Author: Gianfranco Berardi

Categories
Game Design

Richness vs Complexity

The Design of Everyday Games analyzes Advance Wars and what makes it so much fun to play, even with older technology and gameplay.

The argument is that Advance Wars is incredibly rich and yet is not complex. You press a single button to do almost any action, unlike some games that have a different key mapped to do even the most similar things. Advance Wars is enjoyable, has plenty of variety, and yet doesn’t require too much brain power just to interface with it. You don’t have to think too hard about what physical action to take, leaving you more brain cycles to concentrate on playing the game.

There isn’t a focus on the engine, either. The game is more or less the same as it was when it was first released, and it is still fun because it was improved. It didn’t change drastically to allow for the latest tech. The game dictated the tech needed, not the other way around.

If your game isn’t as good as it should be, maybe you shouldn’t be asking yourself what you can add.

Maybe you should be asking yourself what you can cut.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Marketing/Business

Lower Barrier to Market: Physics?

Chuck Arellano argues that indie game developers can compete on physics.

Players are expecting higher quality artwork in their games, especially with the advances in hardware we’re seeing. Creating said artwork, however, is generally expensive, and can easily be outside of the budget of an indie. So what do you do, especially if you want to compete with much more established companies?

Compete on physics. Physics is basically an application of math. You don’t need to pay experts to create physics assets. You just code it! And with some of the libraries listed in the article, you may be able to plug-and-play. Make it realistic or make it fantastic, but with physics, your game can be innovative and fun.

I will agree with Erik that physics isn’t the only place where indies can innovate. What about sound? What about input? I think that games like Platypus show that even with graphics, there is room for growth.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Marketing/Business

Which Project Do You Choose Next?

In Another Indie Quandary: Short v. Long, Tim faces the problem a lot of indies face. Do you pick the shorter project in order to make some cash sooner, or do you pick the longer project, the one you really WANT to make, hoping not to go bust in the process?

The short project, if successful, means you are one step closer to being financially independent of employee-dom. Of course, shorter projects are probably short because they aren’t very hard to make, which means anyone could make it and probably has. How successful can the game be? If it becomes successful, how hard would it be for competitors to encroach on your turf?

The longer project would require funding to help keep you alive long enough to finish, which usually means working for The Man for a little while longer. And that’s assuming you finish. Longer projects are notorious for becoming nothing more than tech demos. Tech demos don’t sell, unless you are trying to find a better The Man, but it is probably not why you wanted to make the game in the first place. Still, this project will probably be more enjoyable and, if successful, much more rewarding.

Is it a question of suffering for your art? Being timid vs being bold? What do you do?

Categories
Personal Development

Be Bold and Daring

Action asks a good question: What is the latest “BOLD” thing you’ve done?

I say that it is a good question because I had to stop and think before I could answer it. I was surprised that I had to think about it!

– I shouldn’t, because it means that I am not doing enough to be a successful indie or successful at a lot of things.
– I shouldn’t because it means that I am always getting satisfied with hitting plateaus and don’t push harder.

The bold actions I recalled:

  • A little over two years ago, I kissed my current girlfriend for the first time.
  • In January, I moved into an apartment with my girlfriend.
  • Around March, I finally submitted the paperwork to form GBGames, LLC.
  • When applying for a programming position in April, I decided to try a completely new design for my test assignment.
  • A couple of weeks ago, I was at Cedar Point in Ohio. I’m terrified of roller coasters, but I went on them.

For each of these actions, I ended up with a good result. I have a great relationship, a great home, a great company (I think so, anyway), a pretty good job, and a great weekend of fun and memories. Still, I had to think back about two years, and I could only come up with a handful? Some of them weren’t all that bold when I think about it, such as my programming design or roller coaster rides. I was either going to do it myself or get a bit of peer pressure to do it. As for being bold, I find that I am lacking.

Fortune favors the bold, which is more than just a cliché. Wouldn’t I be better off, financially or otherwise, if I made it a point to do more things that scare me? At the very least, I should look at the things I have been putting off and ask myself why I am procrastinating. It’s likely that they’ll be like riding the roller coasters: intimidating, but once I do it, I’ll find that it isn’t so bad and is actually enjoyable.

What kind of bold things are we talking about here? Is trying a new recipe instead of eating what I always make considered bold? Is making a call to get a better deal with a service provider bold as opposed to doing nothing and going with the plan I already have? Is running home from work as a form of exercise as opposed to driving or walking a bold move on my part? Is boldness measured in terms of what everyone else is doing or other choices on my part?

Here’s a scary thought: I can’t immediately think of something bold I want to try. When I ask myself, “If you knew you would succeed, what one thing would you do?”, nothing springs to mind. It’s not like I believe my life is perfect, so why don’t I immediately think of at least a handful of things to do? Did I really get conditioned to “go with the flow” when I wasn’t paying attention? I’m going to work on this problem, because it is a problem. I should have at least a general sense of direction in life.

So, what is the latest bold thing you’ve done? When were you daring?

Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business

Thousander Club Update: July 17th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 131.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 432 / 1000

Target: 525

There are 54 days left until the deadline for entering a game in IGF 2007: Countdown to IGF 2007

As far as Oracle’s Eye Prime is concerned, I managed to work on an input system. As of this writing, I was able to get individual entities to detect the state of a keypress and send messages to each other based on them. For now, that means that multiple images on the screen can move about in different ways depending on what keys they are paying attention to. This week I hope to implement detection of key presses and releases. I hope to have something resembling a game as well.

One of my computers has three problems: a rattling CPU fan, a chipset fan that doesn’t spin, and a hard drive that was giving me errors. I bought a new hard drive, but I left off the other fans, partly due to the fact that I need to go to the manufacturer for chipset fans and partly because I just want a new CPU fan but apparently I need a new heatsink as well since they don’t sell them separately. I’ll leave the fans to another day. Last night I started copying files over to the drive, but it is entirely possible that as you read this post that they files are still being copied. A 160GB drive with multiple partitions will need to copy everything over to the new 250GB drive.

And the weird thing? It was my backup drive.

I’m also considering the purchase of a Dell laptop. I wonder if I could order it today and receive it by this weekend, in time for the Chicago Indie Game Developer Club meeting:

Where: The Starbucks at
Streets of Woodfield
601 North Martingale Road
Schaumburg IL, 60173

Date: Sunday, July 23rd, 2006

Time: 5:00 PM until whenever

If you’re in the Chicagoland area, feel free to drop by, give some feedback, and talk shop with other indies.

Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business

2006 Casual Games White Paper

As per The Ludologist, the 2006 Casual Games White Paper is out, although as of this writing you won’t find it on the reports page for some reason. You can find a copy of it on the IGDA Wiki as well as in PDF form at the Casual Games SIG.

Apparently the wiki format was used to encourage people to contribute to the knowledge base:

Contribute

We have decided to utilize this Wiki as it provides easy access for the entire community to contribute to and update this iteration of the paper. Please feel free to help out by updating any section in which you feel comfortable contributing to!

It should make for good bedtime reading.

Categories
Game Design

No Twinkie For You!

I didn’t know if he was still writing them, but Ernest Adams has just published The Designer’s Notebook: ‘Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!’ VII. The series has always been enjoyable and informative.

In this installment, he focuses quite a bit on interface issues. I haven’t played a lot of the example games listed, but I couldn’t believe that you couldn’t configure the controls for Driver until after you finish the first race. And if your game does allow the player to configure the controls, let the player have some way to save and load the configuration!

Adams also announced the new edition of the book “Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings on Game Design”, which has a new name, Fundamentals of Game Design.

Categories
Marketing/Business

Business Sense: Games and Photography

At Joe Indie, Business is Business compares newbie game developers with newbie photographers, something I would not have thought to compare.

Newbie Game Developer: How many games do I need before I can start making money from them?
Newbie Photographer: How many images do I need before I can start making money from them?

Joe Indie’s article shows that it isn’t just indie game developers who have problems with “business sense”. The article links to photographer/blogger Dan Heller’s site, and I noticed that his other page on the subject of business sense was also pretty informative.

For instance, section 4.1 is titled “Jumping in too soon” and warns against creating solutions for a problem that doesn’t exist. For photographers, indie game developers, and really anyone with a business, your products or services should solve a need. Creating world-class, high-quality images or games is great, but if no one is really interested in what you’re offering, you’ve just wasted your time. I believe you can sum up Heller’s words as market research.

The comparison to photography businesses, however, has led me to think about a number of aspects of my own business.

If you shoot specific subjects, like horses, or fashion, or food, or sports, or Bucks County, Pennsylvania, your revenue is going to be based in large part by how well positioned you are with the media companies that buy such specialized images within any of these industries.

How would you change that sentence so that it applies to indie game development? Perhaps I am creating a congruence where there is none, but so far there does not seem to be much difference between the photography business and the game development business. As David Michael says in his article’s title, business is business.

Categories
Game Design Game Development

Converting Table Top Games to Video Games

Table Top versus Video Games: Part 1 – The Dice kicks off a three-part series on converting a table-top game to a video game. To make a successful conversion takes a bit of dedication and hard work. This series provides some idea of what it would take.

The other two parts:
Table Top versus Video Games: Part 2 – Jabber, Jingle, Google and 360
Table Top versus Video Games: Part 3 – Reaching Your Audience

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: July 10th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 126 / 1000
Game Ideas: 432 / 1000

Target: 504

There are 61 days left until the deadline for entering a game in IGF 2007: Countdown to IGF 2007

I took most of Saturday to work on Oracle’s Eye Prime. I really like having entire days of development since I can get quite a bit accomplished in a short period of time. The project is coming together, although progress is still a bit slower than I would like. A few more Saturday’s like this last one would probably help quite a bit. Currently I can load sprites and entity objects dynamically through a configuration file, and there is a way to allow the entities to respond to input. Eventually game development will involve less coding and more configuration file editing.