I think it's tough to explain games to anyone.

Prototypes are important. I prototype the shit out of everything, like as soon as humanly possible. If I think, "here's something that has a good chance of being something I'd put in the game," I prototype it immediately. As soon as my confidence in the idea arrives, I build a minimal prototype. All of the game industry is going to learn to revolve around a couple of key points. One of those points is going to appear after we learn how to optimize that prototype loop into dust. The process goes like this:
  Step 2. Build a minimal prototype for an idea that you feel has a good chance of going into the game.
  Step 1. Have an idea that will allow you to progress to Step 2 as soon as possible.
Repeat.

However. The steps needed to do Step 1 well are complicated. It is very hard to know what idea belongs in your final product without considering the totality of your entire game. Rich experiences are about inter-dependencies. In other words, you need to know every other piece of your game to make a good decision about the current piece. Without strong fore-sight, it is very easy to take baby-steps in circles around whatever your original ideas were, and never go anywhere nearly as deep as you dream about. Games like Minecraft spent years bubbling in the minds of their creators. Notch prototyped hard. He friggin' released on version 0.01 or something. But, he thought about games, his games, other games, his "game" that he'd make when he had an opportunity, a lot. When he pumped the first prototype of Minecraft out, he was pulling from a huge mental base of insight and experience.

Great games need great insight. Big-budget games need teams. Arguably, the development of any game creator's career requires progress into a team eventually. The many are more powerful than the few. There needs to be a way to communicate the mental magic that grand designers have with each other. Why did Miyamoto pump out 3 Golden Eggs, then iterate for 15 years? Have you heard of Romero since Doom (positively)? Dude makes flash games now. Why are the world's largest action franchises recycled mechanics and AI in exotic locations? Mechanically, Super Mario World is more complex than Uncharted. The creative direction of each have huge differences. Mechanically, the statement is true.

In reality, the design and the prototype of a game need to be constantly iterated in-tandem. Someone who writes a doc then produces a game, in two distinct steps, has iterated once. Iteration is king in game-making, so, regardless of the importance of a doc, the monolithic design is a bad strategy, if - and this important - and only if you want a new creative (i.e. original) direction for your project of some non-negligible degree.

I really love the contrast between the above-ground and below-ground shots. The brightness of the above-ground really sets a tension that the underground, which is beautiful by-the-way, resolves. But the underground is better, and here's why.

1. Way more shade variety. I don't feel compelled to live inside a specific brightness range.
2. Way more shape variety. The rocks in the background are awesome.
3. Way more texture variety. The above-ground stuff all looks like a mini-block texture slightly twisted around. It's like 3 5-year-old triplets, with similar bright personalities, got up one day and wore different monochromatic outfits, and picked a single new word each to use at the end of a sentence. In a group of children they still stand out like a neon sign. Living in a world comprised just of them is assaulting.
4. All objects in the above-ground are given the same visual importance. I'm no more drawn to the main character than any other piece. He looks really smooth underground though. I can taste him.

Your game is really funny. I love the death comments, "Oh SNAP," "What a bother!" .

I've seen those movies.

In American Beauty... we see the father's relationship with the daughter, the mother's relationship with the daughter, and the father and mother's relationship with each other. The daughter has a relationship with the boy next-door. The boy next door has a relationship with his parents.

The father is looking for purpose, the mother is looking for confidence, the daughter is looking for an identity, the boy next-door is looking for understanding. These things are set up so that we can relate to them. We know what they all are, and what might satisfy them.

We don't see where any of these desires come from. It's plausible to us as an audience that these desires exist, and that they can co-exist. Each grouping of people makes sense in some way.

The daughter has a friend. I see how the needs of the two friends would make them friends. How did they meet? I don't know. What decisions led the father into a depression? I don't know. When the father was falling into himself, how was his wife reacting? Why didn't she do anything? How was she before, and how did she develop into the person she is? There are a long series of decision that each married partner made that allowed the current situation to develop. There was an interplay. The daughter's current predicament is a result of this interplay. I understand how the family felt before. I understand how they feel now. I even understand how they feel after. But I don't understand what that means.

What am I supposed to take away from that movie? Sometimes, "life is this way." So what? Have I learned to prevent it? How many relationships can I make between what allowed the characters to devolve, and the mistakes I make in my own life? If I'm a father, I might know that my child may suffer an identity crisis because I don't set a powerful example, if I don't lead and listen. But my life isn't like Kevin Spacey's life (the father). I'm not going to be depressed like him. I listen. My wife isn't lacking guidance the way her movie counterpart is. Though... maybe she is, and I can't see it. What are the clues that link my behaviour to hers? What are the decisions that the movie-father made that are similar to the decisions that I've made that produced parallel results? I can't see that. The movie doesn't show me that.

