Development phases? No thanks.
Posted by Adriaan in game design on February 11th, 2010
Working with development phases when creating a game is not going to clear up your process. In almost any case it shifts focus from what is truly important to the game.
At the end of the day, it’s about getting your game on the table. It must be well thought through, look good and must play good. I think development phases can mean a great deal if you wish to achieve that and phases can help you and your team to focus on what the phase is for. But then again, than it is not about your game anymore, it is about completing the phases and completing the process.
I believe that if you focus on the steps that must be taken in order to create the game, there is no confusion and you will never be ’stuck’ in a previous phase. I have never done a project in which the design document was completely written and final the moment the production phase started – another problem of development phases is that there is always an overlap. And that is not going to clear things out.
This is what generally goes wrong with student games – school requires the game to be created by clear phases that must all be completed before the other. The problem is that for most students, this suggests that when you are in the production phase, you don’t have to work on your concept anymore. And beside that, writing complete design documents based on assumptions is never a good idea – the same goes for planning. This is the reason why most student games are either crappy or not finished.
You must be thinking about SCRUM now, but that is on a whole different level – SCRUM does not let you look into the the coming months, only into a week or so. Thats why I like the word ‘milestone’ – milestones don’t need names, they only exist when a certain level of production is (or is going to be) achieved and they are great motivational boosts when you are near or at one. Now, take it from here.
Games as brand
Posted by Adriaan in Beyond Games on February 7th, 2010
How can we combine the boring parts of other disciplines, work fields and such, with games to make them more fun – and a more complete experience? This is a question who came from Jonathan Samel Baskin who held a presentation about this subject at the NLGD Festival of Games in 2009. He had the opinion that people don’t believe in the lies and stereotypes of brands anymore. He thinks that if we turn our brands into games and use all the powerful elements games nowadays use, brands would make more sense and tell costumers their true story. And I think he has a point.
Games are very strong if it comes to binding costumers (or players) to their experience and maybe even better at creating memorable experiences. Almost nobody reads through policies and terms of use – a game with these simple lines of text at its core would surely make these important aspects much more present.
Why can’t brands be more game-like? Why can’t, for instance, people ‘fight’ for their products? Why are brand products often not related to each other in terms of the relation between the product and the costumer? Why don’t brands have achievements and why are costumers not rewarded with titles when they achieve them? Why is there no interaction between the costumers who bought certain products from a brand? I could instantly think of a dozen examples of how to turn a brand into a MMRPG!
I can not imagine the examples I called have not been tried, but I haven’t found any game or brand yet that has become successful in it.
Please comment, this is presumably a very interesting topic.
What games are worth to players
Posted by Adriaan in Beyond Games, game industry on January 18th, 2010
A few months ago, the makers of World of Goo did an experiment. They gave away their game for any amount of money that you would pay for it. The result were fantastic:
http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/
The first thing I realized when I read through the results was that people are currently paying money for games they have not played before. And that is somehow strange, because how can we know its value when we have no idea of how much it will entertain us? I find it a dangerous thought that the amount of money that you have to pay resembles the amount of joy you will have from the game. And even worse is the way we think about a game that we have already bought, see http://goo.gl/eBqX for the reasoning. So not only are we probably paying way to much for games, we think about them much better when we pay a high price.
The second thing that crossed my mind was Runescape. They have a pretty good pay-model which would let people play the game, let them see what their fun is worth – and if they like it, they can pay for it and receive even more fun!
What is interesting about the World of Goo experiment is that they ask the player how much they think the game is worth BEFORE they have played it. So this experiment is all about expectations. And this simple thing is what all games have to cope with. It seems very interesting to do some more research into expectations and how to raise them. Ain’t that what marketing is all about?
An interesting next step would be to ask a player how much a game is worth after he has played it. How should that work? Interesting thought.
World of Warcraft as a serious game
Posted by Adriaan in Beyond Games, game design on November 18th, 2009
Can you imagine the most successful entertainment game ever, created by Blizzard, being a serious game? Well, I can. If you believe that World of Warcraft is purely about entertainment, you should stop reading here.
I have a confession to make – and it is a confession because I am ashamed of it. When I started playing World of Warcraft when I was 14, I immediately became an addict. My life became World of Warcraft 24/7, when I wasn’t playing it I was thinking it, when the servers were offline I was watching movies of it, I spend a minimum amount of time with my friends and worst of all – and the reason I quit – I felt bad that I was socially underdeveloped compared to other kids of my age. In other words, I had no girlfriend. And the moment I quit, I knew that I threw away the two years of my life that I played the game.
