As usual, I promise I’m not using the royal “we” in this writeup! Everything I’m jotting down here comes out of me and Bek’s collaboration. So it’s ours, not mine. Deal with it <3

Hello friends! PAX East is done finally, which means I have a few hours to finish our GDC wrap-up (before heading off to the BAFTAs and EGX Rezzed what even is this industry). Part 1: Notes on Indie Publishing has been up for a while and digs into some business stuff, but Part 2 here is more about the design side of commercial game-making.

GDC for us somehow has slightly less strictly-business stuff lately, and more mentorship- or feedback-oriented meetings, where we get a chance to sit down with harried geniuses from all walks and talk about their new projects and whatever their (and our) worries are at the time. Part 1′s publisher notes were largely distilled from these conversations, and most of the contents of this article are things that we found ourselves bringing up over and over again in different ways with a lot of different teams over the week. Which usually is a sign that maybe we should write it down and it could move the needle for someone else too.

What else, what else… yes, all the usual disclaimers, that we are specifically addressing commercial game-making here and not personal or experimental work, even though maybe under some conditions that’s interesting or something. Finally, I’ll do my best to keep everything here useful on its own, but if you’re not already familiar with our previous presentation on Exposure Design, or Zach Gage’s recent presentation on screenshot design, I would recommend digging into those to kind of add some context to the bigger “picture” here (ha ha god i’m tired)

And so, without further ado…

Get Ready For Some Screenshot Theory

We once pitched that another way of thinking about marketing is thinking about exposure design. “Exposure” is the science word for the 10% of an iceberg that sticks out of the water. The metaphor here is 90% (more like 99%) of your game is gonna be hidden from public view even after launch. So putting extra cycles into designing how the exposed 1% of your thing functions is maybe good.

The thing that we really like about this though is these extra cycles aren’t just good for passersby, they’re usually good for your players too. You’re helping the game do a better job of explaining itself in clever little ways (or big dumb ways), and that’s helping people imagine what it might be like to play your game, or giving them fun ideas about different ways to play it now that they’re clicking around in there.

In theory and practice, for us at least, most of the exposed part of our games are basically screenshots. Maybe they’re actually gifs, or it’s a Twitch highlight or something, or it’s someone playing through the first few levels, but probably the design of your game’s screens is going to be this huge component of the little bit of your game that sticks out above the water.

So screenshot theory basically says this: the better our screenshots are, the easier our marketing is going to be, and the better the game will be for players. But what does a “good” screenshot actually do? Just “be better” isn’t exactly actionable, is it. How does a good screenshot function? What goals are we trying to achieve with it?

Tentpole Legibility

Tentpole legibility is basically this: wouldn’t it be handy if your screenshots could actually execute your elevator pitch for you? Or, as Max Temkin put in his FAQ recently:

Figure out what’s special about the thing you’re making and clearly communicate that.

Let’s clarify how we’re using the words “Tentpole Legibility” real quick though.

Tentpole: this is your game’s main attraction. In Overland, it’s a fantasy of taking care of a group of vulnerable people on a post-apocalyptic road trip. In Canabalt, it’s a fantasy of leaping from rooftop to rooftop. In Night in the Woods, it’s a fantasy of hanging out with your friends in a place that feels like it has a life of its own.

For a lot of commercial games the tentpole is a kind of mechanic or hook or gimmick or something basically systemic in nature. But you owe it to yourself and your game to think about whether your “core mechanic” (if you even have one) is actually your tentpole or not. Overland has a few core mechanics, but it turns out it’s the underlying fantasy revealed by those mechanics that is the actual tentpole. Night in the Woods’ tentpole is not platforming or pressing A to advance text, even though that’s mostly what you actually are “doing”. For a puzzle game, the tentpole might not actually be the core mechanic(s), but the feeling you get when you finally solve the current puzzle, the “ah ha” bit, the sense of having done something seemingly impossible with this tiny toolset.