Tell me what happened in the movie? You can do that. Tell me why it happened? You can do that too. Tell me how you feel about it and why you like it? Easy. American Beauty is a good movie. Now tell me how your family dynamic mirrors the one in the movie? If you're a suburban westerner, you should be able to do this. I'm sure everyone could, but they'd stumble at the question. They'd stumble at the thought.

I want to know how I can change my behaviour to fix the flaws in those I heavily interact with. What should my goals be? I can't force them to change. I have to be different. I'm not like the characters in the movie. How do I change, so that others will change, so I get the result that I want? I don't know.

I don't even know how to do this. The idea is just interesting.

It's like, when I'm watching a movie with my Mother, then afterward we talk for 30 minutes, I make 3 comments that I probably should have held on to. How do these affect the decision she makes in the next 4 days? How could I detect which comment was which? If I carry-on with this behaviour for a year, how do my comments affect her colleagues at work, her behaviour at home, her relationship with my Father, and her relationship with me? What situation am I more likely to be put in by her because of my comments, closing the loop?

Magnolia is a nice comparison. It shows several different lives that have nothing to do with each other slightly impacting one another. However, their interactions are the result of circumstance, aren't that likely in daily life, and are only mildly impactful. They're setup for contrast more than anything, under the guise of interplay.

I'd like to make a Magnolia but where people could say, "that's just like my life! I see how my relationships are like those!" Then they live, and return to the game to further understand the relationship they have with it. Imagine if I built a manual for the "God" of social interaction, that he had to reference to implement the rules that define how our decisions impact one another. Then imagine I made an example video demonstrating all the contexts that illustrate those rules, then I made it into an interesting video, then I made it into a game.

Also, love Jerry Maguire.

Small note here: the Ocarina text speed is accidental. In the original Japanese version, the text appears one character per frame (20 per second). When it was translated into English - which takes approximately twice as many characters to say the same thing, just due to how the language works - they didn't compensate, and it was still one character per frame. So basically it's half the intended speed.

That was fixed for Majora's Mask, which scrolls at 2 characters per frame in the English version.

Ah, interesting.

Nah, you're missing the point.

Describing the experience is hard. It's much harder to describe the experience than the details. They are not a substitution for one another.

Mario is a very deep game. On the surface it's a series of platforms, enemies, and a few power-ups. However, the arrangement of these things produce a wide range of emotions in the player, in a wide range of players.

If you described the essential details of Mario, then tried to reproduce Mario you would get a cliche knock-off with no spirit. Anytime you see a game that's a copy of some other game but way less interesting, that's what happened. Lot's of Mario knock-offs, only 1 Mario. Lot's of Sonic sequels, not well-received. Lot's of Uwe Boll movie adaptations, nothing like the games. These realities are a result of detail-focused comprehension. The difference between understanding details and understanding experience is a mountain.

If you want to understand Mario, just write about Mario. Think about if you fell in-love. It would feel unique to you right? There's a phrase I sometimes hear, "half the music industry is people describing their own experience with love." The industry perpetuates because describing love is hard. If it wasn't, love wouldn't be a very interesting feeling to experience. If describing the experience of a game were easy, then it wouldn't be a very powerful experience to have.

Play Mario, taking breaks, and talk about what you feel. The experience will be very personal. Look inside yourself and say, "what is the biggest thing I have inside me right now?" Then write it down. Sometimes you'll miss it, or get it, or half get it. Then you'll try again. You'll improve.

Talking about details is fine too. I find it useful to describe how certain details make me feel, to get a rhythm going so I can get into just describing how I feel. But confusing details with experience is to miss the point of the Lens. A lot of developers do this. I think they often do this because describing an experience is personal. Describing an experience makes you vulnerable.

Think of it this way. Zelda was partially inspired by Miyamoto's exploration adventures through the outdoors, encountering caves and ponds he didn't know were there. He understood the feeling so well that he could translate what the real world did for him into a virtual, 8-bit experience. If he focused on the details, there would be no Zelda.

For your interest...

Mario makes me feel like a child in a playground. All my friends are yelling and running around. There are only a few key elements to the structure of the park: a yellow spiral slide, a multi-level gymnasium, monkey bars, rocking animals for the littlest kids, and a giant tire swing that can easily fit 3 of us. We would play all sorts of games there, grounders, brother, obstacle-course, manhunt, tag, yelling random things, and stay-on-the-tire-swing while two kids try to swing you off.

