Rewarding Exploration with Collectibles and Gatherables

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to rewarding explorations with collectables and gatherables my name is leah miller and let me tell

you a little bit more about myself um i've made a lot of mmos i worked on dark age of camelot which was one of the

first gen 3d mmos i worked on spiritual successor warhammer online and i worked on wildstar i've also done a bunch of research in this space on things like

how location and population density affects gameplay in pokemon go how gatherable density affects gameplay and pubg that kind of thing i'm super interested

in the subject it's always been one of my favorite parts of game design i've always wondered why people don't talk about it more i had a formative experience when i was

playing wandering through this gorgeous woods in like 2002. look at the top of the line graphics there and as i was wandering along i saw this like

cool construct thing wandering around i'd never seen a monster like this before as i went deeper in there was a like bigger scarier more impressive one again unlike

anything else i'd seen in the area eventually i came upon a tower that was so mysterious that i can't find screenshots of it anymore this was from 15 years ago

but it was gorgeous and when i went inside there was like obviously this factory where these constructs had been made and there was a secret tower i went up to the top of the tower

and there was this mysterious bedroom that it looked like someone had been living in really recently and in that bedroom there was nothing absolutely nothing to indicate what this place was

what had happened there what kind of content took place there i would never find out and i worked there i asked my co-workers and they said oh

one of those quests but the quests in the area were sort of not highly relevant anymore people weren't doing them and so this gorgeous space that had been created and that had been really fun to

explore had no payoff had no reward and while it's a good memory for me i can't find i can find screenshots of these monsters because they're relevant to comment

content that's frequently done i can't find any screenshots of that super cool tower breath of the wild is the opposite of this in breath of the wild if you see

something cool there's almost always something there if you it teaches you as you play a visual language that suggests the presence of something if

you're wandering along really early you'll see a rock that looks out of place lifted up one of your first corox seeds it teaches you to notice patterns it teaches you to

look for things it teaches you that exploration is always valuable and then later on it gives you tools like treasure radar and others systems to allow you to sort of shape

your own exploration and choose your own goals and outline your own motives i've developed some terms for discussing this collectibles

are finite number and set in locations there are checklists which are items where the goal is to collect them all basically for completion's sake or

to achieve a sub goal tomes are items that give you information about the world specific gear which i know is the most generic label ever

is an item that always appears in a set place and there are a limited amount of them in the total gameplay gatherables are the other side of the coin they're fungible resources that are

theoretically infinite you'll never not be able to get more wood or more tin um advancement currency

is things like coins or bonus xp things that collecting them allows you to either buy upgrades to your gear advance your character that kind of thing and then there's

randomized lootables which are the opposite of specific gear where you don't know for sure what you're going to get in them and their location is not fixed and the three tree korok puzzles in

zelda are a perfect example of these working together you're trained early on to see the bright red apples to know that they're a resource and then

you see this visual language that you'll eventually learn is showing you a puzzle that will result in a korok seed which is a collectible where there's a limited amount and you're trying to either reach a goal and how many you've

collected or collect them all this basically rewards exploration draws the player's eye and teaches them about the world

the opposite of this is this beautiful photo that i took while playing pokemon go in the first iteration of pokemon go going to a gym and keeping your pokemon there for a long time was actually

really valuable so you could find a gym that was in the middle of a park like i would go out and hike there every two or three weeks and leave my pokemon

in this gorgeous place the gym was called the abandoned mill which is how cool is that ever since they changed their gameplay so that turnover is more important than

longevity now you only get coins from pokemon not every day if they're there but from when the gym turns over this means that the moral remote places are actually less good as

targets now and have been heavily disincentivized you've got to be careful when you make these changes to your economy because economy will motivate behavior i

used to make this hike every month sometimes more often and i honestly haven't been back since they changed the system everything is the economy every balance

you make and where items are found every balance you make and where content is found will weigh on players decisions and they will always weigh it as if everything were a currency is advanced

plot advancement is a currency leveling as a currency exploration is a currency players will often do what is efficient rather than doing what they consider fun they'll also there's also a stigma

