This week I stumbled upon a small yet brilliant game.

It’s called Toy Cavers, and you can take a look at it by going to its Itch.io page. I strongly recommend you try it right now (you can even play it in the browser, no download required) and then get back here.

The game manages to create an Elegant Gameplay that is rare even among famous Triple-A titles. And it’s not about the number of things you can do but how the game generates complexity without being complicated. With just a few actions, the game opens up a whole world of possibilities. Of course, it’s not the only game that does it, but it’s pretty rare nowadays, even though it’s one of the benchmarks of a good game. Gameplay Elegance is on the far edge of Game Design research studies because it’s not yet fully understood, but today we’ll try to take a little step forward.

We will describe one of the ingredients that correlate the most with Elegance.

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We’re going to discover:

• Why Toy Cavers Is A Small As Amazing
• One Way To Make Your Gameplay Elegant

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

Why Toy Cavers Is As Small As Amazing

Toy Cavers creates complex situations with few simple gameplay elements.

Toy Cavers’ gameplay is deadly simple. You can move left/right, jump, wall jump, hook the pickaxe onto the environment, and use the rope to swing.

Yet, as soon as you move around in the first stages, you immediately get the complexity of your actions. What you do is simple, but how the level is structured makes you continuously think, trying to understand how to overcome obstacles. The key to the increasing challenge is the movement coordination between the two characters.

The game is short, but you can still appreciate many level design situations. And if you push forward your imagination, you realize you can create plenty of challenging combinations with that gameplay setup.

But why does Toy Cavers creates so much more complexity than standard platformer games?

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The answer is called Elegance, and it’s the hallmark of Gameplay done well.

Good Gameplay is a set of interactions that can create many situations with as few game mechanics as possible. And when a game does that, it’s called Elegant. Elegance is not the only thing that makes a game good, but it’s certainly one of the most crucial aspects.

An Elegant Game comes with several pros.

• It has a great amount of gameplay depth
• It’s easy to play due to few rules
• It creates a good amount of challenge
• It requires skill to master it
• It’s easy to create level-design content

The only drawback of elegant Gameplay is that it requires more effort to make than a non-elegant one.

By the way, if you liked Toy Cavers, you could also check out “Beyond the Ocean,” which is from the same author. The game uses a similar concept to Toy Cavers, but it’s also interesting; you can even download the demo and try it for free.

Recognizing Elegant Gameplay is good, but how do you create one exactly?

On Way To Make Your Gameplay Elegant

Elegance is generated by having gameplay Dynamic Complexity.

Elegance won't come out of thin air or through a "game design voodoo ritual" or whatever. You must do it intentionally by creating its most important precursor: Dynamic Complexity.

Dynamic Complexity is the number of different situations a player can overcome by using his gameplay actions. The more situations he can overcome, the higher the game's Dynamic Complexity. Let's give some examples. In Chess, you have a few moves you can make, but the amount of combinations of pieces on the board is insane; in Super Mario Bros., with just simple actions like move, jump and shoot, you can pretty much play the entire game, in Toy Cavers you do everything by just hooking the pickaxes, etc.

But Dynamic Complexity is not Elegance; it's just one of its determining factors.

The higher the Dynamic Complexity, the higher the potential for Elegance, and that's when Level Design comes in.

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When you create game levels, you need to leverage Dynamic Complexity to generate Elegance.

Level Design takes all the Gameplay elements and puts them inside game levels to create the game experience. Having high Dynamic Complexity means you can generate a lot of level setups to leverage that Gameplay.

The more level setup variations you can come up with, the more you can fulfill the gameplay potential and generate Elegance. And here, you’ll understand why Dynamic Complexity is essential. If it’s too low, you’ll end up with few possibilities of variations and thus with less Elegance. You can see now how Toy Cavers has Elegant Gameplay. The player must continuously improve at hooking those pickaxes to move on through many different level setups.

Elegant Gameplay doesn’t necessarily mean “Good Game”, but it’s certainly one of its ingredients.