TIGSource Forums

Hello fellow Tigs members,

Today I want to ask everyone some questions about game design in general. I have had many problems with my design and I have got to the point where I am seriously wondering if I have some problems with the way I go about making a game.

I'll start off by saying I have wanted to make a game since I was about 15 when I started getting into gaming properly. This is when I got an Xbox 360. I didn't play the games that everyone else did, all my friends where playing Gears of War/Halo and all the other top sellers. Meanwhile I was playing games like Kameo/Viva Pinata and Enchanted arm. I really enjoyed the design of these games, graphically and mechanically.

After some time, I did however start joining in with the generic gaming groups that play CoD/Halo/GoW. After a while though I did start to play on my own as I found I felt better this way. Also, this was probably a year or so after first discovering gaming on the Xbox 360.

When I left school I went to college and was doing an IT course with very little programming but one of my friends taught me how to program in VB a bit. We were also tasked to make a game with a space/flying theme which was then what really got me into making interactive media.

So after college ended I was left with nothing more than a few alright qualifications and no jobs anywhere. So I started learning C# using XNA. This kinda failed but I still learnt quite a lot from it. After some time I started thinking about needing a way to live and pay rent to my parents. I thought maybe I could make a game for windows and sell it and make some money - this didn't happen.

I eventually found this tool called Stencyl, really easy to use and can make flash and iOS games. So head on into late 2011. I started working and making a flash game with a friend. The night we released it, it got quite a few views (in my opinion) on the stencyl website. This was really cool and I was telling everyone at work the next day.

Unfortunately the people at this place I worked were not very nice and I ended up leaving in february this year. It was a bad and good choice for me. This is cause, I lost out on about £400 a month but now I didn't have to be belittled by everyone for being me.

So, since february I have been without a job and now I can see the only way me earning money is from making a game for iOS. I know that's not a great way to look at it, but if i can bring in atleast £200 a month I should be ok for a while. I am also looking for a job.

So now you know some stuff about me, I should tell you my main reason for telling you all this.

I really want to make a game that people enjoy. I have wanted to make a game for so long now, and to have only released a couple of really crap flash games, it's kinda a downer. I keep trying to make games but I have many flaws in what I want to make. Usually I start off with the premise that I want to make the game as "simple" as possible, small as possible and so easy to play, that anyone could play and enjoy themselves.

I have thought about some really shit game ideas in the past few months, thinking of games that would work well on iOS as well is kind of tough, but I see it as the only way for me to make money.

I know people hate when people only make games for money but I think I have got to this level. I can't live much longer with no income. I have to pay rent - heck everyone does.

Some of my ideas have included some things that some people would think "where's the fun in that" and here they are:
 - A ball in the middle of the screen - users tap it for as long as they want, and the taps are added to a leaderboard.
 - A game where the amount of players online at one time makes everyone stronger.
 - A spaceship collecting energy whilst dodging oncoming walls they need to dodge whilst they are on a 60 second time limit.
 - A vision board. The player selects a colour and they just swipe over the screen to create different shapes - like a paint brush.

As you can see these ideas are terrible. Utterly shite. I keep thinking of these kind of things though, they aren't fun and no-one would even buy them.

So tigs members, can someone help me. Tell me how you think about new games when you have no game ideas. I am struggling to move on with game development because I lack so much imagination. I am scared that by the time I am 30 and if I haven't made a game that earned me enough to live I would be looking back thinking how I was given a chance but completely ruined it.

Thanks

Hope my post wasn't too long.

Nexus

Your ideas aren't terrible.

Touching the ball is interesting. That could be a game.

The one with everyone online is just a feature. You could add that to a game, but you can't build one around it.

The spaceship one sounds more traditional. What depends is how well you design it.

The vision board is more like a "toy." Toys are not good ways to make a living. They can be a good starting point for making a game. You could have something that has colored finger swiping as the main mechanic. That would be cool, and the main attraction could be the swiping itself, but without mechanics around it you'd have a tough time selling it. There's that hot game right now where you it's like turn-based Pictionary online. That company sold for a lot....

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Okay, so here's the issue as I see it. The 4 ideas you gave are all interesting and very different from one another. I could see myself making a game out of 3 of them. They're all decent starting points. You're talking like you've had these ideas, but they aren't any good, so that's frustrating. Your ideas aren't bad. They're actually all right. Each one is simple, mobile-suited, good with a touch interface. And non sound like rips.

Ok. Turning one of those ideas into an actual game is a lot of work, no matter how complicated the final product is. You would have to build a prototype, think hard about how interesting it is, why it's like that, if other people will get it etc. You'd have to study other successful games and compare them to yours. Over time you'd develop this paper trail, or set of prototypes or whatever. If you released too soon or didn't acknowledge your game's flaws (then fix them), then your game would flop. If you stay critical of what you are doing and constantly make improvements, working and working, you'd eventually get something. Maybe you would just take a while to do it. But with the paper/prototype trail you'd at least be able to gauge your progress.

