Guys, if you're making a game that uses nothing but WASD and the mouse, please, please, for the love of God, put arrow-key support in there. I'm left-handed, and this shit is killing me. I'm gonna get carpal tunnel from reaching across the laptop keyboard to put my right hand on WASD while my left works the mouse, and that's assuming I've got my mouse with me; with the touchpad, it's just unplayable. We're 10% of the population here, guys. Have mercy.

I'm sure all the Europeans with AZERTY keyboards would appreciate it, too...

That's a good thing to keep in mind.  Another one is colour-blindness.

Cool, then my two objects are:

1. A dead planet shrunken down and trapped inside a child's bouncy-ball.

2. A wooden chair haunted by fire spirits, forever burning yet never burned away.

I don't know how I would draw these, but I like!

Nice idea. Can we post suggestions here too?

Yup, I'll be collecting ideas from this thread as well.

[Name two objects that you want to see in the game]

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Power to the People. Power to the People is an experiment in collaborative game design. You may think of PttP like improv theatre – the audience yells out suggestions and I’ll throw them into the game. The result will be crazy and hopefully wonderful.

Once there’s been enough time for everyone to have their say, I’ll implement several of the most common (and creative) suggestions and show several variations on the game. At this point, you get to vote which variant you want to go on. This will keep going until we have something complete or it’s no longer fun. Simple, right?  Here’s how you can send me suggestions:

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Power to the People: Episode 0

If you look on the game page, right now it is a blank slate. Just think of all the awesome stuff that it could become! Here’s the first prompt:

Name two objects that you want to see in the game

It's interesting that you mention the teamwork aspect.  I suppose that I'm so focused on the indie perspective that I don't think too much about that.  Collaborating creatively with others is an art of its own.

Strange that, given this is an indie games forum. What on earth were you thinking?

I'm a hybrid bastard child semi indie developer. I make some of my own stuff but I also whore myself out doing contract work to pay the bills and feed the family. I didn't even realize there was such a thing as a designer for indie games. The designer is usually one of the people with another core skill, most often code but sometimes art.

I'd quite like to know how many indie devs are purely designers and don't do another core task such as code, art, or sound. Maybe I'll make a poll on it later. Maybe ypou can make one now?

Ah, I see.  We have slightly different perspectives here.  I view myself as the designer first and everything else second.  The reason I program and do art and PR is because there's nobody else to do it for me and because it's more efficient that way.

Platformer no but the sandbox style point and click adventure puzzler was awesome simply cause you could do so much more than the film showed.

This gets thumbs up from me, with one minor quibble.  Toss the puzzles; keep the story.  Olympic runners don't need crutches.

Sure, it could be a platformer collectathon where you save the jews from being shot by nazis etc.

I'll let this stand by itself.  Either my head is stuck far up my ass or this idea is so obviously surreal that it requires no comment.

I guess you can choose different themes for your games so that they reflect your real interests. That's only natural. Edmund McMillen/Paul Eres/everyone is doing that.

In Edmund's case it's being trapped in a box with a talking cancer growing out of you. =) I kid, I kid.

I don't know if theme is enough.  If the mechanics are the same, your message hasn't really changed.  Does anyone see Schindler's List: The Platformer?

Cut from the same cloth, sometimes, but not one and the same.

Would you argue that a great game designer can always become a great teacher. For a start you are assuming there is only one style of games designer and one style of teacher which isn't true.

...

Of course there are many other skills to being a great game designer - storytelling, for example.  I'm painting with a broad brush here.

It's interesting that you mention the teamwork aspect.  I suppose that I'm so focused on the indie perspective that I don't think too much about that.  Collaborating creatively with others is an art of its own.

This blog post that I just made is going to touch a nerve.  I still think that it needs to be said.

I’d like to relate to you an experience that I’ve had recently.

It was the day after I released the Zombie game.  I was deliriously happy with success and telling everyone in sight about it.  I bumped into a co-worker in the break room that day.  She has a management position within the department, a couple of kids and absolutely no interest in games (other than as a parent).  In other words, she’s a “normal person”.

Usually, I don’t bother to explain my game design obsession to non-gamers.  They’re not interested, so why bore them?  Well, that day we were chatting about events and I mentioned my game.  She wanted to know what it was about.

It was there that I had a rather uncomfortable experience.  How do I explain to a mature adult that I just made a game about killing huge crowds of zombies?  I mean, I made them pop in large satisfying blood clouds when they die.  This struck me with full force at the moment – I must have had a deer-in-the-headlights look.  Fortunately, I read a lot of game design theory.  With the virtuosity of an abstract art museum curator I said that the game was about territory control and resource management – which it is.

