Designing a Game - Concept to Polish (with audio)

Designing a Game - Concept to Polish

Polishing

Gregory Avery-Weir

Let's Pick Mechanics

Must-Haves

Tuning

(The participants flesh out their concept, letting their player enter numbers on keypads [using a physical keypad or an on-screen touch keypad] to control ship systems and exploring space in an abstract way by choosing from a limited selection of next destinations. I suggested incorporating the time dilation of the black hole to make the time pressure more interesting.)

You pick a bunch of magic numbers while developing; are they the right magic numbers?

• Walk speed, jump height, acceleration
• Music volume, sound volume
• How long does it take to kill an enemy? Open a door?
• Font size, gauge legibility, scaling algorithms
• FOV, camera distance, lag

Make sure you have the essentials:

• Sounds (music/ambient and triggered)
• Accessibility (colorblind, hearing, mobility)

Go through must-have checklists like Rock, Paper Shotgun's "Complete Rules for Games" and Earnest Adam's "Bill of Player Rights"

• Make all cutscenes skippable
• Don't insult the player or waste her time
• Let the player save
• Let the player quit quickly
• Include options

Juice

(Thanks to Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho for "Juice It or Lose It")

Juice is stuff that makes the game seem more responsive to the user. It gives events and actions weight without a lot of art assets or new mechanics.

• Particle effects
• Tweening
• Stretching and squashing
• Screen shake
• More sound effects
• Flash and fade

Mechanics

Definition (for this talk only):

• Mechanics - Ways the player can affect the world (through affordances) and what happens as a consequence
• Could also be called rules

Your mechanics should support your concept.

Designing Challenges

Concept

Consequences

Affordances

• Call this "level design" or "puzzle design" if you want.
• Challenges should fit your concept and your mechanics.
• Teach players how to play your game but leave room for demonstrating mastery.

Make your core mechanics have interesting consequences.

• Samus opens doors by shooting them.
• Mario breaks blocks and kills enemies by jumping at them.
• Guybrush wins swordfights by insulting his opponents.
• You get to the End of Minecraft by crafting Ender Eyes and placing them in blocks.

How does the player cause action?

Buttons? Joysticks? Mice? Motion controls?

• Katamari Damacy uses tank-style thumbsticks to give a feeling of pushing.
• World of Goo uses the mouse for precise placement of goo balls.
• Wii Sports uses motion controls to simulate the actual athletic activities
• Super Meat Boy encourages gamepads for quick timing

What's Important?

• Mechanics are what the player can do.
• They're often verbs: move, jump, take, shoot, build, talk
• They should be things that are important to your concept.
• If it's not important, leave it out!

Pick Actions

Figure Out How

Make Your Game About That

Samus SHOOTS

Guybrush TALKS

Samus shoots:

• What direction(s)? What stances?
• How often? Is there ammunition?
• Special shots?

Guybrush talks:

• Freeform? Menu-based? Symbolic language?
• Are words sometimes more effective?
• How simple is it to talk?

• Don't have an elaborate dialogue system in a game that's about rolling stuff into a ball.
• Don't have combat if your game is mostly about making friends
• You can have multiple focuses at the risk of diluting your rules.

The Player PLACES

The Prince ROLLS

• Buzzword is "ideation"
• Comes from a seed
• That seed is more than "an X clone"
• "Like X but Y" is okay
• More room for excellence if you don't start with mechanics in mind at all

Super Mario Bros 1-1

Super Mario Land 1-3

Thanks to Anna Anthropy for "To the Right, Hold on Tight"

( http://auntiepixelante.com/?p=465 )

Thanks to Anna Anthropy for "Into the Pyramid"

( http://auntiepixelante.com/?p=459 )

Examples

Breakable bricks

Open path

Concept

Result

One block high

Looming

Silent Conversation

How to Raise a Dragon

"I'd like to do a game similar to 'Majesty' but call it 'Medieval Majesty'."

"I'd certainly be interested in discussing the "Medieval Majesty" concept. What is it about Majesty of Colors that you'd want to carry over into the new game? I'd want it to be more than just the original game with knights and dragons instead of soldiers and helicopters. :)"

"Yes, I'd want the game to be much more than just 'MoC' with Knights and Dragons. I'd want it to be a cool game play experience that takes the best of 'MoC' and improves on it."

Let's Make a Simple Challenge

Let's Make One!

(The participants design a challenge where the player can risk entering a less-time-dilated area of the ship, losing more time before the ship enters the black hole, in order to get a needed code. Alternately, they could take more time in the "safe" area to bring the code closer to them.

They also designed an adversarial robot that can't do CAPTCHAs and is forcing the protagonist to do them for its own end.)

(The participants brainstormed ideas and chose one about escaping a black hole while blocked by malicious CAPTCHAs.)

Any Questions?

Future Proof Games

Image by Tom Mooring

"On the topic of emotions, The Last of Us [did a good job]."

"I was playing Alpha Protocol and I got stuck. There was one scene in the middle I could just not get by. How do you fix that?"

"I believe it was Valve that collects statistics on their games on where people die a lot or get stuck and would release patches."

"As you're going through defining [the game], is there ever a point when you let that modify the original concept of the game?"

"I've played Mario Brothers countless times and never thought about it that way. Do you think they sat in a room and were like, this is what we want them to do for that part?"

"As far as skipping side things, I see a couple of different games that have minigames. When you're talking about what is the core of this game they'll throw in stuff like minigames that's not part of the core so they let you skip that stuff."

"What's the... game where you can reverse time? ...Braid, I think, was an excellent example of mood."