No More Losing Your Souls On Death Pls
I finally caved and started playing Hollow Knight a couple days ago. This is a huge accomplishment cause I don't pick up or play many new video games these days, but unfortunately I don't think this is one I'm going to finish. It's absolutely stunning and beautiful and I'm a huge fan of some of the mechanical design choices they made... but I think I've been running into more friction with the platforming mechanics than I assumed I would and its commitment to a lot of the established soulsborne mechanics feel like they hurt more than the games they take inspiration from. Specifically it's gotten me thinking a lot about the mechanic of losing your souls on death and having to run back to get them.
Losing souls
For people not familiar, in the Dark Souls games you gain a currency called "souls" from killing enemies and bosses. You use this currency to make your character stronger through stat level ups, weapon/armour level ups/repairs, and purchasing items/weapons/gear/etc. When you die in Dark Souls, all of the souls you had on you is dropped on the ground in the place you died, and you can re-collect it by returning to pick it up. However, if you die again before re-collecting it, it's lost forever.
Hollow Knight iterates on this a bit with its souls-analogue "geo". When you die in Hollow Knight, this little floating shadow entity emerges from your corpse and it has all of the geo you were holding when you died, requiring you to fight and kill it to get it back. Thankfully fighting it isn't difficult since it's slow, doesn't attack often, and only takes two quick hits to kill. But like Dark Souls, that geo is lost forever if you die before re-collecting it.
While it's technically marginally more difficult than walking up to the spot on the ground you dropped your geo and pressing A to re-collect it, the shadow entity is always positioned outside of the boss arena meaning that, unlike Dark Souls, you don't have to put yourself in the exact same situation that killed you if you want your currency back (sort of). This gives you the option to try a boss, realize you are way outmatched for it, backtrack to collect your geo, and then leave to find a safe place to spend it rather than having to take on the big risk of dying to the thing that has proven it could kill you dead before you could re-collect it.
Run-backs
Unfortunately, I feel like the save points you have to run back from in Hollow Knight are a lot more punishing than they are in Dark Souls. You can just sprint passed most enemies in Dark Souls to return to your souls without having to do any technically challenging tasks. Hollow Knight's run-backs are longer and often feel like they alternate between having to fight enemies in small areas you can't easily get around, spending time running through big screens with nothing in them, or losing crucial health to mistimed jumps or bumping into environmental hazards. Sometimes it can feel like the run back to boss fights is longer and harder than the actual boss fight itself. I feel like I can confidently say that I've spent more time running back to each boss than I do fighting them. I understand that from a certain perspective, the run-back AND the boss are part of the same challenge, but whug does it feel like I'm wasting my time doing rote uninteresting tasks.
The combat isn't interesting enough on its own to be compelling to do outside of being a part of the fun of exploration, but once that exploration has been done, it just feels like they're objects to get in the way and chip your health down before you get the opportunity to continue to explore and learn the boss's mechanics. Engaging with Dark Souls' enemies during run-backs quickly teaches you that for the most part it's not worth the risk and you easily ignore them when you know where they're going and safely arrive at the boss arena having only taken a hit or two.
I've heard from a couple friends that there's a boss fight in Silksong that's really fun and engaging and they always go out of their way to mention that the save point being right near the arena is the biggest relief. Sounds like it makes the fight more interesting as you can learn and iterate on your strategy faster without so much fatigue from the act of attempting to try again. That's great shit! We've even seen FromSoft move towards making run-backs not so unnecessarily punishing in Elden Ring, where they have save points much more close to boss arenas and a secondary type of save point they place near areas with lots of enemies out in the open world so that you can quickly try again.
Ok so more iteration!
So I've been thinking about this dynamic a lot! No game mechanic can be fully lifted from one game into a different game and be expected to work the same way, since the impact and effect of every game mechanic is experienced within context of every other system in the game. The kinds of things you spend your currency on in Hollow Knight are different and done done differently than in Dark Souls, and that in itself is enough to change the consequences of losing all of your currency on death. The two systems can both produce similar emotional and mechanical outcomes, and those are the things to look at when thinking about how/when/where to take inspiration from other games to apply to a new one.
For example, both create this fun sense of heightened risk when in a situation where you could die and you have a lot of currency on your character (good). Both incentivize you to return back to the place that you died in order to recollect it (neutral, sometimes good sometimes bad, sometimes annoying). Both intrinsically give you an "out" to stop bashing your head against a challenge the game wants you to keep attempting, which would feel less bittersweet if the out wasn't punctuated by the feeling that you've wasted a lot of time and have been set back. It isn't a complete set back as IMO no time spent practicing and iterating is time wasted, but it can definitely feel that way when you lose your last extrinsic motivation to a negative punishment.
