Now that we’ve done reviewing and discussing games, let’s
actually talk about the elements of game design.
I’ve always thought the first thing to do when trying to
design a good game after the initial idea of the game is to design everything
around the game play first and foremost, because that’s what would keep most of
the players playing it for a while.
For example what genre will it be? , what kind of players
will be playing it? , will it be 3D? 2D? How will it work? What is the play
style like? Is it actually fun?
Multi-player? Then
comes the artwork concepts, coding, testing and the rest of the big mountain of
work that goes into creating games.
But doing more research into the matter, while game play
is one of the core elements, sometimes it isn’t the only thing a game is
designed around.
It all starts with an idea in someone’s head (obviously)
which soon turns into a Proposal form, or Design document which essentially
describes what exactly the game is, the story, setting, target audience and how
it’ll play out as well as giving detailed specifications on technical matters
and budget restriction estimations on what can and can’t be done while
developing the game.
Though all design documents that are made aren’t helpful
to the people producing the game and this article post gives clear examples of
bad design documents
Here are some extracts that describe idiotic examples of
Design documents and were quite hilarious when I first read them.
“They use
meaningless descriptions like “game play will be fun” and “responsiveness will
be sharp.” In these documents, many comparisons to other games are made: “This
plays like Super
Mario 64” or “The game has a
control scheme similar to Quake.””
To think companies, even the small indie ones can be so
unprofessional and child-like when describing their idea for a game that would
have to be FUNDED and then SOLD to the public is ridiculous, who the hell would
write a document which gives such VAGUE descriptions for their game and not to
mention talking about other games? It’s as if they’re hoping on the bandwagon
of their competitors trying to copy the idea which then gets made into an
appalling game. /sigh
“Often these
documents spend a lot of time, maybe half their pages, talking about
back-story. Usually this back-story is very weak and poorly developed and is
only tangentially related to the game being developed.”
Yeah. The story is important, but what are we making
here? A movie? TV show? A Book? Or a game?
“Players will be
given an option of many cool weapons. For example, the Gargantuan Kaboom does
twice the damage of the players’ other weapons and has a special effect. The
Barboon Harpoon will allow users to kill enemies at a distance with a nice
camera effect. Other weapons will be just as fun and cool...”
It’s like me… in Year 5, so “FUN AND COOL”.
Here was an interesting quote that was mentioned in the
beginning, talking about how to write a proper design document, and it doesn’t
sound that easy.
"Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence
should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for
the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine
no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences
short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but
that every word should tell." - William Strunk in his book The Elements of Style
But let’s get back on topic rather than turning this into
a rant heh.
After the initial design document would be completed and
approved the idea would be put into the hands of a single game designer or a
team of them to further refine the design document and decide which ideas and
elements will be focused and implemented on. They plan out how the game play and
structure of the game will be designed.
I always thought that if the
developers loved their game enough and put enough extra hours of their own free
will into producing and making this game awesome, it would eventually turn out
to be amazing, as would any art form for that matter… put enough work, love,
attention and tears in and the result will be beautiful.
The initial development for WoW
began in 2000, and it took them almost 5 years to finally release their
masterpiece in November 2004. And still to this day, almost 10 years later,
it’s the most popular MMORPG out there. Which is mind blowing. With 8 million
still paying that £8.99 a month.
I played that game for 5 years,
everything from the get go, was just epic, it was real easy to get into the
world and get the hang of things, as well as the MASSIVE world that awaits, but
what kept me for such a long time was probably the social factor and
establishing my character as a famous dueler on my realm and having a name for
myself in that world, I was so immersed in the game, the artistically painted
texture’s on the game had such charm to it, but I’m going off topic here again
so let’s get back to it.
Back in the early days of computer
games, the development teams were very small, usually consisting of less than 4
people. This is probably due to the games not having much technical issues or
huge amounts of artwork and story/ environments to plan out and complete, they
didn’t even have to think about the target market for some games such as PONG since
It was still something new back then and being experimented on. Games like
Pac-man had no storyline or epic visual effects, it was more functional and fun
rather than being immersive.
Here is a interesting article I
read, Randy Pitchford, Gearbox’s President and Director Talks about his
experiences of Game designing in an interview:
“The idea was that we weren't going to have a very strong
management structure, which we were hoping would get people involved that were
self-motivated and capable, and trust them to find their way. This has worked
out quite well, because it motivates people to always try to get better. But
the downside is when we get new people into the company, they really don't know
if they're doing a good job, because of that weak feedback loop.”
The team had great success with being free and
independent/ self-motivated in their own work without having a management team
down their throats telling them exactly what can and can’t be done. Well
similar to WoW they had a sort of freedom and love for the game that they were
developing and it worked out well.
“Well, on day zero our first team consisted of 5 people
and every single one of them has stayed with Gearbox. Gradually of course we
grew to about 16 before we shipped our first game, and of that group, only 2
have left the company.”
He currently has 72 full time employees and Gearbox with
a number of contractors as well as a Quality assurance team which is led by 5
managers which he said would grow between 4-6 people in the coming 6 months.
To conclude, I’ll explain the hierarchy of what’s
important to me when I play a game
First would definitely be the game play, hands down,
still, even if the game has incredible graphical fidelity, if it lacked in
fundamental game play I would get bored within a few minutes/hours and never set
my eyes on that game again, yeah i'm talking about you CoD (same game play
different name EVERY YEAR GOD DAMMIT) Oh and it better be controlled well.
Next would be the reward system, How gratified can I be
after playing this game? After killing another player or achieving/completing a
massive quest? I think the difficulty level plays a part here and it links into game play again.
Next I guess would probably be its ability to immerse me
in the game, which kind of falls into graphics and stunning visuals as well,
but if the game has charm and character to it, then I’m bought.
After that would
probably be sound and music, now one of the main things we humans do is listen
and sing along to music, it creates memories for us and if a game has an
awesome soundtrack and sound effects, it really helps to bring it to life,
which again falls into the whole immersion thing.
So, Game play > Controls > Rewards > Immersion (Charm,
Character, Environment and Story) > Visuals > Sound and Music
May be slightly different to yours, but I think the game play is way more important than stunning visuals, I mean, sure it might be
nice to look at but if it has bad game play, what’s the point? I’d end up really
bored and I won’t really be coming back for the graphics, I can just YouTube or Google all that in an instant if I really wanted to check it out.
Don’t get me wrong visuals are incredibly important for
the immersion of the game but not as much for the game play and reward.
