Category: Game Design

Watch Will Wright Talk About Game Design

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 7/12/2008

I just finished watching Will Wright talk about game design at an SDForum Speaker Series event. It’s an old talk, but it still gives you insight into his thought process when designing games such as The Sims.

It’s a long talk that starts about 14 minutes into the video, although I still enjoyed watching Bill Budge, of Pinball Construction Set fame, introduce Wright.

Wright talked about emergence in more detail than I’ve seen elsewhere. He explained the thought process behind the design of certain elements in The Sims and SimCity. He talked about feedback loops in everything from the basic interactions all the way down to the player’s mental model of the game world. It’s amazing to think about creating interesting yet simple rule sets that take advantage of the player’s ability to identify the possibility space and game play landscape. Wright takes a lot of these complex ideas and explains them well.

Even the Q&A session at the end was fascinating. Someone asked Wright to give the top three good trends and top three bad trends he sees in game development. We can see how some of those trends are working out today, especially in games like Spore.

Watching such a talk can only get you fired up to work on your own game designs, so set aside some time and enjoy!

[tags] game design, will wright, [/tags]

Questions about GTA IV

Corvus has Some GTA IV Questions.

The controversial game has been blasted by the media, the government, and parents, while simultaneously being praised by video game reviewers and fans. While the game is generally about being a criminal in a sandbox environment, plenty of critics have argued that the “point of the game” is to earn points for killing cops and prostitutes. Anyone who has any passing familiarity with video games today knows that games don’t feature scores as ubiquitously as they once did, so such complaints tend to be dismissed as out of touch even if the concerns behind the complaints are valid. Namely, should this game BE so entertaining to such a large number of people?

Many people seem to think that Rockstar’s creation is the epitome of games as art. Corvus has some good questions about the supposed artistic expression of this game, focusing specifically on the infamous prostitutes.

Feel free to answer them, or argue, or just think about them for a while and make up your own mind what the answers to them mean about the franchise.

I would suggest you head over to his blog to see the questions for yourself. There is already a bit of conversation going, and many of the comments are insightful … or inciteful!

So tell me how GTA IV is social commentary, precisely. Tell me how the developers aren’t encouraging you to treat the women within the world like objects. Tell me how providing only the most base and vile of options in an interactive medium is art. Tell me how depicting an entire professional population as empty receptacles of man’s anger and hatred even comes close to the artistic expression of the Godfather movies. Tell me how my objection is to the portrayal of sex and not the atmosphere of violence in which it take place.

[tags] video games, gta iv, grand theft auto [/tags]

Game Design Game Development Games Geek / Technical Linux Game Development Personal Development

LD#11 Results Are In

The Ludum Dare #11 ratings period is over, and the results are in. it seems that I didn’t do too badly. The rankings were out of a possible 5:

Overall: 3.50
Fun: 3.68
Innovation: 2.93
Theme: 4.43
Polish: 3.36
Graphics: 2.57
Audio: 2.96
Humor: 2.83
Technical: 2.54
Food: 4.38
Journal: 3.96
Timelapse: 3.62

My game came in 7th place for the Theme, 10th place for Fun, and 20th place Overall. I did better as a participant, as I came in 6th place for my journal entries and 8th place for my timelapse. Oh, and I won 1st place for food! I have to thank Mandy for her amazing work in the kitchen because I am pretty sure it was her stir fry and not my peanut butter pickle and raisin sandwich that won me the votes, even if it did get me a trophy.

The winning meal:

My lowest scores were for Technical and Graphics, which isn’t too much of a surprise for me since I was spending part of the competition learning how to use SDL. I received quite a few 5s and 4s for Fun, which is gratifying. I’m a little surprised that I got some strong votes for Humor. I never intended for the game to be funny, but some people said that it made them laugh when they finally lost after focusing so hard for over 100 levels.

