[How to design an awesome game, Part One]

And a post from my blog, as a temporally inverted reply to the post from your blog, Alex. 


How to design an awesome game, Part One
In the interest of the common good, I’m going to try to lay down some simple and easy principles that show how to design an awesome game. This first article discusses some basic types of Awesomeness, in an effort to work out a more reliable system to develop great games.

Of course, the easiest way to create an awesome game is to already have an awesome game, and to just make a sequel which is exactly like the original, only more so (God of War 2, Halo 2, Guitar Hero 2, etc). Or alternately, to make a game which is exactly like somebody else’s awesome game, only more so (Duke Nukem 3D, Rock Band, etc).

It’s interesting to notice that both Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band were attempting to make something like Guitar Hero 2, only more so, but ended up with very different offerings; The Guitar Hero 3 developers said “What’s awesome about Guitar Hero 2?”, came up with the answer of “the music tracks” (Awesome Music, below), and so decided that “the same thing but more” meant adding more tracks, whereas the Rock Band guys said “What’s awesome about Guitar Hero 2?”, came up with the answer of “the guitar controller” (Awesome Gimmick, below), and so decided that “the same thing but more” meant adding more types of instrument controllers.

Being able to spot the quality in an awesome game which actually makes it awesome is very important (and is often also surprisingly difficult)! And you need to keep an open mind. As software people, we’re generally biased toward seeing the awesome part as being something in the software, when it very well might not be. In fact, many extremely popular games are awesome for reasons which have very little to do with the game mechanics themselves. But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

Let’s assume that we’re not going to rip off an existing awesome game, and must instead start from scratch with our own, original game design, and that the only constraint on our design is that it must be Awesome.

It seems clear that there are a few different kinds of awesomeness out there. And different people have different preferences between them; we’re certainly not going to be able to create a game which absolutely everyone will swoon over, so we need to pick a target market who will think that our game is awesome. Usually, the best target market to pick for this sort of thing is yourself; after all, if you don’t think your own game is awesome, you’re not likely to spend much effort designing and developing it.

I think that there are seven broad categories of awesome, when it comes to games. These categories are not mutually exclusive; a game can certainly be awesome in more than one category at a time, but it’s rare. Most awesome games are brilliant for just one reason, and the other facets of the game are merely ‘good’.

Anyway, here are the broad categories that I see:

Awesome genre:
Every once in a while, a game appears which doesn’t fit into an existing genre. Usually, these are very small games, often just little prototypes in Flash. When someone finds one of these that turns out to be fun to play, I’ll call that an “Awesome genre”.. although that probably implies things I don’t intend. Usually games which achieve awesomeness this way lose their awesomeness once more games start springing up in this newly defined game space. That is, unless it’s a difficult genre to break into, as happened with, for example, The Sims, which even after eight years is still pretty much the only game in its very successful and awesome genre. On the other hand, note how many pretenders sprang up overnight to challenge Nintendogs, for the much less technically challenging “realistic pet simulator” genre. When I continue with my ‘Sir Nicholas Spratt’ game, it probably won’t fall into this “Awesome genre” category; while the randomised murder mystery thing hasn’t really been attempted in the last decade or two, in terms of the player’s experience it’s still just a murder mystery (and probably one with a very weak plot, compared to mysteries crafted by human writers), and human-plotted mystery games have been done quite extensively.

So in general, if we want enduring awesomeness then we probably want to look at achieving it via one of the other categories.

Awesome gameplay:
Gameplay is awesome when a core thing the player can do within the game is new, unexpected, and fun.

What do I mean by “core”? I mean that it has to be the primary thing that the player does. In Super Mario Brothers, you jump. In Sonic the Hedgehog, you run really fast. In Doom, you shoot things. These are the core mechanics of those games.. and if you’re aiming for really awesome gameplay, then you need a core mechanic which hasn’t been seen before, and which is fun to do.

Vaguely recent games in this category would include Portal (lets the player make two arbitrarily distant locations suddenly become adjacent to each other), Ikaruga (swap colors to make yourself invulnerable to one or the other half of enemies and their projectiles), Crush (classic 3D platformer, but you can crush the level into a 2D sidescroller on any of five axes), Echochrome (swing the camera around an optical illusion in such a way that an NPC character will traverse it), etc.

