push myself to always keep experimenting, to keep making lots of prototype tools.”
All-in, there are 24 items in Mosa Lina ranging from the mundane to absolutely ludicrous that must be deployed across numerous platforming puzzle. Hollendonner says he doesn’t actually know how many unique levels are in the game and isn’t compelled to look it up. “Life is more mysterious this way,” he suggests. Discussing how the items themselves combine and delight, he explains their unpredictability is the result of overlapping properties and a maniacal physics system.
“There are actually not that many unique properties, they just combine a lot. Like, whether a frog jumps from a spear that’s stuck in a falling fruit or from a static floor is not important to the frog at all. As long as its sensor detects that it’s overlapping a member of the ‘solid’ family, it’s going to jump. Because everything is parsed through the same physics system, it influences everything else and creates super unpredictable situations,” Hollendonner says.
Drilling down, he says that leaning on physics-based platforming helped imbue Mosa Lina with “personality and excitement and humor” because it means players are unlikely to witness repeat outcomes—even when confronted with similar scenarios or potential solutions.
“If you press a button on a d6 random number generator, you will get a number between 1 and 6. But if you roll a real dice on a table, instead of 6 possible outcomes, you have infinite outcomes. Sure, the dice will show a number between 1 and 6, but it will come to rest on the table in a specific position. You can throw the dice again (maybe even rolling the same number as before) but to get the dice to stop in the exact same position, at the exact same angle, is almost impossible,” he continues.
“This is what physics brings to the table: Infinite game states. The unpredictability of physics also means that, even if you know the solution to a level, you might not be able to execute on it. This creates an additional layer of emotional protection for a game that’s all about letting go of your desire to win. Sometimes you did everything right but the physics fucked you over. Don’t worry. It wasn’t your fault. Just try again.”
Vanquish the demon of conformity
When it came to realizing his vision for Mosa Lina, Hollendonner claims the biggest challenge was escaping the lure of convention to create something “pure.” He believes that distilling a video game down to its purest form is akin to hammering out a sheet of metal. “Instead of adding stuff to it, you want to try and expand it,” he says.
It was that process of steady, measured refinement that turned Mosa Lina into something “deeper and denser,” allowing it to become more than the sum of its parts. But it was a task that also required Hollendonner to resist the temptation to iterate and cave to conformity.
“The biggest challenge with Mosa Lina was convention. The heavy pull of the sensible thing to do. The obvious financial appeal of compulsion loops. Meta progression. Player satisfaction. Smooth difficulty curves. The opioid-adjacent bliss of the eternal flow-state. That kind of stuff. Ignoring it is basically impossible, it’s so baked into all our smart game designer brains, it will just creep back into the project no matter how often you eventually regain your wits and purge it,” he says.
“The music of John Maus, which is very technical, weird and unapologetic, helped in those moments. I watched the ‘Live in Berlin’ Set at least 100 times during development. It reminds me of what is possible if we let go completely, if we wholly hand ourselves over to our ideas.”
Even now, Hollendonner says he’s fighting the urge to add some basic progression loops to Mosa Lina, and struggles to understand why an idea that’s “the antithesis of the whole project” refuses to relinquish its hold over him. “It just keeps popping back up,” he says. “What if players had more control over their experience? Wouldn’t that lead to higher retention rates? Shouldn’t you do it like that? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do as a game designer? To create something that generates reliable fun at the push of a button for as long as possible? No! Who cares?! Shut the fuck up!”
[ad_2]