Brainstorming a Game Idea (Game Design: Theory & Practice)

Game Design – Theory and Practice (Book's Summary: Part 3)

Book’s Author: Richard Rouse III

Summarized by Samuel Coelho

2. Brainstorming a Game Idea: Gameplay, Technology, and Story

Almost all of the challenge in game development is not coming up with a good idea, but in following through and being able to craft a compelling game around that idea.

The process of coming up with a game idea that will work is complicated by a number of factors fiction authors do not need to worry about. In part this is because computer game ideas can come from three distinct, unrelated areas of the form: gameplay, technology, and story. These different origins are interconnected in interesting ways, with the origin of the game’s idea limiting what one will be able to accomplish in the other two areas.

2.1 Starting Points

For each decision the designer makes about the game she is hoping to create, she needs to understand how that limits what the game will be. If the parts do not work together, it does not matter how many markets the concept covers – no gamers will be interested in playing the final game.

2.1.1 Starting with Gameplay

With a more specific idea of what type of gameplay she wants to create, the designer should start thinking about how that will impact the technology the game will require and what sort of story, if any, the game will be able to have.

Technological feasibility may end up limiting the scope of your gameplay. If you find that you need to adapt your gameplay to match the engine, you really are not starting out with gameplay as the origin of your idea, but instead with technology.

The type of gameplay your game will employ similarly limits what type of story can be told. Certain types of story just will not fit with certain types of gameplay, such as the Greek mythology in a flight simulator gameplay.

2.1.2 Starting with Technology

Sometimes the designer is presented with a new technology and tasked with coming up with a game story and gameplay that will exploit the sophisticated technology to full effect. Of course, the designer does not need to use every piece of technology that a programmer feels compelled to create, but it’s always better to have your gameplay work with the engine instead of fighting against it.

Other times its predetermined that the project will be using an engine licensed from some source, either another game developer or a technology-only company, and many lincensed engines are still developed with one game genre in mind.

When technology is handed to a game designer who is told to make a game out of it, it makes the most sense for the designer to embrace the limitations of that technology and turn them into strengths in her game.

For the greater good of the game, the story and the technology must be compatible with each other.

As a game designer, it is possible to get stuck in a rut of how a game “needs to be done” and forget the potential implementations that may be a better fit for the technology.

2.1.3 Starting with Story

The story can be the jumping-off point, the central vision from which all other aspects of the game are determined.

Frequently, a particular setting may inspire a game designer. Any good game designer who thinks up a story or a setting will have a tendency to think of it in therms of how it would translate into a game, how the player can interact with that story, and how the story may unfold in different ways depending on the player’s actions in the game-world.

Not all stories will translate very well into games, mainly if we consider today’s genres, and thinking of gameplay possibilities early can help you rule out settings that simply will not work out for today’s possible gameplay styles.

The designer MUST find the gameplay that will allow the player to experience the most important elements of whatever story she is trying to tell. Of course, the technology will have to match up the story as well, primarily in order to support the gameplay the designer decides is best suited to telling that story.

2.2 Working with Limitations

Experienced game designers already understand the limitations placed on the creation of games by technology, gameplay, and story. When they take part in brainstorming sessions, these game designers have a gut sense of how making certain choices about the game in question will limit its creation further down the road.

2.3 Embrace Your Limitations

In many ways, developing a game is all about understanding your limitations and then turning those limitations into advantages. It’s the designer’s job to establish what constraints the project has, find the perfect parts that fit within those limitations, and finally make all the pieces fit together in a compeling game.

2.3.1 Established Technology

Often a designer at a larger company is required to work with whatever technology that company has, and even if the designer is fortunate enough to be able to seek out a technology to license for a project, that designer will still be limited by the quality of the engines that are available for licensing and the amount of money she has to spend.

Working solo as both designer and programmer no a project, one might think the designer could make whatever she wants. It’s not always like that. Functioning as the sole programmer and designer on a project has many benefits, but it certainly limits what one will be able to accomplish.

Sometimes it is better to shelve an idea that is incompatible with your technology and come up with a design better suited to the tools you have. Once you have identified the limitations that the engine saddles you with, it’s best to embrace those limitations instead of fighting them. This is not to suggest that a designer should always design the simplest game that she can think of or that sophisticated, experimental designs should not be attempted.

Therefore, a designer should consider what the technology lends itself to and use that as the basis for the game she designs and the story she sets ouy to tell.

2.3.2 The Time Alloted

Though time, and consequently budget, are primarily the concern and responsibility of the project’s producer, the game designer needs to know how these factors will limit the project just as the technology, gameplay, or story may.

For example, if development is running six months late with no end in sight and as a result the publisher pulls the plug, it does not matter how brilliant your game design may have been in theory. No one will get to play your game because you failed to fully consider the logistics of implementing it.

2.4 If You Choose Not to Decide, You Still Have Made a Choice

Without a consistent and unified vision, no game will have a fighting chance. Though each member of the team may have a valid case for pursuing her idea, if the ideas do not work together, at some point the group will need to pick one and go with it.