In the modern gaming industry, gameplay is usually very geometric in nature (whether Awesome or not). Most games end up being about objects moving through space, just because it’s much more obvious how to simulate these Newtonian sorts of mechanics, rather than modelling character emotions or other non-physical traits.

So, since most games are about geometry, the most awesome new ideas in gameplay tend to be about changing the way that the geometry works; either bending it, or warping it, or connecting different bits of it together, or changing the flow of time, or else fundamentally changing the way that we interact with the objects in the world, as in Ikaruga’s invulnerability to half the objects in the game. If we can come up with a new way to move through or interact with our surroundings, that’s a great candidate for Awesome Gameplay.

It’s important to note that “awesome gameplay” is generally made by having a single, simple idea that nobody’s done before, and which can be explained in only a few words. Awesome gameplay never comes about by accumulating a large list of features culled from other games.

Awesome graphics
It’s becoming harder and harder to achieve fame via awesome graphics, though this used to be the standard "but more so" factor differentiating new games from old ones, among commercial games. And graphics are still important today, but are slowly becoming less so as strong visuals become easier and easier to achieve. Note that this category includes both stunningly realistic graphics, and strongly stylised ones, as seen in games such as Okami. But strongly stylised ones tend to remain in the “Awesome” category for longer, as the next generation of graphics hardware will almost always provide something to trump the current state of the art in realistic graphics.

Unless you’re a specialist in this area, I strongly recommend against trying to make awesome graphics your selling point. As you might guess by my usual choice to work with vector line graphics, I’m not a graphics specialist. 

Awesome writing
Many games are currently making their marks based on great writing. Most awesome RPGs, for example, are awesome not because of their game mechanics, but rather because of their storylines. The same is true for adventure games, which can catch and hold our attention by their plots (The Longest Journey, Knights of the Old Republic), or by their characterisations (Phoenix Wright, Sam and Max), or both.

While I love good stories, this is another area where I don’t have huge skill myself, and so I’m going to pass on this one when it comes time to design my awesome game.

Awesome polish
Lets face it; if you can polish something up to be shiny enough, your game can become awesome, no matter what it is. Even starting as simple as pachinko, if you polish it enough, it’ll be awesome and entertaining purely by dint of its amazing level of polish.

But this approach is a staggering amount of work, so I generally don’t recommend it. Of course, maintaining at least some level of polish is always important, regardless of whether you’re aiming for “Awesome polish”.

Awesome sound
Bizarrely enough, many awesome games these days are awesome solely due to their audio, and often just due to their music tracks.

This trend probably started with Space Channel 5 back on the Dreamcast, and has been slowly growing more prevalent. Other games which are awesome almost solely on the basis of their awesome music would be the Katamari Damacy series, Loco Roco, Rez, and many music and rhythm games. The theory is that the music is so much fun to listen to that the game itself doesn’t have to be particularly compelling. The easiest way to spot this type of game is to try playing games muted, and see which ones are still fun to play without sound. Anything that you think is an awesome game, but which is less fun with the sound off, is probably awesome at least in part due to its sound.

As a software guy, it’s difficult for me to make a game which has awesome sound, so I can’t really rely on this to make my awesome game. But to be honest, a lot of my favourite games are awesome almost exclusively because they have Awesome Sound.

Awesome Gimmick
Finally, the Awesome Gimmick. A gimmick is a piece of hardware that’s used in an novel way. The gimmick most usually is a special controller (Steel Battalion, Guitar Hero, Buzz!, etc), but not always. Witness Eye of Judgement on the PS3 for a non-controller example. Most games with gimmicks can still be played without the gimmicks, but are substantially less fun when played that way, as the novelty of using the gimmick is at least half the fun of playing the game.

Again, as a purely software guy, I can’t really do this one unless I steal someone else’s awesome gimmick. So this one’s out for me, too.

So it sounds like when I design my awesome game, I’m going to want to focus on Awesome Gameplay as my best chance of achieving awesomeness. But that’ll be the topic of Part Two. 

Publishers don't actively participate in a game's production, nor do they need to even know what a good game is.

Evidence?

I've personally worked with three big-name publishers (including some mentioned in this thread), and my own experience has been that they are always very much involved in a game's production, and their reps are every bit as passionate about games as are those on the development staff.

