GUNPOINT

Gamasutra Interview

I am interviewed on Gamasutra! Here is a question from that interview!

How did you come up with the concept?

I feel like a lot of games are designed on the assumption that the player is stupid: a tester doesn’t have the intended experience, so I guess we’ve gotta force him to look at that spaceship crash, lock him in the room until the enemies are dead.

I wanted to make a game with the idea that the player might be smarter than me. Let him think of solutions that never occurred to me in hours of playtesting, and give him the tools to be more creative than I was when I designed this level.

I don’t think that testers are being stupid, I think they’re being defiant. And they’re defiant because the game isn’t letting them be creative or smart or funny, it’s trying to make them have a packaged experience.

So the Crosslink gadget, which lets you rewire any of the electrical things in a level, is my way of giving you some of the designer’s power. It’s almost like a level editor: I restrict some things to make sure it’s a challenge to complete, then I let you design how you want the level to work to achieve your objective. You can be clever, efficient, complicated, funny or cruel.

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