Category: Article (Page 3 of 3)

A version of this article first appeared in the April 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine.

In the late eighties, the sitcom Cheers dominated the ratings.  Set in a pub in Boston, the antics of Sam Malone and his everpresent cadre of barflies never failed to provide belly laughs.  The writers of the sitcom pointed out that the bar itself brought a lot to the show. The very nature of the setting meant that new characters and stories could stumble into the front door and into the lives of the Cheers faithful.  The comedic ground was fertile, and Cheers had a long and distinguished run.

By comparison, the recent Fox hit Prison Break was very confined in where it could go.  Set in an Illinois prison, the first season involved the protagonists plotting their escape from prison.  Despite generally good reviews, water cooler talk was skeptical.  Could they really stretch out a prison break for 22 episodes?  What would the next season be about?  And the one after that? Fox gamely managed to keep things going, but ultimately ran out of space to run.  It was recently announced that this season, the fourth, would be the show’s last.

The writers of Prison Break were boxed in.  The inherent nature of the show limited where they could go, and what they could do with the show.  The ending of the series arc was somewhat predetermined, and therefore all of the interest was in the journey to that end.  What’s more, the closed nature of the prison setting limited to some degree the introduction of new characters.  They had very fertile ground to explore, but that ground was very finite.  Subsequent seasons (with the prisoners on the lam, or in a prison in Panama) felt forced.  In game design terms, their design space was limited. Continue reading

A version of this article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine.

There’s an urban legend that, in the early days of the space program, NASA determined that ball-point pens wouldn’t write in space, and so they pressed their engineers to design a pen that could, which after months of time and millions of dollars in research, they finally did.  The Russians, when presented with the same problem, simply had their cosmonauts carry a pencil.

As a veteran in the industry, this myth is compelling because it speaks to a problem that plagues game development teams throughout the industry, that of mismanaged innovation.  We have finite resources – limited time, limited budget, and limited engineering cycles – and these resources dwindle as the realities of development occur and unexpected problems arise.  Given these challenges, even well-funded teams stumble, resulting in failed innovations and often doomed projects. Continue reading

A version of this article first appeared in the December 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine.

It’s always astonishing to see the vast disparity in standards in game design documentation.  Every team and company seems to have their own ideas of how to present their ideas.   I’ve also seen hundreds of sample design documents from dozens of would-be designers when they submit them as work samples along with their resumes.

All these documents seem to have at least one thing in common, though.  Most game design documents I’ve seen really stink.

The lack of standards in writing good game design documentation has resulted in most designers and design teams shooting from the hip, throwing everything but the kitchen sink into a game design document, and then being flabbergasted when programmers choose not to read them.

Here’s a hint: if programmers are asking you to rewrite your 10 page design document into a half-page of bullet points – and you can – your design document presentation probably has room for improvement.  So what makes a good game design document?  Here’s a hint: what did your programmer just ask you to do? Continue reading

A version of this article first appeared in the October 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Sid Meier once said that games are a “series of interesting choices”.   I’ve always liked this definition – it speaks well to what is unique about our craft.  For all of the progress that we’ve made in graphics, audio, physics, AI, and storytelling, interactivity remains the defining feature of our genre.  And interactivity, when you think about it, just means ‘your decisions matter’.

In this light, the true job definition of the game designer becomes clear: we are tasked with creating these interesting choices.  So what makes decisions engaging?  Understanding this has the capacity to turn a shallow game experience into a deep and engaging one. Continue reading

A version of this article appeared in the August 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Darker!  Deeper!  More serious!  These were the marching orders given to the Shadowbane writing team.  The world of Aerynth was a brutal world, appropriate for our PvP-oriented gameplay, with a backstory of politics and treachery spanning centuries.   And to be honest, even as a developer I would be hard-pressed to remember the names of any of the major NPCs.  What I do remember is that we had a combat ability called ‘Hammer Time’.

Beyond the Leisure Suit Larry series, there is no substantial comedy genre in video games – at least not like in film or TV.  And there are good reasons for that – funny his hard, especially in a genre where you don’t control the rhythm of the narrative. Still, you don’t have to be in it just for the yukks in order to add moments of levity to your otherwise serious games and virtual worlds.  The proof that it works can be found in our megahits – how many times did World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero and Grand Theft Auto make you laugh?  These aren’t explicitly comedies, but all games with hardcore audiences that used comedy with surgical precision to enhance the experience. Continue reading

A version of this article first appeared in the May 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Getting your first design gig is often a combination of luck and who-you-know.  But once you’re there, moving up the ranks is typically entirely based on merit.  The junior designers who contribute rock star quality on the small projects they are given will quickly be granted larger responsibilities on bigger systems and more important parts of the game.  Leads love being able to hand off design projects to capable, reliable, low-maintenance designers.  So for those designers who feel they are banging their head against a glass ceiling, there is a clear path to move up – stop making game designs that suck.

The path to do so isn’t immediately intuitive, because it takes an entirely different way of thinking.  Too many junior designers have a habit of hoarding their ideas like precious gems, not collaborating with others, and avoiding showing design documents until they’re absolutely perfect.  They think that their job is all about idea generation, and this perspective lends them all sorts of bad habits.  They’re overprotective of their ideas.  They’re obsessed with getting credit and, at the same time, utterly terrified that their ideas will be rejected, feeling that it reflects poorly on them in the highly competitive field of game design.  The end result of all this self-consciousness all too often is designs that are too big, too safe, or too weird.

The best senior designers I’ve worked with have a different mindset.  They understand, inherently, that most ideas are bad – even their own.  They have less investment in getting their ideas into the game, and more in being sure the game rocks, no matter whose idea gets in.  Consciously or not, they focus on idea synthesis, a term I use to describe the informal game design philosophy that focuses heavily on collaboration, mass idea generation, and focused execution as the pathway to design success.  Continue reading

A version of this article first appeared in the August 2001 issue of Game Developer magazine.

There’s an epidemic sweeping across the games industry.  It’s a sweeping onslaught of gaming tedium that makes an average day of C-Span seem like New Year’s 2000.  I am referring to our boss monster encounters.  The elements of the game that should act as the climaxes of our gaming experience are devolving into boredom and frustration, instead of providing the pure gaming bliss that they should.

Now, I’m not naïve.  I know that boss encounters are usually lackluster because they require special code and art, which in turn translates to money, time, and bugs.  Also, they are often moved to the schedule’s end, which makes them ripe for gross oversimplification (if they don’t get cut altogether).  Complex bosses also cannot be reused easily – and resources you can only use once per game are extremely expensive.  Still, we can do better.

In this age of beautiful graphics and sound and well-crafted stories, most boss encounters are still “whip out your biggest gun, go mano a mano, and hope you don’t die.”  Which usually devolves into a health meter that moves down too slowly and way too many quickloads.  We’ve seen minor progress, but this usually “Shoot him when he taunts”, “shoot him in the stomach”, or if we designers are really clever, “Shoot him in the stomach when he taunts.”

Been there.  Done that.

Continue reading