1. Game ideas are the Story I know already what's coming when people start to tell me "you should make a game about...", that short phrase already encapsulate the most common mistake about games.
Games may contains a story, some simply don't. A story can make a game better, or worse. But a story is not a game, a game is never only a story.
The story behind Tetris
What is a game idea then? How do you go to a game designer and tell him your great vision? Let's go through more mistakes first. Maybe the answer will be more clear once we get the "don't" out of our way.
2. Game ideas are balance The next common mistake is people writing pages and pages on how their game would work. You see this often on gaming forums like here, we are all serious gamers and know so much about games. So we start to explain how we would make a game around this and this mechanics and then comes the 3 pages long explanation how and why the game would be perfectly balanced and so on.
Yes! Brood War was almost perfectly balanced. No, you don't start designing your game and pitching it to people on how it will be good like brood war because it will be as balanced as BW.
3. Game ideas are systems This one is made usually by the game programmers. Hey if I can build the game, I sure can design it. The programmer will start to explain the whole hierarchy of how entities interact and how the pathing will be so smart and so one, but in the end you just ask "Ok and what is the player trying to do?" and you'll hear something like "anything he wants, that the beauty of it" and they'll go back playing Minecraft.
There is more but long is boring If you are talking to a game designer: Talk about goals, goal structure, player actions, difficulty progression... If you are talking to a random person, then pitch the cool thing about it. "You go around dungeons finding treasures" instead of "This is the story of john the explorer who ends up in a peruvean forest after a plane crash where his little dog go lost and now he is trying...." boring... Talking to investors is much trickier, my tip is to not waste time, move away. If you believe your idea is gold and know how to get the team to do it. Then do it after your day job and take a bank lawn 3 month before publication and collect all the money. If you need investors, you should know a lot more than I do about your stuff and it is useless for me to give tips.
"You start with three pawn that you have to keep alive, you can lose them by walking in traps, by starving them, or by them getting corrupted by another player. You have to be the first the traverse the map but you may collect resources along the way"
This is sufficiently abstract to fit any theme, you left many doors open to improve the design but you have a strong guideline to continue your game. Explore how the game changes totally by small changes. You will get a very different game if you make it about a turtle family or if you make it about three soldiers lost in a french forest during world war 2. If you had chosen the theme first, you'd have a harder time to come with original ideas. Now you can take ideas you have for the turtle version and bring them in the World War version.
On December 05 2012 23:11 sluggaslamoo wrote: Haha, I agree with a lot of those points. Especially the programmer one, being a programmer.
Honestly I dunno what makes a good game anymore.
Every good game out there has broken the boundaries of the accepted norms of good game design.
I don't think game design courses help at all either, its just a circle jerk.
I really think good game design is about throwing a dart at a dart board with a blind-fold on and seeing what you score.
Exactly, the problem is not coming with new game ideas, for which courses can help. It is with coming with good games. Games have been focused on evolutions for so long than we know very well what makes the perfect shooter or the perfect shoot'em'up. At the same time engines like Unity allows you to do so much in so little time. You have 1 millions person to compete with . The field is large and the crowd is tough. But at the same time, one man team can create game with 400 000 daily download on Android, check out Hill Climb Racing. Game design is the last open door to reach the mass without the AAA budget.
I'm sorry... did you really just basically say that story can't drive the sales of a game?
I honestly hate 99% of all games for this very reason, there are so few good storytellers left in the game industry it isn't even funny. The last game I bought was To The Moon, a game that is story driven, perhaps a bit to a fault but still amazing.
The lack of great story design has lead to the stagnation of the game industry.
On December 05 2012 23:47 KillerSOS wrote: I'm sorry... did you really just basically say that story can't drive the sales of a game?
I honestly hate 99% of all games for this very reason, there are so few good storytellers left in the game industry it isn't even funny. The last game I bought was To The Moon, a game that is story driven, perhaps a bit to a fault but still amazing.
The lack of great story design has lead to the stagnation of the game industry.
I don't think that is what he is saying at all. I think he's saying to not get hung up on story as if it is a fundamental component. And its not, plenty of popular titles have no story at all. I've seen way too many unoriginal "game ideas" that some guy came up with, by coming up with an elaborate story to justify why its a good game.