But now that I have grown up (a little), I have started to see things from a different perspective. These years might have not been as useless as I thought, I think I even have learned a great deal from this game! And lets start with just one of these: world economy. I will need to explain the economy in order to let you understand my point, so here comes the intense reading:
In a way, the world economy in World of Warcraft (WoW) is exactly same as the economy in our world. In WoW, money is rewarded after a player has killed a unit in the game world. A player can not only use this money to buy items that are necessary in order to advance through the game, he can also buy items that make the player more powerful. This can be done through an ‘auction house’, a marketplace in which players can purchase items by bidding on it or buy them out of the auction house for a higher price. Items are also dropped by units in the game, and because of their scarcity, these items could have a great value in the auction house. Players often hunt loads of units down in order to find valuable items that they can sell in the auction house, it is exactly like demand and supply.
Players also have the ability to choose between ‘professions’ that enable the player to craft different kinds of items, but because a player is never able to craft all the different kinds of items, another economy arises: players offering services to each other for small fees.
And then there is the underground market, which goes far beyond the game itself: buying in-game currency with real-world currency. Beside the Japanese companies ‘grinding’ (repeatedly killing the same enemies) for money and selling it in real world to real people and trading the money in-game, people even bought 3rd party software that would play the game for them and make sure the player would have a constant flow of income. Even today, years after the release of the first copies of WoW, Blizzard is still trying to ban all of these companies and programs.
If a player wants to become a strong and powerful player, he must know this complex system from the in- and outside to use it in a efficient way and to take an advantage out of it. And from my experience, almost all player in WoW know the drill.
Now that you know how the world economy of WoW works, I don’t think I have to tell you in what way it looks like our economy. Almost every part of the economy in WoW can apply to a part of the economy in our world. From the constant flow of money that players receive from their actions to the scarcity of items, from analyzing market behavior to selling your services, all these things can be translated directly to real-life examples.
But economy is not all. World of Warcraft contains one of the strongest forms of communities I have ever experienced. These so called ‘guilds’ are organized groups of people with hierarchies that have a shared goal, which can vary from ‘having fun’ to ‘raiding dungeons’ in order to become stronger as a whole. These communities demand things from players that no other game has ever achieved, including time, money for website hosting, taking effort to recruit other players, creating fair hierarchies and rewarding players for loyalty. Joining a guild is very much like a job interview, extremely difficult when you don’t have the experience, very easy if you have the right friends.
And another thing is the Player vs. Player (PvP) combat system. Players can team up with 1, 2 or 4 other players and be part of an ongoing competition between each other. In order reach the top in these competitions, you need a really strong team with an insane amount of experience. How to create and organize such a strong team is a tremendous effort.
There is so much to learn from World of Warcraft, dare I say more than any other serious game has ever learned anyone. And I believe World of Warcraft is not the only game that is teaching so many people. Games have the great ability to show players how certain systems work. If only the serious games market would focus on this fact instead of creating ‘educative’ games.
Goals and vision
Posted by Adriaan in Beyond Games, game design on November 18th, 2009
This article is about having a goal and a vision for your games and how that influences you as a game designer. Having goals and a vision for your game can have a huge impact on your final product. Why are these useful? It gives the game a direction and adds constraints to the product if used well. How to create these goals and visions is a tough and long process, it requires a great deal of research in what you like to do and in what you can do… So will they pay-off?
First of all, is there a difference between a vision and a goal? I think there is, and it can be found in the fact that a vision is much more general and can be interpreted in many, many ways. This is what sets the direction to your designs. The goal, on the other hand, is what narrows your vision, adds constraints to them. For example, if the vision of your next game would be ‘to create a multiplayer game with high dependency on each other’ it would be very broad. The concept could be used in a whole lot of of totally different games. To narrow it down, your goals could be ‘to create a story-intense game’, ‘to give the player interesting destructive choices’, ‘to let the player fully customize the characters’, etc.
Bear in mind that a game does not need a vision and a goal, but it does make it a lot easier for the team and the designers to have such for your game. Why, you ask? Let’s start with a direction for your game:
Imagine yourself working in a big team: everyone has his responsibilities for the parts that have to be done. Most of these parts require you to temporarily ‘narrow’ your vision, and a dangerous pitfall is forget what the product that you are working on has to achieve – and maybe you come up with things that do not fit that idea. A general vision or goal can bring you back to the level which tells you what you want to achieve. And this doesn’t just count for individuals, but for smaller parts of a team too. The different departments in a game studio, for example, are often specialized and focused on one aspect of the game, and what brings all these different focus points together is the direction and the vision of the complete game.
