The UX of Birthdays The Beginning
Phenomenal Cosmic Powers! Itty Bitty Living Space!
I was fascinated with Birthdays the Beginning since seeing its initial screenshots. The game, featuring adorably designed critters and focused on evolution, appealed to my inner science nerd. After actually playing the game, however, it was clear that poor UX choices mar the experience. Despite those stumbles, it felt important to write about this game. The combination of highlights and flaws make Birthdays an especially interesting UX case study. And despite the recent release of cosmetic DLC there isn’t much excitement left for Birthdays. After all, it’s a niche title, about evolving life in a space terrarium. It’s made by the creator of the cult-classic farming game, Harvest Moon. Just a few months since release, Birthdays has quietly fallen off the radar. Soon, no one will be writing about this game, which is an awful shame.
Birthdays’ descent into obscurity is understandable. Not many people will play it in the first place. The game is a niche title, from the creator of a niche series. The gameplay is relatively shallow. Indeed, most players will finish the tutorial in six or seven hours. After that, the game only features skimpy challenge and free-play modes. Even in those modes, gameplay is mostly using a couple of buttons to push around soil. It doesn’t have the freedom of Minecraft, or the adventures of Dragon Quest Builders. I really like the game’s visuals, but doe-eye velociraptors and wooly mammoths probably aren’t the key to financial success.
Birthdays is a flawed game. From a UX perspective, it’s often a deeply flawed game. However, I think it’s worth writing about those UX flaws. There are plenty of UX lessons in Birthdays’ missteps. And despite its flaws, Birthdays is charmingly dorky and sincere. Even if it’s not perfect, it is worth writing about how the game both succeeds and fails.
Give Me Something to Do!
The premise of Birthdays is pretty simple (or it’s one of the most complex things ever). The player is given a cosmic terrarium cube, and is tasked with kickstarting life. The player then helps it evolve from the simplest single-celled creatures, to dinosaurs, and even human beings.
In Birthdays, temperature is the key to life. The player — in one of the game’s best touches, through a sentai-themed avatar — is able to control it, though only indirectly. Much of the “action” in the game is raising and lowering the ground. Raising land makes the world colder, while lowering land makes it hotter. Therein lies one of the biggest issues with Birthdays. The player spends the vast majority of time lowering and raising earth to create the correct conditions for specific species.
There are some other mechanics, though they aren’t as robust. Birthdays features an in-game encyclopedia, which the player fills by finding new life forms and snapping a picture. Additionally, the game world is littered with power-up items, which the avatar can collect by zooming around like a jet plane. Some items modify moisture, create rivers, mutate creatures, or increase their population. However, most items only increase or decrease temperature. The items simply save the player the work of manipulating the ground, the game’s core mechanic. It should serve as a major warning when an item simply bypasses the game’s central gameplay feature.
Those mechanics are relatively minor, however, compared to the main mechanic, in which the player is simply a cosmic landscaper. While I have an expansive view of what “gameplay” can include, there are multiple issues with Birthdays’s core play flow. It’s frustrating to influence the game only indirectly. Using land to influence the temperature is also mechanically fiddly. That’s especially true as the player alters the landscape, then waits for the temperature to change, and then waits (and waits, and waits) for lifeforms to appear.
Hiding the Ball
That said, other games can hang an enjoyable experience from one central gimmick. Portal, for example, relies heavily on its titular portal mechanic. Similarly, if Birthdays leans heavily into the evolution portion of the gameplay, that mechanic should be compelling. Unfortunately, the game hides critical information, making evolution even more frustrating.
An example from my playthrough involved an early amphibian. Not knowing better, I used a mutation stone on it, and it quickly evolved into a new form, which quickly took over its predecessor. Unfortunately, a population of the original amphibian was a necessary checkpoint in the tutorial. Even playing for another 30 minutes, I wasn’t able to make it appear again. Instead, I had to restart from my last save and try again.
