Valheim’s biggest secret? Trust the player

I am totally delighted with the early access survival game Valheim, and with more than 4 million copies sold since launch, I’m not alone. I am also a avid a fan of survival games and I reproduce practically every example of the genre I can find.

But something about Valheim is different. More refined and elegant. It all comes down to one thing: design a negative space.

The concept came about while I was sitting with our design team at Blackbird Interactive during our weekly Design Sync, in which we discussed recent games, design principles and phenomena. The team is made up of brilliant designers at all career stages: Elliot Hudson, our creative director; Jeremy Hardy, who leads our ship team; Ian Longiaru and Ryan LeMesurier, who are part of the ship design team; Jason Barth, who works on our economy and progression systems; and Vidhi Sha, who is our designer behind many internal systems and user experience work.

Negative space is the principle that, in any artistic medium, what you leave out is just as important as what you include. The human brain is predisposed to take into account what is missing as much as what is included, whether that means seeing additional shapes in a painting or allowing its art to occupy the space necessary to display it to its full potential.

The negative space in game design generally refers to three things: the pace of how content is exposed to players, how systems interact with each other and the complexity of those systems. And so Valheim uses negative space to great effect, and the most important requirement to make this approach work well.

You have exactly how much time you need

A lot of ValheimThe ingenuity of is in its intelligent progression system, which exhibits an underlying confidence in the player. If you’ve ever played a game that seemed to be constantly looking forward to running out of things to do and you were playing system after system and search after search on you … well, Valheim is the antithesis of that.

You start with a simple mission: build a small shelter and get to know the first two biomes. The meadows are deliberately serene and safe. You can find a gray dwarf here and there, but on the whole, this is the anchor for most of the progression in the world and the place I always go back to as I venture further and further. Meadows intentionally offer many features, signaling safety and plenty of space to play with the construction system.

THE Valheim The team is careful about how the game exposes progress and resources to you, making you work hard and overcome a series of challenges to reach the next batch of resources to manage.

Each resource collected is on an increasing risk curve that matches well with your personal skill and equipment progression, which means that focus is prioritized and the game never gets too heavy or overwhelming with resource management.

For example, Valheim starts by joining wood, stone and flint. These resources are related to the progression towards the construction of tools and weapons, which are perfectly adequate for its first two biomes: the meadows and the black forest. Other features that require more advanced game equipment to be processed are not something you can achieve and may even be out of sight or blocked by an escalating risk.

Going to the plains or swamps would be a death sentence at this stage, so there is little temptation to try to move forward before you are ready. Each area prepares you for the next, at your own pace, while protecting you from the overwhelming amount of possibilities in mixing different tools, biomes and enemies at the same time. It is up to you to learn and grow and decide when to move on to the next challenge.

Until Valheimthe company’s building system does that! Having access only to wooden buildings at the beginning and without stone and iron beams, for example, helps to understand and work with the construction system at a basic level before moving on to more complex ideas. There is enough space to experiment and get lost significantly at each stage of progression and to spend as much time as you want.

Each progression section is culminated in a very challenging boss fight, which leads to progression to new tools, biomes and equipment until you are ready for them. It’s a brilliant system for deliberately creating negative space, giving players time and freedom to experiment with current tools until they’re really ready to take on more systems. There is never a hurry. After proving that you understand the fundamentals of the building system and how to survive, you unlock the ability to mine by defeating the first boss, allowing you to further explore the possibilities for new features.

Provide simplicity, let the player bring complexity

Designing negative spaces requires developers to give players space for experimentation and imagination without messing up the screen with too much content, and for them to overcome their internal anxiety about whether players have enough to do.

THE Valheim the developers seem to trust themselves as much as they do the players. Valheim it does not need complex skill trees; instead, players learn by doing. You progress using tools and weapons and repeating tasks. This leads players to try all sorts of different loadouts – game designers sometimes refer to the way players experience them as “expressions” – during the game. Therefore, no tools or actions are wasted; all the time invested in trying and trying new things is valid and usually produces positive results for progression.

As part of your combat system, Valheim leans towards simplicity and elegance similar to games like Dark Souls and even Breath of the Wild: A handful of weapon types, a resistance system and a parry / block system are enough to make it shine. No skills, no spells – just you and your enemies. All of this is thematically correct, housed in the philosophy of not disorder with enough complexity to reward players who explore the limits and use cases of each weapon to find out where their personal preferences are.

Even as an avid survival game player with an affinity for construction, I was surprised at how much freedom and fun I would take away Valheimapparently simple and limited construction system. The structural parts available are much less than expected. But, in combination with free-form positioning and the ability to fit the pieces together, taking stability into account, many expressions become exciting for the player.

From those who want to build a simple hut, to those who want to build big and authentic malocas, even those looking to make brilliant sculptures: Valheim it always leaves enough space for players to express themselves, even within their simple rules and options.

This is also an expression of the negative space of design: a limited canvas, limited pieces, but everything can be used, but you can get away with it safely. The possibilities for experimentation and imagination seem to be in almost perfect balance with the amount of options offered to the player: Never much, always more capable than it may seem at first.

Trust your player

In fact, it all comes down to a directive, used elegantly: Trust your player.

Valheim does it with mastery. It doesn’t require you to get lost in complex metagame mazes and no skill tree gets in the way. The design seems to say one thing: just go out and play. There is always enough to do, always more to explore; you can take as much or as little time as needed at each stage. There are always enough pieces to play with in this kind of interconnected system of seemingly simple features that keep you alert.

Games that give the player as much freedom for experimentation and discovery as Valheim has the confidence of the player as its most important ingredient. Elegance in design, and especially in the design of negative spaces, requires designers to trust that players will find pleasure in filling that negative space with joy, comedy, creativity or anything else they desire. But they have to trust that the players will do something of value with that.

It’s a scary thing to do as a developer: our audience always has other games to play, more delays to resolve. Sometimes, we feel compelled to create dense content to keep the player’s attention. Sometimes, the need for a smaller scope can take that decision away from us, and sometimes we ourselves make the decision to entrust our players with space to experiment. But in any case, doing so requires a trust that is not easy to achieve.

At first sight, Valheim it may not seem like a game that inspires such qualities. But his huge success and word of mouth spread, in my opinion, all due to that particular formula.

Trust your player to fill their play spaces with art, like wonderfully built sculptures and cities, and comedy, like all the videos of players hilariously being hit by a domino effect from falling trees – that’s what gives community-dependent games the most heart.

All developers need to do is provide the screen … and enough space for players to breathe.