Checklist for making a good game

Originally I had this question written as "what makes a game fun?", but then I realized that "fun" isn't the only thing that can be appealing about a game. Sometimes the graphics don't necessarily make the game more fun (in the sense of causing an adrenaline rush or flow experience) but do make it a more enjoyable experience.


- Random thought that I need to move to the right place on this page: While creating my 'game to learn good habits' it really hit me hard how the focus of games on physical skill (eg shooters) is because if you have an infinite amount of time to make a decision, you can always just look up what the best course of action is. My game is very simple, so it would be very easy for people to just look online for the best course of action. But for twitch shooters it doesn't matter if you know what the best course of action is, because you still need to be able to do the physical part of it (aiming to the right place, etc.). Another trick games use is to throw a lot of information at you, which makes it harder to look up answers online (eg Total War games might count, any military simulators really).

Here's a quote from the first GameMaker tutorial:

Quote:

The Game Idea
Before jumping into the action, we should take a moment to plan out our game. It's all too easy to sit down to start working on an idea and then later find that you have lost focus and that the game is no what you actually intended it to be! this in turn leads to an abandoned project and a sensation of having wasted your time, which is obviously not something you want to happen. therefore, we should make a very simple design document which outlines all the important things we want in our game. Once the game has been complete following this document, we can go back and revise and change things.

Design documents can take any form you wish, from a full blown essay with doodles and art clipped onto it, or a simple note with some bullet points. The important thing here is to give your project a definite direction and have a list of goals that you want to achieve.

Here's an example they give of a simple design document:

Quote:

Description
"Catch the Clown" is a little action game. In this game a clown moves around in a playing field. The goal of the player is to catch the clown by clicking with the mouse on him. If the player progresses through the game the clown starts moving faster and it becomes more difficult to catch him. For each catch the score is raised and the goal is to get the highest possible score. Expected playing time is just a few minutes. 

Goals/Resources

• Game objects - There will be just two game objects: the clown and the wall. The wall object has a square like image. The wall surrounding the playing area is made out of these objects. The wall object does nothing. It just sits there to stop the clown from moving out of the area. The clown object has the image of a clown face. It moves with a fixed speed. Whenever it hits a wall object it bounces. When the player clicks on the clown with the mouse the score is raised with 10 points. The clown jumps to a random place and the speed is increased with a small amount.
• Sounds - We will use two sounds in this game. A bounce sound that is used when the clown hits a wall, and a click sound that is used when the player manages to click with the mouse on the clown.
• Controls - The only control the player has is the mouse. Clicking with the left mouse button on the clown will catch it.
• Game Play - At the start of the game the score is set to 0. The room with the moving clown is shown. The game immediately begins. When the player presses the key the game ends.
• Levels - There is just one level. The difficulty of the game increases because the speed of the clown increases after each successful catch.

Get a playable build as quickly as possible and then iterate

Example: Unreal Tournament
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/07 ... eathmatch/

Audio - Sound effects



Audio - Music

Good examples to follow:
Driver
GoldenEye
Hotline Miami


Audio - Room Tone / "No-Noises" Noise
- You should seriously consider having sounds playing even when there is nothing going on in the game to make sound (no music, no events). In movies they refer to this as "room tone", and it makes a BIG difference as to how realistic a scene feels.

Good examples to follow:
LD 28 - Titan Souls - http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-da ... w&uid=7984
- It has great "empty" outdoor sound; it's like room tone for the outdoors.

Graphics - Unusual Visual Style
Some famous game maker said that it is extremely important to have a unique visual style. I think the guy who said that was Derek Yu (Spelunky) but it may have been cactus or the guy who did Gunpoint.
Example: Cuphead - http://kotaku.com/the-1930s-cartoon-gam ... 1493150886

Tutorials

Dissolve - Achievement Unlocked (re: games stealing from movies and vice versa)
http://thedissolve.com/features/exposit ... -unlocked/



Awesome links I need to focus on:
Exploring Game Design Through Technology (for showing how different elements of a game can be thought of as vectors; look at the pics of the genres going off in different directions)
http://blog.wolfire.com/2013/03/Explori ... technology
- I want to know how to use this way of thinking about games to predict what future games will be like


Amit's Game Programming Information
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~am ... eprog.html
- this page is very similar to what I'm doing: aggregating useful links sorted into categories

Hitbox Team - Designing Game Narrative
http://hitboxteam.com/designing-game-narrative

the "Receiver" game (for showing how you can make a game by just modelling an aspect of a genre that isn't usually modelled)
http://blog.wolfire.com/2013/11/Receiver-VR-mod

Narrative Legos with Ken Levine (of Thief, System Shock 2, Bioshock)
http://www.gamespot.com/videos/narrativ ... 0-6417876/

Quote:

00:28 - narrative and systemic games kind of fight with each other

00:40 - to find a new way of doing things they needed fewer employees and more time to experiment and fail

