“Feeling Powerful” as a Core Experience

Caster is a fantastic little indie game that I got into several months ago.  You play as a small character in a large, expansive world with some incredibly heavy firepower.  Acting as savior for the forests, you run around the level at sonic speeds, firing in all directions with a wide range of lasers and energy orbs.  By upgrading your stats and abilities as you complete levels, you fill out your character’s stats, increasing speed, power, and your destructive capabilities.  Over the course of several levels, your stats inevitably max out and your resulting impact against each enemy is monstrous.

The game has since been released on the PC, Steam, and the iPhone and has been well received by the independent games community.  While I don’t have specific sales figures, it would appear that the game has been successful for a title of its size.  It was reviewed positively on many of the major indie sites, and even appears in one of the editor’s choice categories on the iPhone for a time.

What can we attribute the fun and fury of Caster to?  The graphics?  The controls?  The story?  While all these elements are important, we’ll have to turn to our trusty Game Design Canvas to really see what makes Caster tick.  To begin, we’ll start with the game’s Core Experience.

The Core Experience: Feeling Powerful

In terms of Core Experience, Caster can be likened to two AAA titles released within the past year, Infamous and Prototype.  In both of those games, the player acts as a single man with uncanny abilities and near complete control over the vast city he is placed in.  In Caster we get an indie touch to the same Experience — a feeling of near absolute power.  Of course the other four Game Design Canvas components are different between the games, but the Core is nearly identical, making these AAA and indie titles almost family in that regard.

Mike Smith, the developer behind Caster, wrote in an interview that the game was “about feeling powerful”.  That’s as clear of a Core Experience as I’ve ever heard.  Mike certainly achieved his goal; when you play Caster, dashing and jumping about and superhuman speeds, spewing gatling-gun style lasers and demolishing the landscape, you certainly do feel incredibly powerful.  But how did he get from an idea to an actual feeling for the player?

Let’s see how Mike began with that Core Experience and implemented it by mapping the game out on the Game Design Canvas.

The game begins with the Core Experience.  Once that is defined, the other four components of the game’s design are filled in.  The Base Mechanics (what the player actually does), the Punishment and Reward Systems (How the player’s behavior is encouraged or discouraged), the Long Term Incentive (What keeps the player going), and the Aesthetic Layout (How the game looks and sounds).

Caster began with the Core Experience of making the player feel powerful.  Let’s fill in the Canvas to see how he implemented that Core through the other four sections of the game.

A firm and well defined Core Experience means nothing if the game developer doesn’t follow through in the other components.  Caster makes sure that each of the four aspects of the game support the Core in a very easily defined way.

To begin, the Base Mechanics of the game allow the player to run, jump, shoot, and use a turbo option to go faster.  While many action games have these moves, in Caster, the player’s character runs extremely fast and incredibly high.  In addition, the lasers that are fired are numerous and rapid, even before the player has had a chance to level up.  It is plain to see how these controls begin to let the player feel powerful right from the first keyboard or mouse button press.

Next, in the P&R Systems, Caster understands that you can’t feel very powerful if you are killed.  While dying is an essential component to many other similar games, Caster does not allow the player to die.  Instead, if they player runs out of health, they are only slowed for a moment.  This provides some light reinforcement (discouraging the player from getting attacked) without undercutting the Core Experience of being powerful.  After all, powerful beings are unstoppable, right?

In the Long Term Incentive, the player looks forward to gaining points and being able to allocate them to new moves, weapons, or stats such as speed.  This is a tried and true method of making the player feel like they’re a real superpower.  By unlocking newer abilities that the player did not have before, they feel like they’re on top of the world.  And because the player is unlocking something new nearly every level, the player is constantly feeling like they are growing in strength even more.

Finally the Aesthetic Layout of the game, sparse as it is, does its best to contribute to the Core Experience.  While Mike didn’t appear to have an army of artists to create assets for his indie title, he did put what little chips he had in the right places.  The shots fired by the player and the explosions from contact are vivid.  The terrain deforms (arguably an exclusively aesthetic feature rather than an actual gameplay feature), making the player sense that they are strong enough to affect their environment.  And finally the player’s avatar is dripping with effects as a result of their speed: streaks behind their movement as they dart around the environment.

A Powerful Case

Caster is just the kind of tightly-designed indie title that all amateur developers could learn from.  It defines its Core Experience very concisely and then focuses on delivering just that, without getting lost in other features that didn’t have the resources to be done fully.  And in a world where there are thousands of games released every year, a successful independent game is going to want to be the best at delivering whatever experience it is promising.