Sly Cooper and M Plus One

I spent one magical week buried deep in Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus. I voraciously tore through the game's story and worked myself to the limit to clear the game's extra challenges. When I beat the game fully, I was rewarded with developer commentary unlocked for each stage. Whatever possessed me, I decided to take a listen. The Journey I took through Sly's development only made me appreciate the game all the more and introduced me to a fascinating concept: "M plus one."

For the uninitiated, Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus is a platforming game that challenges the player to win through stealth rather than combat. You play the role of the titular Sly Cooper, infamous thief, as he slinks, jumps, and swings around a wild variety of creative and stylish stages. In this game, the equally titular Thievius Raccoonus, a book containing the secrets of the Cooper family, has been stolen and separated page-by-page all over the world. Sly - and you - must use his family's legacy of skills and know-how to recover the pages, reassemble the heirloom, and thwart the ambitions of the villainous guilty party.

And I repeat, this is a stealth game. You are given a complex, hallway, building, etc. and your goal is to reach your target without being seen. All of the stages have tight security, so you'll be sneaking through the shadows, above everyone's heads, and taking shortcuts that keep you out of plain sight.  Therefore the environment design is very important not only to this game's presentation, but how it plays. Every power line, window, rail and pole is free game for getting around. And don't think this is all optional, because being caught or trying to engage an enemy head-on is recipe for disaster. You are a capable fighter able to single out targets, but you won't last long in a really hot area. Besides, it just feels cool to take secret paths and leap around rafters in a borderline parkour fashion.

You'll want to stay up and above this guard

I came for the story, the characters, the setting and the gameplay, and I stayed for the time trial challenges. Beating levels unlocks challenge versions of those stages. They aren't any different, but you'll be racing a strict timer. Beat the timer, and you beat the challenge. Beat the challenge, like I said above, and developer commentary is added to the game. And this isn't simply audio that you hear in a menu. The game actually places an object at the beginning of each stage that begins the audio log. If you're so inclined, you can play through the stage while the audio is playing. You can play the game and learn about the development process at the same time!

I essentially played the game three times. One for story, two for challenges, and third for the commentary. I am a complete sucker for any behind-the-scenes look at game creation, so I had no problem coasting through a third time with a developer talking in the background. Every stage had something new to note. The developer would talk about designing stages, character, enemies, the world, the story, and the gameplay. I distinctly remember one stage where the developer talked about how a stage's lighting worked for style and visibility. Sure enough, I looked around at the stage while I was hearing about the lighting and could absolutely see what the developer was talking about.

One topic that came up in the commentary was a concept called "M plus one." As described by the developer, M plus one is the design practice of introducing new concepts into the game and training the player to be proficient in those new concepts. "M" stands for "mechanic," and the "plus one" stands for the way which the game will gradually make the concept more challenging. This way, it forces the player to get better at that concept and prepare them for the puzzles and bosses ahead.

This game also has collectibles, colorful characters, great design, and more. I could go on but I can only fit so much in an article

Let's look at Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus as an example. If you want to get onto a higher platform, you jump to gain that height. However you can also jump to cross over gaps that you can't run over. Meanwhile, Sly has a cane that he uses in combat and as a way to operate levers. There are also poles that Sly can use his cane on to swing from and cross larger gaps. Now imagine instead of a gap, you're leaping off the side of a cliff and trying to land on a platform that is moving. See how M plus one works? You have these simple concepts, you hone them through a series of challenges, and then you combine these concepts to make all-new challenges that still fit with what you know about the game and the world.

Hearing it plainly like that is one thing, but where and when they place the commentary for their explanation could not be more perfect. You see, the explanation of M plus one comes relatively late in the game, when we've already had experience learning concepts and combining them without a name for it. In comes this developer talking about M plus one. At this point I am exploring around a casino-like stage while the developer rattles off examples of M plus one. And I kid you not, he talked about what I was doing at that exact moment.

In the casino stage, I was jumping between platforms. The platforms were actually large roulette tables, and they were spinning. This made it a little more difficult to jump properly since the very ground beneath me was moving me around. At the same time, there were bars of electricity that I had to jump over. When the roulettes weren't trying to spin me into those bars, they were spinning in the opposite direction of where I was trying to go so I would have a more difficult time jumping over the electricity! And right when I am dealing with this situation, the developer is talking about that very stage that I'm playing, that very obstacle I'm up against. I felt a connection with the developers at that moment. It really drove home for me that amount of care and planning went into this game.

The actual M plus one commentary - starts at about 1:38 in the video

My friends, I love this concept. It's one way to learn and I am pretty sure it's one of the most commonly employed methods of learning out there. But now we have a name for it, and a pretty cool name at that. The more I think about it, the more I realize it's good to have a name for the way we're learning and to really break it down. After all, what is one of the most common pieces of advice for tackling a large task? To break it down into smaller tasks. Good advice, but I know it's hard to do such breaking down when I'm flustered. The issue in my case is that I'm going the wrong way for my personal style. To break a big task down into smaller tasks, I'm still faced with making any sense of the daunting large task.

Using M plus one, however, the focus is on what I am capable of and how it equates to the end goal. For instance, I'm currently learning programming and have been tasked to make a bunch of programs from financial report generators to simple games. Often when I get these assignments, I look at what's required and my mind just burns out trying to figure out how to get there from a blank page of code. When I take inventory of what I know and how to use what I know to build up a program, I'm better able to calm down, find my center, and get to work.

If I want to make a calculator app, let's start from the ground up. I know how to make the program perform math functions. I know how to make the program take numbers from the user. I know how to make the program tell if the user puts in letters instead of numbers. I know how to make the program show the result of the equation. And so on and so on. From there, it's a matter of taking these things I know separately and combining them in a way that creates a program that acts like a calculator.

With some confidence and mastery of your basics, you too can be cool just like this speed runner!

This is a simple example, but it gets my point across. The real important part is to find where you are comfortable starting in your planning process and use that to its fullest effect. There are plenty of projects where you'll need to start from the top in order to spread the work among a team. But eventually, you will have to start and you will start from some sort of bottom. If you're too focused on the top to do your job or do it well, then M plus one will help you gain that focus. In that sense, we may think of M plus one as a jumping-off point for a task or project rather than a full guide from start to finish. I know it helps me out to, at some point, look directly at what I am holding in my hands. Just like Sly Cooper planning to snatch a treasure starting off with just his cane, wits, and agility.

How about you? Does M plus one ring a bell? Or do you have your own learning experiences with games you'd like to share? Perhaps you have your own project or task that can benefit from a little bit of M plus one planning. If you do, I want to hear about it.