Making It Takes Two's Best Level

Welcome back to On the Level - a series in which I play awesome video game stages, alongside the designers who made them. This time I’m playing one of my favourite games of 2021: the endlessly creative co-op adventure, It Takes Two. This is a game about a bickering married couple - Cody and May - who get turned into toys and then must work together to travel through madcap miniature worlds. And that includes the level featured in today’s video: a tree in Cody and May’s garden.

Which is actually full of squirrel soldiers, killer wasps, and a giant robot bee. To fight back, the couple have a pair of handy weapons: Cody has a gun that shoots big globs of orange sap - and May has a crossbow that fires lit matches. And when the two collide - *Explosion*. To find out how this level was made, I talked to Oliver Granlund, a designer at Hazelight - who was one of the designers responsible for this level’s layout and game mechanics.

Now, usually on this series I will play the level, and the designer watches my screen over Zoom. But as this is a co-op game, I actually got to play with Oliver - I picked Cody and he chose May. And so, without further ado, here’s our conversation as we played through It Takes Two’s second chapter: The Tree. CODY: Ah, this way! MAY: What?! You're never gonna make that jump! CODY: Yeah? Watch me! Argh! MARK: So I always like to start by asking: how did this level begin development?

OLIVER: Originally, art were just exploring settings. You know. We know we're going to be shrunk, what kind of places could be fun? And tree was one of them that was explored by art very early as a very interesting location. And design right now is just doing prototyping, just going crazy with tons of different mechanics - and we found the sap and match gun. For the very beginning they were just loose prototypes but at some point they were paired together with the tree. They went through each and every mechanic and, like, paired it to a setting that art had prototyped.

And then we essentially gave each, like, designer or a pair of designers a level and then told them to, you know, make it, and come up with mechanics and everything in between. MARK: So you and designer Robert Johansson were responsible for the tree and also the snow globe, is that is that right? OLIVER: Yes that is correct. So I thought it would be interesting to show this level because a lot of people worked on this. This part was designed by a level designer named Henrik Sandin. This one was actually made quite late. From your perspective it might seem like of course this came first, but this actually came very late. And when the rest of the tree was made there were no swinging for example, and we had to go back and add that in everywhere.

I think this part turned out really well, especially like a very calm piece in between the storm, kind of. And also very much establishes everything around it. There are some cool smart things that are actually done here with like ants moving in the direction you're supposed to go. Like here for example. I think this was originally accidental: you know, art added them in and then people started following the ants and then, you know, the ants led you down like a hill and people jumped off and died. Henrik used that knowledge to his advantage.

MAY: We haven't got time for this! Is this a shortcut or not?

SQUIRREL: The wasps have invaded our tree, wiped out most of our tribe. You two must kill them. MARK: So how did the sap and match gun develop from a prototype to the final mechanic we see in the game? OLIVER: In the original version of it, it was only you sapped and you exploded. *Explosion* Which was very cool, especially for combat, but it didn't really work if we wanted to do puzzles. So that was one of the first things we did when taking them from a prototype stage to the next level is that we looked into how can we make them into more than just a fire and forget kind of thing. And that's where we started pushing, for example, the weight mechanic and the spinner mechanic.

An interesting thing here is that this is one of the few places where we actually have a separate tutorial for the players because, like, if you see a shooting sign (like on May’s screen) both players are gonna shoot it. And if you see yellow… you know, the common ‘use this’ language that's been established by games: both just shot at both things and were super confused. MARK: So you had to make sure each player, like, understood their separate roles?

OLIVER: Exactly. One thing we noticed, since we added weight as a property to, for example, the sap gun is that we had to be very grounded for people to be able to understand this. For example, if you weigh something down and something goes up they need to be connected. If you look at a lot of other levels they'll have just straight up, you know, Super Mario floating platforms. So what we did is for each level we set up our own rule set and our own internal logic. It's basically like teaching a player a new game in an hour.

MARK: And what challenges did you face in doing that? OLIVER: Well it's interesting because the sap gun is a very systemic weapon that has a lot of freedom. You can shoot this anywhere. And it was a decision we made very early on where you can you can go two routes: you can either go the the very restricted route where you'll have a white spot in a black room and that's the only place you can shoot. Or you can do the other way around, and that's the route we went with.

This could create problems where, you know, this cage… I have progress videos for you on. It's a very interesting progress of it. So this is one of the earliest prototypes I ever made. It might look super different, this big wasp nest, but the actual gameplay is very similar. But the problem was that you could sap on the outside, where May couldn't reach. And here we have version two: yeah this also hurts my soul. So Cody saps the roof instantly, so May has to look straight up… oh no. And, you know, it's just not nice. A lot of the work we did with these mechanics was eliminating places where you can do things that just doesn't feel nice.

