#gdc18 Gorogoa!
Gorogoa is pronounced “Go-ro-GO-a”, I discover.
Gorogoa took a long time, more than five years. You can’t skip the learning process. Gorogoa was ambitious and inexperience added years to the project.
there was a demo in 2012. The demo looks like a complete vision but it really isn’t. No thematic or narrative unity. Took years to build it out for real.
“Adapting story and theme to mechanics and form.” A conscious and unconscious process.
The story stemmed from a comic started like ten years ago. There were problems baked into the original finished pages, which were never resolved.
hint: you have to know where you’re going when you start, or problems get baked in.
The fundamental concept is the frame. A comic has multiple panels, and you can’t make the frames invisible. Whitespace is visible and important.
What are the properties of a frame? It has a poignancy, because you are looking through and seeing something separated from you. As you shrink the frame, this becomes stronger.
A frame is a clue. It indicates significance. Shrinking the frame strengthens this.
A frame is affectionate, it indicates something precious. A frame is mysterious and has implied context. A frame is a prison. We want to see it broken or transcended.
a frame is curation.
Now add interactivity. You can zoom in, which means everything about the frame now applies to a new subject. And then multiple frames are a montage: the viewer generates meaning.
Multiple interactive frames! The two effects I just mentioned work together and against each other.
So the narrative theme becomes the search for connections.
So what is the mechanic? Considered a card-game mechanic where you enter frames and transform them to change their properties. But this requires a card game with rules.
Plus, changing cards is cheating at the game! Okay, how about card *tricks*?
The other mechanic idea is the jigsaw. You can put pieces together. Use illusions of perspective and stacking. This fulfills the frame-escape desire.
There is also a relationship to the classic adventure game, but there is plenty of bad adventure game tropes. (Ambiguous nouns and verbs, unintuitive object use.)
Can we get back the fuzzy verb set and the surprising action potential? Without making a crappy cat-hair mustache.
We want to believe that the world is full of hidden meanings and connections.
The world is frightening and chaotic, but maybe the discovery of hidden order is a core theme of the adventure fantasy. Certainly of Gorogoa.
Teh idea of the spiritual acrostic, the sacred written across and with the mundane.
So Gorogoa uses visual puns. Everything you see has multiple natures.
Nothing should look like it’s just a puzzle component. (Integration, mimesis.)
talking about the falling rock puzzle, which is slightly out of place because it requires timing and dexterity.
The game didn’t have to have puzzles, but the author wanted the player to demonstrate understanding. The theme required this. There has to be a test.
early puzzles can be stumble through, and this is delightful — discovery. But later puzzles require some mastery. The rock puzzle cannot be solved accidentally at all. This is reassuring to the player! If they succeed, of course.
another thing about the rock puzzle is that you have to wait for rocks to fall. There is no direct player interaction with game objects.
They originally started with classic Myst-style object interaction. So you could have puzzles within a frame.
That’s fine, and let them design only a few of the “hard” multi-tile puzzles.
But this doesn’t support the theme. So they undertook the discipline of *only* frame-level interaction and *only* multi-frame puzzles. All is about connection.
filled the world with potential energy.
But then puzzles tend to solve themselves, possibly out of the player’s view.
Required a lot more contrivance and animation.
I am failing to describe the game examples here, sorry.
Wound up making character movement a source of game motion instead of player action. The discipline leads to interesting design.
Also, a player who never physically interacts is disembodied, which is very freeing. Can jump into thoughts or abstract images; this doesn’t break any convention of a physical hand.
Also makes the story structure more mysterious and dreamlike. The dream observer.
So we have a lot of back-and-forth between mechanics, theme, and story. A puzzle design decision ripples up and down.
So what kind of story fits these mechanics? A puzzle-gated story is obvious and classic. Gorogoa doesn’t use it.
Instead of s protagonist solving puzzles, we have a story about a protagonist suspended within puzzles.
This doesn’t support a traditional dramatic arc — the timeline is too chopped up and separated. Instead, a parable. A communication.
Parables are often puzzles in themselves. There is a hidden meaning, and the act of solving it is part of the meaning. (Look for hidden meaning!)
So duality, the acrostic, in the theme as well.
There is a dramatic narrative hidden in the game, but it has to be teased out. (I have sensed this but I have not gone back to do it!)
Author confirms my idea that the game was inspired by Kit Manson’s Maze! *Called it*
I loved Gorogoa when I played it, and now that I’ve heard the author talk about it, I’m twice as impressed.