I remember feeling limitless possibilities. I felt free, like each object was an opportunity to express my most whimsical desires. I could string together playful actions like a musician with short-term memory loss. I felt impulsive. Playing in the playground was like a reminder of how easy it is to enjoy life when all you have are poorly thought-out plans, arbitrary tools, and an in-experienced imagination.

That's how Mario feels like to me, except I grew out of the playground; I still play Mario.

ex.
Mario: focused, playful freedom.

If we relied solely on prototypes, our designs would be seriously limited by the initial direction our prototypes took. I think a lot of the barriers that the industry currently faces, such as combining art and interaction, producing an original big-budget title with little risk, are a result of being unable to talk about ideas in a clear way. I think design documents are significantly harder to create than screenplays, like, the comparison between the two is almost funny.

Animals communicate largely through action. One of the key advantages of being a human is having the ability to discuss an idea, without having to execute it, in-order to communicate what we mean. If we relied solely on product for communicating with each other about games, our abilities to collaborate as developers would be limited to the same degree that animals are limited when communicating about anything. We're obviously not at that point, but we're a lot closer to it than away from it.

The reason games don't tell narratives the way books do, and certainly not to the larger public - they play Farmville and Wii Sports more than anything else for God-sake - is because we can't talk about designs in the way that we can talk about stories. Stories are something we already understand. We tell those to each other, and ourselves, all the time. Telling ourselves stories about the world is like, not a terrible definition of what thinking is.

Game design is a whole new frontier. Talking about a game's design is like talking about a system for generating stories. The difference between narrative theory and game theory is the same difference between raising a child and explaining to a child how to raise another child. There's no wonder why our children raise other children not nearly as well as we raise our own. We're programming authors instead of just being them. Design is like talking about the programming of authors. The public is like, "games are 'simple'," and it's like, that is the opposite of true almost by definition.

Can you imagine?

Think of it this way. We program games. We draw pictures and compose music and sound. Every idea is written down in some form or another eventually. There must be an abstraction for these things. There's an abstraction for everything. We just need to go find it.

I think most of the problems we have designing come from massive underestimations of how fucking hard it is. Like anytime anyone claims to have stumbled onto reliable design theory, they are like so far off, like I can't even put into words how far off they are.

It's also important that the main form of pursuing his/her goals is an action that can be performed by the player. God of War: he's really fucking pissed, wants to smash; you can smash.

Vaan and Tidus were extremely weak. Cloud was great for the first-half, then he just kind of, "did the right thing," because it was the "right thing." Literally, the motivation was, "to save the planet." Midgar was human. "Planet"? "Rock"? "Paper-weight"? They all have the same meaning to me.

As a rule of thumb: if your character takes up space in the player's mind and isn't in pursuit of a clear goal that's woven into his character, he shouldn't take up space.

That's the inherent value of paper. It has a cost of change, so you think a lot harder about what you put down there. The foresight needed is like that required in Dark Souls. A poorly thought out plan will not go well. Make decisions clearly.

And you know, making games yourself, like getting your hands dirty in the details, is a lot more fun. It's way more fun. Either you have an incredible relationship with the people that do your shit for you, or you do it yourself. Hint: getting you to do what you want is lot easier than getting someone else to do it. Teams bring barriers. Making a game yourself gives you the freedom to explore.

Most "designer" who only want to "design" are like that because they don't want to face their flaws. They think "design" is a way to stay absorbed in their ideas, do something with their lives, and not have to do things that make them feel like their whole life is pointless. But you know what, the growth you undergo from doing it yourself far outweighs the pain. The idea that you can avoid the complexities of having a big-ass thing with a ton of challenges that you have no idea how to tackle, and get rewarded, is the only delusion.

The story that you are more passionate about writing than any other. I promise you, that hasn't been explored. I bet you don't even know what it is. And you're _you_. .

I like the idea of how people in a society impact each other. A number of movies explore this idea, but generally only superficially. I have yet to see a good look at the way the growth of individuals in a family affect one another. Even if you take a look at the Sopranos, interactions occur in silos. One character affects another character. We get the impression that, oh, this one character has been moody in this one particular way, and is reacting to this other character in a way that implies that his/her moody-ness is maybe caused by something the other character did, but we don't see that something in the story. In the show it's like events come out of the ether, fill the characters for a line of dialogue, then disappear. The real weight of the relationship exists outside of our view. We don't see what someone did to push someone else in a certain direction. All windows into inner-thoughts are anecdotal.