The way I'm handling currency and progression in Dreamrealm Kingdom changes a fair bit to upset these sorts of dynamics. A small change is that leveling up requires consuming an item at a safe point, but that item can be created with the currency at any time. Once it's created, it's an item like any other and isn't lost on death. The bigger change I've been toying with the past week is to use a locking system.
When you die, you lose some percentage of your currently usable currency. Say the percentage is 30%, if you had 100 when you died, 30 would be locked away leaving you only 70 unlocked for use. If you die again, you lose another 30% of your unlocked currency, so 30% of 70 is 21, leaving you with 51 locked currency, and 49 unlocked currency. You can unlock all of your currency, but it requires gaining the same amount again. If you defeat an enemy that gives you 40 currency, that 40 goes towards unlocking your 51 locked currency, and you don't gain any new usable currency until you gain at least 51 more. That 51 is still inaccessible until you you unlock it at a safe rest spot, but any more currency gained is unlocked unless of course you die again before unlocking it. It can all be unlocked at safe rest spots as long as you have 100% of your locked amount re-collected, and the act of unlocking it gives you access to that 51 that was initially locked, as well as the 51 you used to unlock it, leaving you with all 151 currency that you earned.
This is a little hard to explain written out, but I feel like it's easier to understand visually in the pic above. Here you have 150 currency you can use. This number will always reflect the amount unlocked and accessible. When you have none locked, the number is not dithered and gaining currency visually increments it in the traditional number-animates-up way. When you die and some currency becomes locked, the number animates down while the above "10/30" up appears and counts up to indicate how much is locked away and how much you have left to accumulate to unlock it. The main number becomes dithered while the locked indicator are solid to show that when you gain currency, it goes towards unlocking and isn't accessible. The lac of dithering indicates where new currency is going to go: either towards unlocking locked currency, or towards already unlocked currency.
Implications
This is like... a really big departure from the traditional souls-like formula and there are some real potential risks with it. I feel like it still compliments some of that higher tension that comes from being in a difficult situation with a lot of currency on you, but it's definitely dampened by how unintuitive it is to understand at a glance how much is at stake when you're dealing with numbers and percentages. I have 150 currency and am going to lose 30% of that? No idea what that means and I sure as fuck am not going to do the math for it unless it really matters, which I can't imagine often does. 50% is a number that's a lot more intuitive, but the math will work out that you will likely lose a lot of your currency very quickly after a handful of silly deaths which in some situations can be more punishing than Dark Souls.
This system also doesn't associate anything with the place that you died, so it doesn't incentivize you to return to it or try a challenge again. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing though, since in a game heavily revolving around exploration, dying before fully exploring an area doesn't remove the intrinsic motivation to continue exploring the area to the degree you already wanted to. At worst, it can incentive you to die on purpose to fast travel back to your last safe point at the cost of needing to re-accrue some portion of your unlocked currency.
I feel like the downsides of these considerations might still be outweighed by the upside of exploration having less inherent risk, too. In a lot of souls-like games, that inherent risk can be a real benefit and contribute to the atmosphere and tone of the game being really dangerous, but the vibe I'm going for with Dreamrealm Kingdom is a bit more whimsical and less "the world is fucked up and bleak and you shouldn't trust anything or anyone".
Alternatively...
This system is undeniably more conceptually complicated and difficult to understand than most, so I might not stick with it! I'll try it out and see how it goes. Another system I'm considering is just giving your currency to the entity that killed you when you die, if there is one. If you die from environmental hazards, maybe they stay on the ground forever until you pick them back up, or maybe you don't lose them at all. It sucks to lose currency trying to explore and the environment collisions slide you off a cliff.
I think the root of my issues with the typical "you lose your currency permanently for trying again" is the permanence. If something kills you and you lose your currency, I'm fine deciding if I want to attempt it again later and lose it for the time being, or if I want to attempt it again and get it back immediately. I feel like losing it forever can contribute to a message that there are some challenges you will never be able to surmount. As long as you can try it again and retrieve it when you succeed, it communicates that you are expected to eventually be able to succeed.
Honestly, now that I've written that bit out, I kinda like it better than the more complicated system I described above. WELP. Who knows, this is the process of iteration. I can easily implement both and see what feels good. That's game development babey :)