02:30 - the point of the talk is to figure out how to do player-driven replayable narrative

03:10 - negatives of linear narrative:
1) expensive to make
2) pieces don't speak to each other (eg the things you do at the beginning of Civilization don't really mean anything at the end of the game)
3) branching exists, but with limited states and interaction
4) doesn't fully embrace the unique power of games
5) not player driven
6) multiple endings still mean fixed number of player states
7) can only add ON, not add IN. With games like X-Com and Civ you can enhance the same experience, but w/ a narrative you can only add later chapters
8) There is good work in this area (Witcher, etc) but we want to do a different approach

05:50 
- he says it's too hard to try to create fully realistic characters

06:30 - Physics wasn't built in the day
GREAT analogy. He talks about how they started simply when trying to deal with physics.
- don't model everything...model a LIMITED SET OF BELIEVABLE AND IMPACTFUL THINGS

07:40 - The Opportunity
- create a narratively driven wherein:
- narrative elements are non-linear and interact with each other
- all narrative elements trigger off PLAYER action
- such triggers are generally TRANSPARENT to the player

09:15 - Let's consider a particular genre: Skyrum

10:10 - Imagine there are four villages: orc, goblin, elf, 

10:55 - What's a Star?
- An NPC with passions
Passions: Not full psych models
Ex:
Luke Skywalker: Adventure, father issues, prove himself
Things that wouldn't be relative to Luke's story: Vegetarian, tooth decay, OCD
- A passion is what a STAR cares about relative to the actions of the PLAYER
- Passions are transparent to the player
- A passion must be responsive to the player action

13:00 - Example NPC - Orc
- He talks about how the Orc would have a feeling towards you that would be happy or angry depending on how you help each of his passions. [This doesn't seem so interesting; it's like GTA 1, 2]

15:00 - The Macro Passion
- It's just the NPC's overall feeling about you, generated by averaging their passions
- There are certain thresholds on the macro passion scale that, once you pass them, will trigger certain actions by the Orc [again, a good starting point but not really new enough to be super interesting to me except as a starting point]

17:20 - Explanation of zero sum games

18:00 - Explanation of non-zero sum games

18:30 - He says they're going to focus on zero sum games

19:20 - He talks about how you can create a game out of this, as you need to figure out how to balance everyone's feelings for you

20:20 - Drones - Guards, hirelings, scouts, spies, foragers. Their feelings towards you are a function of how the stars feel about you

20:50 - He lists example accomplishments, rewards, punishments

21:45 - Dramatic Event
- He gives a "Red Dragon" as an example of an unaligned star, where the more bad stuff you do the more helps you.

24:10 - He emphasizes how all of these levels of relationships create a complex web of interactions.

25:20 - He talks about how you can have an event that can change the relationships, eg if a horde of zombies attacks the world

26:40 - He says that you'll have professionally-created trigger points / events. IMO this has the same problem of "limited number of endings", and it also limits the amount of gameplay / modelling that is perceived by each player. One of the major things I've noticed is that you want to track the amount-of-developer-time-per-average-hour-played-by-customer.

32:00 - He emphasizes the opportunity to let the player make interesting, tough choices, eg you like being around NPC 1 but NPC 2 has better benefits, and they hate each other so you can't please both.

33:25 - Hidden Passions: They're not transparent at first. He gives an example of how you could have NPCs reveal their passions as the player spends more time with the NPC.

37:20 - He explains how you could have interesting co-op opportunities where one player has developed a relationship with one faction and the other player has a relationship with another faction. He gives Diplomacy as an example of a game where you have interesting

38:40 - end of talk, switch to Q&A

39:00 - Woman asks how lying would be handled.
A: 

39:50 - Q: Guy talks about how you have this huge explosion of writing that would need to be done with so much choice.
A: Doesn't have a great answer.

41:15 - Q: In Dragon-Age-Origins you never have a motivation to make a character not like you. How do you fix that?
A: The obvious answer: the zero sum game

44:30 - Q: What happens if a guy accidentally disables the main quest?
A: Do we really need a main quest? (He's probably thinking in terms of Civilization)

47:40 - Q: What about changing passions?
A: That's a definite possibility, I'm just trying to get the basics down.

48:15 - He says he suspects the best way to test the system is in a paper-and-pencil game.

49:25 - A designer on the Civilization franchise talks about ho
Q: How do you avoid having NPCs end up in the middle-of-the-road area in how they feel towards you?
A: You can have the gameplay / rewards push you into the far ends of the spectrum.

51:10 - What happens if you withdraw from interactions?

53:20 - Q: How do you deal with inept players who just want to kill people?

Yngvi Bjornsson General Game Playing Learning to Play
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgToAsXlsUE

Quote:

- Simple rules (minutes to learn)
- complex strategy (lifetime to master)
- Movie to check out: Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine

"Computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if geneticists had concentrated their efforts on breeding racing Drosophila. We would have some science, but mainly very fast fruit flies." - John McCarthy

5:40 - We want to build intelligent systems cabable of:
- Learning, thus becoming better at solving tasks over time.
- Handling unknown scenarios, eg by adapting existing knowledge from different but related tasks
- Acting autonomously, ie with minimal human supervision.

