Canabalt: Taking a Base Mechanic to the Limit!
Run for your life! That’s the Core Experience delivered by Adam Atomic and Danny B’s hit browser game, Canabalt. Created for the Experimental Gameplay Project, Canabalt was designed to use only one button. That’s right, only one button. Our intrepid survivor runs automatically to the right of screen, while the player presses a button each time they want to jump. By dashing over buildings and avoiding obstacles, the player runs and runs and runs as birds leap off the rooftops and military ships fly overhead. The game really is a thrill.
Canabalt was an absolute breakout hit in the indie game world, so what can other developers learn from it? How can we apply the principles that made Canabalt so popular to our own games? Why, by breaking out our old friend, the Game Design Canvas!
Breaking it Down
As we said, the Core Experience of Canabalt is to make the player feel like they’re running for their life. Games that achieve their Core Experience well are the ones that we dream of and latch onto, and so the trick is to understand exactly how they did it.
Careful choice (and elimination) of Base Mechanics. To begin, you’ll notice that in Canabalt, the player’s character runs automatically. There is no Base Mechanic for making the character move forward; that was purposely left out. The effect? A sense of urgency, a feeling that you have little control. He’s going to run right into that wall in just a moment unless you do something! This simple subtraction of control is a beautiful example of design through simplicity. By causing the avatar to move automatically, the player becomes panicked from the first second the game is being played.
How is this applicable to us? If you’re developing a game where you want the player to feel excited, invested, or on the edge of their seat, consider adding or removing aspects that involve time pressure. Knowing that something is going to happen with or without their involvement will get players to sit up and pay attention right from the get go.
Additionally, having a smaller number of Base Mechanics and a low ceiling for mastery makes the game easy to pick up and play. Someone who has been playing for 5 seconds isn’t much worse than someone who has been playing for 30 minutes, a rarity in many designs that results in instant gratification.
Good Punishment an Reward. I’m normally not a fan of games that send you all the way back to the beginning after each loss, but in the case of Canabalt the design choice makes sense. When your character finally falls to his doom due to an inevitable ill-timed jump, then you are shown your high score and reset to the first building. This was a design of many classic coin-op arcade games, but faded away in recent years because it made the games feel too difficult. It’s discouraging to play through to 99% of a stage and fail, only to be sent back to the beginning.
In Canabalt, however, there isn’t any real difference between the 2500 meter mark and the 2600 meter mark, because the buildings are randomly generated. Thus, the player doesn’t feel like they’re sent back to the beginning. So what’s the difference? Why not just reset the player back a few meters?
Well, there is one important difference: as your score increases, the stakes raise higher and higher. This effect causes the game to increase in excitement the longer you go. This Punishment and Reward System is a great match for the Core Experience. And when you finally do lose, you don’t feel too disappointed, because the actual landscape is the same. It would have been drastically different if the buildings changed as you ran, but they don’t. They stay the same, and the only thing that changes is your own heart rate.
This choice is something that we can be aware of for our own games: If you want the player to feel like they’re making progress, then don’t destroy their progress so readily. On the other hand, if you want the player to feel like they could die at any moment, feel free to catapult them to the start, or worse.
Aesthetics that Play Up the Environment. Finally, Canabalt does a great job of adding a nice amount of polish to the visuals and sound. It’s highly recommended by the creators that you play the game with sound on, because the music and the sound of footsteps add a great deal to the excitement. The breaking windows, the fleeing birds, the zooming aircraft, all contribute a sense of panic and add to the Core Experience of running for you life. Sure, the game could have been made with simpler graphics and no sound, but it would not have delivered on its exciting promise nearly as well.
What can we learn from this? After the other aspects of your game are nailed down, define your Core and then build polish into the visuals and sound to strengthen it. Canabalt shoes that it doesn’t take much to give the player the sense that they’re in danger.
Zero to Fun in 0.2 Seconds
Canabalt is a great testament to the power of a good Design Canvas to grab players by the collar and yank them into your world. And in a time when online players’ attention spans are shorter than ever, it’s encouraging to see another game that proves if it’s interesting enough, people won’t be able to leave until you show them their final score.
Comments
2 Responses to “Canabalt: Taking a Base Mechanic to the Limit!”Leave a comment, and if you'd like your own picture to show up next to your comments, go get a gravatar!
I don’t agree with a lot of things you post, but on this i have to speak up. I played this game way back when it first came out and it was an intensely thrilling game. The course slowly evolved as you picked up speed, more obstacles appearing, buildings becoming more random. The implications of it’s design are phenomenal and can stretch all the way from puzzlers like bejeweled to full on RPG’s in the way FFVII was with it’s 4 disks of gameplay. I’ve been working on a major production for the last five years, doing nearly every job because only one person has responded when i needed help, and her only because we’ve been friends for a good chunk of time and she feels that this game is just as much hers at this point as it is mine. Having done all this work designing the gameplay, the story, the characters, the music, and so many other decisions having been made, with the realization of this simple concept i just now scrapped and redesigned half of my system in my head over the last ten minutes, where it took me months to be happy with them the first time through.
Hi DracoDominus, I don’t know anything about your project that you’ve been working on, but I’m glad that another game has been able to give you some ideas. Just be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater when incorporating a new concept, I’m sure a lot of what you already had was valuable. :-)