Ugh, you know, the way they keep releasing new handhelds and then claiming (as they did with the DSi) that this is the next step for them is wholly disgusting.

I'm confused.  How is Nintendo releasing something new not a "next step" in every factual way?

I mean, it's not like they said "this is the very last thing we're ever going to release ever, ever."  It's a step.  They said that it's a step.  I don't see what's so disgusting about calling it what it is.


@TeeGee:  The usual way for 3d without glasses to work is by attaching a lenticular lens over the display surface.  You have probably seen these on "special edition" game box covers which appear vaguely 3D;  they use exactly this technique to let your eyes see slightly different images, which can result in a 3D illusion at the expense of print resolution on the box.  The same principle works with screen displays.  I can't imagine that Nintendo would do this though, as such a lenticular lens would really need to be fixed in place over one (or both?) screens, and that would cause problems for playing older DS/DSi games.

Its hard for me to take a professor of game design seriously who is trying to promote a message of world peace, taking money from a company that is directly related to childhood obesity and one of the main food/farming problems in the US.

A few years ago I worked for a company that did contract work for Activision.

Does that implicate me in the recent Infinity Ward shenanigans, and therefore make me ineligible ever to credibly talk about anything ever again?

If your message is world-peace through a global message of change, then yes.

Damnit, I knew that I should have been able to foresee what Activision would do several years before they did it, and thereby retroactively refuse to work for someone doing work for hire for Activision, thus retroactively destroying all of my credibility. 

Hey, if I had quit when my employer took a contract to do work for Activision, would that have maintained my credibility in this situation?  Or would I have lost my credibility anyway, on the basis that I had worked for someone who later went on to work for Activision who later went on to do the whole Infinity Ward thing?  I mean, was I irretrievably screwed from the start?

Or put another way:  When I was but a wee tyke in 1981, I bought a copy of "Kaboom!", one of Activision's earlier games.  In so doing, I didn't just take money from them, I actually gave them money from my allowance to support their business.  Did that act as a small boy destroy all my credibility, for the rest of my life?

Its hard for me to take a professor of game design seriously who is trying to promote a message of world peace, taking money from a company that is directly related to childhood obesity and one of the main food/farming problems in the US.

A few years ago I worked for a company that did contract work for Activision.

Does that implicate me in the recent Infinity Ward shenanigans, and therefore make me ineligible ever to credibly talk about anything ever again?

To me Quest for the Crown and YHTBTR feel like different jokes, though they're obviously similar.

Interesting.  For me, they're both about the modern dumbing-down of video games;  games where virtually all of the development budget and effort has gone into giving spectacular rewards to the player for playing a boring game, instead of putting the budget into making an interesting game.

12.1 protects google from damages incurred by you. If Google drops a database accidentally and you lost a month of profits, that is incurred by Google and is consequently grounds for litigation.

Valter, you really ought to check with an attorney in your area.  I suspect you'll find that "incur" doesn't mean what you think it means.

YHTBTR is a joke game that lasts a minute and makes fun of a video game cliche with as much subtlety as a kick in the balls.

I think I would have enjoyed YHTBTR more if it had been a new joke.  I mean,  Quest for the Crown was built around exactly the same joke about six years earlier, and tells the joke better than YHTBTR did. 

To be fair, it's not a particularly difficult joke to invent;  I'm sure it's been independently invented dozens of times over the past decade.  I'm certainly not accusing YHTBTR of plagiarism or anything of the sort.  Just pointing it out.

[Edit:]

You have to accept that agreement before you can register as an iPhone developer on Apple's web site.  It happens before you've given them any personal information or a credit card number or anything.

So with that in mind, I'm not entirely sure why Wired calls it "secret" or decided to go for an FOIA request to retrieve a copy of it, when they could have simply spent three minutes on Apple's developer website to get it.  (And in fact, they had already reported on it way back in 2008).

But whatever.  Playing up some alleged secrecy probably triggers more Internet hysteria, and therefore more page hits for Wired and therefore more ad revenue.  And I understand that Wired's financials haven't been so hot, the past few years, so I imagine they could do with a bit more petty cash around the place.

Edit:  Rephrased, to avoid Melly needing to send me another private message.      

