Currently Playing: Hand of Fate Deals Well With Constraints
I'm actually writing up a presentation related to Hand of Fate for work at the moment. The project relates to narrative games, and Games For Good, so it's pretty interesting. But, of course, we can't talk about it in too much detail today! Secrets, secrets! (NDAs, NDAs!) We can, however, talk more broadly about Hand of Fate.
Hand of Fate is an interesting game because of how it utilises constraints in it's design. It is, in many cases, a rather masterful example of how to do more with less, and it should serve as a lesson in adaptability and ingenuity to game creators of every discipline. Some of these adaptations are easier to spot than others, but when you do tease them out, the method by which a lack of a resource was turned into an abundance of output is astonishingly impressive.
The first and most obvious example is the Dealer's mouth. Presumably, using motion capture to map the character's mouth to their speech would have been prohibitive, so the character's mouth is covered by a cloth, eliminating the concern entirely. This saved time and effort has then been reallocated into the attractive and complex hand gestures that the Dealer makes. But again, here there are smart adaptations at play. The Dealer seems to never physically pick up a card, but instead they float in his palms and dance at the tips of his fingers. Thus a collision detection issue - and with playing cards being particularly challenging because they are thin and only semi-rigid - is completely, and deliberately, avoided. Thus the player focuses on the character's hands, and his magical manipulation of the cards, rather than looking at his mouth. The characterisation of the Dealer, his status within the story, is communicated through his manipulation of the cards, which mirrors his manipulation of the player, adding depth and immersive quality to the narrative spoken over the top. It is very much a case of "show, don't tell" in a literal and a metaphorical sense.
As well as turning animation restrictions into character attributes, the developers have also turned gameplay constraints into landmark features. The game has an impressive branching narrative, which could have easily become unwieldy and overwhelming, both to create and to play, but is kept on track by the story cards. The player creates their own narrative through the use of the encounter cards, shuffling together decks of familiar and newly unlocked content. By giving the player a degree of agency in selecting which cards are available, players are less likely to be resentful of recycled content, and may even purposefully seek it out, as they will already have pre-formed strategies for encounters they have had before. This fact also affects the difficulty curve; the developers no longer need to provide a smooth and balanced difficulty curve, as by handing the control of encounter generation to the player, the player takes on some of the responsibility for constructing the level. Pick only familiar cards, and the level should be easier, but complaints about a lack of new content revert back to the player unless they stretch themselves by picking unknown encounter cards. Recycling content, such as environments, enemy types and weapons, reduces the production cost of the game overall, and the encounter card system permits this to be done in such a way that the player does not feel ripped off by repeating content. The impressive thing about Hand of Fate is that it does not just mitigate this complaint, but rather, by ingeniously working around constraints, turns them into the features that gave the game it's compelling hook and made it stand out for reviewers.
