Henry Hoffman has been making games for over 13 years, and tells me every idea he comes up with starts with a core, unique mechanic, which is evident in the likes of Hue, where players solve puzzles by changing the background’s colour. For his next project, he has partnered with his brother Frederick to createPaper Trail. In this captivating puzzle adventure, players must help protagonist Paige progress by folding paper-like levels to create new pathways and solve evolving puzzles.
“We started with paper prototyping,” Hoffman explains. “Me and my brother were designing some puzzles for a basic top down puzzle game on a piece of paper, and we’d drawn a puzzle on the front and on the back. We were like, ‘What would happen if you fold the paper over? What happens when those two puzzles combine? Is there an interesting mechanic around that?'”
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Hoffman tells me that the original idea was a side-scrolling Metroidvania, but they quickly realised having a mechanic where you’re folding a map — something you don’t see in the context of the game — was quite confusing. This led to them changing it up so that gameplay involved folding levels instead of the map, experimenting with the idea that items like crates and barrels when folded down, would fall into the front of the paper. After further experimentation, a top-down perspective was settled on.
“We had to have this top down, flattened perspective for the walkable areas to line up when you fold the paper,” Hoffman tells me. “It’s very easy to do puzzles because there’s no sense of perspective, but it looks super boring. You’ve got a character, and you’re able to just see the top of their head, right? So there wasn’t much personality there. We created this flattened top down perspective hybrid where all the characters are front-facing, and our buildings are front facing, but all the ground and everything else is top down. We even break that rule sometimes, we’ve got these art scenes where the perspective and everything completely changes.”
The two brothers founded Newfangled Games three years ago, and with it being just the two of them, various challenges emerged. Hoffman tells me that he was doing all the programming, and as a self-confessed ‘middle of the road programmer’, the folding prototype he put together tended to break, and he had to rebuild it all more than once. Though he knew what they needed to get it to work, it was beyond his technical capacity to implement it, so they brought in outside help.
Gameplay involves different solutions and folding paper in various ways, so the team found that players would discover solutions they hadn’t intended for. Hoffman tells me that it can be frustrating if it’s a hard level with an unexpected solution, as it can be difficult to redesign it all, but other times they leave these untouched.
“If it doesn’t affect gameplay, it’s fine to offer an alternate solution,” Hoffman notes. “Other times, they can just skip entire levels. There’s one level we had where you just literally fold the top down, and then you can walk across and get to the exit. How did we miss that? We play these levels hundreds of times, and we still miss some of these really obvious workarounds.”
Newfangled Games was founded by Hoffman because he wanted to create a more sustainable studio where they could hire more skilled employees and delegate their workloads more effectively. He learned this lesson from creating Hue, which left him burnt out and in dire need of a break.
“I was working 18 hours a day, seven days a week. I had attributed all my self-worth to this game. It was like, if this game fails, I have failed as a human being, and it was pretty brutal towards the end. Every day refreshing the Steam reviews, reading every single review, and catastrophizing everything, but obviously it did really well. I wasn’t able to make video games for a couple of years after because it was so mentally exhausting.”
I confess to Hoffman that having to work with any of my siblings would be a complete argument-filled nightmare, and I ask him whether he and Frederick ever struggle with a classic sibling rivalry while working together.
“We never really argued growing up,” Hoffman tells me. “We have the shared value for high quality thresholds when it comes to art and design. Fred comes from an art and illustration background, and he holds himself to very high standards there. I come from a game design and development background, and I always wanted to create really amazing games. So we’ve both got the shared vision of creating something awesome, and we both hold each other to very high standards. Maybe we should manufacture some [sibling rivalry], it would make for better PR.”
I ask Hoffman if he and his brother Frederick grew up with a love for puzzle games, given their current project, but he tells me that’s not the case. “They always say you shouldn’t necessarily make the games that you play, you should make the games that you enjoy making. I think that’s probably particularly apt with what we’re doing.”
Hoffman tells me that he gets excited about unique core mechanics, and it just happens that the puzzle genre is well suited to that, so he makes more puzzle games. He reflects on how creating the core mechanic for Hue bled into every aspect of the game during its creation.
“It informed the narrative, which was all about colour theory, and the aesthetic, which was completely determined by the game mechanics. I feel I’ve carved out a niche for myself. I’ve become quite comfortable with this mechanics-driven philosophy of game design. I would like to do something more challenging. We could still have that unique mechanic, but there could be a crafting system, or a levelling system, or something a bit more gamey that traditional players could relate to. That’s something I’ve never designed before. I’d be interested in how you would give players a choice. That’s what crafting does and skill trees and everything, right? The player can shape the game themselves. I’d be interested in incorporating that into the next games.”
Of course, before the Hoffmans can plan their next game, they must wrap up Paper Trail. Newfangled Games aims to launch Paper Trail before the end of 2023 for PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and mobile.
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