Have you ever tried to explain a game to a non-gamer?  Why do you have to eat mushrooms and jump on top of enemies?  Killing people makes coins fall out?  We take this stuff for granted and ignore it, but outsiders see it for what it is.  We are living in a delusional bubble where violence and immaturity have become banal.

From that moment, I had a new goal.  I want to make games that are as meaningful as the books that I read.  I want to make games that I can show to my co-workers and not feel like I’m 12.

Let me throw in a coda to the above.

This is why MMORPG grind and achievements are bollocks.  I'm reading a book right now called "Punished by Rewards" which makes it clear that external rewards kill intrinsic motivation.  If you have to hand out gold stars to motivate people to learn, you're a crappy teacher and a crappy game designer.

P.S. Thanks to JB for turning me onto the book.

[Empathy for Teachers]

I've been writing game design articles for my blog, recently.  I feel that the idea below is important enough that it deserves some feed back from you guys.

The more I learn about game design, the more I am convinced that there’s a huge overlap between teaching and game design. I don’t think that it’s an accident that my game designer hero – Chris Crawford – taught prior to making games. If you’re an amazing teacher, you can become an amazing game designer.

That’s a pretty strong statement to make, isn’t it? What does standing in front of a class have to do with making games, anyway? At first glance, they are two different activities, but let me explain why there’s more similarity than you think.

Empathy for Teachers

You’ve probably never taught a class, but I’m sure that you’ve explained something new to a friend or a co-worker. The typical experience goes something like this. You lay out the topic in a simple and comprehensible manner, only to be met by a blank stare. You explain again, wondering if they’re a bit on the thick side. This time they ask a question that completely misses the point.  You roll your eyes; muster your patience and prod them towards the correct path. On and on this process goes on until the two of you stumble into understanding.

Now, it’s not true that all learners are thick-headed imbeciles. The problem is that you already know what you’re trying to explain – you don’t remember what it felt like not to know. Of course it’s obvious to you! On top of that, the way your student thinks is probably different from you, so points that you thought were elucidating fall flat for them. Frankly, it’s a wonder that anybody manages to teach anything.

So, what’s the key ingredient in the above process? Think about what goes on when you are teaching something. The knowledge in your head is not a book – it’s not linear. It’s a web of associations, a jumble of related facts and experiences. Your understanding of the subject is organic; somehow you must turn it into a linear stream of words so that a similar web is produced in your student’s head.

You have no hope of making people understand any complicated topic in one shot. This is why empathy is crucial. You must imagine what it feels like to be the student – what’s the web of ideas in their mind? Once you know this, you can tailor your next lesson to correct their misunderstandings. If you don’t have empathy, you’re waving your arms in the darkness.

Empathy for Game Designers

Is just so happens that empathy is a critical skill for game designers as well.  How does the player feel at this moment? Are they bored or frustrated? What have they learned so far? A good game designer is painfully aware of all these questions.  Helping the players learn the game is even harder than teaching face-to-face.

As a teacher, you have the advantage of interacting with your students directly.  If they are confused or frustrated, you can nudge them in the right direction. As a designer, you interact via the intermediary of the game.  If the player is frustrated, there’s nothing you can do. This means that you must be that much better at anticipating your audience before-the-fact.

When I was making Pandora’s Gearbox, I felt a magical sense of connection to the player.  Making puzzle games forces you to get inside the head of the audience.  If a puzzle is obvious or too hard, it falls flat very quickly.  Knowing this, I did my best to play mind games against the player. If you can cultivate this sense of playing with someone who’s not there, you will win as a designer.  Play is an inherently empathic process.

Learning is All There Is

Let’s say that I’ve convinced you that teaching players the game is important. Aha, you say, what about all the time after the player learns the game, what then?  Well, I’ve got a shocker for you – there is no “after the player learns the game.” Once the player completely absorbs the game, it becomes boring and they stop playing it. In other words, your job as a designer is to deliver an interesting learning experience to the audience.  Raph Koster pointed this out very well in his “Theory of Fun.”

Finally, if you’re not convinced with all this fuzzy empathy and learning stuff, let me appeal to your selfishness.  Being a great teacher is a way to sell games that you want to make.   Let’s say that you want to create a game about the call patterns of South American fruit bats.  But, curse it, you seem to be the only one interested in this – for some reason everyone else is missing all the excitement.  They’d rather play those innumerable match-3 games.  If you were a great teacher, you’d be able to explain why someone should be giddy about fruit bats.

Your game must be its own advocate.  It’s not enough to just plop down an interesting system in front of the audience and expect that they invest the time an energy to explore it.  As far as they are concerned, you are a talentless hack who couldn’t design his way out of a paper bag.  If you can’t prove them wrong quickly, they’ll close the game and move onto the next thing.  This is why you must leave bread crumbs for the players to lead them into interesting areas.  Do this effectively and you can make that game about fruit bats or the migration patterns of the African elephant or whatever else you want.