And we still manage to keep the puzzle intact, with just tons of iteration and simplification. Design by subtraction. And I think that was really helpful here. Like some things came out kind of fully formed, but most things always needs, like, at least one or two passes. MARK: Okay, so this is the first co-op game on the show. How did you go about designing for two players? OLIVER: I think we can break it down to three types of co-op. You have what we call parallel co-op, and that is essentially just you're playing your own single player game with another person.

And then you have step-by-step co-op, which is essentially like you do something, that allows me to do something, it goes back and forth kind of. And then we have the third one which is like simultaneous co-op, which is when we're both having to act at the same time. We wanted a variety of all of these and I think pacing those moments in co-op is a big challenge to to make right. And that's something we care about a lot.

MARK: This lab section is great, what can you tell me about it? OLIVER: Here is one of the super early blockouts. Oh this is also, as you see, this is cringe-worthy to to watch. You know, it hurts. The general idea here… you know, the side-scroller camera, which made everything way way better, it's not here yet. MARK: And so when did that come in? OLIVER: I think it was still relatively early that we started experimenting with that.

But I think a lot of these things, like that you see here, they are obvious but it's more like I've built it, it doesn't work, okay… what's the next step to make this work? And a lot of the iteration was like that, you know, initial idea, oh cool they're gonna spin, and then not realising that there is gonna be camera problems, for example. And then you know, oh sh*t it's gonna work great if we just add a side-scrolling camera.

CODY: Hey, let me get out of here! OLIVER: Oh yes, have you played this one? MARK: No, I didn't see this the first time I played, I’m scared now. OLIVER: Yeah you should be. BOTH: *laughter*. MARK: How did these side interactions come about? OLIVER: After each big milestone, we basically played through the game and we played through with some play testers and then we looked at what problems there were. And one thing we reacted to was that there was too little to do, and so we went on a spree of creating both mini games and the side interactions. And there actually ended up quite a lot of them.

And how this one came about was, essentially, it started with a very simple ‘wouldn't it be fun if you could trap your friend’ and then ridicule them. And then ridicule turned into torture and, yeah, it went downhill from there. This kind of became our collectible in a way. We had a discussion very early, because we're a platformer, you know, of course we're gonna have collectibles. Right? Question mark. And we tried that and we didn't find a good purpose for it. We wanted to go another route, like we want to give meaning to the player or something they'd want. And what ended up happening was we created so many minigames and then we ended up hiding them a bit because they were sometimes a bit distracting, so that actually became our kind of collectible in the end.

MAY: Something’s coming! CODY: Killer wasps! MARK: This is our first combat encounter. What was that like to design? OLIVER: One thing that's very interesting about co-op combat is you have to think about it in a whole different way than you would normal combat. Especially if you're going for the simultaneous co-op where you're both acting. So, for example, in this case we actually have an asymmetrical relationship where you're the instigator and I'm the detonator. Which means that I actually don't have a lot to do until you sap one of them. So what we've done in the AI is make sure that more of them are aggressive to May, making it more interesting for me until she can detonate.

The other one is how do you handle if you're playing with a partner who who's not as skilled as you, or the other way around? And I think that that was one of the harder issues we had to answer. I think Tree is actually the hardest level in the game in terms of introducing a new player to it. It's the only level with combat and aiming for combat. But as you can tell when you play it… like, the auto aim system is very lenient and, like, we try to make the gameplay less about ‘can I hit the skill shot’ and more about making sure you dodge the wasp. Making sure that that you're spraying the right thing. And like all of that stuff instead. It's still one of the hardest mechanics for people who don't know how to use both sticks, but it ended up being way more usable than most first or third person shooters were at that stage.

MAY: Interesting mechanic looks like some type of tug of war. OLIVER: Oh you're good at this! Oh no! MARK: Yeah! Oh no that was easy. We need a rematch! OLIVER: I'll take a rematch on that one. This has to be cut from the show. MARK: Ah! OLIVER: Oh. Are you playing with a keyboard? MARK: Nope, just an Xbox controller. OLIVER: : Okay. I'm ashamed. MARK: So why did you decide to add in competitive minigames? OLIVER: So the whole game is about corporation, and it's very hard to break the pace of that.

