I recently started going to an indie game critique group so I could start thinking a bit more critically about what is going on in game design at the moment. The YYC Critique group picked “Capsule” for this month’s discussion and post-mortem.  Capsule is marketed as a survival game and I’d say that is fairly accurate. It was built by Adam Saltsman and Robin Arnott of Venus Patrol.  The basic story is that you wake up in a capsule and your only way to interface with the world is through a grainy CRT-style screen. The navigation is simple, you use the 4 arrow keys that let you steer left and right and thrust forward and backward. You start out the game at a station with a basic narrative that tells that you need to make it to the next station.

Everything shows up as a simple cross on the screen until you “ping” the world with your radar and the things around you become identified. The resource drain element is both oxygen and energy that you burn as you move through the terrain. You can hit elements around you to gain resources or have them taken away. The game play is extremely simple but that was the designers had set out to create. They were inspired by the old arcade game Lunar Lander.

So, what was it like to play? Well there are a couple of things. When it comes to designing games you are often thinking about “The Loop”. This is the cycle of game play that you repeat over and over. In simple arcade games like Mario it is just a matter of running and jumping while trying to avoid (or hit) objects on the screen. You do this over and over again. In first person shooter games it can last a bit longer as you maneuver and try to use one of your various attacks and weapons to kill an opponent. One of the goals of a game designer is to extend that loop as long as possible so that the game remains interesting for the player. You might need a longer sequence of behaviours that need to be completed to finish the loop. In many games new equipment or combinations of elements are added to make the loop a bit different, not in what you do but in how you do it. Think about the upgrades to weapons and special items that can be used in many games. Capsule doesn’t have a long loop. It is extremely short. In many ways it is a great example of how to build a game to prototype a loop because what is there is excellent. Unfortunately for me it got a bit boring. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing in a game because it can then give the designer a chance to get the player to focus on new things.

In the case of Capsule the new thing could have been the narrative. As the gameplay becomes more or less automatic there is a real chance to start thinking about the short email messages that appear each time you dock with a new station. I think this was the real missed opportunity that could have carried the game in a different direction. There is obviously a mystery about what has happened and how you ended up in the capsule in the first place. Unfortunately the writing didn’t really engage me and I found myself skimming the emails after the first couple of stations. This element could have been expanded into something more interesting. Even with a stripped down minimalist game they wouldn’t have had to add a lot. There are a lot of very interesting interactive fiction pieces created with software like Twine that could have served as a good example.

The other media elements of the game had some great production value. The music and sounds of the game did a great job at building suspense and added to the claustrophobic panic that came as you started to run out of air.

Overall, the goal of creating a minimalist game were achieved. I think it could still be tweaked into something really interesting. Maybe someday there will be a Capsule 2.