Developing Great Games

The ancient Romans had an interesting tradition. Whenever one of their engineers constructed a new arch and the capstone was hoisted into place, the engineer assumed accountability for his work in the most profound way possible: He stood under the arch.

Like the Roman architects of old, game designers are responsible for making a quality product that holds up. Maybe the price for failure isn't quite as grim, but perhaps it should be. Designers create a product that demands hard-earned money and irreplaceable amounts of time from both their audience and themselves. If they fail to entertain, then everyone's time, energy, and money is wasted. As designers, we need to take the steps that ensure the best game possible.

At its most rudimentary level, a game is an idea or a series of ideas that are brought together into a cohesive vision. As a designer, you are thought of as the "idea guy." What is hard about being a game designer is knowing whether you're coming up with good ideas. Coming up with a great game design isn't a black-and-white, right-or-wrong proposition. Although game development as a whole isn't either, you can still argue that, with most of the other disciplines of game development, you can often determine whether something is good or bad at a glance. Game design is very subjective, though, so you might need a lot more time and analysis to determine whether you're taking the right approach.

This article talks about the need to understand the most fundamental and subjective question of all: "Is it fun?" This is an extremely tough question that people will often ask you to answer with confidence, even though you can usually answer only in uncertainty. This article also covers the steps you need to go through to actually make something a fun game. Finally, this article talks about the people who play games and tells why you need to understand them better as you begin to come up with ideas that will appeal to them. Everything in the next section should be addressed if you want to have a better chance of creating a really fun game. 

So, what makes a great game? Glad you asked. We'll look at that and more in this chapter, including game play, why people play games, and the audience.

What Makes for a Great Game?

Greatness is relative. For most people, creating a great game is about being successful. Everyone has a different definition of success. For some of you, being successful could mean just getting your first game published; others of you might consider yourselves successful only after you ship five million units. Some of you could be more interested in creating a game that is critically acclaimed, and you might not even really care how many copies your game sells. Some of the best game designs ever have gone unnoticed because of poor marketing and lack of support by the sales channels. Many games come close to being great but are shipped prematurely and with bugs that cause sales to flatline. Only 15% of games sell more than 500,000 copies, which makes it much harder to produce a best-selling game than you think. So, no matter how well you do your job, if the rest of the team falls short or does something wrong, the game will have a high chance of failure.

So, from the perspective of a game designer, can we determine what makes a great game? What you can control is that you can produce a great game design. Having a great game design is also a subjective problem. Do you judge a game design by how fun it is, how new and original it is, how well received it is by the press, or by some other factor that is important to you? My personal goal is to always create a game that as many people as possible can enjoy. Setting expectations for yourself and the game ahead of time can also help you make the right decisions about many aspects of the game. No matter how you define success, don't let others' definitions of success make your accomplishments feel any less important.

Balancing Innovation and Imitation

Games exhibit varying levels of innovation. Some games, such as Seaman for Sega Dreamcast (see Figure 2.1), are totally unique and completely new. Seaman is a game that features a fish with the head of a man that responds to player inputs with strange dialogue. It's a game that does not easily fit into any pre-existing genre. Pikmin for the Nintendo GameCube is a similarly innovative title. Then there are games that easily fit into already established genres. One example is Starcraft, which has lots of innovations and is clearly the spiritual descendent of the Warcraft and Dune series of real-time strategy games. Then there are absolute imitators who seek to cash in on a successful game or genre without contributing anything new. Usually, these games die a well-deserved death in the marketplace.

By definition, a genre has a common set of features in a product. If you try to create a game that isn't in a specific genre, you usually run the risk of not getting shelf space from retailers and possibly alienating the expectations of your audience.

So how much innovation do you need to produce a great game? Should every aspect of the game be new and original? Actually, no. Too much innovation can be risky. A good example of this is the real-time strategy game Homeworld (see Figure 2.2). Although it's still considered a real-time strategy game, Homeworld pushed the genre in a whole new way. It was entirely 3D, it took place in space, it involved missions that built on each other, and it had no real building and focused on the units of the game, among other things. The developers believed that they had created a great game that would also be wildly successful. The game was critically acclaimed and won numerous awards. Retail sales proved the developers wrong, however. The game sold reasonably well, but in comparison to the genre leaders Age of Empires, Starcraft, and Command and Conquer, sales were disappointing. Ultimately, the game was too different for most RTS players to appreciate.

In comparison, Age of Empires (see Figure 2.3) is a real-time strategy game that I consider to have an excellent mix of innovation and "tried-and-true" game play. For many gamers who like real-time strategy, AOE is both familiar (basic controls, unit types, resource allocation play) and brand new (research trees, defensive structures, a larger number of competitors). By applying elements from other strategy games (notably the highly acclaimed Civilization series) in a new and streamlined way to the real-time strategy genre, Age of Empires became a huge hit.