The Wire, another excellent show, takes the opposite approach. Nothing is anecdotal. All we see are turning points. We see the changes and never the daily life. We know how things change, but not what it felt like on either side of the change.

I want a story that's like this,

A character (1) was like <original>, then <x> happened, and is now like <new>.

When this character (1) was like <original>, he had <y> impact on character 2.

Character 2 was like <2-original>, then <y> happened (from character 1), and is now like <2-new>

Does that make sense? It's confusing to read, but it's accurate.

Movies are always like, the character was something, then something happened, and then he was like something else. I want to see how his change makes someone else change, then how that person makes yet someone else change. I want to see the ripple.

Also, movies rarely show how someone got to their original state in the first place, or how that particular person changed because of what happened to them. Think about Darth Vader going evil in Episode 3. WTF was that? The audience has no understanding of what happened inside him. We're left to imagine that part. Movies always describe the how of events but never the how of a character's internal development.

Even think about The Godfather, one of my favourite movies. Marlon Brando is incredible. All we know is that he's cool. He is so cool. We get to see how cool he is. We learn about his values. But he never understand how he arrived at them. It's not like I see that movie and understand how to follow in his footsteps. I know he had a home, that he grew up in an interesting foreign place, that he loves his family, that he was pushed to crime out of necessity. These things set the stage for my imagination to determine how everything worked out to get to the current point, but I'm never given any details about it. It's like the writers of movies are always to afraid to talk about the how. If they talk about the how they need to know about the how. Screenwriters define how as, "the sequence of key events that led to the current situation." That's just past-term "what." "How" gives a description for reproduction. If I explain how I got an A, you should be able to get an A too.

I want to see how the development of an idividual is affected by his environment, and how he affects his environment, which is really just his society.

I also like the idea of putting Man in a position where he interacts with nature. Nature is amazing. It's very slow, so it can be hard to understand what it is, or how we can relate to it, but when I go camping I can appreciate a lot of things that are hard to describe. I often come up with designs that have some kind of complicated ecosystem with lots of plant and wildlife and diverse climates, but everything is tangible. Games often use "nature" as a backdrop, for mood. You never interact with it. Collecting sticks to build a fire in Skies of Arcadia, waiting for a rescue that may never come? Hells yeah.

I also like space-alien plants. I want to relate to a plant in a game the way I relate to an animal in life, and relate to an animal in a game in the way I relate to a human in real life. And I want to relate to a human in a game in the way I would relate to a family member in real life, if you know, we got along.

You jump topics suddenly like 5 times in the first paragraph. That should never happen.

The first semi-colon doesn't belong there. That should be a comma.

You use adjectives too profusely. Let's look at this passage:

"Fearing the words of her father, the obsession of her teacher & thoughts of her congregation; The Darkness overwhelmed the tempted “explosion”."

The ampersand? What?

I don't even know what this sentence means. Clarity is king in writing. It's more important to be clear than anything. A poorly communicated idea only communicates annoyance.

Bad semicolon. Semicolons are used to separate sentences.

Fearing the words of her father, "she"? The subject here has to be a person. Who is fearing? The reader expects the subject be used after the comma, like, "Fearing the words of her father, the girl became apprehensive."

Maybe the stuff after the comma is an explanation of what comes before it?

So like, "Fearing the words of her father, the manifestation of his obsession, the perfect parallel of her congregation's ignorance, the darkness in her heart overwhelmed her desire for love."

We don't know what "The Darkness" is. Being vague about something doesn't make it mysterious. "The Darkness" comes off as melodramatic and insulting. Don't do that.

If you want to introduce a new term, you have to explain it immediately. This sentence is discussing several things. It talks about the father, his opinion, her congregation, her relationship with the two, her flaw, her desire, _and_ some new concept that doesn't fit anyway. That's like sending a girl 2 pictures of your penis. If the first one didn't do it, like, don't send any more.

It takes time to build things up. I feel like you have 10 different ideas and you're shoving them all together for effect. That will never work. Don't ever do that. You need to guide the reader through what you have. Once you've established many ideas in their mind, then you can start throwing them together. Don't make the reader lift 8 differently sized weights just to get through your first paragraph.

It's great that you have ideas. Space them out. Writing is about having courage in what you have to say. Good writers make the banal seem interesting, not the interesting seem confusing. What you're doing is the result of feeling like your ideas aren't worthy enough to breath, that you need to cram everything in there. Tell a girl 1 joke and hold the space confidently, she will go out with you. Tell a girl 10 jokes in rapid succession, she will call the police. See the difference?