To cover my ass I made sure my contract was changed to specifically allow me to do games on the side. I think this is the only way to be absolutely safe but a lot of employers will be reticent to do this I imagine.

My personal experience is that it's easier to get the company to agree to it if you don't propose adding language that allows you to make your own games on the side;  instead, propose adding a few conditionals on their standard "we own anything you make" clause, amending it to something more like:  "we own anything you make using work computers, during work hours, or on work property."

That way, you just need to make sure that you only work on your side-projects outside of work hours and at home (and not on work-provided laptops or suchlike, if you're unlucky enough to have something like that), and you're free and clear.  And work gets to keep their beloved "we own everything" language, just with a set of provisos that look fair from their point of view.

The biggest stumbling block is really that vocal data of a reasonable quality is usually quite large in file size.

When your typical indie game is only a few megabytes, adding vocals is going to substantially increase the file size, which means that it's going to cost substantially more to host.

You could certainly do a few "Lets-a go!" (or similar) quips without any trouble, but for real dialog or story-driven games, using real voice acting is likely to be somewhat cost-prohibitive.

Dear media pundits,  please stop telling people what to do/think/feel.

There was a game, and I forget the name of it...

That's Petri Purho's 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness.

This is true for the Gamecube. The N64 sold relatively badly because of Nintendo's insistence on expensive and "outdated" cartridge technology and their strict regulations for third-party developers, which caused most of them to wander off to Sony, among other things.

Nintendo couldn't possibly have had stricter regulations than Sony.

It is not possible.

There does not exist enough paper in the world for that to be true.   

i vaguely heard something like that too -- that in some countries you can only sell the right to distribute your work, but can take it back at any time by law even if your contract says you can't or something like that

To be more specific, the issue is around "moral rights", which aren't nearly as uniform across the world as copyright rights are.  The general gist is that the author of a work retains moral rights, even if he surrenders copyright rights to someone else.  "Moral rights" basically allow the author to stop anyone -- even the copyright owner -- from doing something to the work that would compromise the work's integrity.  Most typically, this includes packaging the work together with other works, adding advertisements to it, or otherwise modifying the work.

Of course, precisely what that means and what the threshold is varies from country to country.  Some countries (such as the USA) typically have extremely weak moral rights (in the above cases, the author would probably have to file a defamation suit, rather than prosecute under moral rights).  In some countries, an author surrenders his moral rights when he's doing work for hire, or when he's an employee of a company that's jointly producing the work.

But it's all very different everywhere.  It's one of the reasons that it's difficult to create things with an international team;  all the different conflicting laws about who keeps what rights, and who can even assign them away.

(Moral rights also include the right to say that you were the author of the work, or else to keep your name off the product.  If you have moral rights, then the copyright holder cannot add your name to the work, or remove your name from the work, without your permission.  More details on Wikipedia.)

I don't recommend starting small.  I recommend starting big, and finishing small.

Start big -- huge.  Ridiculously huge.  When you have a vague sense of what your ridiculously huge game is supposed to be about, start cutting back the design.  Figure out which bits are the most interesting and the most compelling, and which bits are just meaningless bits of fluff that sounded good at the time.  Cut one (relatively) unimportant feature at a time, until your huge game has become small, and consists of nothing but the very best of the best bits of your huge game.

Under this approach, you're still making small games, but those small games are much less likely to merely be yet another tower defence game. 

Red wizard sez:  "Oh no, the castle's lavatories have backed up again, and are spilling out and forming a dirty lake in the fields outside the castle walls!  And there are giant clams in that lake!  Save the kingdom from the giant clams, and I'll give you 1000 experience points, and your choice of either (a) a wide-brimmed hat (+10 to rakishness), or (b) a pocket pen protector (+7 to emergency numerology, -3 to social graces)"
 

Another one of my flaws. As a perfectionist, I just can't stand making a long-term strategic mistake. The reason I re-started Dragon Age: Origins like 20 times before I was finally happy with the choices I made.

Twenty times?  Dear lord...  I forced myself to slog through Dragon Age for the sake of the story, but I don't think I could bear to start it over again.  Never seen such a horrible muddled mess of a GUI interface.  Can never find anything in it;  really dragged the game down for me..

