Affordance: Capacity of an object to suggest his own usability.

New lands is an extension of the original game Kingdom nothing last, the player incarnate a king or a queen riding a horse which will help him to roam through the map in order to construct, consolidate his castle and to enroll villagers to give them a specialty. Every night the fort is assailed by hordes of monster more and more powerful, through the game length, the game ends when one of these monster grabs the crown.

The player has one main resource, which is gold coins, it will allow him to interact with plenty of elements on the map and mostly it will enable him to build a boat which will bring him to new lands.

Kingdom new lands use a system that is outside the usual system.

Indeed there is no indications which will warn the player about the consequences of his actions (pre-feedback in other words).Thus the player will not have any other choice than to experiment, otherwise he will not take any decision and a tragic fate will occur for his character.

Consequently the game can be intimidating for people without experience in this type of game as it was my case. The first trials will be messy, but this learning phase becomes pleasant once overcame, it creates an emotional engagement. We can link this to the phenomenon described by Donald Norman in his book Emotional Design as the feeling of accomplishment.

It’s about to creating an accomplishment and a pride experience from the users who overcome a difficulty.

The only way to know if you can interact, these coin slots

When there is no previews or textual indications of consequences from an action, the affordance notion becomes primordial, this is why it’s a point which, I think, won a crucial importance.

So I asked directly at the main concerned, Thomas Van den Berg the main developer of Kingdom New Lands.

Does affordance takes a most important place because of the lack of instruction in the game ?

Affordance becomes a very important aspect if you stop relying on text to tell the player what to do. And as the game progresses, I got better at creating the link between what the player sees and what he guesses he should do. This also forced us to make many objects in the game real physical objects. Bows and other tools have to be in the world for the player to see how they move and are picked up.

A lot of indie game developers can’t afford (by time, money or human resources) too much playtest phase, was it your case with Kingdom ?

We didn’t do a lot of playtesting, to be honest. I just followed my gut instinct to decide how much guidance and feedback the player needs. And the result is that there is never enough feedback. The ghost (it’s the first character that you will encounter, he guides you to your camp, then he introduces you the way to recruit villagers) is a good example of this. It started out as just a sparkly line pointing to the goal. In the end it is a ghost pointing and shouting “Come” at you. But this is a fun exercise, and when it finally is ‘good enough’ players find it really enjoyable too.

We could notice few comfortable changes between Kingdom Vanilla and New lands, do they occur because of your self will or by feedbacks you collected from players ?

The steam forums are full of things, players get stuck so for sure we discussed with them about it, then we fixed a number of those. For example the citizens running is actually one of those things to much better show their intention, it doesn’t make them so much faster but it mostly shows that they understand your order. (And that build stronger relationship with the community, win-win as long it doesn’t affect too much the game).

It’s a kind of no-orthodox approach that you had with Kingdom, we are never sure if we can interact with an element until we see the coin slots, so did you try something more mainstream before ?

Like mark ALL interactable elements ? oh… that’s ugly!

Did you have a specific design pattern which told you how to design then create each elements ?

Each element was introduced separately, there was never a real design document that outlined how everything should work. So all interactions related to the Boat for example were only invented right as we were building New Lands.

Affordance is a notion which must be manipulated carefully because giving too many indications on an element will probably risk to bother the visual aspect of the game and it will give a huge amount of facilities for the player so it will result in a limp game flow.

Inversely an affordance less understandable will turn interactions invisible, the player risks to pass without noticing them and so will turn his progression extremely difficult or even impossible.

In Kingdom a simply coin slot on a element is effective in order to indicate his interaction, nothing fancy. It is visible, understandable and minimalist. And importantly the suggestion isn’t giving any indication on what will happen, so it still respects the developer’s wills.

TIPS :

Don’t be afraid to adapt design rules into video games.

If there is no possibilities to collect feedbacks via playtest there is always another solution such as steam forums.

Visibility and understandability are both primordial elements in order to create an intuitive affordance.

Do not mark interactable elements (suggest them instead), it’s ugly!

Kingdom is a game made by Thomas Van den Berg & Marco Bancale, it is available on Steam, Mobile & Switch.