At the other extreme, if you look at a game such as Cossacks: European Wars, which is obviously a complete clone of Age of Empires set in the age of the Renaissance, you can see where a little innovation and a lot of imitation led to some success. It is worth noting, however, that the sales of even the most polished clones are usually far, far lower than the sales of the original. Creating clones of existing games is not necessarily a safe bet, and it is harder to create a good clone than you might think. A good example is the game America, by Data Becker. This game had all the makings of another possibly interesting clone of Age of Empires set in the time of the Old West. This great idea was poorly executed, however, which led to bad reviews and worse sales.

Understanding the Audience/Market

Before you make a single design decision, you have a potential audience equal to the entire game market. Every time you decide on a particular genre of game that you're going to make, you define your potential audience. Every time you design a new game-play feature, you define your audience. Every time you pick a particular theme for your game, you define your audience. And each time you define your audience, you lose some of the members of the audience.

So, what's a game designer to do? First, you'll never make everyone happyperiod. If you try, you'll fail. Trying to make everyone happy will dilute your product and make it weak all around. Finding the right mix of genre, game play, theme, and innovation to appeal to the largest possible audience is very tough. Before you start making choices about what your customer might want, make sure you know what you want. If you're not passionate about what you're making and you don't enjoy the subject, you probably chose the wrong topic for your game from the get go. Never forget that you are the earliest audience for your game.

The most successful games on the market are ones that are designed by individuals that have chosen a topic, genre, and style of game that appeals to the broadest number of people. You might set out to make a science-fiction action game for 16-year-old boys who like fast spaceships and girls, but you have to make sure that this is the best possible audience for your product.

Keep in mind, however, that you still need to appeal to hard-core gamers, even if you are targeting a broader overall audience. Hard-core gamers are typically the first ones to buy a product and are usually the most vocal about spreading the word to others. It is a tough job to make sure that your dedicated hard-core audience will love your game and, at the same time, give your game appeal to casual gamers who might not know the difference between a powerup and a power cord.

You must also identify your competitors here and make sure that your features are stronger and easily identifiable by your audience as superior. Otherwise, you run the risk of getting lost in the crowd. Having a distinctive product is one of the most important things that you can accomplish when trying to reach a broad audience.

Making the Game Fun

This is a long topic that I'll get into in more detail later (see the section "Is It Fun?"). At this point, let's just say that it is important to realize that, even if you have the greatest idea in the world or the greatest licensed property in the world or even the greatest technology in the world, it doesn't mean anything if the game isn't fun to play.

Making the Game Instantly Appealing

Beyond making the game fun, you need to make sure that your audience can pick up the game and play it without having to read a manual or play 20 hours of tutorials. I strongly believe that people must enjoy themselves immediately upon picking up the controller or mouse. The first experience with the game must make an indelible impression and force the player to come back for more. The game must compel the player not only to want to keep playing, but to come back for more.

This is another reason why long initial cut-scenes can be a bad thing in games. People want to jump in and interact immediately, not watch a movie for the first 10 minutes. I'll have more to say on this when I get into how to build storytelling into a game.

Prototyping the Game

One thing you'll hear me repeat over and over is how important it is to prototype your design. Getting your game up and running as early as possible is one of the smartest things you can ever do. There is no substitute for actual game play. When you have the controller/mouse in your hand, you'll find that a lot of your cherished initial ideas go out the window or are replaced by new, stronger insights. The sooner your game is up and running, the sooner you can test your ideas and iterate them.

Unfortunately, some of you might not be in a position to actually have the game prototyped for you. If this is the case, think about how you might mock up the game using traditional paper or board games and then play it, or come up with some other limited interactive demo that you can easily do. If you're creating a game that is similar to another game and that game has a level editor, see if you can mock up your game within that other game to get an idea of how it might work.

Using Iteration

When you have a prototype of the game up and running, you will see that often the best approach to design problems is to just sit down and play the game over and over. When your game is playable, make sure that you play it all the time and as often as possible. Rely on your instincts as a gamer as to what you like or dislike. Encourage your entire team and your friends to play the game regularly, and watch them play (keeping your own mouth shut is recommended). If you have the ability to keep your ego in your back pocket and observe this feedback, you will learn volumes about your game in a very short time.

Creating a Franchise

Make sure you think about your long-term goals and the long-term future of your game idea before you jump into it. Most game designers and game-development companies usually just jump right into developing a title without thinking about what to do next. To ensure that your product is financially appealing, leave yourself room to expand. Think about what other games, expansions, sequels, and products might evolve out of the game. Even if the game fails and you never do a sequel, if you plan it correctly, at least you won't end up with the Highlander dilemma and have to make a sequel to a product that was never designed to have one.