In the end, you do not want your game to consist only of an excellent technology or a compelling story or a brilliant game design. If none of these components support each other and you lack unified vision, your game will be just as bad as if you were working with a hackneyed story, a thin game design, and an incomplete technology.

What Players Want? (Game Design: Theory & Practice )

Game Design: Theory and Practice (Book's Summary: Part 2)

Book’s Author: Richard Rouse III

Summarized by Samuel Coelho

1. What Players Want

Determining what players want out of a game is something that all designers must contemplate if they want to make great games.

Designers must have the ability to assess whether something is fun for themselves, combined with the ability to listen to the opinions of others.

We cannot look at the problem of “what players want” purely from a market-driven standpoint and declare, “I don’t understand it, but if they want it, I’m going to give it to them.” In order to make a great game, you must first find it fun yourself, and hopefully this can be used to build something that appeals to others as well. But in the end, the spark must come from within.

Often game designers are so bereft of an idea of what will be fun and what gamers want that they instead only include gameplay ideas that have been tried before, rehashing what was popular with game players last year.

Gamers generally don’t want to buy a game that is only a clone of another game; a “new” game that only offers old ideas and brings nothing original to the table. Nonetheless, successful games can be useful, not for cloning, but for analysis.

1.2 Why do Players Play?

1.2.1 Players Want a Challenge

The challenge is one of the primary motivating factors for single-player home games.

Games can entertain players over time, differently each time they play, while engaging their minds in an entirely different way than a book, movie, or other form of art.

Games force players to think actively, to try different solutions to problems, to understand a given mechanism.

1.2.2 Players Want to Socialize

Computer game designers need to remember that the origin of games is tied to a social experience, and that this communal component is central to their appeal.

The fact that players still try to chat with each other in high-velocity games like Halo and Doom is testament to they player’s desire to socialize.

As multi-player games have become more and more common, many game developers have been quick to point out their advantages in terms of competitive AI. Human opponents are much more unpredictable and challenging than any AI that could be reasonably created for games. This, they suggested is why people are drawn to multi-player games. Though this may be true, the biggest advantage of these multiplayer games is that they transform computer games into truly social experiences, which is one of the largest motivating factors for people to play games.

1.2.3 Players Want a Dynamic Solitary Experience

Sometimes friends are not available to play, or players are tired of their friends, or simply are tired of having to talk to other people all the time. Similar to the differences between going to a movie theater with an audience versus renting a video to watch alone at home, the antisocial nature of single-player games attracts a lot of people who had enough of the other members of the human race.

1.2.4 Players Want to Bragging Rights

If one looks at arcade games both old and new, the high-score table and the ability to enter one’s name into the game, even if only three letters, provides a tremendous incentive for people to play a game repeatedly. Players who may not have much to brag about in their ordinary lives, who may not be terribly physically coordinated at sports or bookish enough to do well in school, can go down to the arcade and point out to all their friends their initials in the Centipede game. Even without telling to anyone, players can feel tremendous satisfaction when they beat a particular game.

1.2.5 Players Want an Emotional Experience

The emotions that games are able to evoke in players are much stronger than what can be experienced in other media where the experience is less immersive and considerably less personally involving.

Unfortunately, many games emotional ranges are limited to excitement/tension during a conflict, despair at repeated failure at a given task, and then elation and a sense of accomplishment when the players finally succeed. Game designers would be wise to concentrate on expanding the emotional experience in games beyond excitement and accomplishment, into more unexplored and uncharted emotional territory.

1.2.6 Players Want to Explore

Exploration is not limited to spatial exploration. There is the exploration of different strategic choices, different types of resources and the exploration of personalities of the characters you meet.

1.2.7 Players Want to Fantasize

Computer games have the potential to be a fantastically immersive form of escapism providing a good medium for players to explore sides of their personality that they keep submerged in their daily lives.

1.2.8 Players Want to Interact

Games provide better than any other art form an interactive experience. No other art form allows audience to be the guiding force in the experience they are having. Games have fond their greatest successes when they have played up the interactive nature of the experience and provided our audience with something that they cannot get anywhere else.

1.3 What do Players Expect?

Players have certain gameplay expectations, and if these are not met, they will soon become frustrated and find another game to play. It’s the game designer’s job to make sure the game meets these expectations.

1.3.1 Players Expect a Consistent World

The consistency of the player’s actions must be maintained. Having no expectation of what will happen if a certain maneuver is attempted will only frustrate and confuse players.

Players also do not want a maneuver to work sometimes and fail other times, without a readily apparent reason for the different outcome. Also, if only expert players are able to identify why their action failed, many novices will become frustrated of they are defeated for no reason they can understand.

1.3.2 Players Expect to Understand the Game-World’s Bounds

When playing a game, players must be able to understand which actions are possible and which are outside of the scope of the game’s play space.