In another example, after a few scenarios, the game stops giving hints on how to create checkpoint species, including T.Rex. The game helpfully suggests that two other animals, eoraptor and plesiosaur, are required for T.Rex to appear. However, the game doesn’t clarify how to create those critters.
Without that information, waiting for the reptiles to appear was a slog. Even with the right conditions creature evolution is randomized. Therefore, the game becomes a loop of adjusting the temperature and waiting. The encyclopedia feature can help, but I was never clear if it was intended to do so. It contains silhouettes of the creatures, plus some tips on how to make them appear. It’s not always easy to guess the species from its silhouette, though. For example, the long-necked plesiosaur is easy to spot. Eoraptor, however, is harder to peg.
In my playthrough, eoraptor appeared quickly. However, plesiosaur was difficult to will into life. Even when one appeared, the delicate animal went extinct quickly. I spent considerable time making fine adjustments. Then I waited for the creature to appear. When it did, I waited more for the plesiosaur population to grow large enough to support Tyrannosaurus.
Another example of the game hiding information is the mini-map. As the world grows, the map becomes more important. It’s a necessity in finding items and new life. The map can be flipped to see specific objects. However, the game doesn’t make it clear what each view represents, especially after the tutorial. I even dug through the in-game help to make sure. I eventually realized which view represented new life, but it was harder than necessary.
Finally, the game refers to a lot of creatures by scientific name. I recalled that Mus refers to mice, but other species were more obscure. For example, I had to look up Triticum and Olea. You may better know those species as wheat and olives. That opacity is frustrating because both plants are necessary to create another checkpoint species, humans. There’s something geeky and endearing about the game’s use scientific names. Perhaps, though, it should have come with a guide for us non-scientists.
Itty Bitty Living Space
Birthdays is available on the Playstation 4 and PC. I played the PS4 version with the PS4 controller. It’s an awkward fit. A Push Square review notes the game’s controls are “generally confounding.”
Movements works as one expects, but other functions are tied to the controller buttons. The game has so many functions, holding down L1 changes the functions of many of the buttons. That’s on top of a different control scheme for the games macro mode, described below. The game’s controls are confusing to explain, but they’re even more confusing to use. Even at the end of the tutorial I was still confused as to which button did what. Unlike, say Dark Souls, the complex controls never became second-nature.
The game doesn’t help. The first tutorials explain the controls in rapid succession. It’s hard to retain each button’s functions because they’re taught in a tutorial vomit. Even the in-game help doesn’t adequately recap many of the functions. It’s a masterclass in how not to teach a player complex controls.
One might assume the PC release would be better. After all, that platform can assume the use of a mouse and keyboard. Unfortunately reports online suggest that the game doesn’t control well on PC either. It seems clear that the game was designed for the console controller first, with PC controls retro-fitted as an afterthought.
The Waiting Game
As noted above, a lot of the game is spent waiting. The main gameplay is split into two sections, micro and macro mode. In micro mode, the player zooms into the world. Time pauses, and the player can modify soil, find creatures, or pick up items. In macro mode, the avatar zooms out and time passes as the world turns. Much of the game is spent switching between the two screens.
The game likely didn’t need these two parts. Particularly when macro mode is mostly spent watching the cube rotate, and species rise and fall. Switching between modes feels clunky. It also takes up precious (physical and cognitive) controller space.
Macro mode does benefit from appropriately grand music. It’s also compelling to watch populations rise and fall, new creatures spring to life, or old ones go extinct. However, on this Birthdays pushes the line between game and screensaver. The Polygon review of the game suggests that the PC version, confined to an extra monitor, might be an interesting distraction. On a single TV screen though, macro mode isn’t compelling enough. The player will spend time in macro simply waiting for creatures to appear, or populations of existing creatures to reach a certain size.
The screen also features some of the worst sound effects I’ve ever heard in a video game. These sound effects play when populations drop and when lifeforms go extinct. Unfortunately drastically increasing or decreasing the temperature, something necessary throughout the tutorial to create new life, wipes out many existing species. Get used to those grating sounds as they play constantly.