sometimes against focusing too much on the kind of gameplay that is sub-optimal for a particular game if somebody's wandering around exploring

they're seen as less serious of a player if it's a game with competitive aspects wildstar actually had a big problem with this at launch we wanted to set up

a plex-like system plex is eve online's uh pay-to-subscribe model where players can buy subscriptions put them on the auction house and then other players can buy them for in-game currency

it works really well if players have a reason to want to get in-game currency wildstar's economy was rebalanced shortly before launch and it removed multiple gold sinks which

meant that farming for gold was no longer an efficient enterprise it was no longer a core part of what players were doing in game because of that

several relevant systems became less relevant for players and the cred system wasn't as strongly utilized as we had hoped at the same time people still like

gathering there's this really cool kind of love of the mix between gathering and more intense play while

there are plenty of total chill games a lot of people will spend hours and hours working on something in minecraft or gather or wandering around monster hunter and still like the punctuation of combat

even when most of the gameplay is gathering centric the balance between these is really important and i don't think it's something we highlight as much because players will often not say oh

man i'm looking for a game with really good gathering but when they're given one they'll really enjoy it so i want to distinguish that last tweet had a

good example of the interplay between collecting and gathering versus grinding for me collecting and gathering is interacting with static objects or entities placed in the world

action may be involved but it usually doesn't imply violence and rare monster spawning can leverage some similar principles if you're putting in rare monsters where the combat is not the point

you can still apply a lot of these design principles because it's really just finding an object to interact with only in that case you're interacting with your sword or whatever i'm still going to stick

primarily to object-based gatherables here but i just wanted to let you know in the in the increased applications but why why do people like gathering why

do people like this there's a bunch of reasons one is that it provides a way to socialize a friend of mine used to do data gathering based on wow

add-ons and he found that people spent a huge amount of time doing mining and herbalism and wow he also had another one add-on that saved chat logs and found out that

people were really likely to combine urban herbalism and mining with chatting activities with their social time and like people who use their social

time for gathering were actually more likely to continue playing than people who spent their social time dancing in the stormwind fountain

or any of the other non-non-productive ways to engage with that so this is my big point gatherables and collectibles have are

more interconnected than any other aspect of game design other things may be the focus and these are really a lot of the times the connective tissue in your game

you have to be aware of a lot of things when doing this placement you have to be aware of combat in the area story and characters relevant to the space what the world in prop art is so that

your things look appropriate and so that you're teaching players the rules of where to find things and the economic and symbolic weight of the items that you're

placing and i want to talk about how different principles of design apply to the different types of collectibles and gatherables

my favorite type of collectible and gatherable is the tone this is basically holocron's recorders in bioshock journal entries those little hits of

narrative and lore for for this one you'll be collaborating a lot with narrative but you'll also be collaborating a lot with art and world art and props

you can actually add a lot to the story and save the narrative designer some work by strategic placement of lore items if a letter from a random scientist is

just scattered on the floor whatever but what if it's in the desk of a rival scientist that adds a layer to the story that would not be there by just placing an item in a slightly more

strategic place the big thing to be careful with about these though is not to halt flow one of the biggest design no-no's if you're going to have narrative gatherables is to force the player

to stop and read or listen to it right then um you can have it follow them there's an option that very few places have done but that i'm in favor of which is adding audio gatherables

to a queue that you can then decide to play yourself during downtime the next major type sorry the next major type i want to talk about

is checklists checklists covers a really wide array of different implementations it's basically anything where collecting

them all is the vital part like the the letters in donkey kong or secrets like the orbs in inside i don't know if you guys have played inside but there's

it's this cool platformer and in it there are a few orbs you'll probably run into like three of them if you play the game normally but then you can play through multiple times

explore everywhere and find them all which leads to a secret ending quest items and checklists share a lot and i don't always like to group them in

the same thing but it's important to draw that comparison because if you find a quest isn't working that it's not satisfying or the story related to it isn't capturing people

you can convert it into a gatherable that rewards something less significant and less important like an achievement or an optional item

or a cosmetic you can draw focus away from it from making it ambient instead of the kind of necessity that implementing it as a quest gives it