The first games ever made became popular without the use of stories. What is the story in pong or pacman? and gaming is as popular as ever now, especially indie games. In what way is it stagnating?
We should be careful not to put on our elitist niche monacles and judge games like someone would critique the finer points of amateur films. In the end "true gamers" are always going be stuck in their little niche subcultures who think they know what a good game is.
The biggest problem is we don't have metrics to good game design. It is clear that the currently accepted norms of good game design are probably incorrect for the most part. If it wasn't, we would see top companies making a hell of a lot more profit making games like angrybirds, minecraft and farmville (note I say profit, not revenue). The only times "good game design" appears in most top titles is if they are franchises, and they are milking out the big risks they took earlier in employing a new game design philosophy when they were a small company and had little to lose.
I disagree with all those points, or at least I can't relate to them at all They may be mistakes that beginners (or even veterans) can make, but I don't know whether they are that common or not.
On December 06 2012 00:36 imPermanenCe wrote: I disagree with all those points, or at least I can't relate to them at all They may be mistakes that beginners (or even veterans) can make, but I don't know whether they are that common or not.
Its funny that I'm the only one that is in agreement with the OP.
You guys should visit gamedev or any game engine forum. Its choc full of this crap.
"The game will be good because it will have an awesome story"
"My game will be good because it is going to be balanced"
"My game will be good because it will have dual joystick controls"
"I am planning on making a MMO better than WoW" (seen this about one hundred thousand times)
On December 06 2012 00:36 imPermanenCe wrote: I disagree with all those points, or at least I can't relate to them at all They may be mistakes that beginners (or even veterans) can make, but I don't know whether they are that common or not.
Its funny that I'm the only one that is in agreement with the OP.
You guys should visit gamedev or any game engine forum. Its choc full of this crap.
"The game will be good because it will have an awesome story"
"My game will be good because it is going to be balanced"
"My game will be good because it will have dual joystick controls"
"I am planning on making a MMO better than WoW" (seen this about one hundred thousand times)
Well, I'm a programmer and when I'm making a game (so also designing) I don't think about the points mentioned by OP. So they may be common mistakes, I can't relate to them.
But I do believe that these are common mistakes, yes.
On December 05 2012 23:47 KillerSOS wrote: I'm sorry... did you really just basically say that story can't drive the sales of a game?
I honestly hate 99% of all games for this very reason, there are so few good storytellers left in the game industry it isn't even funny. The last game I bought was To The Moon, a game that is story driven, perhaps a bit to a fault but still amazing.
The lack of great story design has lead to the stagnation of the game industry.
Oh, I was missing a phrase in my intro. Like pointed out by slugg, I don't speak of game design as game design of release game. Game design in the early stage of a project just shouldn't focus only on the story. Now a days, we need a mix, a perfect balance. Masterpiece are created when the story meets the game design.
Games like Syberia can carry the player with the story alone, their is not much of a game to it. Grim Fandango creates this illusion of a great story: When you finish the game, "wow this could make a movie" and then you start to think about the absurdity of puzzles in a movie. Game and movie stories are driven very differently. Prince of Persia: Sand of time is a great storytelling game. The story is minimalistic, but the player feels he is making the story.
The lack of story has not lead to a stagnation. The industry has never been so creative as it is now. We are drowning into games. We are probably the last generation that has even a chance to complete a good % of great games. Movies, you can watch 5 classics a day and you will catch up very fast. Books... Good luck reading out all the interesting stuff.
I think there are vidya games of many genres, and different games rely on different strengths to be fun. It's hard to really say what makes a good video game without just saying what you look for in a game. I also think designers start with different aspects of the game they find most important, and build the rest from that foundation.
This kind of reads like Shady Sand's horrible 'how to write a good story' blog lol.
While I realize that there are some common mistakes someone can make upon initiating a proto-manifesto of a game design, those mentioned in the OP are - just as is said in the post above me - too generic and do not apply to every game genre.
For example: Many people would argue that The Walking Dead is a bad game because it is mainly story driven. You could even call it an interactive movie. Regardless of what you call it, it is highly sought after and succesful in sales. The Walking Dead relies solely on the story, the mechanics behind the game are rather simple and besides being consistent, the art-style isn't top-notch or high-end either.