1.3.3 Players Expect Reasonable Solutions to Work

If the player finds himself with a given solution for a puzzle that logically, along with the gameplay provided, should work in the game and it doesn’t, he will feel cheated by the game. Therefore, there may be a lot of equally reasonable solutions, and unless the designer makes sure that those solutions work as well, players will discover and attempt these non-functionality solutions and will be irritate when they do not work.

1.3.3 Players Expect Direction

Players need to have some idea of what they are supposed to accomplish in the game and how they might achieve this specific goal. Not having direction is a bit too much like real life, and players already have a real life, also most of the players play games to fantasize.

If players do not know what their goal is, the goal might as well not exist. The classic example of the goal-less game is SimCity. SimCity is like a toy with which players can do whatever they want, without ever explicitly being told that they have failed or succeeded. In it the players will strive to make their idea of perfect city. Therefore, though SimCity does not explicitly have a goal, the very nature of the game and its grounding in a widely understood reality encourages players to come up with their own goals.

1.3.4 Players Expect to Accomplish a Task Incrementally

Once players understand what their goal in the game-world is, they like to know that they are on the right track toward accomplishing that goal. The best way to do this is to provide numerous sub-goals and sub-sub-goals along the way. Players are rewarded for accomplishing these sub-goals just as they are for the main goal.

Without providing feedback of some sort, like rewards, especially if the steps necessary to obtain a goal are particularly long and involved, players may well be on the right track and do not realize it.

1.3.4 Players Expect to Be Immersed

In order for players to become truly immersed, they must come to see themselves as their game-world surrogate.

Once players get into the game they often forget that they are playing a game, just as film audience may forget they’re in a theater or a book’s reader may become completely swept up in the lives of the story’s characters. Commonly known as the “suspension of disbelief,” this is the point when a piece of art can be its most affecting on its audience.

Things that may snap out the player from the gaming experience:

• Game crashing;

• Physics outside of the game’s context;

• A reasonable solution for a puzzle not woking;

• Bad correlation between GUI and game-world;

• Main character featuring an annoying behavior;

1.3.5 Players Expect Some Setbacks

A victory that is too easily achieved is a hollow victory.

It must be kept clear that when players fails, they should see what they should have done instead and they should instantly recognize why what they are attempting failed to work out.

It’s also a good idea to let players win a bit at the beginning of the game. This will suck players into the game, they will know that success is possible and enjoyable and will try extra hard to overcome what has bested them.

1.3.6 Players Expect Fair Chance

Players do not want to be presented with an obstacle that can only be surmounted through trial and error, where an error results in their character’s death or the end of their game. Players may be able to figure out the proper way to overcome the obstacle through trial and error, but there should be some way to figure out a successful path on their first try.

If players keep dying from each shot-in-the-dark attempt around an obstacle they will curse your game!!

1.3.7 Players Expect to Not Need to Repeat Themselves

Once players have accomplished a difficult goal in a game, they do not want to have to repeat their accomplishment.

Game player’s lack of desire to repeat themselves is why save-games were created. Also, if the game designers recognize that a specific obstacle is a difficult one to pass, they can make the game automatically save the player’s position.

It’s also important to note that automatic saves should not be used as a replacement for player-requested saves, but should instead work in conjunction with them.

1.3.8 Players Expect to Not Get Hopelessly Stuck

Under no circumstances should the players be left alive, stuck in a situation from which they cannot continue on with their game.

We also must consider the implementation of an AI that figures out when it has been hopelessly overpowered and surrender, just as players who are hopelessly far behind will do the same thing by quitting and starting a new game.

Introduction (Game Design: Theory & Practice)

Game Design: Theory & Practice (Book's Summary: Part 1)

Book’s Author: Richard Rouse III

Summarized by Samuel Coelho

0. Introduction

The book Game Design Theory and Practice, from Richard Rouse III, deals with the game development process from the viewpoint of the game designer.

0.1 What is Gameplay?

The gameplay is the component of computer games that is found in no other art form: interactivity. A game’s gameplay is the degree and nature of the interactivity that the game includes, i.e., how players are able to interact with the game-world and how that game-world reacts to the choices players make.

Accordingly to the book’s author, the gameplay concept does not include how the game-world is represented graphically or what game engine is used to render that world. Nor does it include the setting or story line of that game-world.

0.2 What is Game Design?

The game design determines the form of gameplay. The game design determines what choices players will be able to make in the game-world and what ramifications those choices will have on the rest of the game. The game design might determine what win or loss criteria the game may include, how the user will be able to control the game, and what information the game will communicate to him, and it establishes how hard the game will be. In short, the game design determines every detail of how the gameplay will function.

0.3 Who is the Game Designer?

The game designer is the person who designs the game, who thereby establishes the shape and nature of the gameplay. Many game designers perform a wide variety of tasks on a project, but their central concern should always be the game design and the gameplay.

Knowing how to program can be a great asset to game design. However, it is not necessary component of designing a game; many fine designers do not know how to program at all.

Note: Projects are often led not by the people with the most seniority or who have the right title on their business card; projects are led by the people who “show up” to the task, who care about their projects and are committed to them, and who are willing to put in the time and effort to make the game the best it can be.