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Building games is one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences I can think of. Taking pure imagination and making it come alive is absolutely addictive—a creative process so immersive and consuming that you’ll start craving it when you haven’t done it for too long. Some people think the fun is in playing the game, but, for a few special people, creating and building the environments in which other people play causes mere gameplaying to pale in comparison. If you’re reading this book, you are probably one of those special people who have that compulsion to create, and, with your creation, entertain.
Designing your game is the first step on your journey toward bringing your dream to life. Remember, many designers have come before you and failed to deliver. The game design world is like an iceberg: Only a small number of successes have peaked above the frigid water to shine in the sun. These successes are what happens when a great design meets a great team. The rest lurk in an underwater graveyard, rotting slowly in the company of a million other badly designed failures.
To avoid this watery fate, you’ll have to be smart, imaginative, tenacious, and driven. You’ll need to take a look at those successes and pick them apart like a scavenger bird, ripping out their guts to learn how they managed to get on top of the heap. You can learn from the failures as well, stripping them of their once-bright promises and glinting hype to peer at their ugly, ill-conceived gameplay so you can say to yourself,“I will not follow this path!”
■ The Basics of Game Design
In this chapter, you’ll learn the following:
■ The basic knowledge you need to begin designing a game
■ How to empower the player
■ System design
■ Different forms of challenges and how to build them
■ Pacing and flow
■ The beginning, middle, and ending of a game
■ Some tips on how to make your games better
The “Fun”damentals
Making games can be a humongous power trip. Having the ability to create what can amount to rat mazes for humans can lead some designers to grow egos the size of a large continent. They lose sight of the core fundamental, which is that games are about one thing: entertaining people. This is the first and most important thing to think about when you’re making any kind of game, whether it’s a teensy mod or a huge, 250-hour RPG. In making a game, you become an entertainer, not a puppet master bent on world domination. As such, your primary concern should be the hap-piness of your audience and not satisfying your unfulfilled need to punish those who annoy you. You have to make your game fun.
Fun
Fun is the first thing people think about when they hear the word “game.” Fun is a simple word, easy to spell, and everyone agrees on what it means. However, the things that people consider fun are as individual as fingerprints. Some people might like hang-gliding, some enjoy going to the mall, some enjoy watching sports, and some enjoy data-entry jobs. Although two people might agree that something is fun, if you get a group of 10 people together, you’ll start having problems.
Games are supposed to be fun. People expect them to be sources of entertainment and delight, a source of diversion to distract them from a less-than-perfect existence. The game industry employs thousands of testers and spends millions of dollars a year in market research, trying to determine what people think is fun. So far, no one has really narrowed it down enough to create a magical “fun” formula that guarantees success time after time.
As a future level designer, you’ll want to make your levels fun. Although you might not be able to please everybody, there are some ways to hedge your bets.
Know Your Audience
Unless you’re making mods that only you are going to play, you’ll be making your game for other people. These people will have definite opinions as to what is and isn’t fun, and they’ll completely pass you over if you don’t consider those opinions when making your game. Knowing your audience can be an easy task if you’re making a game that isn’t exceptionally innovative, such as a first-person shooter (FPS) or a real-time strategy game (RTS). The further you get from the accepted genres, the harder it will be to find your audience. There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes companies create a genre out of whole cloth, much like Maxis did with their wildly successful game The Sims.
To know your audience, you have to find them. Again, it can be pretty simple to find your audience if you’re making a game that belongs to an established genre, especial-ly if that genre has an online multiplayer component to it. You can frequent Internet message boards and chat rooms dedicated to games similar to the type of game you want to design to see the opinions of people who play the games like the one you want to create.
Another good place to find people talking about what they like and dislike about games are game review sites and magazines, like Gamespy.com and Computer Gaming World magazine. One site that I’d recommend is Gamerankings.com. It’s a portal site that gathers links to all kinds of game reviews. You’ll be able to find as many opinions on what’s good and what’s bad as you can handle.
Once you find your audience, pay attention to what they like and what they don’t like. This will give you tremendous insight into what to do and what not to do when designing your game.
A word of warning: As you start looking for opinions on message boards and chats, remember Sturgeon’s law: 99% of everything is crap. For many, the only reason to write anything about a game, positive or negative, is because they have very strong feelings about it. They might not be looking at the game in the most balanced way. A lot of game reviewers can also let their feelings get away from them. Remember, these people are trying to describe why a game is or isn’t “fun,” and “fun” is a slip-pery thing to define. Always keep your own counsel, and when you read something that seems highly emotional, try to get what you can from it and move on to the next opinion. Remember, you’re trying to make a game that many people will enjoy, not just one or two.