Ensuring High Production Values

Although fun, easily accessed, and easily understood, game play is the key to creating great games, graphics, sound effects, and music have very important supporting roles. Graphics and sound effects are key elements in the game interface. Graphics must be attractive and must inspire inquisitiveness. Graphics and sound effects should convey information quickly with a minimum of player effort. Acting together, these three elements set the mood and help the player forget that he is playing a game. Graphics and sound have important ancillary roles in helping to market the game as well.

High production values for graphics, sound effects, and music enhance the player's experience and contribute to the game's overall cachet of quality. Low-quality elements among others of high quality stand out like off-key notes, greatly diminishing the overall impact of the product. A high standard of quality in production values enhances the reputation of the game, the developer, and the publisher.

Building in Ease of Use

The interface often gets treated as an afterthought because it rarely has the capability to create a sensational experience for the player the way that game-play features, graphics, sound effects, and music do. No one gets excited about how a game drops down menus or presents buttons. Although the interface has little chance of dramatically enhancing a game, a poor interface design can do real harm. Keep in mind that capturing the player's imagination with great game play, visuals, and sound is only part of the battle. Giving the player access to all of these cool things easily, without frustration, is the other half. A confusing, difficult, and frustrating interface can ruin a game. Players encountering these problems in their first play session might easily lose interest and give up.

Minimize the layers of an interface (menus within menus) and control options (for example, being able to play the Age of Empires games using only a mouse is a good thing). Provide an interesting and absorbing tutorial when learning controls and operations can be daunting or if the player must learn quite a bit before beginning play.

Giving Them Many Ways to Play

For some types of games, such as strategy games and role-playing games, players tend to appreciate a game that can be played over and over or in different ways to keep it interesting. Many very successful games have no replayability, but they provide an engaging experience that the player can enjoy the first time and feel satisfied. Providing replay-ability can increase some consumer satisfaction and the perceived value of the game. A few years ago, it was expected that a great game had 30[nd]40 hours of game play within it. As more games are coming out and people get busier, many are now coming out with less than 10 hours of actual play time. Although getting 10 hours of game with no replayability doesn't seem like a lot for $50, it satisfies many people if those 10 hours are incredible.

For example, the Age of Empires series of games provide replayability through randomly generated worlds, a variety of maps, a variety of game types, and multiple civilizations. Replayability is easier in some genres than others: Strategy and sports titles easily accomplish this with their open-ended natures, whereas heavily story-based action-adventure and role-playing titles are far more linear and yield less replay time. You need to decide early on where your value will lie for the player.

Encouraging Player Investments

Some of the most successful games ever created require the player to invest in the experience of play by building empires, character statistics, or city infrastructures. Players enjoy creating things within a game, taking possession of their creations, molding them to their personal taste, and using them to further their game goals. Examples of games that require player investment include SimCity (city infrastructure), Diablo (character statistics), and Age of Kings (empire and technology). Building, defending, and using in-game investments creates a strong bond between the player and the game.

Allowing Content Creation

Players enjoy creating additional content for their favorite games, whether it is new planes for Flight Simulator, skins for their favorite shooter, or scenarios for Age of Kings. They get a chance to be a game designer and see their own work running onscreen. Consumer content lengthens the working life of a game, creates a community of devoted people, and helps increase awareness of the title in the marketplace. The Sims is a good example of a game in which the developer continues to expand the lifetime of the game through new content and features.

Presenting a Great Story

The story of a game (or narrative or plot) is the experience of playing it through a series of events that extend from start to completion (victory condition). A great game story keeps the player engaged, intrigued, and playing, increasing satisfaction and player investment. The story a game tells depends on the topic and the victory condition, plus the hurdles that the player must overcome to reach victory (completion).

A great story uses plot twists, reversal of fortune, and other ploys to keep the player interested. Adventure and role-playing games require the designer to script the story and the player to take on the part of one or more characters and act out the story. RTS games usually provide no story but instead create an empty map, like an empty page, on which the players write the story themselves as they play.

Game Play

The most important aspect of creating a great game is making sure that it is, in fact, a great game to play. If the game isn't fun, what's the point? Of course, these days, as alluded to earlier in the chapter, if you also don't have great art, good technology, good audio, and high production values, you'll also probably fail. Designers control only one aspect of the game-development process, so it's up to us to set up the best game play possible. So, it's important to remember that it's all about the game play. Did I mention game play?

Surprisingly, a good majority of game designers don't actually tackle proper game-play mechanics in their games. Even the most seasoned game designers think they know what the user wants and just head down the path of least resistance while designing. It is critical that you understand why a particular game is fun.

