Focus (Game Design: Theory and Practice)

Game Design: Theory and Practice (Book's Summary: Part 5)

Book’s Author: Richard Rouse III

Summarized by Samuel Coelho

4. Focus

Developing a game for two years with a team of twenty people typically more resembles war than the creation of art. A stronger game may arise from the ashes of team members arguing over the best way to implement some aspect of gameplay. If the game merely becomes unfocused as a result of these squabbles, then a good game is not likely to emerge.

With conflicts potentially arising with other team members or from within yourself, it is far too easy to lose track of just why you were creating the game in the first place. You must be able to overcome the difficulties that will come and stay on track by remembering your focus.

4.1 Establishing Focus

A game’s focus is the designer’s idea of what is most important about a game. Designers should be able to write down their focus in a short paragraph. Writing can often clarify and solidify a designer’s thoughts.

As a game designer you should start concerning yourself with your game’s focus from the very beginning of the project. You should ask yourself a series of questions about the game you are envisioning:

• What is it about this game that is most compellin?

• What is this game trying to accomplish?

• What type of experience will the player have?

• What sort of emotions is the game trying to evoke in the player?

• What should the player take away from the game?

• How is this game unique? What differentiates it from other games?

• What sort of control will the player have over the game-world?
  

Keep as part of the focus only what is most important to your vision of the game, only those points which, if you took them away, would irreparably weaken the game.

Your game may be similar to another game, but in your focus you want to describe the game on its own terms and avoid making vague comparissons to other games. If you want to copy some aspects of other game, you must first determine what you think its focus may have been. Then take that focus, remove whatever parts are not necessary for your game, and add in whatever new ideas your game will incorporate. Thus, if your focus need to refer another game, it’s important to make sure everyone involved with the project understands the focus of that other game as well.

When choosing your goal you have the oportunity to express yourself; choose a goal in which you believe, a goal that expresses your sense of aesthetic, you world view. It matters not what your goal is, so long as it is congruent with your own interests, beliefs, and passions.” If you do not believe in your game, it is not going to be the best game you can make.

You want your focus to be something you will fight intensely until the game finally ships.

Ask the lead designer, even if he’s you :), what the project is trying to do, not in a confrontational way, but just so you get a good idea of where the project is going, and how your contribution to the game can properly aligned with that direction.

You do not need to be in a lead position in order to keep your project on track. Try to figure out where the project seems to be heading, and start talking with people about it. Chat with other designers, artists, programmers, and producers.

Do not self-censor your ideas until it’s absolutely necessary. Try to include in your focus a few more sentences that serve to illustrate the feeling of your game.

Do not include aspects of your game that are more about getting the project funded and published than making the game you want to make. You can worry about commercial considerations later.

Avoid using generic descriptions that do not actually provide the reader with any useful information.

When doing a remake or a sequel, it makes sense to take a look at the original game you are working from, and get a clear understanding, for yourself, of what its focus was. This is necessary so you will have a good idea of what exactly you are remaking.

Assemble the pieces of your focus into one paragraph, and try to write it cleanly and succinctly. Refer to your game in the present tense, as though your game already exists.

Giving your game a name makes it real instead of just an idea, as ridiculous as that may seem. You want other members of your team , the marketing department, and the business people to start liking your game as soon as possible. Try your very best to come up with a name that you like and that you could end up being the final name for the game. Often whatever name is given to a game early on will end up sticking with the game forever.

4.1.1 The Function of the Focus

Since the focus is designed to guide your team members as well as yourself, it needs to communicate the same ideas to everyone who reads it. You need to have a properly streamlined focus that can stand on its own, without demanding that the person who is reading the focus understand any other particular games.

Without a strong focus to guide their actions, programmers and artists may have a misunderstanding of what the game is supposed to accomplish, and may be thinking of some other type of game as they work on yours.

If your game is to have multiple separate modes. Your focus should apply to all of the different sub-games within your project.