I guess just consider very seriously that your game’s tentpole might be a feeling and not a feature. Even when your game is pretty “core” or whatever.

Also, you probably don’t know what the main attraction is yet. Even though you’re the lead designer or the co-creator or whatever. Even though you’ve been designing the game for a year now, and doing a good job. Games are complex and the way they function psychologically is extremely complicated and it’s going to be an ongoing and iterative thing to get to know your game’s tentpole and that’s ok.

For a long time we thought that Overland’s main attraction was that it was just hard af. Gradually that got more nuanced and we started to realize that the real thing of it was essentially close calls and narrow escapes. That started to point at maybe some of the guts of the thing was more character-based, but it wasn’t super clear yet. Eventually we realized that actually connecting with your little characters does matter, and narrow escapes are thrilling, but only because of this feeling that you’re taking care of this group on their trip. Maybe in six months we’ll have an even more refined notion of what this actually is.

The other annoying thing is sometimes the tentpole is a bit fuzzy. Maybe it’s not a single specific emotion or a single specific moment, maybe it’s a whole range of feelings or a set of interactions or some little arcs or something else entirely. And that’s ok too, as long as you can find a way to talk about it.

The only other thing I want to add here is that trying to make a good screenshot or do good screen layouts without understanding your game’s main attraction as fully as you can is an absolute nightmare. It’s just nonstop second-guessing and an almost complete lack of ability to make good, satisfying judgment calls about whether this approach is better or this other one is worse or whatever. So it’s possible if not likely that the exercises below aren’t actually very relevant or useful if you don’t have a pretty high level of confidence in your assessment of your game’s tentpole.

Legibility: this is just how clear or readable something is in your screenshot. The thing that we’ve been realizing more and more over the last couple of years is that while legibility itself is a good goal, it can be a little undirected or confusing sometimes as a designer. What exactly is it that I’m trying to clarify? What parts of my game design should be prioritized visually?

Into the Breach by Subset Games is legible af.

Tentpole legibility is our attempt to answer these questions at our studio. If you’re trying to figure out where to spend these legibility cycles, well, spend ‘em on stuff that speaks to your main attraction. In Canabalt this means that almost the only things you can actually see are A) rooftops and B) a jumpin’ fella. Obviously for more complex games the analysis isn’t quite so simple!

That Does Sound Easy, Thanks

I literally just said the opposite of that but whatever. Ok, here’s the first problem: strangers tend to have a lot of difficulty valuing the tentpole experience of your game without some context for it, which is often as simple as “what is the basic genre here?” So for a game like Overland, it’s extremely important that at first glance it is pretty strongly referencing previous isometric strategy and tactics games, in terms of having an angled grid full of evenly-spaced objects. That’s the ground that holds the tentpole up.

Oh hey, it’s an isometric diorama floating in a gradient void.

In a game like Dead Cells, if the tentpole is the satisfaction of unlocking new abilities for the next run, it’s pretty important that you see that oh yeah also it’s a 2D action platformer. Otherwise it’s really hard to imagine what those unlocks might be, both in terms of theming but also in terms of how they’re going to add value to replays etc.

This is oversimplifying a bit but for us a good rule of thumb has been to trying to broadly establish but not overly emphasize genre in screenshots. In an elevator pitch scenario, we always try to mention it first, but almost as a disclaimer or aside. You’re really just setting up a foundation so that your tentpole can stand up and mean something.

Interrogations

Ok let’s say you’ve already somehow achieved the double-miracle of A) figuring out your game’s tentpole and B) your basic visual presentation manages to establish a genre foundation one way or another. Congratulations, you have even more work ahead of you, because there’s a bunch of ways to kind of min-max the way you’re presenting the main attraction now.

Refining the emphasis: what can you do to continue to emphasize your game’s unique tentpole and downplay aspects that, necessary as they may be, are ultimately boring or over-familiar for your audience? As a game designer, this might mean culling systems that you carried over from your inspiration sources but that are no longer as necessary in this new environment. It might mean simplifying or encapsulating some clearly-established genre conventions in a sort of shorthand or shortcut. It might mean shifting design elements back and forth a bit between an abstract UI layer and a more diegetic world layer. You’ll be iterating on highlighting and drawing more attention to your main attraction, and minimizing the impact of everything else, probably for a long time.