This seems like an obvious issue, but it is (surprisingly) often overlooked or thought about at a very late stage in the game design.

Is It Fun?

This seems like an obvious question. Who would set out to create a game that isn't fun? Yet games are released all the time that that are boring, dull, pointless, and utterly uninteresting to play. I don't believe that the designers set out to create an uninteresting game, but I think that these failures derive from designers losing perspective on what they are trying to build.

To create a great game, designers need to constantly work toward two goals: maximum player fun (game play) and minimum player frustration (random events, poor interface, "cheap hits," bugs).

Another common problem is that someone has a small idea that sounds very interesting but that ultimately is a concept that is inadequate on which to base an entire game. It's one thing to have only a few ideas if you're creating a short arcade game, but it's entirely different if you are trying to create a full-length, 20-plus-hour game. Many games become boring and repetitive because designers fail to realize that their one short idea repeated over and over becomes very monotonous.

Is It Interesting?

A great game provides players with interesting decisions, not trivial or random ones. This is the essence of game play. Good game design demands that players choose constantly: Do I go here or there? Do I use this powerup now or later? Do I get this resource or that resource? Do I build this structure or that structure? To be interesting, the game decision must provide a reward for success (I made the jump!) and a penalty for failure (I missed the jump and blew up!). Decisions without both positive and negative consequences are boring. In psychological terms, the rudiments of game play are a potent brew of positive and negative reinforcement.

Most computer games are basically just a series of such interesting decisions. Action games can be less about decisions and more about the twitch reaction. The art of game design is giving players enough opportunities for meaningful decisions to maintain their interest, without overwhelming them with so many decision points that they get frustrated or give up entirely. At the same time, designers must continue to vary existing game-play elements or add new ones to keep players challenged.

There are any number of ways to keep your game interesting to play throughoutI'll be talking about them in future chapters.

Is It Interactive?

Computer games are fun because they allow players to interact with a story rather than simply sit passively and receive it.

If your game limits too many of the players choices, or if your game adds so many choices that they are not meaningful, then the level of interaction of the game could be wrong.

Is It Original?

"Originality is the essence of true scholarship. Creativity is the soul of the true scholar." - Nnamdi Azikiwe

As noted in the previous discussion of innovation and imitation, creating an original game is a fine line to walk. If you make your game completely original, you risk alienating current players of the genre. On the other hand, if you fail to make the game at least somewhat original and it is too much like another game, people will see no need to buy yours. Make sure that your game strikes a balance between originality and familiarity. It is not necessary to be totally innovative and original in every aspect of the product.

Is It Coherent?

A game is coherent when its game play, story line, and aesthetic elements form a consistent and harmonious whole. It is important that your game is easy to understand. If there are major inconsistencies in the game, players will be turned off by it.

Is It Cool?

Creating a cool game, to use an older slang word, means creating a game that the audience finds incredibly attractive for so many reasons that they can't list them all. Not every game has to be cool, but many games that appeal to kids need to be. "Cool!" means that your game has overcome all resistance and has created a fan. Clearly defining what exactly is "cool" is a very tough thing to do and is very subjective. Later in the book, I talk more about how to balance innovation and imitation, which is a key issue behind making games cool. So, at its heart, cool games have at least a few fresh ideas in them.

Let's look a little more closely at what it means to get that "Cool!" reaction. The following list helps unpack the concept:

• Cool is not additive. Process is critical. You can't continue to just add features to your game and make a game that is cool even cooler. There must be a process to creating the game, to control what goes into it.
• Cool is a cultural value. Your audience decides what is cool, not you. Trends, fads, and things that impress people constantly change, and this can be tough to design for.
• Cool games are different. It's important to create something different enough to appeal, yet not so different that it is strange or hard to play.
• Cool games are emotive. Games that appeal to people's emotions or that have strong emotional content are often more attractive.
• Cool games are fun. No matter what, the game must be fun to be appealing.
• Cool games are functional. The game must work and make sense to the player.
• Cool games have an attitude. Many people like games that have an attitude or that take a stand.
• Cool is a strategic attribute. Being cool is as much calculated as it is accidental.
• Cool games are useable and transparent. Coolness is persistent: Games that are cool need to be cool throughout the entire game. They also need to be easy to use.
• Coolness comes from passion. The best way to make a great game is to be passionate about what you are creating.

It is possible to make a game functional, aesthetically pleasing in every way, and never, ever push the "cool" button. Function and form must be welded together with passion and excitement to produce something cool.

Although not every game out there is cool or hip, it is important to understand whether your game needs to be in order to be successful. Even if you're not cool, many of the same ideas that would make a game cool can still be important to understand because this will help you potentially understand your audience better. When you understand what people like, you can then try to understand why people play games and why they would want to buy your title.