the beauty of gameplay systems
w027 an ode to a magnum opus in gaming
When Dostoevsky said "Beauty will Save the World," I believe he meant something deeper than aesthetics—like the rainbow after a storm, emerging from hardship. This week, I'm celebrating a game creator whose work perfectly embodies this, reinforcing my belief that if the world is to be saved, it will be through art.
🪢 crossing bridges
Growing up, my Japanese name, Hideo, often drew comparisons to Hideo Kojima. Though I wasn't a gamer, my curiosity led me to discover his immense influence. What started as a mere coincidence, profoundly shaped my creative path.
In 2019, I finally delved into his universe with Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding and what I saw was something incredible. The game is able to evoke a feeling that very few are able to nowadays. In a world that is always about getting faster and optimizing everything, consuming more media quicker - Death Stranding offers solace to slow down, reflect and think deeply about the meaning of life, death and the bridges in between.
🧑🚀 death stranding 2 : on the beach
Death Stranding 2 came out this week and I won’t sugarcoat it — it is a masterpiece. Its tone shifts from "Tomorrow Is In Your Hands" of the prequel to "Should We Have Connected?"—a poignant "no." The game explores the double edged nature of our hyper-connected, always online, precarious world. All of it is done through flawlessly executed, innovative gameplay. Every moment is meticulously crafted, emphasizing the importance of creating bridges through strands of harmony.
Each system in the game is crafted with the highest amount of detail and care. For instance, the asynchronous online multiplayer co-operative systems is a rare feature in most mutiplayer games that tend to be competitive, but many would argue that this “strand-like” feature of games is the future of social gaming. The only thing is, Hideo Kojima had the foresight to think of this in 2015 - ten years before it started to catch on as a trend in games like It Takes Two and Split Fiction.
I cannot deny how fortunate I feel to be alive in a time where I can be inspired by the peak of his creative genius. As the famous mid-century japanese surrealist painter Taro Okamoto said, “Art is Magic” — and that couldn’t be more true of the world of death stranding.
🎓 the beauty in gameplay systems
Last week we left off talking about level design. I made a few level layouts but ran into an issue where I was re-using many of the same assets. The code was getting messy and out of hand and gradually I felt like I needed to look up better ways of managing things.
🧱 entity component systems
In a video game, there are all sorts of "things" in the game: your player, enemies, bullets, power-ups, trees, etc. In traditional programming, you might make a separate "object" for each of these things, and each object would have its own data (like its position) and its own rules for how it behaves (like how it moves or attacks).
An Entity Component System (ECS) is a different way to organize these "things" in a game, especially when you have a lot of them. It breaks down game objects into three main parts:
Entities: Aa blueprint for "something" that exists in the game world. It doesn't have any data or behavior itself. For example, "player_one" is an entity, "enemy_two" is an entity, "bullet_five" is also an entity.
Components: These are pure data. They store information about an entity, but they don't contain any rules or actions. For example, a "location" might store the X, Y, and Z coordinates of an entity. A "health_component" might store how much health an entity has. A "double_jump_component" might store information about the ability of an entity to double jump. player_one and player_two who are frogs could both have double jump components but enemy_b which is a shark might not have the double_jump component. Both frog and shark have a health component, but only the frog can double jump.
Systems: These are the "brains" of the operation. Systems contain all the logic and rules. They look for entities that have specific combinations of components and then perform actions on the data in those components. For instance, a "Movement System" would find all entities that have both a "Position Component" and a "Velocity Component" and then update their positions based on their velocities. A "Combat System" might look for entities with "Attack Components" and "Health Components" to handle damage.
Think of it like building with LEGOs:
The Entity is like the empty LEGO baseplate on the left.
The Components are the individual LEGO bricks (a red brick, a blue brick, a wheel, a window). They just store shapes and colors.
The Systems are your hands, which take the bricks and put them together to build a car or make the wheels spin.
This modular approach allows for a more efficient and re-suable gameplay system design. Godot’s node based approach and Unity’s actor to script implements this beautifully. Unreal has a slightly more complex, albeit sophisticated approach to this called the Gameplay Abilities system that we will explore in detail next week.
Now isn’t that elegant? I’d say there is poetry in the simplicity of these systems.
🤹 animation state machines
An animation state machine is like a flowchart for your character's animations. It defines different "states" like idle, walking, or jumping, and the "transitions" between them. You can set up rules, such as "when the 'jump' button is pressed, transition from 'walking' to 'jumping' animation."
It visually organizes and controls which animation plays when, making complex character behavior easy to manage.
📝 unreal engine starter templates
This week I looked into some starter templates to learn how simple features like moving platforms, re-suable assets and gamplay systems were implemented in Unreal Engine 5.6.
Through these templates you can learn, in depth on how Unreal implements gameplay abilities, through gamplay tags, gameplay cues, event dispatchers, delegates and an enhanced input system.
When people hear about unreal they might think of the flashy high-end graphical systems of Nanite and Lumen - but the real developer advantage in using unreal is these gameplaysystems that take advantage of the best practices in modern gameplay systems.
unreal engine C++
I’m about halfway through this course - and it’s been super helpful in helping me understand how to make my own custom C++ classes (a concept that is hard to grasp just by looking at the UE documentation alone).
🎮 playing diet
Death Stranding 2 : On The Beach
🍿 watching diet
The Studio on Apple TV+
Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning - Tom Cruise & Christopher McQuarrie
28 Years Later - Alex Garland and Danny Boyle
📚 reading diet
強く生きる言葉 - 岡本太郎
The Neuromancer - William Gibson
🎧 listening diet
On the Beach - Caroline Polachek prod. Danny L. Harle and Hideo Kojima
Polytope - Daichi Miura
many lives - Purity Ring
Shoreline - TDJ prod. Danny L. Harle
Long Promised Road - Beach Boys
I’d like to dedicate this week’s post to my father, who turns 69 today who built a lifetime of “bridges” between India and Japan. And that’s all folks!
Thank you, reader so much for reading and indulging in my journey. I wish you well! And if you can - check out Death Stranding 2!
🧑🚀🚀🌕
I stumbled upon your post by accident while looking for something completely unrelated but this was very informative and well explained, keep it up man!