Thanks for the bug report, Melly.  I believe that I've already fixed this in the next version.

Version 1.3 should be out tomorrow, along with a Mac release.

Where's the 1.1 download link? All the links seem to point to "http://www.indiebird.com/download.php?f=AotP_Zombies_1_0.zip"

All of the versions on the site are 1.1.  I just didn't anticipate that updating the game would break all outside links to it.  Because it was confusing, I just made a second copy and called it 1_1.

I was confused by the relation between the instructions shown at the bottom of the screen and the things-that-look-like-instructions shown on the bulletted list. The context was that I was in a rush to play and didn't want to stop and think about this stuff. Also the list covers a lot of the playing area, so I wanted to get rid of it, but wasn't sure how; I think once or twice I instinctively clicked the bottom instruction box, to try to remove the list, and ended up missing some of the instructions there.

I see.  The box on top is supposed to be the objectives box, whereas the one on the bottom is the instruction box.  Obviously that didn't work out as well as I thought.

Also there are now three different art styles on the screen - the hand-drawn stuff, the neat symbols and instruction-box-with-outline at the bottom of the screen, and the big bulletted list with no outine. I found this rather messy -- there's also the front-end and "mission completed" stuff, which is in a slightly different style as well.

Yes, an artist friend pointed this out to me as well.  It's something I never got to fixing.  I'll need to work on tightening up my visuals and sound.  All too often, they feel like an afterthought.

Hi I liked this game, its like a less polished version of my game. Oh I said it, go look at it if you don't believe me

Anyway, the problems I found were:

- I could scroll endlessly upwards.
- The tutorials wouldn't let me finish them unless I did exactly as it asked. Like it says "buy a turret" if you buy anything else you have no points and no way of going forward. you just have to restart, but it shouldn't give me the option of getting stuck like that.
- I also had a problem with the building progress circle thing being too hard to read (the blue on blue)
-I also kind of felt that there was only one viable strategy to complete each level (although I only got to level 3) Like the choices in what to buy were more problems than choices if you know what I mean.

BTW, I was just kidding about it being a less polished version of mine, it's a cool game and most likely not full of shit coding like mine.

You should get the latest version - 1.1.  I've made the building circle have more contrast and prevented infinite scrolling.  As for the single strategy comment, try playing random map on advanced and tell me if you still feel that way.

As far as the tutorials go, I feel that I could have done a better job with them.  They're a bit too stiff.

Thanks for the comments;  I'm glad that you find the game fun.

I have some quibbles about the UI that have mostly already been mentioned. One thing that might be relevant for future games - I found the layout of the screen in the tutorial confusing, since it had a text window in the bottom left and one in the top left, both similar-looking (and not quite matching the style of the rest of the screen) and both with similar information.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean.  How would you change the UI?

Also, a bug: twice I had a teleporter stop working. The second time, it happened like this: a soldier got stuck inside a wall (possibly the zombies forced him backwards into it). I built a teleporter to teleport him out. It let me choose a destination, but then nothing happened; the line from the teleporter to the destination stayed visible, and the teleporter was unusable. The first time, I was trying to teleport a siege gun, and I don't remember the exact circumstances (it may have been that there was no room at the destination).

Cheers 

Teleporters require line-of-sight to the target and enough space at the destination.  People have been running into the LOS restriction, so I think that I'll remove it.

@Paul:  I guess teaching the player how the game works is a much bigger deal for me.  You seem to have it well in hand, judging by ID, so I guess your method works for you.

* Accidental placement of buildings (wasting build points and handicapping myself)
Possible remedy: Allow incomplete buildings to be recycled for their full value? Make it easier to cancel the radial menu... not sure how. Does it ignore the selection if the mouse is outside the circle? Also could disable scrolling whilst the radial menu is up... I managed to do some weird stuff like place a HW zone outside the map.

This is a good idea.  I think that I'll make unfinished building sell for full amount.

For what it's worth, I would happily pay $5-10 for a version of this with a friendly UI and some more levels.   

Thanks!  I hope that when I get to charging for games you'll find them that compelling.

I don't know why, but I find this idea curiously awesome.

- for polish reasons, you should have all actions which have a gameplay effect have associated sounds, so that you are not just reliant on visuals for feedback. selecting units and order them to move fall under this. generally the ears react faster than the eyes. this is why starcraft has sounds for when you select units or tell them to move somewhere, it helps a lot. same thing for accomplishing individual objectives and many other things -- i think sound effects associated with those actions will help a lot.

Good advice.  I have trouble with sound and visuals in general.  Part of the problem is that when I get to making them, I'm so far into the project that I run out of energy.

Paul, how do you make sure that the difficulty curve is right in your games?  I have a tendency to make the games too hard.  I've gotten better, but it's still a significant issue.