Category: Game Design (Page 7 of 22)

Arcane Election Rules

March 11, 2008 / Damion Schubert

My experience with the Texas Primary was not unlike Scott’s, only we were attempting to fit about 500 people into a 35-man classroom on a college campus. We ended up forming two lines, going down the hall each way, each supporting a different candidate. Somehow, I was drafted into actually playing traffic cop for these two lines. Fortunately, I had the foresight to put the Obama line down the long hall.

My coworker, who is from France, is completely baffled and befuddled by stories such as these, especially when you get to the part where Obama lost the primary but (probably) won the caucus in Texas. Continue reading

Mao and Magic

March 8, 2008 / Damion Schubert

In the previous thread on hiding numbers, Raph argues that showing the numbers is bad if

[You have] some other sort of game where figuring out the mystery is part of the point…

The king of these games is, arguably, Mao. The game is a crazy-eights clone, with a whole bunch of Uno-style rules, but with the catch being that the players are not told the rules. The dealer makes up his ruleset in his head, and enforces the rules on the fly, forcing players to deduce the ruleset along the way. Continue reading

Design Musings: The Questclamation Mark

November 26, 2007 / Damion Schubert

One of my random and frequent overstatements, “The yellow exclamation mark is the greatest invention in the history of MMO design.” Now, I don’t really think that (the real greatest invention would be, of course, clickable hyperlinks for items in chat), but I still think it’s way up there.

Of course, WoW didn’t invent the ‘hey! there’s a quest here!’ signifier – several games, including some non-MMOs, had it at some point. Other games have made their own interpretations of it – I believe LotRO’s looks like a one ring, for example. There’s clear indication why this idea has persisted – it does good things for your game. Of note: Continue reading

My Only Slightly Less Snarky, but Much More Thorough, Thoughts on Designer Scripting

November 7, 2007 / Damion Schubert

I didn’t start the fire, I just threw gasoline on it, with a terse, 3-line post that was, as Joe correctly surmised via a private message, totally a troll. Then it exploded.

I like fire. It quiets my inner demons to watch things burn. So while I was on a plane yesterday, I cobbled together a few more logs to toss on top of it. Continue reading

No Scripting for You!

November 1, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Ubiq’s law of scripting:

Programmers always say, “No designer scripting!” This lasts until they see the production schedule.

Then it’s all ‘hey, didn’t Joe used to be a Java programmer?’, and then everything goes down the slippery slope from there.

Original comments thread is here.

Triage and Extrapolation

October 22, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Ryan has a bold statement, a new rule of MMO development. Like many of his rules, I don’t fully agree with it:

A game is only as strong as its weakest feature. Games are more often judged by their weaknesses than their strengths, just like anything else. Any incomplete feature or complete but crappy feature will leave a bad taste in players’ mouths. Reviewers will dwell on anything that isn’t up to par in your game far more than they will dwell on all the positives. Do not be afraid to get rid of features, even if you’ve already implemented them. This goes for more than just features: If a quest sucks, fix it or get rid of it. If a zone sucks, fix it or get rid of it. If anything sucks, fix it or get rid of it. It may make you shed a tear for all that lost work, but it’s better than leaving it in.

Well, for a single-player game, sure. A reviewer will certainly see the whole game in his review experience. Continue reading

XBox Achievements Lead to Higher Review Scores and Sales

October 17, 2007 / Damion Schubert

My boy Geoff has been busy: his new company has put out the following story.

Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) has just released a revealing new study based on the Microsoft Xbox 360 Achievement System. The study concluded that, in general, game titles that have a higher volume of Accomplishments correlate with both a higher Metacritic Metascore and higher gross sales in the United States. The data also indicated that not all developers are utilizing these design options. In fact, 29% of all Accomplishments are Completion Accomplishments; one of the easiest to develop and integrate – leaving way for additional opportunities within the Accomplishment categories.

The 360: Not Worth It (Yet)

October 4, 2007 / Damion Schubert

I didn’t buy a 360. Sure, it’s true that I haven’t even seen an XBox 360 as of yet at the stores, but even if I’d come across one hidden in the back of a sales rack that everyone else had missed, I’m not sure I would have picked it up.

Given I’ve constantly harped about gameplay over graphics, this may not come as a surprise to a lot of Zen readers. It’s not that I don’t appreciate great graphics. But really, I don’t buy a console for ports of games that appear on other consoles. The 360 desperately needs an exclusive game made with it in mind. Continue reading

How Genre Progress Hurts Your Game

October 2, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has an excellent interview with Robin Walker and Charlie Brown, key members of the about-to-be-released Team Fortress 2. I expect big things – BioWare Austin has pretty much stopped eating out in favor of TF Lunches. Many topics are covered, including why the game took 10 years to make. My favorite snippet:

RW: Not really. The arc of TF2 is something that’s probably familiar to a lot of amateur developers or designers. When we got here the first thing we built was overly complex, very hard core, almost impenetrable to anyone who wasn’t familiar with FPSs in general. And as we found as we played it, wasn’t more fun because of it.

Why MetaPlace Just Might Work Out

September 27, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Once upon a time, massively multiplayers were pretty much entirely a culture steeped in open source. This is back in the MUD days, when great worldbuilding meant concise yet interesting blocks of text, and the term ‘massively multiplayer’ was still waiting to be invented by some overzealous marketing droid.

Success was defined by reaching 100 simultaneous users. Wild success was reaching 200. The developers actually feared wild success – we were usually running on the back end of university email mainframes and whatnot, often without the IT department’s permission, and wild success meant they might notice, and pull the plug on your world. There were many, many stories of MUDs who encountered a service interruption of that sort, and who lost their entire player base in the 2 week period it took to find a new internet-connected mainframe to call home.