And I think that a big reasoning behind us doing that was wanting to create, you know, a variation in moments, essentially, for the couples. Also kind of enforcing the story of them bickering. We had them in some places where, you know, the characters are bickering - now the players will be bickering. And it’s kind of fun and funny when you see that working out. And we tried to create a variety of minigames as well that would allow different kinds of players to win. We even have a literal chessboard in there. So the idea was that not everything would have to be technically skilled, because then the same person would win over and over.

MARK: I love this giant vault door, it has a really cool design. OLIVER: This one was actually the original, where you would spray on it to explode it. But it had to be so tiny to not make your camera go wide. So we ended up switching for this, basically turning. So, instead, we iterated on it and made it into this lid actually. So the prototypes were basically just moved around. MARK: Just how important is that iteration process?

OLIVER: I would say iteration was immensely important. We didn't have a lot of time to actually, like, make everything perfect. We aren’t triple A, we can't spend however much time we want on something. But we need to make it so that it's good enough for the player. Iteration was an immense part of that, I'd say. Even though a lot of the ideas were similar, I'd say the actual execution of them were quite different - wildly different, from beginning to end. Especially when you have so many mechanics that you're teaching.

Like half of it was, you know, working on the mechanics themselves. Maybe this isn't clear, maybe this isn't good. Can we communicate this better? Another half of that was just iterating on the puzzles themselves, making them smooth, making sure it's fun and intuitive. A lot of the things that are fun here, they aren't fun first pass. Taking something from idea to fun gameplay - it takes a lot more work than than you might realise. Because the way we worked, it's very similar to how Respawn structure their action blocks: make something in a week, and throw it in there. The one deceiving thing, though, is that even though it might take like a week to prototype and get playable, it might take way longer to polish. And that's something we realised, like, painfully so.

MAY: Don't worry, it's just a squirrel inside a robot. CODY: Yeah! A very big robot. It’s trying to kill us. You know, maybe we should just turn back… OLIVER: This is the cutscene that was added in later in the game when we realised… holy sh*t, this level is growing. So we had like a storyboard for the tree and then eventually we looked it over and we saw that it was supposed to be one hour… now if you play the tree you know that it's probably more than an hour. It's bordering on two hours. This actually was a problem because we had diluted the story with more gameplay because we we had so many prototypes.

One place where we actually filled in with story what was these places where, like, okay, here we're gonna need to put a cut scene. MARK: It must be really difficult to pace a story when the level keeps changing… OLIVER: Yeah, totally. And I think it’s… especially for this type of game, knowing how long can you go without having story, and also how long can you watch a cutscene without any gameplay. It's a very fine balance to not bore the players, but also not having them lose interest in their larger purpose in the story. It's interesting because it's something you don't really see until the game is done. A big reason why a lot of this doesn't land for a lot of games is because you can't see it as a whole until very late. You don't know if a segment is gonna get extended or shrunk, and it's very hard to judge that without the whole context. You're gonna have to do a lot of imagining to see the whole there.

MARK: And when you're balancing the story and gameplay, does one ever win out? OLIVER: The previous game we made was A Way Out which was very story focused. In this game I think that gameplay won out, but we try to keep them very balanced. One of our mottos is to try to marry gameplay and story - keep them together. We want some mechanics to have a multi-purpose kind of… you know, they’re filling story. For example, like, the magnets are about attraction. Clockwork is about time. You know, we call them emotional levels.

MARK: So one of the things I love about this game is just the sheer variety of gameplay. Where did that come from? OLIVER: That was one of our core pillars all the way through. We don't want to repeat things. And so we we questioned the very classical Nintendo's game design, you know the four step level design rule. That's a great way to do it and we do at some places, but we were more interested in cramming out as much variety as we could. In another game the whole boat thing could have been like an entire game, but here it's a five minute segment. We could have definitely extended and had some ideas for how to make it 30 minutes long, but I think that would have ultimately made a worse game.

MARK: How much depth do you give a mechanic if it's only going to be there for a few minutes? OLIVER: There is a lesson there that depth doesn't mean it's good if you don't have time to use it. And I think that's something where we talk about ‘finding good enough’ which is one of our kind of pillars as well. Like ‘variety’ and ‘finding good enough’. And they go hand in hand. How deep does it have to be? It doesn't have to be like a deep 20 hour mechanic if you're just gonna do it for five minutes. And I think that's a very important thing: knowing when to stop. Because the players might not appreciate anything beyond that point. What we did now is we try to take all the best things that we found and put them in the level instead of, you know, finding all the things and dragging them out.

