Welcome to Applied Game Design! | EGG. Everything You’ll Ever Need To Know About Gamification. Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience. He is the creator of leading game design blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development. You can follow him on Twitter here. A friend of mine once relayed this quote (as a joke) to me about consulting: “Why make money solving the problem, when you can make so much more by making it worse?”
And, like all such quotes, it’s funny because it contains a kernel of truth. I provide consultancy services to people who need game design advice, like mechanics, user interface, progression curves etcetera, and mine is a position of some power. Rather than say things like “Well we really need to see the problem from all sides and develop a complex solution that tailors to all of your users’ needs” (Or “getting them on the tit” as Don Cheadle calls it in House of Lies), I tend to say “Just move that number over there.
This is all, not to put too fine a point on it, overheated extrapolation. Features - 10 Game Design Process Pitfalls. If you look at which games succeed and fail critically, you will notice the outcome is generally not due to a great mechanic or a new idea, but from competent execution from the moment of boot-up to the end credits. Countless games such as , , and present the player with innovative concepts but fall apart when it comes to filling up the 10-15 hours of gameplay. On the other hand, you have games such as , which brings almost nothing new to the table, but excels greatly when it comes to pacing and level structure -- keeping the player hooked throughout the entire experience. Even games considered to be innovative -- or -- would not have had their success were it not for superb execution.
I've worked with a number of teams that start with a very nice concept but run into problems when it comes to translating it into a compelling video game experience. I've noticed that certain practices tend to crop up that hamper a developer's ability to get the most from its design team. Card Design Commandments | Hyperbole Games. Post by: Grant Rodiek I have a thing for card games. I like playing them and I like designing them. Every time I try to veer away from cards to tackle another component like dice, I always end up right back with a box full of index cards and penciled scribbles. As I design card games, play card games, and give advice to other designers about their card games, I see a few patterns emerging. There are key design mistakes that many of us commit repeatedly, so often that I thought it’d be good to compile a list of guidelines. Text should be easy to read: Two smart individuals, Chris Farrell and Daniel Solis, have already written about this (and many topics in this post) at length.
Bottom line, it should be incredibly easy for people of all ages to read the text on your cards. Use icons where possible: If you’re using a term or rule often, create an icon. Good iconography saves space on cards and immediately gives the player an idea of the card’s purpose at a glance. Overwhelming! Game design, B-minus, should try harder. « #AltDevBlogADay. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were talking about common clichés in games and we started listing all those funny little things that seem to make their way into lots of the video games we play.
Use any search engine to find them. However, he thought there was more to it and we shouldn’t be forcing players to do all those dull things, simply because all games do them. Designers of games should try a bit harder. He sent me an email of all the lazy design elements in games and I thought I’d post it on our company forum. It got some responses, good but mostly bad, yet it has driven him on to send me another email explaining his thinking.
Rather than post it on the company forum, I have his permission to post it up here. So here it is, unedited. A while ago, I had a talk with Dr. The Evolution of RPG Mechanics: From Die Rolls to Hit Volumes. » 6 Key Questions To Help Turn An Idea Into A Great Game » Farshid Palad. The 10 commandments of PC games. By Bruno Ferreira — 11:05 PM on June 13, 2011 Picture this for a second: you just unpacked the latest PlayBox 720-X blockbuster game, Gran Gears of Duty Fantasy XVIII. It's a game so juicy and dreamy that it'll send you flying into all the colors of the rainbow, twitching and jerking with pleasure-induced spasms just from looking at the loading screen. Let's assume for the sake of argument that said game is a first-person shooter, like, oh, about 135% of recent releases.
You insert the Megaray disc, go about the installation process, and merrily start to play. All of a sudden, you notice the left stick is used for switching weapons. The right stick moves the character, and shooting is only accomplished by pressing it. The camera is moved with the directional buttons, and the triangle, square, A, and B buttons are used for your character's smartass quips. Now you see what us PC gamers have to put up with. No comment. I. The shop and inventory interfaces in Borderlands are good examples. V. 8(+1/2) Simple Rules For Designing My Motion Control Game » #AltDevBlogADay. There’s a lot of downsides to being a student – primarily that I’m working in an intense environment (3 month game developments), my time is divided between game development, research projects, and studying, and there’s no guarantee that the people I’m working with know how to act professionally.
