Pag on Games

In design, it’s easy to know what you don’t want once it’s made — to point out what’s wrong with a feature once it’s implemented. The real skill is knowing what you really want before it’s made — so it doesn’t have much wrong the first time it’s implemented.

Most designers think of “Marketing” as a dirty word. They think a game’s success is just a matter of how much money is spent on marketing, as if marketing didn’t require skill, just cash. I think marketing is a very powerful tool for designers to understand and use. And marketing requires a lot of skill, not just cash — some games haven’t made enough money to just cover their advertising budget.

Do you want to create popular games? Marketing is, essentially, the art of making things popular. Quality isn’t enough — it sure wasn’t enough for Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil. Studying marketing will help you understand why some good games fail on the market while some bad games succeed. That way you have more chances of making good games that sell.

A large part of marketing is communicating ideas in a compelling way. This is an essential skill for game designers: whenever you try to convince someone that your ideas are good (something designers do on a daily basis), you’re basically marketing your ideas, whether you realize it or not. Might as well learn how to do it properly.

So, why do I care so much about marketing? Because it lets me make games that are more popular and it helps me communicate ideas more effectively. More surprisingly, some of the biggest insights I’ve had on game design came from reading about marketing — what makes a game cool isn’t that different from what makes anything else cool.

You may have noticed that the site has been down for a large part of the weekend and it’s not exactly working at full speed as I’m writing this. It seems my host has had major power problems, frying a large number of their servers. I had a post scheduled for today, which was eventually posted as scheduled, but the site is working very slowly at the moment so it would be a pain to make a regular update. Hopefully things will return to normal very soon — apologies for the problems.

Once in a while, I read about an experienced game designer wondering about his career choice. “If only I’d become a policeman or a doctor” he muses “I could have made a real difference in the world.” Another variations on this theme is people complaining that John Carmack should have spent his spectacular intelligence trying to find a cure for cancer rather than programming video games. You hear the same thing all the time, about how entertainers are not really important (even outside games), it’s the people who extend life that really matter: policemen, firefighters, doctors, etc.

I’m tired of these arguments. I believe entertainers are just as important as doctors and firemen to our society.

It’s a quality vs. quantity thing. Yes, a cure for cancer might extend your life for a few years, but it’s not going to make your life better, it won’t make it more enjoyable. We could all live in white, featureless and perfectly safe buildings that would keep us alive longer, but how fun would that be?

Living a long life is important, but so is living a good life. Doctors help you with the former, entertainers help you with the latter. Both matter.

A few years ago I watched a French vampire movie in the “so bad it’s good” category: Requiem pour un Vampire (Requiem for a Vampire). In it there’s a scene where a character walks slowly through a very large room to light a torch and back, in one single take. This is a 2 minutes long take showing just one character walking. It’s such a pointless long take it can’t but leave you puzzled as to why it’s in the movie — good movies are edited to get rid of those boring moments.

A lot of games are much worse than that when it comes to walking dead time. In most RPG, you’ve got to walk long distances to do anything, even if there’s nothing interesting to do while you’re walking. You spend a lot of time walking from shop to shop in Diablo, even though there’s absolutely nothing interesting happening between those shops, for example. It’s just dead time.

Zelda tries to make the time moving from dungeon to dungeon more fun by adding filler: random monsters to fight, ghosts to capture, fences to jump over and so on. It’s filler, but at least it’s somewhat fun.

Other solutions exist. Most games keep your character running at all time, which reduces time spent moving around, but it also makes the game feel somewhat silly (I find it hard to take seriously characters who are constantly jogging, even when there’s no rush). A better solution is to let characters warp at any time to known locations — the game just skips the walking part. Mass Effect does it by having taxis you can take in some locations.

In any case, the best solution is to just skip dead time. Just avoid boring bits that don’t make the game progress in a meaningful way.

Few people had as much influence on gaming as Gary Gygax. Dungeons & Dragons, his creation, inspired countless games and turned many young people into gamers. Truly, a great man passed away.

