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Designing Videogames / Computer games

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Apr 21, 2019
12 min read

Table of contents

Child pages

Related pages

My website
Other websites

Experimental games

Websites

Creators

Game design writers of interest

Major websites

Articles / Videos


Rec'd articles from a very good gamer:

Quote:
Not whole sites, no, but after digging up a couple articles that I remember liking, I guess I could recommend Gamasutra. The specific ones were:
"20 Mysterious Games" ( http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1 ... ls_20_.php )
"The Invisible Hand of Super Metroid" ( http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HugoBill ... etroid.php )

I also found these while looking for that first one (I haven't read them, but they seem okay, and the rest of the site might have more):
http://adamloving.com/internet-programming/gamification
http://www.lostgarden.com/2006/10/what- ... anics.html

A couple others I like that are a little more "artsy" and moreso about the effects designs have on the player rather than the designs themselves:
SF3 3rd Strike - http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/ind ... /3rdStrike
Mother 2/Earthbound - http://www.largeprimenumbers.com/articl ... id=mother2
Majora's Mask - http://www.playtime-magazine.com/2010/0 ... -far-away/
http://www.damnlag.com/majoras-mask-underrated-zelda/
http://www.damnlag.com/power-of-majora-mask/

Books

Design docs

Pitching games

  • 2017.11.02 - YouTube - GDC - Brian Upton - 30 Things I Hate About Your Game Pitch
    • 1:00 - He was the guy who designed Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon.
    • 1:50 - There are two questions that the pitch needs to focus on answering:
      • 1. Is this game worth making?
      • 2. Can this team make it?
    • 2:20 - #1 - I don't give a crap about your game's backstory / lore.
      • If you need to set up some lore, use Star Wars as an example to follow: a *quick* text crawl, and then you're into the action.
    • 3:18 - #2 - Don't explain standard features. / I don't give a crap about your inventory system.
      • He said he would frequently see people explain in detail systems that are very standard.
    • 4:00 - #3 - Don't ask me what *I* want, tell me what *you* want to do. / I'm not going to design your game for you. / Don't ask if it should be first or third person, or similar questions.
      • Instead, lay out *your* vision, what *you* want to make, and if the producer wants to tweak things, they'll tell you later.
    • 4:53 - #4 - Pillars are not hooks.
      • Pillars are key attributes of your game.
        • Ex: "A really strong fantasy story", "A detailed world", "All about hand-to-hand combat".
      • The *hook* is what makes your game *unique* from other games with similar pillars.
    • 5:45 - #5 - You never explained what the player does.
      • People would explain all of the systems without going into detail about the moment-to-moment gameplay. They'd say "it's a platformer" without explaining what makes it different from other platformers.
    • 6:37 - #6 - Unless your game is a hard-core sim, don't use "realism" as the sole reason for a design decision.
    • 7:25 - #7 - Hard to understand: Don't feel a need to justify (unrealistic?) game mechanics by some artificial and extraneous frame story. ("It's a game show.")
    • 8:11 - #8 - Saying "it's a parody" sets off alarm bells that makes him suspect that this game started off serious but had problems and flaws that prevented that angle from working.
    • 8:54 - #9 - If you are pitching something that's technically very difficult and risky, and then you don't go into how you're going to pull it off, that makes publishers nervous that you don't know what you're doing.
    • 9:50 - #10 - Your proof-of-concept doesn't prove your concept.
      • Prototypes shown at a pitch will often show off things that aren't in question, like a player character opening doors, rather than what *is* in question, like whether a never-before-tried combat mechanic will be fun.
      • Your prototype should show the hook of the game and that you can mitigate the risks of whatever new / dangerous plan of action you're proposing.
    • 10:52 - #11 - Having lots of shitty images doesn't make them less shitty.
      • If you don't have an artist on staff, try to pay to just have one or two images. You can often sell the look of a game with a single really good image.
    • 11:39 - #12 - I can't tell what's placeholder and what's not.
      • Obviously-placeholder art is better than bad art that might be mistaken for being final.
    • 12:21 - #13 - You polished too early.
      • He gives an example of a game he worked on where they had detailed images of ships before they had the combat model down, and all of the ship art had to be thrown out.
      • So to restate: if a game is very visually-polished before the gameplay is worked out, that sets off alarm bells.
      • As he said before, if you want to show off the art chops of your team, a single very good piece is good enough.
    • 13:32 - #14 - Your sample dialog sucks.
      • If you're trying to create a game where the dialog / story is important, follow the same approach as with the art: create a single example piece that shows that you can deliver in that department. Show dialog from a dramatic scene rather than standard "Do a quest for me" dialog.
    • 14:20 - #15 - You're pandering to the latest tech craze.
      • Does this game *really* need the tech you're proposing to build it for?
      • If you think you can take some idea you had on the shelf, do a shallow retrofit for some hot new tech, and get interest that way, you're likely to fail.
    • 15:03 - #16 - You just pitched a phone game to a console publisher.
      • Do research to make sure you aren't pitching something for a publisher that focuses on a different platform, or a different genre, or where that publisher already has a game very similar in development.