What this last thing means for a game studio is that everybody has his expectations of the final game, and this can be positive or negative for your final product. Positive if the vision of the game inspires the studio and is a little ambitious but achievable, negative if your vision is not challenging your studio in any way.
So having a direction for your game can help a lot, but how can constraints help you or your team to create better games?
A good example would be the indie games industry. Independent game studios have a sh*tload of constraints: time, money, resources, no business relations, marketing skills, you name it. But still every month, indie game developers manage to create games that reach the mainstream audience and sell thousands of them, some of them comparable to AAA titles. So how do they do it? How do they manage to create wonderful games with so much constraints?
I think the answer lies in the solutions of these problems: studios must come up with creative solutions to do ‘more with less’, to use everything they have got in the most optimal way. And that optimal way does not have to be the most straight forward way. Although constraints might sound like an inability at first, if you think again, it can also be used the other way around too: constraints can be used to help you focus on what is really, really, really important for your game. If you have no time and no money, but still want to make a great game, it has to be cheap and easy – and now that you know that you can use this inability to create a better game, you could even see it as an enormous challenge!
Once you realize that constraints can also help you instead of just blocking you, it’s like a new dimension opening to you. Now that you know where to focus on, you can see the bigger picture much easier and directly know what you can and can not do. If something doesn’t fully support your vision, leave it out! If something blurs the vision of your game, leave it out! If an adorable extra feature takes too much time for your programmers to make, leave – it – out!
The goals and vision of your game can simply be tools that you can use in your team. These tools give your team a direction and constraints. And if used well, these two small things might make the difference between being successful or not. So think about it: do you want to be successful?
Team play
Posted by Adriaan in game design on September 23rd, 2009
It is this one magical experience that drives players to play games for days, months or even years. It is the most proved and addicting aspects of games. What is this ‘team play’ and how is it used in games? What makes team play such a powerful game element?
Imagine yourself setting a goal that is far beyond your capabilities. You can either try to accomplish that goal and fail or… you could ask for others to help you. Every person that is going to help you reach your goal will extend the capabilities of you and your group of people we call a team. So to work as a team basically means to use the extended capabilities of every individual. Every individual must act on the behalf of the team or else the capabilities won’t add up to the people who do. If the full capability of the team is required to reach a goal, you need real team work, something that is not as easy as it may seem and something that needs a lot of preparation and organization. This part of team play is what we call team strategy or tactics.
In many recent video games, this last thing is where most games are based on. Think of an MMO like World of Warcraft where 25 individuals team up to defeat dungeons, or Left4Dead where 4 players all take a role in defending themselves and their teammates. Or think of almost any team sport – soccer, baseball… even tennis with 4 people is mostly based on strategical positioning and shooting.
Is there a difference between teamwork and team play? Is there a difference between working together and playing together? Which term you could use would depend on the context, on the goal of the team and whether that goal is brought to the team with a cooperative mind or setting. Both terms suggest interactivity between the team members. Team play would suggest that the team members have fun doing their part of the work that has been done, but why can’t team work be fun?
Anyway, we can conclude that the goal is what makes team play so powerful, impossible as an individual but possible as a team. The accomplishment of difficult tactics or strategies only add to the reward of achieving the impossible. Even if there are no explicit tactics, is can be a huge reward for the team members to accomplish implicit tactics. But are there also other factors that strengthen that sense of being part of a team?
If you have ever been part of a (successful) team, you would know that there is always this one team member that is better at what he does than everyone else in the team. I would like to call these people team heroes. These people inspire others to do their own task better, whether that task is the same or completely different. Beside respecting each person’s individual capabilities, strong team members also trust in each other in acting with their full capability.
So to wrap this up, a team is easily created by gathering some people together and giving them the same goal, but for a stronger sense of team play, a lot more is needed. Tactics make sure the process of achieving the goal is done organized, team heroes inspire team mates to do their work (better) and team members being dependent on one another will create trust in all the team members.
Achieving the impossible is possible. You just can’t do it by yourself.
Expectations
Posted by Adriaan in game design on September 17th, 2009
In a previous post I talked briefly about how the experience and expectations of players influenced game designers and game developers, to create games for the people who were already familiar with other games and their habits. But there is another problem: what about the expectations of the designers themselves?
Designers have been playing games too. Disappearing bodies, health bars, WASD controls, all of these things are elements of games that designers often fall back too. And there are tons of them. Pick up any random shooter and you will find at least 20 of these cases that would not be believable in the ‘real world’. And let’s be honest; I can’t do it either.