the next type of collectible i want to talk about is specific gear which again very generic term but it's when items are placed in a set place and you know where you're going to

get them you're going to get them in the same place in every type of play through and there's a limited amount of them it can be a piece of equipment a

decorative item or even just like a jokey fluff souvenir if you run enough mmos you'll be amazed at what people keep i know people have had vendor trash

items from vanilla wow in their banks since whenever vanilla wow launched what is time it's uh chests in old school final fantasy games are this kite type

of collectible metrovanias rpgs and games with rpg elements are the ones that are most likely to design gear acquisition around stuff like this

now i want to move from collectibles to gatherables the most common gatherable type is crafting materials like literally everything in minecraft

is a gatherable herbalism and mining nodes are the most common type in other genres the best way to implement this is to use it as a way to teach players rules and

make them feel smart there's the rule that you have to dig to a certain depth to get diamonds in other games there are certain props around which certain other gatherables

are likely to spawn like in wildstar we had these cool owl statues and we had specific herbs and specific mining nodes

that would be more likely to be found around the owl statues this is my this is the most sort of

obscure gatherable type that people often don't think of as a gatherable they think of it as its own thing advancement currency can be gold experience anything that you

basically gather a lot of like a near infinite supply and use to advance your character as you can see here these are uh advancement currency trails

there are two gold trails on the bottom and then hovering sort of in the middle is a circle of xp nodes this lets the player know that both of those trails are an option for where they can go in this sort of fast-paced downhill

slide event and also that there's a bonus for hit for making a jump it teaches players mechanics it shows them paths and it does it with a resource that will

pay off for them later this is one of the types of gatherings people are most familiar with and most often encounter since even the old mario games would

often show you hidden or alternate paths with coin trails and the final category of gatherables i'm going to talk about right now is randomized lootables

this used to primarily be in the form of treasure chests but uh pubg and fortnite have sort of revolutionized this variety by skipping the middleman and just putting them

right out there and this actually provides a way to reward observation a way to reward visual knowledge which is something we don't often see rewarded

in this kind of game it's also ways to give players an instant dopamine hit they don't have to open the chest in order to see what's available they can walk into a room and see that

as in this picture there's a car 98 with a scope right next to it even if the player doesn't win that's a huge victory dopamine hit you give them

early on in their process i want to talk about when collectibles and gatherables fail a lot of people find collectibles and gatherables tedious they feel like completing them is too

grueling and if they're completionists they feel like they have to 100 a game and if you go too far with gatherables then they get frustrated

there's also the famous problem when gatherables are incongruous when somebody's wandering through a high-tech place and like half of the gatherables are

magic orbs you can be try to be clever and end up being antagonistic if somebody has a collection quest and every single other collection quest item has been

on a floor or on a bookshelf and you hide one in the ceiling and that makes the player finish this level they spend a lot of time on with 99 percent completion they'll get really frustrated unless

you've taught them that that's how the game works and economically unsupported is the most common problem i see people will put a lot of work into

coming up with gatherables and they don't end up being useful you can spend all this time on herbalism and potions suck so what constitutes a successful

gatherable the problem is that tastes vary my brother and i really enjoyed 100 in donkey kong uh 64 when we were kids and a man recently tortured himself for charity

for several days with how unpleasant he felt the experience was so does donkey kong 64 have a good implementation of gatherables it's impossible to say you have to sort

of tune for your audience and try to get to a spot where enough people are having fun with your gatherables and it doesn't feel as required for the people who aren't having as much fun

gatherables are also good for rewarding different gameplay types you can motivate people towards challenge by hiding hiding appealing items between behind

gameplay you can look into your player heat maps and put items where there's less player

play and you can tell the story you can teach players and make them feel smart i want to look at an individual zone and

talk a little bit about gatherables and shared spaces first before you're going to place things in a shared area you have to know a bunch of things about that area

you have to know what the main route through the area is where the mandatory quests are where the alternate quests that will probably be popular are where the safe routes are that don't have many mobs where the what

the story is and what the place's aesthetic is now i'm going to do the most technical part of my talk you have to know about hot spots which are the places where there will almost