Check out my Ludum Dare submission at GBGames presents Minimalist- the final version. There are GNU/Linux and Windows versions available. Congratulations to all who competed and finished, especially to mrfun, mjau, and Hamumu!

Game Design Game Development

How to Build a Game Prototype by Introversion

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 4/30/2008
3 Comments on How to Build a Game Prototype by Introversion

Introversion’s Mark Morris has written a piece on Building a Prototype.

Of course in different games, different aspects are more important (the story is perhaps less important in Half-Life than in Mass Effect), but you may not be able to determine this at the start. The point is that until you actually have the game in front of you, then you do not necessarily know which areas of the design work need tweaking, and which are fundamentally flawed.

This is where your prototype comes in…

Morris then takes you through the “spiral software engineering paradigm” that Introversion uses. The basics:

Determine the scope of the prototype.
Determine what part of the design is uncertain , important, or challenging.
Hack something together.
Once you have something working, do it again.

The above approach provides a good deal of momentum for your initial work. It enables you to tackle the hard problems first and not get caught up in something that might ultimately prove impossible.

Even though it is a good read, I wish it had some more meat on it. Specifically I would have loved to have seen some examples from the trenches when Darwinia, Uplink, and Defcon were in development.

[tags] indie, game development, video games, [/tags]

Game Design Game Development Games Marketing/Business

Casual Indie Game Development Blog Launched

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 4/30/2008

Started by a game producer at Garage Games, The Casual Indie Game Development Blog aims to bring together casual games (games for everyone) and indie games (games by anyone).

From the post titled The Casual Indie Connection:

Developers are attracted to independent development and casual game development for many of the same reasons. Some developers see casual/indie game development as a stepping stone into heavier AAA development. Most in the casual and indie game spaces are there to stay (and grow).

Besides CasualGameBlogs.com, you now have CasualIndie.com. Hopefully there will be plenty of good development and design tips available, and I can’t wait to see who will do guest posts there. GameDev.net’s Drew Sikora has an article up encouraging more game developer blogs.

[tags] casual games, indie, game development, game blog [/tags]

Game Design Game Development Games Geek / Technical Linux Game Development Personal Development Post-mortem

LD#11: Minimalist Post-mortem

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 4/29/2008
7 Comments on LD#11: Minimalist Post-mortem

In one 48 hour period, I made a simple game based on the theme “minimalist”. I didn’t try to stay awake throughout the entire Ludum Dare competition, so the game was made in less than 48 hours.

What Went Right:

Used my build script to create a distributable game from the beginning.
I have a build script from a previous project that allows me to use a single command to take my project source, build it, and create a .tar.gz file to distribute for GNU/Linux users. Towards the end of the competition, I wasn’t spending too much time trying to figure out how to get my project into a judge’s hands since.
Mouse control was easy to do and easy to use.
Since I was learning SDL, I tried to make my game as simple to use as possible. I knew that using a mouse was a lot easier than expecting someone to use the keyboard, but I had never implemented mouse control in a game before. Luckily, it turned out to be very easy. As a result, the interface was very simple since you’re just moving the mouse around, and the game that this interface produced was better for it.
I got really involved in it.
I had food photos and a time lapse video, and I even received two trophies, one for my eclectic food choices. Hanging out with all of the other Ludum Dare participants, even if just virtually through IRC, was a lot of fun.
I finished!
Of course, finishing was also a lot of fun. While I could have used some more playtesting and would have loved some feedback before it was submitted, I think I put together a decent game in a short amount of time. It feels good to finish things.