The "tempted 'explosion.'" Same problem as with "The Darkness." We don't know what the explosion is. Is it sexual? I don't know. "The" tempted explosion? Why "the"? I also don't understand why she's tempted. I don't know what the explosion is, or why she's tempted. Is the temptation hers? Who does it belong to? If I can't naturally understand what the tempted explosion is, you have to explain it. But since you're already introducing more significant ideas in that sentence, if I can't understand your adjective ("tempted") then it shouldn't be there at all.

Do you see how many questions I have that need answering just to understand your one sentence? You need to get that number down to 0. If you want to raise questions in the reader's mind you should do it deliberately. If them not understanding something will undermine their ability to understand something else, then everything will unravel. Be very aware of that.

I like the ideas though. There are interesting ideas in there. They're just presented in a giant jumble. It's like you stuck 'em in a bag, shook it up, then dumped out 30% on the floor. But I bet they were part of something I would like to read.

I'm following this model (or something like it) in my big game project. It's easier for me the way I'm doing it because you have control of 4 characters. So you feel less need to "become" the characters because you're more like this omniscient personality floating around above them, assume control now and again. It's a tightrope act keeping that design from getting frustrating.

That's the theory, anyway, I'm still in pre-production!

I have some designs like this. Some of my first ever, like when I was given the blank slate, focused on this idea.

I think in any game the player is an omniscient being. You can never actually be the character because there's always going to be some dissonance. Anyone who thinks their game gives the player complete freedom is seriously confused.

Tightrope? I found the approach to be liberating. What problems have you come across because of it?

A lot of my current designs have some element of the character's "natural tendencies." The feeling I try to invoke is that all the characters that you can control have their own wishes. If you back off they will do things on their own, literally. When you turn the system off, then return, things have happened in your absence. And so on. When you play, it's like you're "influencing" the character instead of controlling him. Sometimes your control is so precise it's exact, and other times it's suggestive. Sometimes you control one character through another character, adopting even "fuzzier" control, and so on.

I'm curious what issues you're having.

(Think about the behaviour of the horse in Shadow of the Collosus - it pulls on its own - or for that matter, Ico pulling Yorda around).

Kefka - he was original.

The dude who hit me with his car in GTA? Fucker.

That dude who threw me out of his car after I threw him out of it, in GTA? Fucker.

The bitch who called me a name (in GTA)? I'll show you....

Dr. "Eggman"? Meh.

Pokey from Earthbound? Hell yes. Hell, yes.

My recipe:
  1. Make an interesting character.
  2. Give this character a goal that will regularly conflict with the character's goal.
  3. Have the antagonist's, and the protagonist's, journey's towards their goals develop, so their point of conflict and nature of conflict shifts.
  4. Root this conflict in the mechanics.

Pokey? Interesting because he's rooted in reality. He's cocky without being cliche. Spoiled by his parents, a friend in some ways, legitimately, but also kind of fake. He cares for his family, but also looks down on each of them in interesting ways. Dislikes Ness for his ease of making friends. Has a stronger work ethic. Is more practical, less idealistic. Doesn't fit in with his surroundings, dreams of a bigger life - like Ness. Comes from the same hometown; contrasts with the main character.

Pokey is real, filled with detail, subtle, and driven. I can understand who he is. I have expectations of how he should behave but don't know nearly enough to not be surprised by what he does.

His goals evolve over the course of the story. What he wants changes. How we gets it changes. We can't predict how we'll conflict with him next, or if we will.

Pokey's behaviour directly affects gameplay. The knock at the door in the middle-of-the-night at the beginning of the game is incredible. He makes decisions in battle, forces you to do things, to lead him places. His family life is accentuated by his parents' reaction to Buzz Buzz (they kill him). You have to face him occasionally. He is behind circumstances that impede you.

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Health is pretty weak. I think it's weak in Halo (regen) and Half-Life (x/100).

In Assassin's Creed it's like _slow_ regen. Sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn't. The speed of regen doesn't really affect your decisions.

In Halo, every combat is reduced to 30-60 second bursts. A decision you make now doesn't have weight on the future. It's like talking to a person who doesn't remember anything you say for more than 3 minutes. But, it also means you don't trap yourself in a hole for a past mistake. It streamlines play. No shit :|.

Diablo III removed the concept of personalized character growth. That would be the Halo route.
They gave play-variety by removing the problem-areas, but demolished a large sense of the ownership you could have. The argument goes that hardcore D2 players never had any ownership anyway because they would follow set builds. WoW has that problem. Variety is an illusion, with a cost, like singing mermaids on the rocks.