There is some great literature out there for people who want to start their own game design company that I have read (also through my own game design study) - but the stuff said in the OP doesn't appear in that literature in this generic way.
Games are a very unique and intresting medium, and people have jet to figure it out. I could list many other mistakes people make all the time....
a) You are not represantive for humanity. Never argue with "I exclusively like monkeys so all games should be about monkeys". This is exactly how it sounds when one says he only buys games that are focused on only the kinds of story he personaly likes.
b) There are not many different genres out there with different strenghts. Genres are artificialy created by players for players to find games, not for designers to design games. Thats one of the reasons game designers should be able to program, because if they they don't orient themselves on technical limitations, they will often times use other artificial limitations, such as genres.
c) game design is not throwing a dart on a board blindfolded. The thing you think about is not game design. Its not game design to decide stuff like setting. Its creating and polishing mechanics, rules and dynamics. Its about interface and interaction. Not about orcs or elfes. There is as much to learn about game design as there is about programming, maybe even more. Unlike in programming your game wont crash if you make a mistake in game design, and in 99% of the cases no one will be able to tell you the mistakes you made, unless you have an awesome community like Blizzard. If you are a programmer, you can imagine a bad game design a little bit like a sneaky memory leak. That makes it very hard to learn and very important to closely study other games.
d) game design is often misunderstood, because many people associate with design something like fashion design, making things look good. But in in the game industry this is called art, and art and design have nothing to do with one another. There are hybrid professions. A character designer often times is also a concept artist. But the term design doesnt mean you make things look good at all, in fact aestetic is not part of design at all. Story, Visuals, Music, are all forms of aestetics, and if you think about them you dont think about game design.
edit: reading my own post I realize it sounds like im a total dickhead. But its hard to state something about game design without sounding like a dickhead, thats why i mostly prefer to let other do the talking. If you are realy intrested in this topic I would much rather recomend you to follow people like Jonathan Blow, Terry Cavanagh, Edmund Mc Millen, Tommy Refenes, Derek Yu, Zach and Tarn Adams, just to name a few. I post some talks that i personaly find incredibly inspirative:
There are more but they are kinda hard to find, especialy talks from the gdc. But if someone is intrested I will try to get more links.
Yep take it with a grain of salt but don't come crying after you get your game idea rejected by someone, just because the format of your game idea was wrong.
There are no limits for games, each time you put limits on what makes a good game, someone proves you wrong. This is generic advice, because the patterns I see everyday are very strong.
You can't bring a best-selling game as an argument on why a person who has never made a game shouldn't talk about his story idea as a game idea. (Point 1 is especially aimed at those who come talk to me, "hey you have a game company, why don't you make a game about"
Point 2 is aimed at gamers. So many time I hear gamers going "I've played so many games, I know everything". They know much, but knowledge without wisdom is seldom enough.
Point 3. is aimed at programmers. This is trickier since I have a programming background and I enjoy programming stuff that are now included by default in game engine, just because programming is fun. Game design implementation can be rather boring compared to tweaking some AI behavior. Anyway, programmers tend to make the game idea clear much too late thinking that "they'll have it soon", this result in average game that might be interesting looking.
There are no limits for games, each time you put limits on what makes a good game, someone proves you wrong. This is generic advice, because the patterns I see everyday are very strong.
I think is very true, and we are just about to explore the possiblitys of the medium. We are far from having seen and made everything. This is especialy important for
So many time I hear gamers going "I've played so many games, I know everything". They know much, but knowledge without wisdom is seldom enough.
just because seeing what already exists is very important, but realizing that its just a very tiny fraction of whats is possible, is also very important in my opinion. It sounds rather trivial, but many people seem to struggle with it. I said its important to closely study existing games, because many little solutions already exists, you can build upon that knowledge or you might end up with something worse then existing and 20 years from now your game will be reviewed by angry video game nerd
Here is an intresting example of the camera logic of super mario, to give people unfamiliar with game design a better feeling of what the profession is about:
Thankyou, I enjoyed the videos although they did come off as a bit amateurish. Johnathan.B made some good points although it sounded like he struggled to translate what he had in mind into words, I feel like I learned something new. I feel like he tacked the current paradigm of hand-holding in games very well.