    • 15:59 - #17 - Gone Home already exists. / Don't pitch a game that's exactly like another already-successful game, without explaining how you're going to move it in a new direction.
    • 16:53 - #18 - "Can you help us negotiate a license deal with Marvel?" / You need to get the rights to the IP *before* you pitch the game.
    • 17:41 - #19 - I know more about your monetization than your mechanics.
      • You don't need to go into detail on the monetization in the pitch.
    • 18:46 - #20 - You have no idea how much money you need to make this thing, or how many people, or how much time.
      • Questions you need to be ready to answer include:
      • How many hours of gameplay does this have?
      • How many levels?
      • How many lines of dialog?
      • Not having answers to these questions suggests you won't be able to execute on it.
    • 19:43 - #21 - You don't have a team.
      • If you don't have a full team, you need to have a roadmap for how you *are* going to hire people.
      • At least have an idea of who the leads are going to be.
    • 20:27 - #22 - Your business plan is based on outliers.
      • If your business plan requires as many sales as the outlier-successes (like WoW), your plan makes no sense.
      • It's OK to pick a title that's middlingly-successful to gauge likely profit; you don't need to be totally pessimistic.
    • 21:18 - #23 - You seem like you'd be a huge pain in the ass to work with.
      • Game development gets stressful; if you can't be agreeable in a pitch meeting, what's going to happen when things are *really* going badly?
    • 22:19 - #24 - You expect me to know who you are.
      • Don't assume I've played your game before, and don't be offended if I haven't, even if your game was well-received. There are a lot of games out there.
    • 22:42 - #25 - You're annoyed that I'm asking questions.
      • It's understandable that you could get annoyed if you rehearsed your pitch and someone interrupts you to ask a question that you intend to answer later in the pitch, but try not to: it means people are taking interest.
    • 23:26 - #26 - We're watching the pitch on your phone.
      • Even if you're pitching a phone game, it's often useful to have stuff on a tablet when showing it to people. So please bring a tablet or a laptop to your pitch.
    • 23:55 - #27 - You brought a laptop...but no headphones.
      • If sound is at all important to your game, bring headphones.
      • Assume you'll be pitching the game in the noisiest bar at GDC.
      • Don't bring earbuds, he won't want to put them in his ears.
    • 24:28 - #28 - You're hungover, or drunk, or high.
      • This makes it look like you're not taking it seriously.
    • 25:08 - #29 - You trash other games / companies / developers.
      • Developer / publisher relationships are always stressful, and the publisher is going to worry about how you'll talk about them later.
    • 25:41 - #30 - You need to take a shower.
      • If you're doing a VR demonstration, wipe off the faceplate before you give it to him.
    • 26:17 - General advice:
      • Be enthusiastic
      • Be honest - Being upfront about what the challenges and risks are makes it look like you know what you're doing.
      • Sell your hook
      • Know your scope: How many levels, how many characters, how much dialogue, etc.
    • 27:30 - His contact info:
    • 27:53 - Q: How much time do people have to pitch?
      • If it's at GDC, it'll be half an hour.
      • If it's on-site, it might be 1-2 hours.
      • But the pitch itself might only be 30 minutes of that, with the rest of the time used for follow-up questions on the tech being used, etc.
    • 28:31 - Q: What advice would you have for pitching non-publisher investors, like studios?
      • Go higher-level: just talk about the grand vision and the team, without going deeper into the gameplay.
    • 30:07 - Q: How do you get published when investors won't publish your game if you haven't already published a game?
      • You may need to put extra effort into your prototype.
      • You should also try to do something smaller, because you can have it more complete when you're trying to sell it to somebody.
    • 31:32 - Q: What advice do you have for convincing publishers to even listen to your pitch?
      • Contact them before you come to GDC.
      • Publishers should have a point-of-contact listed on their website. Send them a 1-3 page description of your pitch, including information on who the team is. Remember the two main questions: 1. Is this worthwhile? 2. Can the team pull it off? That should be enough to get some back-and-forth emails, and if you do it prior to GDC or E3, you're more likely to get a quick meeting.
      • Don't expect publishers to pay for travel expenses so early in the process.
    • 33:22 - Q: What advice would you have for people creating trailers as part of a pitch?
      • Higher-level investors are more likely to respond to a highly-polished trailer, because it shows you can pull something off.
      • More down-in-the-trenches people are more likely to ignore the trailer, because it's so easy to lie / hide things.
    • 34:38 - Q: What metrics, if any, would you recommend mentioning (in terms of previous success)?
      • Any metrics that show a track record of success.
    • 35:25 - Q: What advice for you have for how to find a hook for a game?
      • What I do is take the core gameplay and push it in some new direction.
      • In Rainbow 6 the question was, "What would it like to play a first-person shooter where twitch reflexes were downplayed and it was instead about patience and tactics?"
      • So it's about changing the rules a bit.
      • Aside from mechanic hooks, sometimes just the *look* of a game is a hook.
      • One of the best pitches he took at Sony was for The Unfinished Swan, because it had two hooks: an original mechanic and an original look, and they were interrelated.
      • Another hook can be a very original character.
      • Take something that already exists, push it in a new direction and then *iterate* on that, don't just use the first thing you come up with.