Know Your Genre
Just as it’s important to know who your audience is, you need to know the games that your own game will be competing with. Not just so you don’t unconsciously copy another game developer’s work, but to learn what players expect from your genre.
T i p
What players expect from your game is perhaps the deciding factor in whether it will be a success or a failure. If you meet the players’ expectations, or even exceed them (in a positive way, of course), your game will be a hit. If you fail to meet the players’ expectations, well… Welcome to Nowheresville, baby. Population: You.
Expectations are usually generated well before players pick up your game. They’ll be influenced by the scanty information you provide on your Web site, the possibly false information generated in online or magazine previews, any marketing you may do, the box your game comes in, and even the name of your game. And, most annoyingly, they’ll be influenced by pure conjecture generated by word of mouth. The more your audience’s expectations get out of hand, the more disappointed they’ll be when they find out that your game doesn’t actually allow them to match Captain Kirk against Darth Vader in a duel to the death.
It’s important to know your genre, and what that genre has given its fans so far. Consider first-person shooters (FPS) games on the PC. Currently, every single FPS uses the W, A, S, and D keys for major movement control. The W key moves you for-ward, the S key moves you backward, and the A and D keys strafe, keeping you facing forward while moving side-to-side like a crab. Players now expect that key configuration when they sit down in front of any new FPS, and woe to the plucky game company that tries to do it “a better way.”
When you’re making your game, you need to find all these standardizations that have become associated with your chosen genre. It’s not just control configurations, either. A boss at the end of each level is a cliché that a lot of players expect. In an RTS, start-ing a level near needed resources is expected.
You also need to know the taboos. Jumping puzzles aren’t very popular in first-person shooters. Random disasters aren’t appreciated in any game. Each genre and even each console and the PC have their own “thou shalt nots” associated with them. PC gamers, for instance, hate save points, and like to save anywhere. Console players don’t mind as much. The white and black buttons on the XBox controller are hard to get at. By studying games and reading reviews, you can get a good idea of what drives players crazy and what they like.
You should also know your genre well enough to know what sorts of things it could do better. Although some of the mechanics may be set in stone, others might be more pliable. If you can find and improve the things that need improving, or change the things that won’t alienate the player, you’re on the way to making a great game.
Know Yourself
This may sound a little philosophical, but in order to make a fun game, you truly need to know yourself. Or at least you need to know what you think is fun about games. You’ll never truly know your audience enough to predict what every single one of them will think is fun. However, you do know what you think is fun. When playing a game, whether yours or someone else’s, try to notice when you are having a good time. If you can pause, do so and ask yourself what you just did that caused that big smile on your face.
The next step is figuring out why what happened was so fun. Is it because of the way your character moves? Is it because of the rewards you’re getting? The victories you’re achieving? The cool dialogue? The other players in the game? The intriguing puzzles? The challenge of it all?
You need to find that root, identify it, and really look at it hard. Then, you need to fig-ure out how to implement it in your own game. If you can do this, you’re ahead of the pack. Many people can’t tell why they’re having fun, and if you quiz them about it, they’ll give you fairly vague answers that can change each time you ask them. Knowing yourself, and being able to objectively identify the core reason why you feel that a game feature is or isn’t fun, is essential to making fun games for other people.
Empowering the Player
Tim Schafer, the designer behind such games as Grim Fandango and Full Throttle, once noted that all games are about wish fulfillment. When you play a game, you’re putting yourself into a fictional scenario that you wish you could experience in real life, at least in general terms. You can be a mighty general in chess, a tough, sarcastic biker in Full Throttle, or a powerful dwarven paladin in Blizzard’s World of Warcraft game.
This is a good point. When you design a game, you want to immerse the player in a role that he thinks is fun and cool. As they say about writing good fiction: “Take me to a place I’ve never been, make me something I could never be, and let me do things I could never do.”
However, I like to boil this down a little more than that. I think that the root of fun in most games has to do with power. When a player feels empowered, achieves some level of competence that was formerly beyond him, that’s when he starts having fun.
