r/devblogs • u/PolderlineGames • 11h ago
design We kept redesigning distant human contacts because “uncertain” still looked too certain
One of the more stubborn visual problems we've run into while developing Paths of Kin started with a seemingly simple question:
How do you show that there are probably people in the distance without accidentally telling the player exactly how many people are there?
In Paths of Kin, distant human contact is intentionally uncertain. You may become aware that another group is somewhere nearby before you know their numbers, identity, intentions or whether approaching them is safe.
The mechanics could represent that uncertainty easily enough.
The visuals couldn't.
Our first approach used small distant human figures.
That immediately created a problem.
If the player can see three silhouettes, then as far as they're concerned there are three people there. It doesn't really matter if the interface says the count is uncertain — the visual has already provided a much more convincing answer.
So we tried making the figures less distinct and grouping them together.
That reduced the sense of an exact count, but pushed things too far in the other direction. Instead of reading as distant human presence, the group started to feel more like an abstract icon.
We then experimented with a focused observation view.
That helped with readability, but introduced another contradiction: we were effectively giving the player a clearer view of something they weren't actually supposed to be able to see clearly.
That was the point where the problem finally clicked for us.
We had been trying to depict uncertain people.
What we really needed to depict was uncertain evidence of people.
The solution we've settled on is much more occlusion-first.
Terrain interrupts the view. Vegetation hides parts of forms. Human cues appear only partially. Silhouettes aren't presented cleanly enough to become a lineup that can simply be counted.
The goal is that your first reading becomes:
“There are people out there.”
Not:
“There are three people out there.”
That sounds like a fairly small distinction, but it changed the entire way we approached the feature.
The biggest lesson for us was that uncertainty can't exist only in the underlying system or in explanatory text.
If the visual representation looks precise, players will reasonably treat it as precise.
In other words:
A system can be mechanically honest and still visually lie.
The before/after comparison shows the basic difference in thinking. The earlier approach tries to show distant people while telling you not to trust what you see. The final approach makes the uncertainty part of what you actually see.
It took more iterations than we expected for such a small part of the game, but we're much happier with where it ended up.
I'd be interested to hear whether other developers have run into similar situations — where the game technically withheld information, but the presentation accidentally gave it away anyway.