It took us ages to figure out that the UI should have that little player-party profile view where you can see your group hanging out side by side. This is so important to our game and not really a thing that other games want or need.

Where does your game spend all its time? Action RPGs are semi-notorious for having these huge 3D worlds, but a certain kind of player ends up mostly just looking at icons on the mini-map as they move from quest to quest. Do players split their time evenly between the upgrade tree screen and stabbing rats in a dungeon somewhere? Are players mostly messing about in the extremely satisfying inventory screen, sorting their grenades by color (I’m looking at you, RE4)? Our rule of thumb is basically the more time your game spends in its “tentpole view” the better. Whatever part of the game you cooked up where that core experience happens, try to keep things happening right there as much as possible.

In a game about being a forest fire lookout, it makes sense for you to spend 95% of your time in the forest and lookout tower. Power move.

This is not the same thing as “make your whole game one core mechanic” or whatever. It’s about the game tending to just be in the place where your tentpole experience tends to happen.

Hey, here’s some basic questions that a lot of games and screenshots absolutely fail to answer:

What is the player’s identity? Can a complete stranger tell who they would “be” as a player just by looking at a random screenshot?

What are the player’s actions? Can they tell what the heck that can (or can’t) do in this game?

What sort of objects or items are there? Can they tell what the world is made of? What sorts of things the player can (or can’t) interact with?

The player isn’t even visible in Papers, Please! and you can still tell who they are, what they can do, and what all that stuff is.

Before, during, and after: can a passerby tell what just happened in the game by glancing at a screenshot? Can they tell what’s happening now? Can they make a guess at what might happen next? These deductions depend a lot on being able to parse the identity, actions, and objects in the scene, and are a good way of double-checking that you’re actually hitting those goals.

Line of action: where did you come from and where are you going? This obviously depends on both the previous deductions, but addressing directionality in your screenshots can be a real nice place to spend some cycles. It’s often relatively cheap to address compared to other things, and provides a big shared win for your active players and for those strangers walking by and taking a glance. Addressing this can also start to chip away at bigger problems, like how do you show medium- to long-term goals and your progress toward them?

This lends itself more to certain genres than others, but you might be surprised how helpful it is to consider or identify what this might be in your game even if it’s pretty non-traditional. It was a big deal for Overland when we decided that every level would have a west-leading road cutting through the middle of it. Even Night in the Woods has these really clearly described paths through the environment that help players and strangers form ideas about where they came from and where they might be going next. And I think you can find these things in much weirder games too.

What’s the loop? Do your screenshots communicate anything about what changes in your game as you move through it? Are the environments or backdrops quite different from screenshot to screenshot? Does the player identity change or shift? Do the actions available to them change from screenshot to screenshot? These things tell players and passersby a lot about how the game might change or grow over the first few hours of play.

Fluency barriers: how much domain knowledge does a stranger have to bring to the table to understand what’s going on in the screenshot in terms of interactions or the experience of the game? Do they need to have played this actual game in order to tell what’s up in the screenshot? Do they only need to have played other games in your genre? Do they only need to be vaguely aware of the notion of what a videogame is? Not every screenshot can say everything to everyone, but are there places in your visual design where you’re gating comprehension unnecessarily?

Let’s Wrap This Up Already

Even these small questions are the tip of the iceberg in some ways, but hopefully they provide helpful starting points in terms of nudging your commercial projects in the direction of being a bit more self-explanatory. This is not the same as “letting your game market itself”. It’s more about building something that you will even be able to market, because it’s able to at least explain what it is and maybe a bit about why that’s interesting.

TLDR: if pictures really say 1000 words, then your screenshots should absolutely be killing it on the elevator pitch.