As a game designer, you have a vision of how your game should look, feel, and play. But how can you translate that vision to different devices, such as PCs, consoles, mobiles, and VR headsets? In this article, you will learn some tips and techniques to adapt your design vision to different devices, without compromising your core gameplay and aesthetics.
The first step to adapt your design vision to different devices is to know your target devices. What are their strengths and limitations? How do they differ in terms of input methods, screen size, resolution, performance, battery life, and user expectations? You should research and test your game on the devices you want to support, and identify the main challenges and opportunities for your design. For example, if your game is a fast-paced shooter, you might want to optimize it for high-end PCs and consoles, and avoid mobiles and VR headsets that have lower frame rates and motion sickness issues.
Knowing your target devices means understanding the gadgets your game will be played on. Think about screens, how players interact (touch, mouse, controller), and what each device can handle. It's like knowing your audience - the better you understand them, the better you can tailor your game to fit their needs and preferences.
Adapting design vision to various devices involves a harmonious blend of flexibility and consistency. Prioritizing user experience and functionality ensures seamless transitions across platforms, enriching engagement and accessibility. It's about embracing diversity in form factor while staying true to the essence of the design narrative.
Some pointers: Mobile: automate as much as possible and then some more; the less the user's hand/fingers are in the way, the better. Handheld: avoid polling, relying more on event-driven architectures, so as not to tax the battery unnecessarily. Console: add subtle assistance features (like turn acceleration) to compensate for lack of precision with analogue sticks. PC: allow customization to a silly degree, in everything from control schemes to resolutions, to accommodate for the massive range of hardware.
A mobile phone has an input design completely oppsite from a PC and different than a gaming console. When designing your game take into account your target platforms since the start. If you end up in a situation where you need to adapt for a platform, let's say, PC to mobile. In that case you may need to take design decision. One example could be lowering the difficulty due to a less precise input system.
Knowing your target devices before hand is going to solve a lot of your problems and questions. For example, if you want to make a racing game, it can work on all consoles! However, if your racing game has arcade features and more fantasy elements involved resulting into more things happening at ones, maybe PC can be the best option so you can optimize these features better and be able to process them easier.
The next step to adapt your design vision to different devices is to prioritize your design goals. What are the most important aspects of your game that you want to preserve across all devices? What are the secondary or optional features that you can modify or remove if necessary? You should have a clear hierarchy of your design goals, and use them as a guide to make trade-offs and decisions when adapting your game. For example, if your game is a narrative-driven adventure, you might want to prioritize the story, characters, and dialogue, and be flexible with the graphics, sound, and UI.
Prioritizing your design goals is like setting the compass for your game's journey. You need to figure out what matters most - whether it's delivering stunning visuals, smooth gameplay, or intuitive controls. By putting your key goals front and center, you can focus your efforts where they'll have the biggest impact, ensuring your game shines in all the right places. Design goals should be aligned & according to end-user experience. Much more effective & honest results can be achieved by not only relying upon testers. As developers and designers, we should take notes and review users in beta and alpha releases.
If your game resembles more a tabletop game ( like a roguelike deckbuilder ) it will be much easier to adapt for mobile devices. In general anything that involves sekecting things in a turn based manner will be much easier to adapt than a fast paced gane or an RTS that requires fast precision clicking.
The first step to adapt your design vision to different devices is to know your target devices. What are their strengths and limitations? How do they differ in terms of input methods, screen size, resolution, performance, battery life, and user expectations? You should research and test your game on the devices you want to support, and identify the main challenges and opportunities for your design. For example, if your game is a fast-paced shooter, you might want to optimize it for high-end PCs and consoles, and avoid mobiles and VR headsets that have lower frame rates and motion sickness issues.
First of all, as a game designer, stop thinking about devices: think about their input interfaces. You're not making a game for PlayStation or Xbox; you're making it for a controller. Touch. Keyboard. Mouse. Controller. Surfboard peripheral. Those are your platforms!
Identifier les 3 mécaniques de jeu principales que vous souhaitez implémenter. Une fois identifier je conseil de les subdiviser chacune en 3 dérivés de mécanique. Cela permet de diversifier le gameplay en recyclant les mécaniques principales et rend le jeu globalement plus cohérents.