On the plus side, it means relatively risk-free development using new technology, and the chance to do some really exciting stuff – including playing with new motion-control technology. Here’s what I’ve learned so far. Motion control: The Next Big Thing – or, at least, that’s what the last two years’ E3 shows would have you believe. While Nintendo (for once) shied away from encouraging us to leap around our living room this year, Microsoft and Sony seemed determined to ditch the traditional controller and get us all onboard with the Motion Control Revolution this year. What you have to remember is that this isn’t the first revolution to hit the industry. Credit: Penny-Arcade.com. 10 Game Design Commandments « My Simple Minded World. Implement these fundamental rules and your game will be fun to play. Always reward the playerNever punish the player arbitrarilyControl is kingWaiting should be avoided at all costs 4B. It’s called multiPLAYer not multiWAITERDon’t prevent players from experiencing all of your gameDon’t tack on half-baked new game modes to spice things upBe logically consistentLet players craft their own experience 8b.
Let players play any point in the game at any timeDesign as if this is the first game the player has ever playedDesign as if the player has played every game in existence Explanation 1. Each minute that the player is playing your game they should feel a sense of accomplishment and progression. Good example: Call of Duty 4 COD4′s multiplayer has quickly become the standard by which other multiplayer games are judged. Bad Example: Forza 2 2. Failing a challenge/mission/task in a game is frustrating enough, don’t add even more insult and injury to the player just for trying. 3. 4. 4b. Dear God. 5. The Ten Commandments of Game Design – Part 1 « Jaron's Realm.
You know, I really love games. I mean really. A good game to me is something like an interactive book or movie. As gamers, we don’t just follow the story, we get to influence it and really experience it. And nothing pulls us out of that experience faster than a design flaw. In that moment, we completely forget about storming the castle and remember that we’re just watching a bunch of pretty dots on a screen. Sometimes they’re unimportant enough that we quickly ignore them. But sometimes it’s something so critical, even if small, that it makes the game almost more trouble than it’s worth.
. #1: Thou Shalt Not Make the Player Wait I think it’s safe to say much of the gaming crowd suffers at least a little from ADHD. And speaking of loading screens, I know optimizing and speeding up the game initialization process is low on the priority list since it only happens once per session, ( and again, Dragon Age! Next on the wait list is the menu animation. Finally, lose the death scene. Like this: The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey. We are here to condemn Grand Theft Auto IV, and other equally great games, not out of hatred, but out of love.
For it does no good to point out the flaws in bad games as bad games by definition cannot be saved. No, we aim to save gaming from the abyss by pointing out the sins of games like the Elder Scrolls and Half Life series, games made by creators who actually care. It is in that spirit that we proclaim the commandments that they have broken, so that they may be redeemed. Who are we? Just a bunch of gamers who got really, really bored.
What are the consequences for breaking these commands? Well ... we might start reading books or something. Therefore, we declare ... Thou shalt let us play your game with real-life friends. Violators:Grand Theft Auto IV, MotorStorm, Shadowrun, etc. Quick, tell us what the following games all have in common. Wii Sports Wii Play Guitar Hero III Super Mario Galaxy Madden NFL 08 Guitar Hero II Mario Party 8 But what else? This system had 4 MB of RAM. The No Twinkie Database! A Gamer's Manifesto. And this is years after analysts told developers that women would happily play games if they didn't feel so objectified by them, and several decades past the point where they should have even needed to be told that.
Have you guys ever met a woman? Then why don't you try making just a few games that don't play off of a 14 year-old male's idea of womanhood on the apparent hope that he'll play the game one-handed? Chances of that happening... Sadly, the proven money-making designers in the industry are the same ones that have given us Dead Or Alive Beach Volleyball and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (where the main character rampages though a city populated with violent men and sex-crazed street whores). There is hope however. 5. Gradually tougher enemies, more enemies, mind-bending puzzles, it's all good. Arbitrary triggers in RPG's. Ammo starvation. Confusing, mapless floor plans. If you game wizards are so proud of your sprawling levels and alternate routes, GIVE ME A MAP OF THE LEVEL. 6. Pitfalls of the Working Game Designer: An Introduction. I hear it time and time again: “Game design must be the best job in the world.
