Yellow Paint

 

For Context: This is a topic that turned into another miner firestorm on Twitter. It's about how more and more games are making paths and interactive elements bright yellow to help players know where to go and what to do. A lot of gamers think this is 'dumbing down' games. ---

Now that this trending Twitter topic has died down, I'm ready to weigh in. A little background: I've been doing level design/art for ~25 years in many genres including FPS, 3rd Person ARPG, Sidescrollers, and MMOs. I don't like most of the takes I've seen, both from Gamers™ and fellow devs.  But I chalk a lot of disagreement up to the fact that Twitter is about the worst format for nuanced discussion of anything. So what I'm reacting to may or may not be actual views held by any actual people.

Arguments I've seen that I think are wrong:

* Yellow Paint is condescending.

No. It's a response to watching actual people struggle and grow frustrated with navigation in your game. That's a terrible feeling to work hard on something you hope will bring joy to people and then watch them experience the opposite.  I've been on both sides of this feedback loop many times, and it's always difficult to process and even harder to know if your solution is going to be the right one. Many studios have VERY limited opportunities for playtest feedback from the outside, so we are incentivized to err on the side of over-correcting. 

* Yellow Paint is a necessary evil. (due to playtest feedback)

No. It's the nearest/easiest tool to use to address the problem that affects the fewest developers and can therefore be acted on quickly. More on that below.

* Yellow Paint represents a 'dumbing down' of games.

No. It is a symptom of the complexity of AAA development. On small teams, when a navigation problem is discovered it's generally pretty easy to get everyone in the room from all disciplines to hash out the best solution. But in AAA, every decision needs to go through layers of production/leads to ensure one person/department is not going to accidentally trigger a ripple effect that causes unplanned work for other teams. This makes development brittle. If a solution to a navigation problem requires multiple departments then you have to account for not just that work, but the overhead of communication (usually lots of meetings) and sometimes inter-departmental drama. "Why are WE having to fix a problem the level design team created?!" (This depends on the culture of the company and how siloed the departments are) 

* Yellow Paint doesn't damage immersion any more than a HUD or ammo packs laying around.

No. The environment in a game is a different vector for immersion. We don't use this to excuse other unnatural things in games like stilted dialogue or bad physics. To say that arbitrary gamey things in the level are the same as arbitrary gamey systems/UI/etc. is like saying a movie can have terrible special effects or bad acting without breaking immersion because after all, there's ALSO non-diegetic music playing out of nowhere during many scenes. So that unnatural music should already be breaking your immersion, right? Why would bad FX or acting be any different?  Because they are.  They're a valid thing to criticize a movie for. 

* Yellow Paint is proven to be the best way to solve navigation problems.

Yes and No. Yes, it almost always 'works'. No, it's not automatically the best, just because it solves one problem while creating others. Any solution needs to account for externalities before it can be fully judged. IF your criteria is: What makes this particular navigation problem go away with the least risk, then Yellow Paint is a good call. If your criteria is "What makes this particular navigation puzzle go away while preserving a naturalistic and beautiful environment?" then not so much. Not all games need or want naturalistic environments. But for those striving for that, Yellow Paint in unnatural places is bad, actually. (Though I'm ALWAYS in favor of accessibility options that make traversal clear. Not everyone can do -or likes- that particular kind of challenge in a game, and if you want a wide audience it makes sense to deliver options for reducing particular frustrations) 

* Yellow Paint = Lazy Devs

Lazy devs exist. But in my experience they are rare. MOST devs are trying their best to make a game they will love to play. As I explained above, the challenge in creating a non-Yellow Paint solution is generally bureaucratic in nature. It's not that some devs don't want to put in the effort. It's that there are structural hurdles that individual devs may not have the capability, seniority, cultural capital, or other resources necessary to get over. This is simply the nature of large complex organizations. This is also why thematically consistent great movies are so rare. (From what friends in that biz have told me)

In my experience, navigation problems arise when a level designer and/or level artist are pushing the limits of the systems they are working with. That can be the camera system, lighting, textures, texel density, etc. When you're developing in the trenches of any given game element, your whole focus is on that element. You're whole cognitive bandwidth. So it's very easy and common to overestimate how much cognitive bandwidth a player will have when they encounter your element. But a player is being bombarded with UI, physics, controller input, navigation, the emotional element from combat, long term planning around resource management, etc. A level designer should never have a player-cognitive-bandwidth 'budget' that is too high. (Except where games are almost ONLY about navigating an environment, as in 'Getting Over It', or where the other gameplay elements are purposefully stripped back.)  In other words, we have to expect that a player is literally cognitively challenged when they encounter our work and any challenges we provide them.  That's not condescending. That's just how brains work.  

All of this is to say that from my own experience here are some of the reasons I've caused navigation problems in my levels.

* Inexperience. I hadn't been a part of playtest feedback before. I didn't know the pitfalls to look for.

* A traversal mechanic was added late in development. This means other systems like the camera or map were not built with that in mind, so there was a tension between fully exploring the new traversal mechanic, and keeping it simple enough that it doesn't strain the other systems too much.

* Being too clever by half. Hey, I'm an explorer-motivated gamer. That's probably why I ended up as a level designer.  I love exploring and finding secrets SO MUCH!  Doesn't EVERYBODY?! Well... no. Since I have so much love for exploring and have spent so much time doing it, it's easy to forget that my explorer muscles are more developed than most players, and as a result, I tend to tune my puzzles too high.

* Not utilizing lighting/color/texture well enough. Related to...

* The distribution of visual noise is too uniform. There aren't enough areas of visual rest to lead the eye. This is easiest to mess up in games that are shooting for photorealism.

* Too much ambiguous traversal potential. If your max walking angle is 60 degrees, try not to use any slope that's between 40 and 80. If your grabbable ledges are horizontal cracks, don't include ones that are less than 30 degrees off of horizontal. 

* Too much focus on level ART instead of level DESIGN. I've done a lot of both, and this is a constant balancing act. You want every frame to be a painting. You also want every frame to be a sign post. The tension is palpable. 

* The game's shipping in a month and I'm getting this level in juuuust under the deadline. What that? 80% of players couldn't find there way to the boss room?!  AAAGH! Yellow Paint! ARROWS!  Glowing animated arrows everywhere! Glass walls all over the place! Etc. This particular pitfall is part level design/art problem, and part production problem. There will always be a 'last' level developed. And when that is happening, typically the team is at their peak. They have all the tools and pipeline in place and they've practiced making this game for a long time. They've explored the potential for all the systems. So this final level asset is their chance to SHINE! They want to be the most creative and ambitious. (This is greatly affected if development has been a death march, in which case there are other patterns which cause different final-level problems.)  (another caveat to note is that often the last level worked on is the first level of the game.)  Ok, but when those two things aren't the case, you end up with a massive convoluted level that is very prone to navigation problems. Production can, in theory, account for this and schedule more time for iteration on this level. But creatives do be creating, and it seems like no matter how large the time box, we'll find ways to overflow it. That's where it becomes the level designer/artist's job to know when to clamp down on themselves. 

So, those are my thoughts on Yellow Paint. I don't think I'm 'picking a side' here. Just trying to articulate how complex the topic is, and advocate for the best art we can make. Often Gamers™ are truly terrible to us devs; assuming the worst and accusing us with bad faith arguments, so I get not wanting to meaningfully engage in something that feels so innocuous as Yellow Paint. But I think when an actual point CAN be found in the chaff, (Not always the case) it's worth examining. Anyway, Follow for more very-long luke-warm takes on the topics of last week!