Dev Take Tuesday - Risk in Nuclear Throne

I recently picked up Nuclear Throne as part of this ludicrously good deal on Humble Bundle. While the bundle includes many games I’m looking forward to trying out, Nuclear Throne was the first one I installed and played. In part because I knew it would be one of the easiest games to quickly jump into, but also because I’ve learned a lot about game design and development from the makers of Nuclear Throne, Vlambeer. I was immensely curious to see some of their design decisions in action.

Nuclear Throne image found on Wikipedia

Nuclear Throne, at least based off my initial impression, does a lot of things very well. However it was one tiny design decision that really stuck out to me as I died over and over and over again (I’m not really great at “twitchy” games). Whenever you destroy an enemy, whether it’s a maggot or a mummified bandit, small little green canisters—apparently called “rads”—pop out of the enemy. These radioactive bits give you experience, which in turn allows you to level up and gain powerful mutations. Experience systems are pretty typical in gaming, so my question was: why not just gain the experience points automatically? Why force the player to manually collect the XP?

If there were no reason, I’d probably call this bad design. After all, part of the appeal of video games is that the computer can automatically do tedious things—such as tallying experience points—for the player. Fortunately, there is a reason. The little green rads disappear after a short amount of time, so if you want to collect your experience you have to go grab ‘em. And in Nuclear Throne, that means putting your character at risk. If you want the reward of additional XP to level up, you can’t always play things safe and hide behind cover. So with one small design choice (making XP a collectible instead of automatic), Vlambeer created a risk/reward system that encourages the player to take risks and move faster.

Risk is an essential element in any game. While a game maker obviously wants to reward the player, you can’t have a true reward without risk. Our upcoming game Alkanaur is a turn-based tactics game, so at first glance it might not seem to have too much in common with the fast-paced Nuclear Throne. But the balance of risk and reward has always been something on our minds while designing Alkanaur. Much like Nuclear Throne, tactics games can occasionally become stale when the predominant strategy is to play extremely defensively and inch around the battlefield. Much like the recent tactics game X-COM 2 (and of course Nuclear Throne), we will design reward systems that inspire interaction and risk to give our players the push they need to learn, adapt, and have fun.