Designer Gabe Cuzzillo's reflections on the literal and meditative walking simulator Baby Steps were a highlight of GDC. In his panel, Cuzzillo discussed how the game's mountainous open world was curated, made, and tested – and, in some cases, not tested. A moment that stood out to me was a comparison made to Valve's Half-Life, or rather, comments from designer Greg Coomer in the developer commentary of Half-Life 2: Episode 2.
In a section highlighted by Cuzzillo, Coomer examines a section of tunnels: "Before we simplified the path through the Guardian's Lair, we allowed a right turn at this junction, leading the player right back to where they began. One of our playtesters continued to repeatedly turn right here for half an hour. That was a compelling argument for removing the mazelike elements." (You can watch this bit around 20:40 here.)
With Baby Steps, Cuzzillo says, he and co-developers Bennett Foddy and Maxi Boch wanted to lean into the maze. By design, it's very easy to walk in a complete circle in Baby Steps. The world is a loop, almost in a funhouse kind of way. Even if you don't fall – the easiest way to lose progress – you can go nowhere fast just by walking correctly in an incorrect, but correct-looking direction. Ask me how I know.
"Why are we intentionally creating this experience that Half-Life is going to such great lengths to avoid?" Cuzzillo asks. And he has an answer: "This is pushing you to start poking at the edges of the space off the authored path. It's inviting you to start wondering what is possible and where you can go in the game. And it's trying to push you into the part of the game that I think is really interesting and that I enjoy ... It's also trying to emphasize that there isn't only one intended route, that this is an open-world game and there are many ways up, and you might have to poke around for different options to find one that works for you."
In what might seem like a heinous game design sin, Cuzzillo says they even included one climbing challenge without testing it. Other "masocore" segments in Baby Steps push you to reach certain ledges, usually either to claim a stylish hat or knock over a stack of cans, and those were all proven to be climbable. But the team let one infamous pile of cans slip through with extra rough edges, and it ended up becoming a shared challenge for the Baby Steps community.
"Maybe I'm foreclosing the possibility that someone finds something more ingenious and more beautiful than I ever could," Cuzzillo says of the challenge. And in the end, people did find a way to knock over those mythical cans – not by climbing, but by using the walking system to kick a rock.
"These open questions are the opposite of traditional single-player level design, where we're trying to communicate something that we know to the player," he concludes. "This is more like asking the player what they can find that's new to communicate back to us."
