"The great thing is that there isn't just one spicy dish that you can eat to improve your spice-eating ability," Yu said. Its user interface forces players to slow down, which many people find frustrating, but the point is for your island to feel "like a place to live, rather than to min-max and optimize and get the biggest house as fast as you can." He gave the example that Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons isn't a difficult game, but it still has elements of spiky design. Yu's descriptions of spiky and soft game design are similar to the common descriptors of 'hardcore' and 'casual,' but he said he thought those terms were "too loaded" now, and too focused on difficulty, which isn't always necessary in spiky design. That gave players a place to relax and practice between runs, and a way to feel a sense of progression even if they died. He wanted to make Spelunky 2 softer without making it less spiky, which he did by expanding the base camp. Yu also made the point that games aren't just spiky or soft-they'll always contain elements of both kinds of design.
The biggest takeaway for me was that soft design makes the player feel like you're the center of the game world, rather than an inhabitant of it. What Yu calls 'soft' design, by comparison, emphasizes player comfort and progress, minimizing negative feelings about your interactions with the world. The 'flavor' of spiky game design is that feeling of the game world being able to exist without you and the big, rewarding consequences around how you interact with it. (Image credit: Derek Yu) (opens in new tab)