You sit around, think up game ideas, and then you get to play the game you’ve always wanted.” As compelling a fantasy as this is, though, it has very little relation to the realities of working as a game designer in a commercial studio. This series of short pieces identifies specific issues that come up in the day to day business of game design. In part, it is written for the lay audience, to give some insight into what actual design work deals with; in part it is written for other working designers (or those who would like to be working designers one day) to share insights and occasionally strategies. To start, let me make a few corrections to the fantasy of design.
Second, no one gets the freedom to design the game they always wanted. Let me be clear, this is not a tutorial on how to arrive at a good design. Next: Not Defining Design Back to Top. Pitfalls in game development, inspired by Adriaan de Jongh. On Independence Day, former colleague and game design intern at W! Games, Adriaan de Jongh, posted an interesting article about what he discovered were common game development pitfalls. When I read it the first time, I was impressed. Another colleague, a producer, also responded very positively to Adriaan’s post.
When I took a look at it a second time, to see if I could come up with something he missed, I decided to write something about his article. Now, Adriaan is still attending the same school as I went to, the Utrecht School of the Arts, which is why I was pleasantly surprised by his in depth observations on game development. On to the list then.
Entering production without something funStart big, end up smallPeer reviews not taken seriouslyStarting too late with playtestingNot enough games playedToo much importance on design documentationNot taking advantage of placeholdersNot keeping design documentation up-to-dateNo external playtesting Entering production without something fun. Features - 10 Game Design Process Pitfalls. [Game designer Fisch looks into the process of making games, suggesting the ten biggest reasons why a game's production doesn't end up working out quite as hoped, and possible fixes for those issues.] If you look at which games succeed and fail critically, you will notice the outcome is generally not due to a great mechanic or a new idea, but from competent execution from the moment of boot-up to the end credits.
Countless games such as Spider-Man 2, Stranglehold, and Assassin's Creed present the player with innovative concepts but fall apart when it comes to filling up the 10-15 hours of gameplay. On the other hand, you have games such as Call of Duty 4, which brings almost nothing new to the table, but excels greatly when it comes to pacing and level structure -- keeping the player hooked throughout the entire experience. Even games considered to be innovative -- Portal or World of Goo -- would not have had their success were it not for superb execution. 8 Things Not To Do... (Part I) « Beyond the Sword | Main | Whither Workshop? » 8 Things Not To Do... (Part I) Inspired by Troy S. Goodfellow's list of the Eight Greatest Features he values in strategy games, I started thinking about the opposite question: what are the greatest mistakes that I hate to see done over and over again in game design?
In no particular order, here are my first four: 1. One of the most common pitfalls for a game designer is to fear that the game is not hard enough. 2. I am currently enjoying the old-school dungeon crawler Etrian Odyssey quite a bit on my DS, enough so that I can't help day-dreaming about how much fun it would be to remake Bard's Tale or Legacy of the Ancients for the DS. Fun Factor = Interesting Decisions / Actual Time Played. (UPDATE: Yeah, so I blew this one. 3. No matter how good your game is, it is going to get stale after awhile. 4. The temptation to pile extra units and buildings and whatnot onto to an already complete design is strong. I really appreciate this writing. The 10 most common game design mistakes. Making games is hard. Making fun of them isn’t. It’s really, really easy, actually. Of course, we wouldn’t be so critical if we didn’t love them so damn much (and if we weren’t, you know, critics). We think games are just the bee’s knees, and that’s why we get so pissed about all the stupid crap they do.
We can forgive the small things, but when they’re as painful and inexplicably chronic as the 10 below, we’ve got to act in the only way we know how – by making a list. It wasn’t hard to think of 10 things game developers constantly irk us with – we could have geeked on and on about 20, even 30, but we aren’t trying to nitpick…well, yes we are…but we aren’t trying to rub hydrochloric acid into gaping chest wounds. Does anyone think that running back and forth across an area looking for the exit is fun? Sometimes they’re even more obtuse than that. And how do most game’s AIs work? What’s worse are NPCs with the attention spans of caffeine-addled Jack Russell Terriers.