always be a decent chunk of players i've circled them on this map of celestion here they're the major quest hubs and then

over there on the east you can see the transition between the major city and the rest of the zone those are places you know will always be high traffic you can also see in yellow

the other player paths the map actually clearly shows you where players will regularly be walking now these are the cool spots there aren't many quests here they

require jumping puzzles to get to the content there is optional or it's content that's limited it's actually cool to put gatherables here as a way of

of intrinsically exploring uh rewarding exploration but the problem is that you can then make it so that people who are playing the game in a less explorative manner

don't get anything and that's bad too i want to talk about the ways into some central design principles about shared world spawn systems this is my

read from the slide part of the talk spawn groups are spawn points that are managed together spawn minimum is the lowest before a respawn is triggered spawn low is spawning is sped up it's a threshold

where if there are fewer than that number of items up it'll be sped up spawn max is the maximum number of objects that are allowed to exist on a single spawn group

the example is i could have an herb spawn group that has 30 potential points where an herb could spawn a new herb will show up every 60 seconds if the spawn minimum is five there will never be less than five herbs spawned

you can check for this a bunch of ways you can have it check as frequently as your server will allow you can have it check whenever an herb is gathered it depends on your personal infrastructure

low is 10 when there are fewer than 10 herbs spawned on this theoretical spawn point a new herb will spawn every 30 seconds instead of every 60.

the max is 15. this is a really important thing about implementing gatherables in shared spaces you almost never want to end up with a full spawn index you want there

to always be some variation where things are found and of course the optimal numbers and the way you set these things will vary a lot based on your individual design your server structure your population

all that stuff okay now back to the good part there are a couple ways to implement item spawns this one is an illustration of discrete spot groups

every uh colored dot shares a spawn group with all the other dots that share its color they don't influence each other at all there's no what is called spawn migration

which is when because people more frequently interact with spawns in one area the active spawns move to less populated areas this is the other implementation all

spawns in a single group which maximizes spawn migration this is good because it will uh eventually algorithmically reward exploration

but it's bad because after people have been playing in it for a while as you can see the hot spots have nothing in them the places where players are more frequently they're not just going to

find less they're going to find none because every time a herb spawns there and somebody collects it it randomly rolls where else it can spawn and you know odds as they work out

eventually they'll be clustered in the cold spots which is again great for the people who go to the cold spots when you go there there's a huge bonanza you feel super rewarded for exploration

so the best is a hybrid and i'm sorry that this is confusing this is actually a simplified version of what our spawn system looked like for celestian so you know what kind of stuff we're dealing with here

but the the pink salmony on the left is one big spawn group the violet on the bottom is a big bond group

and the maroon on the upper right is a big spawn group and then you'll see that the other colors the cooler colors are individual spawn groups in the

specific areas this way there will always be basically take that yellow group in the middle as an example there will always be at least a couple herbs up there

but there will always also be a higher concentration in those more remote areas and so this is sort of the aftermath of people being around there as you can see there's still significant

clustering in the hot spots but there's no place where there's just nothing every region has at least a little bit to offer which is a good balance

now i'm going to move away from that and just talk a little bit really quick a refresher on the different principles and how they're applied to the different genres

platformers and non-linear action games primarily use their gatherables to alert players to alternate paths reward memory and backtracking for instance if you're wandering around and you see a piece of set gear in a

castlevania game and you can't reach it yet you know that you can remember it and come back to it that's a different kind of exploration and a different kind of reward but it's really important

they can also challenge skills if you see an item that you want and it's at the end of a really complicated jumping puzzle that motivates you to do that puzzle in rpgs and story exploration games

treat every space as a mini open world if somebody is wandering through an old house you might think that these principles don't apply but they do

just on a smaller scale you can also really leverage environmental storytelling in these kind of games like the placement of items has huge impacts for characters

we actually often find characters or find players and streamers telling stories about well why was there a chair in this bathroom

or why was there a mystical jewel in the shoebox in this abandoned shoe store people love making up their own little stories as to why why things are in certain