CODY: Whoa, I think they're bringing out the big guns now! OLIVER: This thing took it took a while to get working: the swarm technology, the one with the hammer, the whole system for this. And for it to go like seamlessly from one fight into this slide. This was quite a lot of work but I think it was it was worth it in the end. CODY: Hey hey! Don't do that! OLIVER: Sometimes as a designer you're kind of like I'm doing this thing, it's going to be very very expensive, I really hope it's gonna be cool so I'm not wasting everyone's time, you know.

MARK: Yeah, as a designer like you're giving lots of work to programmers and artists. So how do you make that relationship work? OLIVER: I do believe it's very important to think of, you know, the final look before you actually commit to anything. We give art, you know, like an abstract piece of gameplay and it's like ‘what could this be?’ and, you know, art sits there, and they're looking at it, and they're like… it's not fun for anyone.

MARK: Are there times when an artist made something that like really surprised you? OLIVER: So, so many things. Like the the whole lab section, you know the big wheels, this one was kind of like, I’d say, one of the prototypes that didn't really have a good context. You know. Why do you have big spinning wheels? And they turned it into this very elaborate lab that ended up influencing parts of the story. And I think that a lot of the times both art and programming as well would just build things that surprised us and I think that, you know, it's very true that game development is, you know, it's a team sport.

CODY: Aww… now what! MAY: I think we need to head that way… CODY: Come on May, we can't swim in this. MAY: We're going by boat! Help me out! OLIVER: I wanted to show you the iteration of the boat because you asked me a bit about how we prototyped and I actually have the setup here. The initial idea was that you'd shoot and the boat would propel in the other direction. This is a terrible idea: you don't see where you're going. Absolutely terrible. And, you know, it's no worries - we made it in like a very short time.

So then we took the the second question: okay how can we make this in a way that feels fun and easy to control? We landed on this one which was basically you controlled it with a rudder. This was very fun to control but it didn't match the kind of rules we had set for ourselves. As I said before, each kind of designer of a level set rules and Robert and I had decided that our things were gonna be kinetic. We were gonna avoid as much UI as possible and we would like to use the weapons. Instead of having a lever you press Y on, you would blow something up.

So that's when we came up with essentially taking the same kind of function but tying it to the actual mechanic. So here you press the fire button to just start going. I think we're great at being reactive: we make something, play test it, talk about it, and then we change it. I think that that's one of our strengths. It's definitely like one of the things that I think made this game great in the long run. MAY: Wow! They are beautiful!

CODY: Yeah… deadly beauty. Jellyfish can be lethal, we better get moving. MARK: So at this point the level starts getting really weird: were there rules for how strange the game could get? OLIVER: No, no. There definitely wasn’t. In meetings the feedback was ‘could we make it a bit crazier’ from Josef… I think, like, think Avatar on LSD or something. So we did. It's definitely out there: this is one of the moments where people playing, you know, they’re like ‘are we still in the tree’?

CODY: You know, I am getting really tired of falling. MAY: Well be grateful you're in good shape. CODY: Oh yeah? Thanks May! MAY: I meant good shape in this world. CODY: Oh. MARK: What was your approach to pacing the level? OLIVER: So I think this is something we probably should have paid a bit more attention to because we were just focused on creating cool sh*t and variety. A lot of games have to care about pacing in another way than we do: what they pace is the repetition of content. Here you're gonna have platforming, here you're gonna have a combat encounter, here you're gonna have platforming, here you're gonna have combat again. And to not make that boring you have to make sure that you're pacing it correctly with enough variety. we didn't have that problem as our game was just full of variety by the baseline. We just created new mechanics all the time.

But we still have to make sure we pace intensity so that people don't get exhausted or people don't get bored. You still have to make sure to pull the intensity curve up and down. CODY: Oh, whoa… MAY: What is this place? CODY: Uh, I don't know but they look pretty angry. MAY: Yeah they do. OLIVER: This one is one of the most intense fights in the game actually. MARK: What do you remember about designing it? OLIVER: We actually wanted the beetle to be like a mini enemy. And at one point we said, yeah, we don't need that variety - should we just make it into a boss? Which is not really what we intended because there is a boss right after this.

But after the passes it became that way - I missed it, that was my fault… MARK: No worries! OLIVER: And I remember iterating on this so many times to make it more difficult for, like, platformer and reducing the skill it needed from a mechanical or an aiming level. For example the grates were both a switch up from what you'd done earlier but also reduce the amount of, you know, how much aiming you need to do. In an earlier version we had it so that you had to like shoot it on the butt, but it required like a lot of mechanical skill and communication on our side to make that happen, you know. To go in behind, aim, you know, it was a lot of stuff… CODY: Well, uh, you know the queen? She has all the nectar. So if you help us take her down, you can have as much nectar as you want!

