In the keynote to IndieCade 2011, Richard Lemarchand (lead game designer at Naughty Dog) talks about the "creative risk" to have this level in a village (Chapter 16, "Where am I") where they could have an "interactive, explorative sequence showing the village at a quiet day".
SKIP to 35:00 - 41:50:
If you didn't watch the video, here's a summary.
"However, some people at Naughty Dog didn't think this stroll through a quiet, sunny place was going to work at all. We were planning to disallow the player from running, jumping, climbing, and not be allowed to perform any of the combat moves on the villagers or pull out their gun. Now people thought this was going to be boring, and players would just recoil away from the constrained interactivity, when the rest of the game leading up to that point had been so rich.
However, I had played a game right around this sequence that had made me think this idea was definitely going to work. The name of the game was The Graveyard."
"I thought that in the same way that The Graveyard had created a space for me where I could reflect, so could our village."
An early playtest had players punching the villagers but with no effect, and he knew they were just testing the boundaries of interaction instead of trying to be mean. Which is why he added a reward for the intended interaction by the punch button leading to a friendly handshake animation with the villager.
"We discovered that they weren't trying to beat up the villagers, they were just testing the boundaries of the system," he said. "I think that's a very human kind of curiosity, and I worked with artists and animators who did all the really hard work to ensure that if you did try and punch a villager it would a show an animation of Drake shaking hands with them."
Mainstream games can learn from the lessons that indie games have to teach.
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