Design Talk: the joy of Natural Synergies in 20 Minutes Til Dawn

It's a combination Design Talk / Let's Play! 20MTD is a great showcase of what I call Natural Synergies: abilities that combo beautifully as a natural consequence of their properties, not because they're hardcoded to unlock some extra buff.

[@margaram78]

Babe wake up, new Tom Francis let's play.

[@hantuchblau]

Intentionally designing synergies to make players feel like they are getting one over on the devs is a really fun idea. I think both magic-like card games and systemic games are treasure-troves of design lessons in that regard. I've heard card-game players complain about 'forced synergies' when sets of cards have too obvious synergies, leaving less room for experimentation and discovery. My favourite 'discovered' natural synergy is in Catacomb Kids. Magic blast is a projectile spell. The overload upgrade lets you hold the button to make a strong beam until your magic is drained. The portal spell lets you open paired portals and move yourself/drop enemies into lava/target spells at a distance etc. But opening aligned portals and looping the beam kills you because you are standing in the loop. If you get armor of reflection, though, the beam bounces off of you. So it bounces back and forth, amplifying into a really silly and roundabout way to kill bosses.

[@jabberw0k812]

Watching this reminded me of one of my favorite synergy builds I've had, from the Ordinator and spell mod in Skyrim. Ordinator changes the perks, and the Destruction perks let you specialize in an element. So I took increased fire damage, and a perk that makes any burning enemy hit with a different fire spell explode. I also had a perk called Vancian Magic, that increases all spell damage, but you can only cast a set number of spells before resting. To make up for this, I took an ability that lets you auto-cast mage armor at the start of combat, and doesn't count as a cast. Another spell lets you combine two spells together, so the second one is always cast with the first one. So I combined mage armor and flame cloak, so I would always have flame cloak during combat. The last step was to enchant my sword with fire damage, so every enemy I strike with it was hit by both the flame cloak and the fire from my sword. Because it's two different types of fire damage, every enemy hit would explode because of the earlier perk. On top of that, my damage was boosted by having increased fire damage, and a huge boost from Vancian Magic. So it was just overpowered explosions ragdolling every enemy hit with my sword, and those explosions could chain to surrounding enemies as well...

[@PopMusicKiller]

Thanks for the video! I love it when designers play through and analyze games. You made a great comparison with 20MTD and Vampire Survivors.

[@AzureLazuline]

the lead designer of Magic the Gathering, Mark Rosewater, always talks about things like this! Magic tries to make the game have as much natural synergy as possible so it's more fun to discover, but some authored/artificial synergy is needed to fill in the gaps, since it's obviously a lot easier to be pinpoint with it. One related term they use is "parasitic mechanic" for anything that requires you to use a specific called-out subsection of cards that all feed off each other, which means you generally either go all-in on that one strategy, or exclude it from your deck entirely.

[@VanBurenPhilips]

Reminds me of my favourite 'broken' (?) ability in a game. Too Human. Normal loop: 1. kill things to increase your combo meter, 2. spend meter to activate your Battle Cry (some kind of temporary buff or big damage), go back to 1. Combo meter raises *much* faster if you do flashy shit like launching enemies into the air and juggling them. Normal loop gets utterly destroyed: There's a character that leans heavily into guns, basically turns the game into a twin stick shooter. One of their battle cries makes *every single bullet* a launch and juggle. The combo meter gain is OUTRAAAAGEOUS. It's fucking great. So instead of the ebb and flow of gaining meter and spending it, you gain enough to activate once, and then within seconds your meter is full forever and you have infinite battle cry for the rest of the level, hordes of enemies bouncing into the air in front of you. It's amazing fun, in a game that is infamously not all fun. Following your examples, I think that qualifies as a natural synergy? The way that particular battle cry interacts with the standard combo mechanics?

[@StephenKatt]