But it is not just the designer himself who causes this. There are programmers who tell you what they are capable of (or everything they are not capable of), producers, investors and marketeers that ask you to come up with cheap solutions so that the job can be done faster and there are gamers who will always expect a certain level of familiarity. In only a few cases, designers have almost absolute freedom in what they design – too bad that in these cases, designers create what players want and that is, unfortunately, mostly what they expect.
So what is it for me? Is there a way to overcome these game habits and create something that is more believe able than any other recent video game? Let’s hope so…
Summer GameDev: Day 7 / 8 – Crunch, Night and Day
Posted by Adriaan in Summer GameDev on July 16th, 2009
When I started this post it was late, but I couldn’t finish the post because my eyes wouldn’t let me! Tuesday was rough, we started early and worked quite hard from the start. Again, Sherida couldn’t come because of her illness. A lot had to be done in one day and we agreed that this would mean working at night too…
Queen Mosquito
Because so many things happened the last two days and I can not remember exactly what and in which order all these things happened, but happily they did. The programmers slept 2 hours last night and spend the rest of the night coding implementing, while the artist worked hard to make all the art for the background.
Playtesting
The spawn pools were successfully added to the game, giving us the possibility to start the level design. We also got a menu which was made and animated, sounds were added along with Background Music, an awesome cursor was added that added a lot to the feedback to the player whether he was pushing or pulling the flock, the code was cleaned up so that it would run smoother, at least designed 4 levels were added, a lot background art was added, the game was playtested for the last time and a presentation was made.
In-game style
After the presentations our game was played and we all agreed that we had to playtest even more, but that happens when you make a game in a week; you have to make choises on what you are going to implement and do within tha week, when the time is up, time’s up!
Ronimo playing our game
The day ended with a very inspiring and cool tour through W!games. As a team we promised each other to remake the game to a version that could be played without a WiiMote, a web-version.
Starting Screen Style
It has been an awesome week in which we all learned a lot – not just about skills but also about teamwork… About the fact that creativity DOES come outside in the sun and not behind TL-lights. And working hard, as a team, working for each other, that’s what is most valuable!
To try the game with one player (not how it is supposed to be though) you can go here. Use the mouse to aim, press A to confirm or PUSH your mosquito’s and S to PULL them.
Summer GameDev: Day 6 – Four Flockers
Posted by Adriaan in Summer GameDev on July 13th, 2009
Monday morning started with another walk through Utrecht. Decisions had to be made; where is our game going? What do we want to make? What would work best? 2 players? 4 players? Or back to a single player? Any more resources? And how can we do all this without lowering the drop below 30 fps? The warm weather combined with a soft breeze did us nothing else than good.
We decided to go for a multiplayer (2 vs 2, 1 vs 1 or 4 player deathmatch) manage-the-flock game in which there would be multiple ‘respawn pools’ that could be controlled in order to constantly receive reinforcement mosquitos. About 2 hours later, the programmers finished a battle-mechanic prototype in which rules of conflict were added between two groups of mosquitos. We playtested it…
… and came to the conclusion that further playtesting should conclude whether it is fun for 1 player to have 2 WiiMotes. In the battle-mechanic prototype the 2nd WiiMote did not add much and was, most of the times, only used when a player wanted to divide his group or pull back a lost group of mosquitos.
So, we created a to-do list and got to work… And we are still working! We already finished a bunch of artwork, animations, the cursor, some sounds including dieing flies and planting queen mosquitos and ofcourse there are loads and loads of code taht are coming through. Tomorrow is the last day and we’ll have to work hard… But it sure is going to be an awesome game!!
Summer GameDev: Day 4 & 5 (weekend)
Posted by Adriaan in Summer GameDev on July 12th, 2009
With a lot of candy and chips, we started the weekend with a ‘meeting’ talking about possible stories, enemies, elements, etc. the game could have. We had a prototype that the programmers built last night which we used to tweak the parameters of the flock and some parameters about the influence of the player.
After this tweaking, we decided to go for a single player experience in which we had to think of enemies which required different ways of attacking. We thought of 3 different enemies called Sockmouth, Trashpit and Chef Pepper which all required different strategies to ‘kill’ with your flock of mosquito’s. The artist started drawing, the programmers started programing, and the designers started thinking of the level design and ways to challenge the player even more.
About an hour later, we were playing the prototype with 2 players, each player holding two WiiMotes. We discussed about it and actually decided to go on with this concept and built another prototype for it. Here is how this session went:
A prototype was built today which we are going to test the next time we meet, monday. Then, we are going to talk about it and make a final plan about where this game is going. And after that, crunch time!