Empowering the player is pretty easy to do in modern video games. In fact, it’s hard not to give the player too much power! You can give him super-strength, armies of crack soldiers to command, or even power over life and death itself. He can survive deadly ninja attacks, falls from great heights, or scathing verbal assaults from salty pirates. Game developers can create any conceivable world and make the player its god.
For some players, being a god is the pinnacle of fun. For others, just being a tad more competent than they are in real life brings the most enjoyment. Once again, this goes back to knowing your player and your genre. Knowing how to properly balance your game so that the player has as much of a challenge as he wants, without making it too easy or too hard, is one of the many balancing acts you’ll have to face.
A Small Lesson on the Nature of Power
Power, by definition, is the ability or official capacity to exercise control. By under-standing the nature of power, and which types of power appeal to which types of play-ers, you can begin to fine-tune your game design technique.
There are three types of power: creative, destructive, and manipulative.
Creative Power
Having creative power allows you to bring something into existence that wasn’t there previously, usually by combining separate, already existing objects or concepts. You can create a chair, a meal, or a relationship. Building games, like Sim City and RollerCoaster Tycoon, focus a lot on this type of power.
Many hobbies and professions revolve around this type of power, from model build-ing and painting to manufacturing cars and game design. Creative power brings with it a sense of accomplishment that is extremely rewarding. Games that focus on cre-ative power are generally considered “toy” types of games because they are more about play than about competition.
Most creative games have two aspects to them, a building aspect and a reward aspect. The building aspect usually concerns itself with giving the player a toolset that allows the player to create whatever he wants given his building materials. An example would be a building game based on Lincoln Logs. The player can use the toolset to create buildings and constructs out of an endless supply of virtual Lincoln Logs: giant log skyscrapers, log statues of famous rock stars, log museums, etc. The reward aspect of the game would issue challenges to the player, such as “build a log International House of Pancakes that seats 100 log citizens with as few logs as possible” and rewards him when the challenge is completed.
There is a large, vocal audience out there that loves creating. However, this type of gameplay is usually complex and time consuming, and can turn off players who want instant gratification.
Destructive Power
Destructive power is the ability to uncreate or radically alter the state of something until it no longer resembles its original form. You can destroy just about anything: civilizations, rhinos, or ideas. Games like Serious Sam, Space Invaders, and other shooter-style games primarily focus on destruction.
Games that center on destruction are the most satisfying in an immediate sense, and thus are the quickest to empower. Destruction, at least in western culture, is also asso-ciated with winning, as this quote from the movie Apocalypse Now suggests:
Robert Duvall, Apocalypse Now (1979): You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn’t find one of ‘em, not one stinkin’ body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like… victory. Someday this war’s gonna end…
Erasing all existence of the things and people that annoy and anger in order to “win” drives the nihilistic pleasure that players find in games of destruction and anarchy. Probably not something we want to remind ourselves of very often, but it’s a part of human nature that readily becomes apparent when given large weapons and a sense of unaccountability.
Games that focus on this type of power also have the quickest gameplay, with the shal-lowest learning curve. Players can boot up the game, learn the mechanics, and accom-plish something very quickly, making this type of game the friendliest for people with a limited amount of time or short attention spans.
Manipulative Power
Manipulative power allows you to control other things. (It could be argued that this is the only real type of power, but for this discussion, the three types make more sense.) Manipulative power is present in all games. A player can control armies in Command & Conquer, control how Lara Croft moves in Tomb Raider, or control the falling blocks in Tetris.
Manipulative power is the most subtle power, and its correct use rewards the player by making him feel clever and proud of that cleverness. Giving the player the power to manipulate also allows the player to immerse himself in your game, as your game characters become his extensions into your game world.
Games centering on manipulative power usually require the most thought, and can be incredibly complex. Depending on their complexity, they can be short or long experi-ences: a game of Tetris can be short, but a game of Civilization can take quite a long time.
The Flow of Power
To be complete, we should also consider the flow of power. In any contest, there comes a point where you have power over your opponent, or your opponent has power over you. If I jump from a step stool, I have the ability to land safely. I’ve triumphed over the adverse effects of falling. If I jump from a cliff, it’s more likely that the adverse effects of falling will overcome me. In the game City of Heroes (shown in Figure 1.1), I can jump from any height without killing my character (although he does take quite a bit of damage).
All this is part of the complex web of interrelationships between different power sys-tems in a game. The ability to create, destroy, and manipulate often appear in the same game. Each ability can interact with the others, creating interlocking systems