places and also there's always secret tunnel everybody loves finding a secret tunnel even if it doesn't actually offer any gameplay advantage even if it's

totally missable because good secrets are often miscible you still reward them by putting some gatherables or collectibles in there that are that are

non-essential and more linear and narrow worlds um you have to be more careful to match the visibility of items and the difficulty of obtaining them

to the play style that those items are compatible with you shouldn't put narrative items between really intense content challenges because often the kind of people who are really just

playing the game for narrative won't be able to do the content challenges um one thing i like to do with hiding items behind content challenges

is to put an item that's really only usable by high-skilled players behind a high-skilled challenge so if there's a cool item that like massively lowers your defense

but raises your attack something that only a skilled player would be able to get good use of you can hide that behind a content challenge make it visible so that players know that it's a reward

for doing that and it's a reward that is suited specifically to their play style and one of the big provisos is

only include completionist tasks if a game is designed for replayability it's like that example i gave earlier where you hide one of your uh one of your checklist collectibles in a really

obscure place players spent two hours getting through your level gets to the end of it and is at 99 and is super frustrated if your game is designed to have people

play through it a bunch of times and you know for a fact based on play testing that people enjoy doing that then go ahead and pull gags like that that's fine but if you really think that players are going to be

mostly playing through it once for the story be a little nicer to them and this is sort of my lighting round things that don't fit on any of the other slides

people like secrets visibility is good and you've got to decide how much visibility you want and keep it consistent like a good example is the balloon challenges in zelda where they'll hide them somewhat but

they won't ever be completely hidden breadcrumb trails work everybody knows how they work everybody sees them and instantly understands them teach people where to look and do it early too many

empty things is bad if sometimes items are in barrels but 99 of barrels are empty people are going to be either stop looking in barrels or look at every barrels while getting increasingly

furious with you as you do as they do it the same thing is achievements they're nice but they can be compulsive the number one complaint i get about gatherables is there were too many of them

i felt like they were unnecessary and i want to get my platinum trophy i'll never get my platinum trophy because of all those damn collectibles and that's something

you really do want to be conscious of because often the kind of people who are really valuing this sort of exploration and emotional engagement with your game they aren't they aren't the

completionists and some sometimes the people who are really into your combat system won't want to do all of the exploration and you sort of have to

weigh their respective wants and needs against each other there are exceptions to all of these rules i've pointed out a few of them now but it's sort of this is a guide that you should follow some

principles to keep in mind you'll know when it's time to break them but when you decide to break them make sure you subject that aspect of your design to increase scrutiny and to increase

player testing to make sure you haven't made something frustrating so just play with it like my favorite part of implementation is actually flying around a map looking for

cool stuff that my artists have put in that i can enhance with the gatherables i put in there i've actually been not entirely but somewhat ruined for

mmos because i'm used to being able to fly around look at cool stuff be the herb berry put everything in all the cool nooks and crannies

and when i am trying to do that in real mmos i'm like oh wow there's a really cool tree i wonder if it could crime it could climb it oh it's full of wolves why are there wolves in a tree i don't

know and it's disrupting my exploration experience it's fun to place these and if you don't find it fun to place these see if there's somebody else at your

studio who actually does enjoy this because i you know this is a task that i often find when i'm doing consulting has been given to whoever didn't say not

it when the tasks were given out and it's something that especially people with interdisciplinary issue interest in art and design or narrative

and design are often really good at this task so when you're looking to assign this task when you're looking to volunteer for this task know that those are kind of the skills that are

are shared between them and i think this is a really cool design space because it's something that there are very few experts on this and so you have a chance to innovate

with this in a way that you might not have with some other systems that are a similar level of complexity so go out there explore have fun

um if you have any questions please feel free to hit me up on twitter email me i will certainly tell you about this um if you were colorblind and you could not see the details on that map really well

i apologize please email me um i will try to upload them some of the color blind sensitive slides i've made but they're

less legible to everyone else and so if you're interested in versions of this map that are designed for uh teaching people who are colorblind to use these systems

please do get in contact with me uh thank you guys very much i don't know how much time do i have for questions okay we are out of time