I know what game design "is". I put that in quotation marks because I am merely talking about what game designers consider their role is, rather than what game design actually is.
Game design is believe it or not, actually about designing games. In the end game designers intend to come up with original ideas in order to, you said it, make a game. They then try to "design" their ideas using research and game design patterns so that their idea works better. One of the main focus's being to instil conduits that links the player to the game and makes the game feel natural and adds immersion to the game.
The problem is that the game design community is for lack of a better word, a circle jerk. It is still a group of self-entitled amateurs that seem to believe that their observation of good and bad game mechanics will have a big impact on the success of a game.
The biggest reason for this is lack of alignment between game design and game value. Game designers spend a lot of times looking at previous games and seeing what they did right and what they did wrong, however they don't spend any time aligning the game mechanics with value.
Game designers always get confused by why such well designed games fall flat on their faces, and "terrible games" end up being really popular, and are quickly to judge it on luck or marketing. Well, on a low budget, its mostly luck and part marketing, but its also more often than not about alignment of game design to value (with low budget games, this is also often by chance, but Facebook made this 100x easier).
When design is aligned to value, that's when we will more consistently see top titles from an indie developer, instead of a huge mass of one hit wonders. Alignment of design and value, is the reason WoW was so successful. Whether or not you think its a good game, it is extremely popular. Value are things like friends, investment (money or time), progression, skill level, etc. Its interesting that Blizzard afterwards went in the opposite direction, by making BNet 2 feel like a barren wasteland, hiding stats from the players, and locking people into divisions.
Other good examples of this are Maplestory (community and fashion/gear), Mafiawars (see Schelle video), Minecraft (what you build) and Diablo (loot, gear and battlenet), off the top of my head.
There are still no metrics for good or bad game design. Instead you have professional game designers making presentations about their observations and why they think something is good or bad and explain to the best of their knowledge, why the mechanic made the game popular. A game designer will happily give their opinion on what is right and wrong with your game, and the potential future of it. The fact of the matter is, he has no clue. I'd love to see a game designers analysis on farmville before it was released.
Game designers spend way too much time looking at game mechanics, instead of the whole picture. They spend the least of their time talking about value, which is why we see so many arcade style indie games which don't contain elements of community, personal and competitive progression (gear, leveling, etc), story, etc. They think its dumb, and unfortunately many game designers are too intelligent too see the value in these kinds of components. Of course when they do pull it off e.g Portal, its amazing, but just look at how many games failed trying to do the same thing.
Its interesting that after 30 years or so, we still have no clue what makes a good game. Game designers can only say what made a game good, but they cannot come up with a system for consistently creating top games unless they are leeching off a franchise.
Every year a new game will come up that boggles our minds on why so many people play it. Farmville, XBox Achievements, Mafiawars, Webkins. There's not a lot of evidence that shows that any of these games/systems were ever professionally designed to the extend that JB did with his game, if they were, they probably would be much better.
As I said earlier, making a good game is like putting a blindfold on and throwing darts at a dartboard. The one hit wonders pumped out by one man teams that completely overshadow "well designed" games by people JB makes this obvious. It is not to say that game design is important, I just think that its silly to say good game design has any importance on a game (with the state of the profession that it is now).
On December 06 2012 03:34 Winchestro wrote: Here is an intresting example of the camera logic of super mario, to give people unfamiliar with game design a better feeling of what the profession is about:
Here's a good example of what I'm talking about. Super mario could have had different camera logic and the game might have been even more popular.
The main problem I have with game design talks about games is circular reasoning. They pick popular games and analyse the components they think were good. The game designer cannot be wrong because, the game was popular right?
I know in this particular case he talks about it as objectively as he possibly can. I think using Super Mario as the topic of a design research task, and using that to justify the validity of game design does not convince me, well, the validity of "game design" as the profession it is seen now.
When they put the principles to practice their game isn't popular because they weren't looking at the whole picture. I'd really like to see game designers talk about games that haven't been released yet and put their theories to the test.
