Failure is a great tool for a game designer; it is another way to figure out what we don’t want to do when we’re working on a game. Whatever part of the game design process you fall into, it’s important to be able to recognize, assess, and grow from failure, whether it’s as a programmer, mechanics designer, level designer, or even an artist.
Tag: Game Design
Game Design: Working With Randomness, Balance, and Narrative
One of the greatest things that I hear people complaining about in games is the random element of them. And, truth be told, many games with random elements handle them wrong; the random number generator may be faulty or the randomness only serves to force repetition. However, randomness is also a great tool in a game designer’s toolkit; it turns a simple challenge of execution into a risk and reward analysis, and can add great amounts of depth and replayability to games.
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Game Design: Managing Scale
One of the easiest ways for a game designer to damage their games is to pay too little attention to the methods by which they design the mechanics of the game. The flaw that comes up the most when I see it is a failure to correctly scale games’ mechanical structures in relationship to each other. Often, developers get lazy and use exponential or even linear scaling in their games and don’t realize the impact that their actions have on the difficulty and balance of their work.
Game Design: Fun Complexity
One of the things that we’ve seen recently is a wave of games that I like to call “dumb fun”, games which cater to the lowest common denominator and sell widely, like Call of Duty and really just about anything EA makes, barring The Sims and its ilk. However, I think as game designers it’s important to consider that while simplified and streamlined explosion presentation devices are certainly a pathway to commercial success, it is possible to receive just as much enjoyment from a game that requires a little more thought. Continue reading “Game Design: Fun Complexity”
Game Design: Characters as a Route to Immersion
One of the major gripes I’ve had as a games reviewer is that a lot of the time games just don’t get a passable story down. The main root cause of this is poor writing, but not necessarily even with regards to the narrative. I’ve seen incredibly complex narratives, such as Dishonored’s, fail not because the core narrative failed but because the characters as individual parts of it did.
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Project Update: Designing ABACUS’s Event Philosophy
ABACUS is built to be an ultralight system that allows for a high degree of detail and flexibility. Put simply, it attempts to do everything for everyone without becoming too much of a burden, in part due to modularity and a universal design principle that focuses on parallelism and an easy to understand structure inspired by grammar and linguistics.
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Game Design: Consistent Pacing
Not too long ago, I talked about padding in games, and how it’s not always beneficial to stretch out experiences for players just so that you can say that your game has “100 hours of content”. This week, I’ll examine one of the core reasons why; pacing. Pacing is crucial to any gaming experience, tabletop or digital, and it’s really one of the things that is heavily dependent on the designer of a game’s careful and deliberate design. Continue reading “Game Design: Consistent Pacing”
Project Update: Ostravia and Social Combat
Ostravia is a game set in 1202 near the geographical intersection of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia/Moravia (modern day Czech Republic), and as such it has to consider several political structures, namely the fact that there really is a fair degree of social stratification in European society at this time. While it makes no claims to be incredibly solidly researched, Ostravia does care a fair degree about providing an authentic feel, and some of that is managing the social environment as such. Continue reading “Project Update: Ostravia and Social Combat”
Game Design: Eliminating Padding
One of the goals of a game designer is to create an engaging, challenging, and immersive experience that leaves the player filled with awe, wonder, and excitement. However, often that’s not what our games actually do; genres have fallen out of favor over this and it’s the sort of issue that becomes more and more relevant as our games are being targeted at an increasingly mainstream audience that doesn’t want to sit through fifteen hours of gathering materials for a MMORPG by killing the same monster ten thousand times. Continue reading “Game Design: Eliminating Padding”
Thursday Review: Dungeon Siege 2 (Part 2)
Welcome to the second week of my Dungeon Siege 2 review; we’ll pick up where I left off last week and begin to look more at the things that Dungeon Siege 2 did that were really interesting and saw a lot of echoes in later games as well as things that would be cool if more people actually took up.
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