4.2 Maintaining Focus

If no one on your team thinks your focus is very captivating, and despite your best efforts to campaign for it no one can get excited about it, you can come to one of two conclusions. First, perhaps your game idea is no all that good. If the idea in your head is still exciting you, maybe you did not capture the correct focus properly on paper.

When working in a team environment, it is important to include people from many sections of the development team in early brainstorming sessions. The designer may take ideas from all sources and mold them to fit into a single, unified vision.

It may be that the focus you have come up with is quite strong and will produce a great game, but selling people on it will be trickier if they feel like they were needelessly excluded from its creation.

Not every team can develop every type of game. A team that has been making sports games for years, likes working on sports games, and a team that knows how to make a sports game fun is probably not the best team to enlist to create your nineteenth-century economics simulation.

4.2.1 Fleshing Out the Focus

The design document should take the game suggested by your focus and expand on it, detailing how the goals in your focus will be accomplished by gameplay and precisely how that gameplay will function. You will also be sketching out the flow of the game, what the game-world will be like, and what sort of entities the player will encounter.

A properly designed focus will allow you to refer back to it to answer many of the questions you encounter during the design process. Through the focus, you can carefully consider if you are adding gameplay that takes the game in a new direction. It is important to identify which additions to your game cause it to deviate from the focus, and then change or eliminate those erroneous elements.

Many of the ideas you or members of your team have may be fine concepts, but if they not fit the game you are currently working on, they are not worth exploring or implementing. Do not throw these incompatible ideas away, however. Write them down in your notebook for the next time you are working on a game design.

Once the design document is finished and other elements of preproduction are completed, full production can start on your game. Questions will come up about how to implement a feature, in addition to new ideas about how to improve the game. For each of these, again, you should refer back to your focus to clarify your team’s direction.

Very often, players play and enjoy a focused game and will quickly cast aside one that is unfocused.

4.2.2 Changing Focus

You should expect your focus to change several times while you’re working on the design document. This is particular painless if you’re in preproduction phase and the design document is not yet complete. Thus, it’s good to detect problems in the game and in your focus as early as possible if you don’t want to develop an inferior or over-budgeted game.

If too many assets need to be reworked, or if it’s too close to the ship date to change them, of if there’ not enough funding available to get them changed, you may need to rethink changing your direction.

Your focus can change for variety of reasons. You may come to see shortcomings or failings in your original focus or you may recognize a more compelling experience that the game can provide that is outside of the scope of your original focus.

Of course that if you change your focus radically, you will need to tell the team about the change and make sure they all agree with it. If your team do not agree with your new focus, you may want to rethink that change or rethink your team.

Avoid changing things just because you are tired of them.

The usually worst decision you can make is to create whatever new assets the game needs following a new focus, while the old assets still follow the inferior focus you had embraced previously.

4.3 Sub-Focuses

You can see a sub-focus as a concept that supports your main focus, and one that will help your game attain that central focus. Through it we can break apart other objectives of your game to accomplish the central focus.

Now might be a time to explore what type of player you are thinking will want to play your game. Are you appealing more to the hard-core gaming crowd, or to people who maybe do not play computer games quite often? This will have a direct effect on many aspects of the game, including what level of simulation will need to be created, as well as the control system the game will use.

It might make sense to talk about what type of engine and graphics your game will have in one of the sub-focuses.

Sub-focuses are set off by separate headings from the primary focus. This way, readers of the focus can easily see the primary and most important focus and how the sub-focuses go into detail about specific parts of the game.

As you are working on your sub-focuses, it is important to always make sure that they jibe with your primary focus, as well as any other sub-focuses you may have.

4.4 Using Focus

It’s important to realize that your focus is not a marketing tool. It is not created to sell your game to the executives, It is written as a development tool for your team. Neverthless, you may be able to take your focus and change it into something to get your marketing department excited about your game. You may want to come up with some direct comparisons that place your game within the context of know popular games. Of course that you can use the content of your focus to back up such superficial comparisons and to make the marketing folk understand why your game is unique and will appeal to gamers.

Using a focus is one tool that will help you to create a solid, entertaining, and compelling game.