On December 05 2012 22:57 0x64 wrote: 3. Game ideas are systems This one is made usually by the game programmers. Hey if I can build the game, I sure can design it. The programmer will start to explain the whole hierarchy of how entities interact and how the pathing will be so smart and so one, but in the end you just ask "Ok and what is the player trying to do?" and you'll hear something like "anything he wants, that the beauty of it" and they'll go back playing Minecraft.
Can you please tell my brother this? He has been trying to tell me that "good games are a result of good programming." No, polished games are a result of good programming - the game itself must be designed to be good. It has nothing to do with the code, the setting, the story, or even the fucking characters. It has to do with the base system feeling good.
I like Final Fantasy 7 because the game system was entertaining. Materia was a genius idea made by some japanese dude who though to him self "How my character can't just use any skill?" Then bam! He did it. But what a lot of people focus on is the story... which is really generic. Yeah + Show Spoiler +
It's sad that Aeris dies, and that Cloud isn't the ex-soldier he thought he was,
, but you would have never figured that out if the game wasn't fun to play. It's common sense, really.
EDIT: I meant Materia as in the Materia system, and how it works with the game. Not Materia in itself. I know that's only a part of game design, but it played a pretty big factor for me in continuing to play.
The rest of what you said was also right, but I have personal experience with trying to explain to my brother that good code =/= a good game.
EDIT: Also, I want to thank you for posting this. I was beginning to think I had no idea what I was talking about when it came to game design. But now I see I'm on the right track. I'm not exactly correct, but I feel like I have a way better idea of what I'm doing than I did before.
I agree with the people in this thread who are right.
"My game will be good because it is fun" is about the only acceptable answer, and in reality, it comes second to "my game will be good because people will buy it."
Im glad you liked the videos of Jonathan Blow! Jesse Schell is also a name absolutely worth mentioning. I didnt see the talk live, but I watched it on youtube 2 years ago. I remember it beeing totaly mindblowing
I could not agree with you more, on all points. Especialy on
The main problem I have with game design talks about games is circular reasoning. They pick popular games and analyse the components they think were good. The game designer cannot be wrong because, the game was popular right?
Thats actualy what tried to avoid, but I didn't make it clear. Super Mario could definetly have had different camera logic, and even a much better one. But when you start learning game design, you need to learn what has already been done and why its done the way it was done. Once you understand it, you can build upon it and make your own, better camera logic.
One statement of a tutor of mine is sticking to my mind, because it changed the way I think about innovation "You need to understand a rule, before you can break it". Its a great philosophy and it took me relatively long to realy understand it and when i first heared it I refused to believe it
But circular reasoning is kinda the opposite of what you want to have happen, and its very dominant in game design. Its tempting to just blindly copy existing concepts, instead of learning from them and building upon them to create new, better or completely different concepts with the same and better quality. The reason why I posted the camera logic video was to give a feeling of how much thought is put into details people normaly don't see if its done correctly, like the way the camera moves. You only realize it when its done badly. Examples for that you can get watching any episode of the Angry Video Game Nerd^^
Im curious what you mean with "value". From what i've learned about evaluation of game design descisions, its a good practice to find and define the core gameplay of a game, and then value each descision by asking yourself "How well does this support my core gameplay?". For example the core gameplay of star craft 2 could be defined as something like "Fighting with units". Then you can watch some aspect about the game, like base building or economy and ask yourself "how well the way i build my base and my buildings support fighting with units?"
Pylons can be used to warp units in, creep gives your army a movement boost, buildings block movement, etc. You end up wich a very basic form of economy in sc2, because blizzard asked that question and removed most elements that didnt support "Fighting with units" or didnt add unique new elements. If your core gameplay on the other hand is "building an economy" you need to evaluate all your fighting units (if there are any) in terms of how well they support "building an economy". Just a basic example, i don't know if "fighting with units" is actualy the best definition of the sc2 core gameplay.
If you mean with value something more of a ethnic value, like morality, then Jon Blow actualy covered it with good talks you might also be intrested in. He talks a lot about the moral values of game design desicisions and both of these talks go deep into details of what what kinda summarized in the first video i posted above. I don't know if many other people here would have the patience to watch 1-2 hour talks about the topic tho
EPT![[image loading]](http://yababoon.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/how-tetris-works.jpg)
. The field is large and the crowd is tough.