But I digress.   I find Bioshock 2 to be a bit bizarre.  I mean, I've only played about two minutes of it (still too distracted by Mass Effect 2 to really pay it any attention), but doesn't it seem weird for them to have said "gosh, let's make a sequel to Bioshock, and we'll build the game around that terrible, terrible section of the original game that everybody hated, where you were in control of a Big Daddy, escorting a Little Sister."

It's like if they were to announce a sequel to Full Throttle, but decided that it's design would be entirely based around the original's demolition derby minigame.  Or if they'd decided to make Mass Effect 2 entirely about driving the Mako around on mostly-empty rectangular height-mapped worlds.

Surely when making a sequel, you would logically want to base it on the best bits of the prior game, rather than the worst bits?

This reminds me of my.. let's call him my "high-school" english teacher (I'm from the UK, I was a bit younger than an American might assume from that but, it's fine). We were studying Golding's Lord of the Flies and going through the religious/biblical symbolism. At one point, getting thoroughly sick of surgically dismantling what was originally a very well-crafted novel, I raised my hand and asked, "Did Golding actually put all this into his book deliberately?"
I was told, "It doesn't matter, meaning is defined at the point of understanding".

I was in a college-level "children's literature" course, in which the teacher was extremely fond of Psychoanalysis;  everything got brought back to Freud's (bizarre, unsupported, non-scientific, but scandalous and therefore popularly known) theories.

I found myself frequently in the position of dismantling the teacher's Freudian analyses, since I was the sole psychology student in a class of literature-majors.  (side-note:  If you do deep research into Freud's history early in your college career and keep your notes, it'll pay off hugely.  He's controversial enough that most non-technical disciplines will want to talk about him at some point or other.  Think I had written about six similar essays on the unsoundness of his experimentation and theories for different classes by the time I graduated.  Honestly, Psychoanalysis is like Scientology, in terms of scientific rigour and truthiness.  And incidentally, not enough people use the word 'truthiness'.  We should fix that.)

Anyhow.  Favourite exchange in this children's literature course was when we'd read the story of Cinderella (plus historical and regional variants of the story), and the teacher put forward the claim that the act of putting the slipper onto Cinderella's foot symbolised having sex.  (On the basis that a foot is longer than it is wide, and therefore symbolised male genitals, etc. etc.)  

My favourite approach to dismantling a bit of psychoanalysis was to accept it and run with it.  Kind of "disproof by showing how silly it is if you really stop and think about it."  So in the silence that followed that claim, I pointed out how interesting it was that Cinderella had the foot, and the Prince had the slipper.  Or making the interpretation explicit, Cinderella had male genitals, and the Prince had female genitals.  Now, the Prince has just been riding around the city with his female genitals, trying to fit the male genitals of every woman in the land (including Cinderella's step-sisters) into his female genitals, trying to find someone --anyone -- whose male genitals were small enough to fit.  It wasn't until he found the "dusty, dirty serving maid" Cinderella that he found someone with sufficiently small male genitals for him to marry them.

(It occurs to me now that in the original Grimm version of the tale, the step-sisters actually each used carving knives to cut off bits of their feet -- sorry, "male genitals" -- to make them actually fit into the slipper -- sorry, "female genitals" -- but the Prince realised the deception when he noticed blood welling in his female genitals.  This proved to him that neither of the step-sisters was the correct match for him.   That is, even though their feet fit the slipper, the blood in his slipper indicated that despite the sex, he was still having his period, and therefore was not pregnant;  therefore, a bad match.   I dearly wish this extra point had occurred to me back then;  would have really blown some minds!)

At the end of the day, labels are basically meaningless.

Whether you want to call it a game or an experience or interactive art or whatever, it really doesn't matter.  If you make something genuinely awesome, it'll find its audience.  Anything else is just crass marketing or pandering. 

As craftspeople, I'd have thought that we should be above that sort of thing;  our work should be able to stand on its own merits without apology or explanation.  And we should never be influenced by pseudo-intellectuals or games "journalists" trying to logically prove what can and cannot be enjoyable, or laying claim to bearing the objective truth about what a game can and cannot be.

My advice:  Trust your game design instincts.  Make the games that you think are awesome.  And don't ever let the bastards get you down.