I’ve been struggling for a while between two seemingly contradictory approaches to games development I believe strongly in:

1. You should know what game you’re building at the start of the project, otherwise your game will lack focus and will take forever to build.
2. You should be very agile by iterating a lot and adapting your game as it’s built to take it in the best direction, which you discover as you build the game.

The two method are opposed in that the first tells you that you should know what you’re doing ahead of time and the second tells you that you can’t know what you should be doing until you have something running. By following the first approach, you risk painting yourself in a corner when you discover, too late, that a feature that sounded great on paper isn’t so great in reality. By following the second approach, you risk running around in circles for a long time as you don’t really know where you’re going and you keep adding and removing stuff.

I now believe that the best approach is a balance between the two methods: for each decision, you iterate using a method that’s appropriate the level of the decision and avoid changing the decision you find is best unless it really proves wrong.

What do I mean by the level of a decision?

A high level decision is an issue that concerns the game as a whole: what’s the high concept, the environments the game takes place in, the story, etc. Iterating in software at this level of decision would be really difficult, so you’re better iterating on paper by brainstorming, drawing concept art or writing ideas and seeking feedback on them.

A medium level decision is something that affects a sizable chunk of the game: enemy types, control and interface decisions, overall level layouts and so on. Testing these elements directly in the game might be difficult because of the interactions with the rest of the game, but you can build a separate prototype to test them out independently. Iterating in a separate prototype lets you see these ideas closer to what they will be in the game without risking to break the game to test them out.

A low level decision is fine-grained element of the game that need to be decided: the specific stats of an enemy, the placement of those enemies within a level, the details of the working of an interface, etc. These decisions are small enough that building them and testing them directly within the game is the best approach — more abstract methods would just take too long. Iterating directly within the game is fast and lets you see the decision’s impact to the game immediately.

Let’s say you’re building a first-person shooter. A high-level decision might be to decide that a quarter of the game will take place in a secret Nazi laboratory in the Amazonian rainforest (you’re not making a very creative FPS). You decided this after carefully considering a lot of other potential settings. A medium level decision might be the general layout of the Nazi base, which you quickly modeled in 3D using SketchUp to quickly communicate with artists what you have in mind. Using SketchUp, you can quickly modify the layout without concerns for small details. Low level decisions in this case are all the details of the map: where to place enemies, what each part of the level should look like and so on. You can quickly put those in the game and tweak them by playing the level directly.

So that’s where I stand right now in the “design upfront” versus “iterate, iterate, iterate” debate. My approach is to take decisions and stick to them until proven wrong, but iterate to find the best decision. It’s not perfect, but I find it’s a good balance between flexibility and decisiveness.

In the Grand Theft Auto games, you shoot enemies from an over-the-shoulder point of view, drive cars and helicopters and upgrade various stats and abilities as you play. In Mass Effect, you shoot enemies from an over-the-shoulder point of view, drive a truck and upgrade various stats and abilities as you play. In Assassin’s Creed, you hack at enemies from an over-the-shoulder point of view, ride a horse and upgrade various stats and abilities as you play…

Is it just me or are major games all converging into this bland action-adventure über-genre? What’s wrong with doing just one thing, but doing it really well?

There’s a fascinating interview at GhibliWorld.com with Enrico Casarosa, a storyboard artist working at Pixar (he storyboarded Ratatouille). The interview covers the differences between the Japanese and American approaches to making animated movies — between Studio Ghibli and Pixar — among other subjects. It’s a very interesting read; you can find it here.

Five things I wish game developers would just stop putting in games:

1. Crates: They’re just the point where developers ran out of ideas.
2. Explosive Barrels: Barrels don’t explode in the real world and nobody would put explosive devices right in the middle of their base.
3. Blowing in the DS’ microphone: It was a gimmick the first time somebody put that in a game, now it’s just a tired feature.
4. Beating again all the bosses at the end of the game: Can you say “filler”?
5. 20 minutes long cutscenes:  I’m running your game to play. If I wanted to watch a movie, I’d watch a DVD.