You highlighted some of the things that make natural synergies great. So I naturally got to thinking about when Unlocks (non-natural synergies) fit. So I'll just list some examples that I can think of: Dota-Aghanim's Scepter: You're always buying items in Dota, many of which provide natural power build up with some limited synergy. But if you get Aghanim's scepter, it actually changes your ultimate power to work in a new way. You have to read the text to find out what it does and it is unique for each character. The reason this works as a fun mechanic is that it is pretty rare, gives players something to chase only rarely, and when it does happen, it provides fun power spike moments. Because of its cost, it is usually a capstone to a situation where you're already winning, but it's possible that buying it could turn around the game for you. League of Legends on the other hand has many items which provide a variety of upgrade paths (AoE dmg, on hit effects, etc). These somewhat function as natural synergies in the sense that you are sort of creating your own build. But they aren't super transformative, to the extent that other players may not even notice what items you've chosen. Hades: There are many natural synergies present, such as getting lighting procs from a fast weapon, or choosing Ares-Doom for a weapon that easily hits big groups of enemies. But it also has Unlocks, like the duo boons which really work as those capstone powers, giving you a payoff for choosing a particular set of abilities. This seems quite similar to what Til Dawn is doing with natural synergies + Unlocks. TLDR: Sometimes Unlocks provide you with satisfying power spikes, and sometimes they open up avenues for new gameplay styles. Often, they transform your gameplay in such a way that even allows new natural synergies to emerge. My Preference: I really like the mix of natural synergies and Unlocks in something like Hades. Many games use the formula found in something like Path of Exile, where most level-ups provide something like +3% dmg to swords or something kinda lame, but if you choose the right path, you might end up with one like "Lightning has a 50% chance to proc a second time". That build up can be satisfying for people looking for long term power, but it also feels a little like "Once I finish high school, and then college, and then a few years of work experience, I'll finally be able to afford my own house", which really isn't the sort of power trip I'm normally looking for. It also provides very little of the "self-discovered build" that you mentioned in the video. Similarly, Diablo 3 was pretty dissatisfying to many players while leveling up because it provided the same powers to everyone. So every level or two you might try out some weird new synergy of power, but they were all ones which the developer had selected for you, not ones which you worked towards or discovered. DeadCell has a good mix of natural synergies and unlocks, but suffers a bit from the "Once I find the weapon or build that I like, I pretty much want to stick with that." (Does anyone like playing with shields?)

[@camyron]

At least 20 minute's "synergies" are mostly for combining upgrade trees that you would normally take together. Because lightning and fire both benefit from increased fire rate and don't really care about bullet damage, it's worth making a combination capstone upgrade for them. I wouldn't want a combination upgrade for fire & bullet damage because a) I can't think of a fun thing for them to do together and b) their upgrade trees don't synergise naturally so I wouldn't expect to build them together. Also, the explosions from lightning striking ignited enemies were happening in the last 7 seconds, they're the white fog clouds around enemies (especially obvious on the trees)

[@alastairvanmaren5243]

Love it, thanks, Tom. I had a lot of similar intuitions for why this is one of my favorite survivorlikes, but I didn't have much of a language for expressing them, so this is very helpful, there. 😁

[@samhammer325]

Really cool. so it's important to make the player feel like they are discovering, or better yet creating, and feel like they've broken out of the game loop.

[@WizardofWestmarch]

Sorry if you find this out later, still watching. Unless they changed it (haven't played in a few patches) you only need one tier 2 of a diamond to take the tier 3 of the same diamond (what you're talking about around 19:39) Edit; Also the Dragon is kind of a... vanity? build. If you get it in your first upgrade or two, go hard on summons and summon synergies, plus all his upgrades that synergize on time, by the end of the game it can go completely crazy. But you have to tailor your entire build around it.

[@Tecrogue]

Was coming here to mention that as well re: upgrades unlocking.

[@Charlie-pm5di]

I find something similar comes up with counters in strategy games: the most interesting tend to arise through a natural interplay of the abilities rather than something like "Pikeman deal 5x damage to Horse Riders." The original Starcraft had a lot of these. Yes, there were damage types. But a lot of the counters arise through the interplay of range/speed/splash/"micro-ability"/positioning of each unit. Which also leaves you some room to "counter your counter" by trying to overcome the weaknesses of your units.

[@terencebad7009]

I always liked doing this kind of thing in a very simple way in Diablo 2. Procs and poison better with multi hits and fast hits, crit works well with high physical damage and physical reduction, crushing blow with fast hits, piercing arrows are better with the heat seeking arrows and multishot vs massed enemies, cast rate drains mana faster so your mana/damage doesn’t get better but your chance to cast before stun and dps improve etc etc

[@chrisb9787]

Reminds me of your original Gamemaker tutorial. Was waiting to see some enemies exploding into chunks...

[@KyriosHeptagrammaton]

24:06 A man after my own heart

[@sk-me5cr]

Since you haven't talked about it I assume you don't know about crimsonland. This game feels like a love letter to that game.

[@nevercine]

Hey Tom, would love to hear your thoughts on the synergies and systems of Spellmasons. It’s got that same kind of “break the rules” feeling once you understand the systems well enough to be super dangerous.

[@glitch_borealis]

Dear Tom Francis! My name is Semyon and I’m a really big fan of your games. I have no chance to take an answer but I'll give a try. I'd like to ask you some questions about game development for my video about Gunpoint and Heat Signature. Thank you for you attention, sincerely your fan.

[@KyriosHeptagrammaton]

Monster Train takes that "Allowing for cheating" thing too far in my opinion. You can play Slay the Spire without "Cheating" but in monster train if your damage doesn't need scientific notation to track after a while, you've lost.

[@gloverelaxis]

this reminds me a LOT of Nova Drift