Patrick Dugan just made a recent post continuing the thread of the realities of indie gamedev. There’s been a recent rash of parade raining for the indie gamedev scene, starting with Jeff Vogel’s idie lament that I commented on earlier (and was recently linked to from Grand Text Auto). Patrick quickly recaps the observations made by Jeff Tunnell on what the proper expectations of success should be for indies. Jeff properly points out that average titles can only hope to break even, while only the really successful ones are profitable. The result: the market is actually not that different from nearly every other mature creative market where craftsmanship is plentiful (see movies, websites, books, music).
Game Design
19
May 04
Design Notes for the The Single-Player Project…
Here are my design notes for the single-player project thus far. It’s really just a brain dump at this moment, as evidenced by the “worrying” near the bottom. I’ll hopefully be cleaning this up over the weekend.
28
Apr 04
…A Slight Detour!
Okay, here’s the game design for the Single-Player project: Detours, the Game. Yes, I’ll definitely come up with a better name, but I do feel as though I’ve nailed down the cornerstones of the design.
I was inspired while driving home one night. I noticed a detour sign on a side street and wondered what would happen if I just blindly followed the detour sign without thinking much about my route. After a bit of tumbling around in my head I came to he basics of a game design, somewhat of a puzzle game based around detours. Here’s the basics, to be expanded on when I put together a proper design doc:
The playing field for the game is an overhead view of city streets, divided into a standard block-n-streets grid. Cars begin entering from the edges of the playing field along the streets. The cars are heading for specific exits based on their color. The cars take the most direct route according to a standard path-finding algorithm. Along the way, there are parts of the street that are damaged or otherwise blocked to passage. The cars’ path-finding does not factor these blockages so they will blindly drive straight into them. Most of these blockages will simply bring the cars to stop at the damaged road. The player must place detour signs on or before the damaged roads to properly re-direct traffic. The player loses if the cars back up so far that new cars can no longer enter the playing field.
So, that’s the basics. Of course, there are lots of other details to work out, some of which I already have and will go into in more detail with the design doc. Also coming with the design doc will be the engineering task list.
Okay, ready, set, go.
28
Apr 04
Chris Crawford on Game Design
Just finished reading Chris Crawford’s excellent book, Chris Crawford on Game Desgin. I heartily recommend the book to anyone interested in any facet of game development. It’s rare to have such a serious look at the process and art of designing games.
Kudos aside, I certainly have some disagreeements with Chris. While he strongly encourages designers to move outside of established genres, and bemoans our industry’s insistence on relying on tried-and-true genres, he invaribly falls back on his strengths as a strategy game designer when presenting new game ideas. The chapter that he devotes to games he’d like to design consist primarily of variations on classic strategy gaming. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, the designs certainly sound better than most of the me-too RTS’s that have been made, but they’d still likely be cast as a Strategy/Sim/RTS by any modern game player reviewing them.
Beyond the aforementioned chapter, though, he does touch on a few interesting designs from his past, of particularly note a game titled Siboot. This game very clearly demonstrates the fundamental elements of interactive design as outlined in Chris’ other excellent tome, The Art of Interactive Design: verbs and nouns. To boil down that whole book in a few sentences (do read the book, please!): Interaction is at its most fundamental level a conversation between two parties. The conversation is broken into three steps: listen, think, speak. This of course is the canonical computational model of input-process-output. Speaking (and it’s flipside, listening) can be broken down into two essential elements: verbs and nounds, actions and the objects they act on. Siboot presents a very nice mechanism (particularly for it’s time in history) for presenting player with possible verbs and possible nouns.
To get to my point: while Chris does provide some much needed critical analysis of game design as a true, valuable pursuit, he unfortunately does not give many current games any benefit of the doubt. In fact, he dismisses the First Person Shooter genre outright while admitting he has not played any of its offerings since dabbling with Half-Life. I would consider this tantamount to dismissing comedic films that followed Chaplin’s Gold Rush as “more of the same.” While I’d be the last to regard the FPS genre as the foregront of innovative game design, it nonetheless has progressed quite a bit since its humble beginnings in Castle Wolftenstein 3-D, Doom and Quake.
Of course, what use would critical discussion be if we all agreed?