6:00 - He defines general game playing:
- capable of playing many different games
- even games they have never seen before

7:45 - Game rules are described using GDL (Game Description Language)

8:10 - The games must be deterministic: no games with dice
They're perfect-information games: no card games

8:50 - This approach was initiated in 2005 by an AI research group at Stanford.

9:30 - He mentioned something called CADIA

11:10 - He analogizes the method to having a thousand monkeys playing the game at the same time

12:40 - This guy's team has been at the top of the global GGP competitions since it started, so he knows his stuff.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/e ... aires.html

good links:
http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread ... n&p=198534

good example of random pictures being used to keep people reading:
http://www.johndiesattheend.com/updates/?p=1071

5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying To Get You Addicted
http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5- ... icted.html
[5. Using Skinner-inspired reinforcement schedules; 4. Tapping into people's hoarding / collecting instincts w/ items; 3. Variable ratio rewards, the same techniques as slot machines (he gives a great example of the Chinese MMO ZT Online
- He points out that games will punish people for stopping:

Quote:

Why is your mom obsessively harvesting her crops in Farmville? Because they wither and rot if she doesn't. In Ultima Online, your house or castle would start to decay if you didn't return to it regularly. In Animal Crossing, the town grows over with weeds and your virtual house becomes infested with cockroaches if you don't log in often enough. It's the crown jewel of game programming douchebaggery--keep the player clicking and clicking and clicking just to avoid losing the stuff they worked so hard to get.

- He says people play games because they provide three things that most jobs / responsible-activities don't provide, which is:

Quote:

1. Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day);
2. Complexity (so it's not mind-numbing repetition);
3. Connection Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your hard work).

- he mentions short levels being a way to make people go, "Oh, I'll just have one more." That reminds me of how Counter-Strike rounds are only ~5 minutes each, but you'll sit down and then look at the clock and 5 hours will have gone by.

Articles linked-to in the Cracked article:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ErinHoff ... eweled.php
http://www.johndiesattheend.com/updates ... yXS_fldVHs
http://www.smh.com.au/news/articles/eth ... 77195.html
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3 ... php?page=1
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i ... tory=23724


Another thing about CS was that you'd be "punished" when you were killed: you had to wait a semi-random amount of time until the round ended so that you could play again. On your downtime you'd watch the other players or talk to the other dead players. This variation may have helped to keep the game from getting stale.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Skinner_box
Backward Chaining

Skinner also developed backward chaining. A complex series of behaviors can be created if taught "backwards". For example if the desired behavior was for a monkey to jump off a ledge, catch a rope, swing to a platform then climb to a banana, this could be taught sequentially. First the monkey would be placed on the platform, where it climbs to the banana. Then the monkey might be placed on the rope, where it learns it can swing to the platform, climb up and get the banana. Then it might be placed on the ledge, where it learns it can jump onto the rope. In this way behaviors can be "chained" together.

GDC Talk - A Theory of Fun
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016632/A-Theory-of-Fun-10

2014.12.05 - RockPaperShotgun - The Flare Path: Wargaming – Where To Start?
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/12 ... -to-start/


Book - A Theory of Fun
http://www.amazon.com/A-Theory-Fun-Game ... 1932111972

The Chemistry of Game Design
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1524/
- rec'd in the "A Theory of Fun" talk

Through the Grinder: Refining Diablo III's Game Systems
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1017794/Th ... ing-Diablo

Understanding F2P with the four pleasures model
http://famousaspect.com/?p=665

Quote:

In the talk, I explain the 4 pleasures model, a mental framework I use to aid hesitant developers in better understanding F2P players. This model, presented by anthropologist Lionel Tiger in his book The Pursuit of Pleasure, explains 4 different types of pleasure:
Physio – pleasures of the body and derived from the sensory organs.
Socio – the enjoyment derived from relationships with others.
Psycho – pleasure pertaining to people’s cognitive and emotional reactions.
Ideo - pleasure from or relating to a person’s values.

Mark Rosewater, head designer of Magic: The Gathering - Ten Things Every Game Needs
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/a ... ily/mm/174

Mark Rosewater, head designer of Magic: The Gathering - Bursting with Flavor: Why Magic is still so delicious
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/A ... daily/mr60

The Applied Value of Player Psychology: Putting Motivational Principles to Work
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1017784/Th ... -of-Player

Book - Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Mechanics-Ad ... 0321820274
- rec'd in the "A Theory of Fun" talk

The Game Design Forum - An Intro to Videogame Design History
http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/GDH_1.html

Q: What is the ideal rate at which to increase difficulty? (Eg 1% per minute?) What is a standard way of measuring difficulty?