Half-Life has the opposite problem. Past decisions have too much consequence. Also, what the hell is 100? I don't even understand that number. It's tough for me to relate the damage I took because of a decision I made, and the actual amount of damage I took. 93 to 62, to 41? What the hell does that .... *shooting guys, forgetting*.

Deadspace was nice. You had a visual bar that was like, "oh, I have 2 and a bit lengths; I have enough packs to recover 1 and a little."

Resident Evil your character like limped when she was hurt? Is that how it still works?

Smash Bros is too detailed, but at least it does something interesting with the damage (you fly further).

You know a cool way to represent ammo? "Reload Mr Freeman!" "Here's a health pack." I get companionship; awareness of my buddy's location; and an easy-to-understand, just-detailed-enough, description of my situation that strengthens the narrative _and_ doesn't draw my attention away from the action, and it's partially randomized - surprises are better than sure things.

I had one design where you were a young dude with a dog basically wilderness camping in space. The dog had a rich behaviour set. He had different feelings about the environment, enemies, the progress of an event/conflict, and _you_. When you made a decision it would affect what your dog was doing and your relationship with him. Both were always changing.

You had your own behaviour set as well - call it animation. You (the player) could instruct your character (the guy) to, say run, and he would run. Depending on the character's context the animation would vary. For example, in Mario, when you're on ice, you slide. Duh. The difference between Mario-on-ice and my character in-some-situation, is that my characters "context" is largely defined by how he feels, though also by his physical environment (like standing on ice). When you chose to run, his run would be affected by his state of mind.

Simple example: say the main character was pissed, and worried for the safety of his dog. These two variables would affect both his animation, and the mechanical meaning of "running." For example, getting speed bursts in small spaces is hard. You normally need space to build up momentum to get speed. Now, speed is important. It's necessary for pushing certain moves to their limits, so that they open up new tactical, and non-tactical, options. If the character is pissed, he gains an advantage, and some disadvantages, that allow him to get a burst of speed with far less space to build-up momentum. Being pissed would look, sound, and play differently.

All of the character's feelings affect how he appears to the player, and how it feels to play him. The character's "health" is like his state-of-being. Situations and enemies affect his state-of-being. The player becomes aware of these changes naturally, through all the game's visual/auditory cues, _and_ mechanics.

Both the characters (dude and dog) are very aware of one another. A lot of how they feel is dependent on what's happening to the other at any given moment, and what's happened between them up until that point.

Getting pissed can happen in a lot of different ways, and there are a number of different ways to feel other than "angry," which is literally 1-dimensional. Let's say an enemy attacks you. Maybe this makes you (the character) a little more pissed. Maybe he attacks you, and scores a hit by exploiting an obvious weakness for the 5th time in-a-row. You would get even more pissed. Maybe the enemy always goes for the dog, each time you execute a certain move. You might become "apprehensive" about that move. Maybe the enemy does a kind of damage that "wearies you," blunting your motions. The dog then interacts with you in intentionally nuanced ways, so that you (the player) need to perform a sequence of staccato-like actions, so that you can give the dog what he is implicitly demanding from you. The dog is effectively communicating that he thinks, that you need, to combat your weariness. In this case he's demanding you discipline yourself and stay sharp. Maybe the dog gets cornered at one point and you lose some of the insight he used to provide, even if only for a while. For the entire game you're dependent on him to tell you a lot of things about yourself, and he's dependent on you for the same thing. He needs you to make good decisions in the same way you need him to do the same.

And so on.

In a sense, both characters have "health" in a multi-dimensional space. "Damage" is done to you by your own behaviour, circumstances, the environment, particular attacks, just seeing something, and so on. Each type of "damage" affects your "health" in a unique way by shifting your state-of-being (inside this multi-d space).

Think of it this way. Health in the traditional sense exist in just a 1-d space. Enemies shift your health down different amounts. You can shift your own health back up by using health items. Sometimes you receive a status effect, like poison or slowed-movement. In this case, your "global health" has shifted in the "poison" dimension a single degree, from not-poisoned to poisoned. What if you could be partially poisoned? Or poisoned 20%? Then your health would be in a 2-d space, 1 dimension representing standard health, and the other representing the degree of poisoning. Your "tiredness" could be another dimension, your "anger" another, your anxiety over getting surprised another, your caution over pits another, your desire for recognition from a particular peer another, and so on. Objects in the game affect you by shifting how you feel, and your behaviour reflects these changes by always reflecting your current state.