The game also limits player action with an HP mechanic. In micro mode, the Avatar’s actions cost HP. When those points are used up, the avatar must return to macro mode. Allowing time to pass refreshes HP, and the limit is increased as new life is catalogued. The mechanic is mostly useless, because I rarely ran into the HP limit. Towards the end of the tutorial, the HP limit was so high it was difficult to use it all.
In nearly all games, waiting is a part of gameplay. Take grinding to gain new abilities in an RPG like Persona 5, the pre-match wait periods in Overwatch, or enemy turns in XCOM. However, the implications for those waits are obvious to the player. New abilities in an RPG make it easier to battle. The pre-match waiting room in Overwatch affords a chance to check team composition. Enemy turns in XCOM reveal whether the player strategy in previous turns worked. Enemy turns also create gameplay implications for later turns. In all these situations “waiting” has immediate, obvious gameplay implications.
This is not true in Birthdays. Instead, waiting is often just waiting. While it sometimes leads to new life, even that’s shallow payoff. The creatures that inhabit the cube don’t interact with each other. Other than being cute they don’t do much at all, so beside the initial joy of creating them, there isn’t much depth. Plus, the appearance of specific organisms is based on world conditions and RNG. Therefore it’s difficult to know how long a waiting period will last. Sitting around for new life isn’t compelling enough to justify the amount of time spent waiting. For all its other faults, Birthdays would be a much more interesting game if there was less waiting, the rewards for waiting were better, or both.
Life is Messy
Birthdays The Beginning is charming. The beautiful music fits the game’s cosmic scale. The creatures, especially as they begin to evolve faces, are are a joy. The sentai Avatar is stroke of genius. Even the inky void of space is lovely. However, there are plenty of UX mistakes that make Birthdays a difficult game to enjoy. The controls are complex and confusing. Even worse, they’re not well explained. The game often makes key information frustratingly hard to find. There are even typos throughout the English localization. As for gameplay, most of the game is spent simply raising and lowering dirt. That’s problematic for both the gameplay and UX. When the player isn’t pushing around soil, they’re often just waiting for something to happen.
To me, the biggest lesson from Birthdays is how good decisions can be impacted by frustrating UX. For example, it’s hard to enjoy (the legitimately) beautiful design and graphic work when the UX makes the game hard to play. The complex controls ruin the satisfying airplane zoom of the avatar. Obscure scientific names suck the joy out of the game’s menagerie. Even the typos distract from the game’s content. For every good or compelling decision, the game seems to find a way to make it less fun.
Another takeaway involves how games teach players to play. A game can forgo a manual if the first level(s) help teach the player. Good games can also have complex controls. Some, like Dark Souls use the controller in a logical way. Others, like Civilization VI are so complex that they require the mouse and keyboard. In either case, those controls must be taught to the player. Those lessons can’t come all at once, either. They must be reinforced, and it should be easy for the player to check them again later in the game. Birthdays fails here at every step. The game’s controls are so complex that the control tutorial resembles cramming the night before a final exam.
Finally, it’s clear that Birthdays’ UX flaws are intertwined with its gameplay issues. The relatively unrewarding gameplay and the constant cycle of waiting bleed into UX. Great UX couldn’t save mediocre gameplay. However, it could have made the experience less frustrating. Smart UX also would not have distracted as much from the game’s actual accomplishments. UX and gameplay need to be thought about organically, as pillars supporting the same goal. Many games get this right, giving the player the right information at the right time, by rewarding patience, and by using gameplay mechanics to make up for UX compromises. Unfortunately Birthdays is often not one of those games.
For me, the biggest shame in Birthdays is how UX lets down the art and graphics. I can’t help but think of the designers who created and turned in fantastic work which is less compelling because of unrelated UX (and game development) decisions. UX is a team sport, and it’s clear that UX professionals have an important role in the success of others. Dropping the ball (or cube), as in Birthdays, impacts not only UX but the others’ hard work too.