I find the best resource is another person to work ideas over with. The second best resource is my notepad or text editor. You build a prototype, play the shit out of it, play the shit out of everything else, get inspired, then write and write about all the things you think your game should do and doesn't do. Then you make the game better. You remove stuff that shouldn't be there, add stuff that should. It's real work. Starting off with a "concept" that's really good or whatever isn't that important. What matters is your ability to look at what you have honestly, research, write/talk/think, then make improvements. Good games always evolve. We just find it super scary to start off with an idea that doesn't "sound" like a success, because doing so is like putting ourselves out into the world naked.

Game design can be like marching into the wilderness steadily. The process is supposed to be like that. You literally can not be certain of your success before you begin, unless your game is boring and you already have funding.

This is how imagination works:
  1. Do whatever inspires you until your game ideas stop pouring into you.
  2. Improve your game.
  3. Repeat.

You get an imagination by working. Working is like the ploughing a field. Then living is like harvesting the produce. Sometimes you can get into this catch-22 where you don't start working until you "have an idea," which you won't have until you start working. Just plough around like an idiot. After you've tasted some vegetables your ploughing will get better all by itself.


  

Thanks for the insightful response. It makes me feel a whole let better. :) I will start looking into how I can evolve these ideas by playing with other mechanics and piecing them together.

Nexus

When you hit particular stumbling blocks you can always come back here (TIG). Theory goes down kinda well here. But discussions about really particular things spawn easily.

You don't really know if an idea is good or bad until you've actually tried it out.

This.

If none of those feel like something worth actually working on to you, break them down further first. Find out what you like the most about each, scrap which bits are the reason you think they're shite, and see if what remains can be recombined into a new idea you find adequate.

Definitely agree with this. Lots of ideas sound good on paper but just aren't fun to play. You might here about prototyping and indeed I'd recommend doing this; before you write any design documents I'd recommend taking a simple idea and prototyping it. I've discovered that in order to really prototype something you often need a few key ingredients. I always recommend adding sound effects - I found the auditory feedback is really key to getting a sense from a prototype where a game concept is a good idea to invest time in. Likewise I'd also recommend grabbing some filler art.

For sound effects I'd recommend SFXR or BFXR.
http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html
http://www.bfxr.net/

Also, more mechanics/features don't necessarily make a game better. I'd highly recommend focusing on a very limited set of mechanics and making it work.

Not to be a downer but I'm not sure earning £200 a month from your first iOS game is a realistic goal. Petunk (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/petunk/id446318190?mt=8), a game I designed, was released on the iPhone and makes more like $0 a month...

The advice I would give is:
  1. Continue to work hard to find a job that you don't hate and which gives you enough spare time to pursue game making on the side
  2. Release several smaller games, update them, and then see which ones do well
  3. For the games which do well double down to expand their audience

Insofar as you can use Stencyl to accomplish these goals I would definitely do so. You already know the tool which is huge, and it's likely easier to produce something simple with Stencyl than by writing a bunch of code. If Stencyl does not target iOS yet then I would simply stick with Flash and aim for sponsorships on Flash Game License (http://fgl.com).

As to your ideas, I think the first and third hold the most promise. I would focus on creating a polished initial version of each and then seek feedback here. Once you've developed the ideas a little bit you can then put them up for sponsorship or on the app store. The problem with your the ideas is they are very abstract. I mean, you've tried to describe the entire game in a single sentence! What are the emotions you wish to evoke when playing? What are the core feedback loops in the game? What skills are involved? I think answering these questions will help flesh out the games and give us more material to critique.

Best of luck!

Point the first: Just make shit! You'll learn a ton more from trying and failing then you will from killing your ideas before they even have a chance to breathe.

Point the second: Something I've found myself doing a lot lately -- and I'm not necessarily saying this is amazing or anything, but it's one approach -- is asking myself, "What do I want the player's mindset to be?"

The ideas you listed are defining specific affordances of the game: it can do this, and it can do that. Which is great, but what do you want the player to think of that? How do you want him to react? What sort of experience do you want him to have?

You suggested tapping a circle a bunch of times and scoring that on a leaderboard. What do you want the player thinking and feeling while he's doing that? Maybe you want him to laugh at the absurdity of competitive circle-tapping -- it's like a satire against mindless/pointless competition, or something. Or maybe you want him super-focused, in a hyper-competitive "zone".

Let's say you want him laughing at the silliness of it all. So now maybe you make the game just absurdly over-the-top: massive particle explosions every 10th touch, a litany of ridiculous awards ("KING OF TAPPING!"), a Madden-esque commentator ("What you've gotta do to be successful on the field here, is really just keep tapping that circle... and he's doing just that!")

See what I'm getting at?

I found that when I thought of game designs strictly from the perspective of what the game can *do*, what the features are, it was real easy for me to get into the kind of design paralysis you describe. But when I start thinking about what I want the player to experience, I can work backward from that and ideas just start tumbling out faster than I can prototype them.

Not saying that'll definitely work for everyone, but it works for me. Might be worth a shot. ;)