Link panting when's standing still and low on health is a binary signal, of a one dimensional health measurement. Either your health is low or it isn't. The health bar on Isaac's back in Dead Space is an analog signal, of a one dimensional health measurement. You can see approximately how much health you have. The presentation of it is very good for ratios, like, "I have half health." Your character's appearance in WoW is a set of discrete signals representing your equipment choices in an X-D space, where X is the number of visible things you can wear at the same time. People go bat-shit for their appearance in WoW, and it is only a representation of a state in a small space, in which the choices made are not very interesting or personal; and those choices have nothing to do with your character's current state.

Back to my game. The characters animation/sound and mechanical options change to represent your character's change in "health." The best part is this. The dog interacts with the main character in a way that represents his opinion of the main character's status/health/state. Note, the dog's "perception" of how the guy is, is not necessarily accurate. Its accuracy depends on the guy's context, his own context, and the development of the 2 characters' relationship.

This creates real dependency between the two stars. You actually need each other to survive. The game doesn't force you to be together by creating obstacles that sometimes needs you, and sometimes need him. You literally are half a person without your companion. You lose sight of who you are. You need his constant feedback to give you the self-awareness necessary to reach the level of persistent tactical genius, and artistry, required to overcome the games challenges. And he's dependent on you, so you need to pay a lot of attention to him to give him the support he needs to be himself and grow.

If escort missions are a punch in the dick, this is falling in love, being together... in a game.

. Life is just semantics.

Nah, I like the name. "Essential Details" would mean something different, and far less valuable.

I've read the book. God, is it good. "Essential Experience" forces you to think about what the player is feeling. Very often designers get themselves into traps because they don't understand what it is they're actually trying to achieve, so they follow a bunch of conventions for different aspects of the game and end up with having them clash.

You want to know what it is the player is going through at each major point in the experience, so that you can say, "my player feels this, this, and this. Those are the 3 most important things; everything else is secondary. I know that my game is unique and valuable because those 3 things are things that people want and can't get from my competitors. Here's my reasoning...."

I'll give you an example. In an episode of Extra Credits (on PATV - Penny Arcade) they talk about Skyrim's opening. They declare that Skyrim's core engagement is "exploration," for example, "exploring a wide variety of beautiful landscapes that feel connected and real and beg you to traverse them according only to your heart's desire." This is not a bad assessment.

Then they talk about the opening sequence where you are in a cart, travelling around through closed, boring, terrain, listening to a self-important monologue filled with jargon. The experience is literally the opposite of what the developers should have tried to achieve. Why did they make this mistake? Because they didn't have a clear understanding of why people were playing their game. They got caught-up in details and started to think the details were the engagement, learning about "<some fantasy name> and <some fantasy name>." But that wasn't the engagement. Those details are only relevant when they represent the vastness of the world. They didn't, so they didn't deliver.

Expressing the key details that support your essential experience is important, that's why Jesse mentions it as a bullet, but expressing the goal of those details is more important.

Think of it this way. Life is just a bunch of experiences as far as humans are concerned. The description of an experience is as diverse as life itself. Look at all of music, or anything else. Describing the essential experience is about describing what your player is "really feeling" when they play your game. You can describe that any way you want.

maybe that's because the game is *intended for kids*? you have to realize that most videogames do not have adults as their target audience. if you found a game wonderful as a kid but boring as an adult, it doesn't mean the game failed. it means the game succeeded for its target audience of kids

. Of course its intended for kids. That's why I loved it as a kid. But, here's the thing. The text is probably the top reason I don't enjoy it as much now. Scroll-speed is literally the barrier to entry. Why can't I speed up the text? Often small design decisions can slice off huge sections of an audience because they make a game in-accessible. Was Nintendo wrong? No, they managed to control the pacing. If they gave the option haphazardly to kids to change the text speed, kids would do it without fore-sight and ruin their own experience. Miyamoto is like Steve Jobs, "the consumer is too simple to make a good choice." (Apple is now the world's largest company). I'm just saying that the way shit scrolls is actually a really big place for interesting things to happen.

also @toast_trip you have to consider the context in which these "ideas are worthless" statements are usually made on TIG. most of the "idea guys" coming here are kids who think their "awesome idea" for a minecraft zombie mmo is going to make them rich and famous and people are going to be lining up to work for them. people who play down the value of ideas here are often just trying to make it clear that that's not how game development works.

I wasn't trying to disagree with the value of doing that. There's a reality to success that's difficult to face. Somebody has to say something about it. I've got no problems with people reducing egos.