Lists of game mechanics

Major game ideas I'm interested in

  • Why are games fun?
  • What is the best possible game? What will games look like 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years from now?
  • How many aspects of a game can procedural generation be applied to? Is there some algorithm that will tell you where to look to apply it?
  • Players can only observe a part of the simulated world at a time. What are the implications of this? Are there diminishing returns from simulating things the player won't notice? For example, simulating 100,000 AI citizens of a country for a player to explore. Or only drawing the front of a rock and not allowing the player to blow the rock out of the ground.
  • Could a checklist be created that would lead people to systematically find the "next big thing" in gaming? That is, in the same way that there are algorithms you can follow to escape from a maze. It would say something like, "Hey, this new technology is out, and it will enable this particular game that couldn't have existed before." (Oculus Rift). Or, "Hey, all these people now own this particular technology so this particular type of game is not only possible but also has the potential to be a big / viral hit." (eg Words With Friends)


How can we get people to stop making annoyingly derivative games ("minecraft with portals!") and instead get them making very different games?

- I think one of the big reasons people make derivative games is that it's easier to get people to try your game. You can find all the people who play Minecraft and say, "Wouldn't it be cool if you could do X?" and there's a good chance they'll understand what you're talking about. Whereas if you have a totally fresh idea people may have trouble understanding it when you describe it.
- Another issue is that every game requires that you learn how to play it. Even stuff like "hold this key for the action menu, then press this button to select things" is a learning curve that makes starting a new game frustrating. So if you can copy a lot of the basic rules of another game it makes it a lot faster for people to learn how to play it. The problem is that the game also becomes more derivative. I can definitely say that the learning curve for Dwarf Fortress is what has kept me from starting it, even though I'm fascinated by it.
- So what needs to happen is we need a way to fix the above issues.
- I think having trusted game experimenters (like a lot of these YouTube channels and gaming sites) is a good way to solve the "explain a totally new concept to people" problem, because they'll be the early adopters who will be more interested in a new concept and willing to deal with whatever learning curve is necessary to play the new game.
- I think YouTube videos are a good way to fix the learning curve issue, because new people can watch someone else playing the game without having to be bothered by which key press does what. I've definitely done that with Dwarf Fortress / Rogue / ArmA / etc.

Games that teach you something unique about the real world

How to Make a Farmville-Style Game


Stackoverflow - How to make an addictive social game like FarmVille


Quote:
Farmville clone 101

  1. Learn flash, I recomend Kongregates Shootorial, start at step 0.
  2. Create your first game (this will be hard), post it to Kongregate and feel good about yourself (because you should, if you complete this step).
  3. Make it social, target the Facebook platform, you can find the developer portal here.
  4. Realise that now is a great time to learn php.
  5. Make a second game, integrate it with facebook and publish it. Feel good about yourself again.
  6. Going from a shoot em up to a persistent game (the worlds "state" is saved between sessions) you will need to learn mysql.
  7. Find a host with a database so you can keep the players games saved.
  8. Make a third game, persistent and Facebook integrated. Feel very good about yourself.
  9. Now is the time to look for a group! If you decide to take this further and want to create something either to time consuming or complex to do it by yourself.


The Escapist - How FarmVille Was Written in Five Weeks
Steve Bromley - How to make an addictive social game: The First Five Minutes

Misc

  • I was reminded of Brett saying it is extremely important to watch other people play your game.
  • I was also thinking it is extremely important to get an early build of the core game mechanics to make sure they work.
  • Quote from Phaeden about the WGL mod, one of the things that has most stuck with me from OFP modding:
    • Overall, in order to keep the general [realistic] feel of the WGL total conversion, it is necessary to alter individual components which, when looked at individually, may not appear to support 'realism.' However, when taken as a whole, each subsystem supports each other component to create a thoroughly realistic and enjoyable simulation experience.

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