What can we learn about game design by comparing Dance Dance Revolution and Pump It Up, two nearly identical rhythm games?
Show Me Your Moves
I would wager that most people have heard of Dance Dance Revolution, an arcade game where you step on arrows in time to music. It used to be quite popular in the US during the late 90’s and early 2000’s, and the dance pad used to play the game has become something of an icon on its own.
In its heyday, DDR inspired many people to create nearly identical rhythm games. One surviving example of these games is Pump It Up. You might notice that these games look incredibly similar at a glance.
The only obvious distinction between these games is that DDR uses 4 arrows in the cardinal directions, and PIU uses 5 arrows in the corners and center. But does this difference significantly affect the gameplay experience in any way?
The Devil is in the Details
As you might have guessed, yes, the arrow placements on the dance pad actually have an enormous impact on the gameplay experience.
When Dance Dance Revolution was popular, there were many players competing with each other for the highest scores on the hardest songs. Naturally, these players studied the game and took advantage of every technique they could, whether or not these techniques were originally intended by the developers. One of these techniques is known as bracketing, where a player turns their foot at a diagonal angle and places it at the corner between one of the side arrows and one of the top or bottom arrows. This allows a player to hit two arrows at once with a single foot, saving a significant amount of energy by avoiding the need to jump and use two feet to hit the arrows together. You can get an idea of how this works with one glance at a DDR pad:
The DDR dance pad was not designed to allow bracketing, and the separation between the corners of the arrows on the dance pad makes the technique difficult to perform consistently without having huge feet. Thus, most players try to avoid bracketing unless it is absolutely necessary. Even so, it is an essential tool for DDR players at the highest level.
Now, take a look at the layout of the Pump It Up dance pad:
Observe how unlike the DDR pad, the PIU pad does not exactly divide the dance pad into a 3×3 grid. The corner arrows actually overlap the center row of the pad slightly, creating a small spot at each corner of the center panel where a foot turned diagonally can easily hit the center arrow plus a corner arrow simultaneously. This makes bracketing on a PIU pad far easier than on a DDR pad.
What this tells us is that Pump It Up was designed with bracketing in mind, and more importantly, PIU was designed for advanced players to exploit every technique they could to play the game. This is important to understand because this detail informs us about the motivations behind a slew of other subtle differences between DDR and PIU:
- Arrow colors: In DDR, the colors of arrows on screen are based on the timing of the arrows. In PIU, the arrow colors are fixed by the type of arrow.
- Failing songs: In DDR, when your life gauge depletes from missing too many arrows, the song ends immediately and awards you an E rank for failing. In PIU, the song continues to the end and awards you a grayed-out rank that would correspond to your score had you not failed.
- Timing windows: In DDR, the timing required for hitting arrows is extremely strict for the best judgement ratings. In PIU, the timing is far more relaxed.
- Freeze arrows/Holds: In DDR, freeze arrows require you to hold them for some amount of time, but you have some tolerance where you can let go of the arrow and press it again without dropping the freeze arrow. In PIU, holds count as a bunch of arrows in rapid succession, so releasing the hold even for a moment breaks your combo and drains your life gauge rapidly.
Overall, these changes make one thing very clear: Pump It Up was designed to challenge your footspeed and stamina in contrast with Dance Dance Revolution which was designed to challenge your timing. And once the focus is less on the exact timing of each arrow and more on the physical capability of the player to survive the song, then Pump It Up is free to introduce even more physically demanding songs than Dance Dance Revolution that push players to their absolute limits. For example, here is a video of one of the top PIU players, FEFEMZ, passing the second hardest song in the game, PARADOXX, on the hardest difficulty in the doubles mode (one player plays on two pads side-by-side). Note that he is one of only 5 people in the entire world to pass this song to date.
What can we learn?
So, what do we learn from all of this? Well, regarding DDR and PIU, we now know that DDR is a game designed to test your timing, and PIU is a game designed to test your stamina and raw speed. But on the whole, I think there are two key lessons that apply to game design at large that we can take away by comparing and contrasting DDR and PIU:
1) Small differences in games are difficult to detect at an entry skill level, but at the highest level, small differences have drastic impacts on the gameplay.
Even for players that are new to DDR and PIU, the fact that one game has 4 arrows and the other game has 5 arrows is obvious. However, the differences in the gameplay experience brought about by changes in the pad design won’t make any difference to new players. The songs these players will be able to play are not going to require advanced techniques such as bracketing, and the addition of one extra panel to keep track of will not greatly affect how successful new players are overall. Additionally, the slew of subtle differences in gameplay mentioned earlier will be nearly invisible to new players who do not have enough experience to notice such small differences. However, for players at the highest level, these changes impact the game drastically, making DDR and PIU feel like totally different games. As game designers, we should bear in mind that small tweaks to our games might not be detectable in early stages of development or when playtesting with new or inexperienced players. However, these small changes can make enormous differences for well-established, experienced players.
2) Decide on what skills to test when deciding exactly what small changes to make.
The differences between DDR and PIU are so subtle, one might imagine it would be difficult as a designer for PIU to know what changes should be made. However, I believe the key lies entirely in what skills the designers want to test in their players. PIU is designed to test players’ footspeed and stamina without worrying as much about players’ timing as DDR does. Through the lens of creating a game with this objective, it is easy to see how changes such as relaxing timing windows and letting songs finish despite failing serve PIU’s overall design.
Anyway, that’s all the wisdom I have to dispense right now. So, fellow game designers, show me your moves!
Kevin Stiles' Game Design Blog 