How Ratchet & Clank Taught Me Game Design
421Ratchet & Clank is a 2002 Action Platformer originally released for the PlayStation 2.
It's gone on to spawn an extensive series and while much ahs been analysed about it, with this video I want to go back to basics, as well as tell a more personal story.
Ratchet & Clank was a very important game to me growing up and it is where a lot of my love of games and game design came from.
I've been doing a lot of design in the last few months and when I replayed Ratchet & Clank recently, I was ultra aware of a lot of rules which the game consistently followed.
With this video, I want to express my love for this game, as well as explore some of the lessons which really clicked for me.
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0:00 • Intro
03:40 • Lesson 1 - First impressions matter
06:02 • Lesson 2 - Try to not leave the player without options
06:59 • Lesson 3 - When locking content, get creative
08:35 • Lesson 4 - Don’t hate your characters
09:31 • Lesson 5 - Don’t fight the controller
10:48 • Lesson 6 - Make Standarization your friend whenever you can
13:53 • Lesson 7 - Parse out the tutorial
17:03 • Lesson 8 - Play to your strengths
18:56 • Lesson 9 - Quiet Time.
19:46 • Lesson 10 - Players like to feel smart, let them
21:17 • Lesson 11 - Dynamism
22:23 • Lesson 12 - Good & Bad Difficulty
23:09 • Lesson 13 - Please don’t use Invisible walls
23:51 • Lesson 14 - Save it for the sequel
27:10 • Lesson 15 - Theming
29:04 • Lesson 16 - Payoffs
31:13 • Lesson 17 - Gimmicks are far from inherently bad
32:44 • Lesson 18 - “Optional” should not excuse “underdeveloped”
34:38 • Lesson 19 - Appreciate the whole animal
35:38 • Lesson 20 - Don’t undermine your game
39:31 • Lesson 21 - Gameplay is not the thing in-between the story, it is the story
40:52 • Lesson 22 - Deviate from the norm, don’t replace it all together
41:53 • Lesson 23 - Scale strength with Skill
45:37 • Lesson 24 - Try not to waste the player’s time
46:21 • Anti-Lesson 1 - You can always pace it better
48:05 • Lesson 25 - Embrace glitches and oversights when they’re good
49:40 • Lesson 26 - Diegesis and Believability
51:23 • Lesson 27 - Don’t solve a big problem with another big problem
52:15 • Lesson 28 - Know how to say goodbye
56:13 • Lesson 29 - Games excel at different things, and it is very rarely a good idea to ask a game to do something it isn’t good at
57:10 • Lesson 30 - The game hits different people differently
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Promoted Videos:
Resident Evil: https://youtu.be/bJ5U0a_dV-8
Bloodborne: https://youtu.be/xiAVSgtIn8Q
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Footage Suppliers:
World Of Longplays: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVi6ofFy7QyJJrZ9l0-fwbQ
Maklocke: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfG1ElNPUfigxLNzuljSXgw
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Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MedievalMegaman
Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/aesiraesthetics
Essays&Espresso:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeb8nyeVXk2is7gVhgcJ2PQ
Discord: https://discord.gg/aHys5Jjf3M
Play my game: https://aesiraesthetics.itch.io/snail
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