The talk of "ideas" vs "execution" is a common topic. The idea that someone has a "concept" then runs into a wall and crashes, or if he/she is talented, pivots into a better game and succeeds, is cliche. Half-Life and Starcraft both had to be scratched and re-built before they became the monsters that they are. 38 Studios burned because baseball star whats-his-face got ahead of himself. He confused dreams with labor, like one could replace the other. (38 Studios is that recent Rhode Island catastrophe - closed studio).

Maybe I'm just being a dick. When I look at triple-A games, or any game, that's unoriginal, or a set of interesting ideas put together poorly, my first thought normally is, "these guys were just guessing." Assassin's Creed is a beautiful game that sold a million copies and scored like 80% around. It could've been a classic, but the mechanics were a hodge-podge. I feel like the developers built 6 different features in silos and just stuck 'em together at the end. They succeeded by having a new idea and spending a big budget well. The mechanics of the game were so-so. The game was the most exciting and simultaneously disappointing one I'd played in a long time. If the devs spent more time discussing how the elements of their game would integrate in the player's actual experience, even just a little bit, the game would've been much better. Iterating blindly without a sense of design cohesion is just as bad as not prototyping. (I enjoy Assassin's Creed btw).

I think there's this fear among a lot of developers (including me) to not dig into design theory. Sometimes it's more like a caution. Learning about your game through observation alone is very limiting. Making games that deliver deep narratives (or deep anything) the way other media do is complex; it's more complex than it is for those other media. Movies for example - the simpler art form - don't even start production until a solid script is produced. They see good paper work as gold. Games almost see paper-work as a novelty.

The reason movies plan ahead is that the extreme malleability of ideas, when all they are is ideas, is necessary for making a good one. Good stories have a few thousand elements all richly integrated with one another (good mechanic systems have thousands of richly integrated elements too: Starcraft, Diablo, Street Fighter). The only way to achieve that integration is to iterate the narrative. The only way to iterate the narrative is to drive the cost of an idea change down to 0. Movie makers do this by demanding a script before production begins. That way, idea generators have the freedom to come up with something meaningful. The only cost of making a mistake when writing a script is having gained the experience to make it better.

I guess when I see people say, "ideas are useless," I think, "no, bad ideas are useless, small ideas are useless." Ideas are very valuable. The industry needs way more ideas. Ideas is the thing its lacking. Why are the top selling games casual, sports, racing, and shooters? That's like the entire global market right there. Throw in some MMOs and you're done; throw in long-running franchises and you're really done. Companies iterate the shit out of the same stuff because any other idea they have is so weak and under-nurtured they have no idea how to execute it. They're afraid of the design process, so we get theories like, "designs documents are useless, you need to make a game," instead of theories like, "maybe we just suck at designing."

*steps off the soap box*

i think there's a big difference between an idea for a game and a screenplay, though -- it has all the dialogue, every scene, descriptions of the scenery and costumes, and so on. a design document represents much less of a percent of the "total work" that goes into a game than a screenplay represents for a movie. a screenwriter isn't just someone who comes up with ideas, he's someone who basically writes the movie

I agree with this. I think there isn't a common language for what a "design document" is. If the design of a dungeon, for example, was a critical element of a game, and its description in the design wasn't strong enough to give the reader a clear idea of what it would feel like to play through that dungeon, then that design would not be a good one. It would be like a car without an axle. It's not like a car like that can "sort-of" drive. You can't get in it and test the handling out. It is literally useless without the axle. Everything that's pertinent to delivering your game's experience to the player needs a clear explanation in the design. It has to be clear enough for the reader to visualize the game's experience from the design alone, the same way a reader can visualize a movie from the script alone.

I think we're just in a culture of sub-par design documents. If 1% of scripts are viable, maybe 0.1% of game designs are viable, maybe less. We, as an industry, are really, really bad at expressing our ideas on paper. A lot of the game design "geniuses" out there, like Miyamoto and Notch, spent a great deal of time designing the game in their head, then got their hands on the means of production. Their design doc medium was intuition instead of writing.

Ocarina is almost unplayable because of slow-text. When I was a kid it was wonderful. The pacing captured me. Now, the first hour of play is like 35% spent in a text-stream of what is now a cliche story line. All I can think is... "Nintendo... it's not that good...."

Scrolling text gives character. You may even want to consider changing the way it "scrolls" - _slightly_ - for each emotion. There are a lot of non-annoying ways to animate text. Doing so would take real work to make it not look cheap, but it would be totally awesome. I miss the days of profile shots and text boxes. I'm loving Persona 2 because of this.

If you fucked up the multi-dimensional scrolling, people would hate your game for that reason alone.