BEETLE: Oh yummy! What are we waiting for? Come on, jump on! MAY: Jump! QUEEN WASP: Intruders! MARK: Okay so now we're facing the final boss of the level and I was just curious about the design of the game's health system. OLIVER: We actually had some different health systems we prototyped. We prototyped a Gears of War type of health system where one player dies and you have to go and revive them. That didn't work because of the sheer variety of our gameplay, you never know if you're dying during a platforming section or if you're separated. So that didn't work. We tried a shared health bar in the very middle of the screen and this idea seems great: you're sharing health, that's co-op, but what happened is if you had one player that was really good and one that was really bad, the bad player would just take damage over and over and then they would both die - instead of allowing the good player to carry them. So what we ended up on is just like a timer that that goes down,

as long as you're both living. It becomes this kind of cheer on, like, ‘don't die, don't die, I'm almost back!’ that ended up being actually quite effectful I'd say. We generally didn't want players to have to replay parts either, that kind of goes against our motto of variation. Our health system ties into that because if one of us dies that's fine and then we'll just spawn in eventually, so it basically becomes like you have two lives. It's fun to die because then you feel like I'm challenged and you get that stress, but it's not fun to redo it.

*Explosions* OLIVER: It's funny because a lot of people reacted to the beetle dying here. Which, for us, the beetle was kind of a throw-in, like, that was a one week prototype that we threw in. They were like ‘oh no the beetle’ and we're like, ‘oh yeah, the beetle, that's right’, and we didn't think of that at all. It's kind of funny. MAY: Come on Cody, over here! You drive! CODY: What, May, this is a plane - it's not a station wagon!

MAY: Just fly! MARK: This plane section is really memorable, what can you tell me about it? OLIVER: So this was made by Per Stenbeck. You had the storyboards already, and we had the plane in there from like a story perspective, I think, before there was a prototype. And I think that this could have easily just been like a flight section that's that's kind of cool but it took some turns where it went even further than that.

And what happened was that they had this idea of the squirrels that are flying behind you that they would like land on the plane and you'd have to like shoot them off-- oops. MARK: Sorry! OLIVER: They they were talking about that and they were like ‘oh what if you could jump out of the turret and like kinda kick them off’ and then somebody said ‘like Street Fighter?’. SQUIRREL: Time to say goodbye little doll. Can't wait to smash your wooden face!

MAY: I can't wait to kick your furry arse! OLIVER: You know it's one of those things where in a lot of game companies those ‘what-ifs’, they don't happen. But they do happen here and I think that's one amazing quality about Hazelight. And I think kudos to everyone who worked on that because I think it turned out to be a great highlight. ANNOUNCER: KO! MAY: I’m here! OLIVER: This part is like a homage to Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons where you have a section kinda like this but with the brothers, but now in co-op. And, yeah, it worked excellently. And I think this whole section is great because you get variation. You know we've gone through three stages of plane but they all feel different. And I think that speaks to the, you know, like integral to the way we worked was just variety and both from art, programming, and design, everyone really got to add their own flair to everything and have so much ownership that it just naturally became so different.

CODY: Oh! Oh! MAY: That is the last time I'm flying by the seat of your pants. CODY: Oh ha-ha, you're real comedian, you know that? MAY: Ah, thank you. MARK: And so there we have it. It was fascinating to hear about how the sap and match gun evolved from a purely combat-focused mechanic, to a puzzle-solving tool. And it was great to look at the step-by-step process of going from prototype to polished game mechanic. Plus, this conversation really highlighted the very collaborate nature of level design. And, as such, Oliver wanted to thank a handful of colleagues - OLIVER: I would like to thank Robert, Alexander, and Tom, who helped with the video. and I would like to thank Robert, Per, Henrik, and Filip who all worked on Tree and made it excellent.

As usual, a full level playthrough and conversation is available exclusively to Patreon backers. And if you want to support Game Maker’s Toolkit, please check out this quick YouTube ad before we get to the indie game recommendation. My indie game recommendation this time is Umurangi Generation - a low-poly photography game with a subversive sense of humour. In each level you're dropped into a 3D environment with a camera and a list of things to snap. You'll need to find each target and figure out the right lens to use and the right spot to stand on. If you agree with me that photography is an excellent video game mechanic, play Umurangi Generation. It's out now on PC and Switch.