The third step to adapt your design vision to different devices is to use scalable and adaptive techniques. These are methods that allow your game to adjust its quality and functionality according to the device's capabilities and settings. For example, you can use graphics settings that let the user choose the level of detail, resolution, and effects that suit their device and preference. You can also use adaptive UI that changes its layout, size, and visibility depending on the screen size and orientation. You can also use adaptive gameplay that modifies the difficulty, speed, and feedback based on the input method and user behavior.
Employing scalable and adaptive techniques ensures your game caters to any device, akin to a versatile wardrobe fitting all. Games like "Among Us" exemplify this, seamlessly adjusting across mobile, tablet, and PC. Its consistent layout and controls provide an enjoyable experience regardless of the device, enhancing its popularity and accessibility.
You have to determine when this breaks the experience; there are many tech and business reasons why you want to 'stretch' the experience across different input and output systems; but know when you have stretched too far and you need a different kind of experience, a new UI metaphor, or special affordances. Find players who are passionate users of the target device as your control group. Do effective user studies. Gather metrics about performance to see where the rough spots are. Stretch the design as far as you can without breaking it - and help others understand where those breaks are; this lets you respect and honor your whole audience, not just cash-grab.
At this point you have to be realistic. Your AAA full global illumination with procedural terrain generation will not run on mobile devices unless you take some compromises. Know where you can cut or which things will not compromise your artistic vision. If your game depends on shadows for its look, then don't cut on that and instead tone down post process effects or texture quality.
The final step to adapt your design vision to different devices is to test and iterate your game. You should test your game on as many devices as possible, and gather feedback from different users. You should also monitor the performance, usability, and accessibility of your game on each device, and fix any bugs or issues that arise. You should also compare your game with other games in the same genre and platform, and see how they handle the adaptation. You should then iterate your game based on the feedback and data, and improve your design vision accordingly.
Testing and iterating your game is like refining a recipe through taste tests - you keep tweaking until it's just right. Start by playing your game on different devices to catch any bugs or issues. Then gather feedback from players to identify areas for improvement. This continuous process of testing and refining ensures your game evolves, becoming more polished and enjoyable with each iteration.
Consoles have few target devices. Mobile phones have infinity target devices. Even when developing for PC the number of configurations your users will have is almost infinite, as well as the programs they can be running alongside your gane, such as OBS to capture gameplay. Be sure to study the most common configurations and use that as a base, and then test as many configs as possible. Betas tend to be a good way to do this.
Test on the target platform--there are no shortcuts. It's very common to not bother with the build process or hassle of deployment, particularly if you have a badly developed devops pipeline or when stress rears its head, but every time you do, you will be tainting your data. If you don't play on the target device, you don't know how the target device will behave. Simple as that.
Instead of adapting your design vision to different platforms, I rather recommend doing proper research on the topic "Where are my Players now?" Different platforms have different types of Players. Sure all of them share some types of Players but the majority of specific types are exclusive to specific platforms. One platform is best for casual Players. The second is for Players who like short sessions of gameplay. And a third one is best for hardcore Players, niche markets or experimental projects (indies). Once you are done with research you find the answer on which platform to focus and what elements to consider during your development cycle.
Play a lot with a particular device If you get to know the possibilities and limits of a given device, you will find out what works on it and what doesn't. Get to know other people's games as well, because then you will see how they solve certain problems on a certain device. This helps to design a game that makes better use of the capabilities of a given device and also takes into account its limitations. The best games always use the capabilities of a piece of hardware in creative ways.
When people talk about "AAA" games, it's important to remember that the AAA is purely to do with the artistic fidelity. Nothing is ultimately stopping us from making a AAA game on mobile if you just scope the art correctly. Take this mindset and apply it to any platform and you'll find a way to scope any project to any platform.
There are many considerations beyond platform. Localization, culturalization, accessibility; your game can reach a wider audience in many different ways and you must strive to be aware of as many of them as possible to stay on top of your game design game.
With the rise of cross-platform gaming, we need to think about targeting multiple devices simultaneously to reach a broader audience and allow players to seamlessly transition between different platforms while retaining their progress. Embrace responsive design principles to ensure that your content and user interface adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes and orientations. Gather feedback from users on different devices and incorporate their insights into your design iterations.