What Went Wrong:

My work environment was horrible.
A couch is comfortable…but not for marathon game development sessions! My back still hurts. I need to clean my office. Right now, I am using it as a giant inbox:

I prefer development with my laptop because the CRT of my desktop is harsh on my eyes. Still, it would be nice to sit in a real chair while working. Alternatively, I can finally buy an LCD for my desktop.
My cats love to hang out with me.
Even if I was sitting in my office, I know from experience that my cats would still jump up into my lap and try to rest their heads on my arm. When you’re using a laptop, there isn’t room for it AND a cat or two. Having an office door to close would help, of course, but the cats were quite a distraction for LD#11.
I didn’t practice using SDL before the competition.
It was a problem especially since I had decided not to depend on the Kyra Sprite Engine for future projects, but I really only used libSDL for input and creating a window prior to this project. When the first 24 hours are finished and all you have is a window rendered and the knowledge that the mouse handling is working (even if it isn’t visible), you might be afraid that you won’t have anything to show at the end of 48 hours. I did manage to pull it off, but by the next competition, I want to be able to work with less of a focus on technical details and more of a focus on game development.
I spent too long in the beginning trying to mock something up in the GIMP.
Similar to the previous point, I was spending more time on technical issues than on creation. I thought I was more familiar with the GIMP than I was, and I spent a lot of my early hours fighting with it instead of just using pencil and paper. The worst part about it was that the initial idea was one I ended up discarding, and if I wasn’t wasting time with figuring out how to do some simple things in it, I might have been able to figure it out sooner.

What I Learned:

My kitchen goes to entropy during LD.
When you’re focused on game development for most of your waking hours for two days, other things have to take a lower priority. One of those things was cleaning. I had a bit of a mess to deal with after the competition was over.
Even something incredibly simple can be a good game mechanic.
I knew I wasn’t going to be drinking multiple cans of Mountain Dew or Red Bull, and I don’t drink coffee, so staying up for 48 hours wasn’t going to happen. I needed to work on a game I could finish, so I picked the simplest thing I could. Surprisingly, it was fun, and some of the judges have said so as well. At the end of the competition I already had a list of ideas that could improve it, and I hope to release an updated version with those improvements.
It’s possible to do a lot in a single day.
Even though I spent some time learning how to use SDL, I still managed to make a game. The best part is that I can incorporate what I have learned into my personal library of code for my future projects. Also, there were over 70 games submitted, and it is amazing what some people were able to do in 48 hours. Some of them were learning how to program!

I set aside most of a 48 hour period, and I have a game, some new code, and more experience. If I could work on a project with a similar scope each month, I think it would go a long way towards improving my ability to create video games. Also, it’s a lot of fun, and I will definitely be participating in future Ludum Dare competitions.

To see my entry, check out the final version. There is a GNU/Linux and a Windows version.

[tags] postmortem, video games, game development, cats [/tags]

Game Design Game Development Games Geek / Technical Marketing/Business

Indie Lessons from Sins of a Solar Empire Post-mortem

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 4/29/2008
2 Comments on Indie Lessons from Sins of a Solar Empire Post-mortem

Gamasutra has the Sins of a Solar Empire post-mortem up. It’s always a treat to read what goes on behind the scenes at Stardock, a prominent indie developer/publisher, although I’ll admit that I was a bit confused by the writing.

A single unspoken decision made early in the Stardock / Ironclad partnership led to a host of positive results that might seem obvious in hindsight, but were not at all straight forward at the time.

Er…what was that unspoken decision? The What Went Right section lists a number of decisions, and they all sound like they were not only spoken but also written down as a formal agreement. Perhaps it was just a case of bad writing, but luckily all of the important points of the article offer some insight into the development of the game.

As for what went right, I think it can be summed up in two points.

Stardock and Ironclad worked together as a team rather than have a stereotypical publisher-developer relationship.
The game was made for the customers.

Stardock and Ironclad worked together on marketing and design. I think that the employees of Ironclad probably felt more invested in their project, especially since they did do much of the up front work on their own.

And as for the paying customer? The game was delayed to make it better. The hardware requirements were brought down to a sane level so that people other than those with the latest hardware could enjoy it. Copy protection was considered more of a hindrance to paying customers than anything else. It isn’t a game in a popular genre like MMO FPS/RTS, so making the game run on more hardware and making it easier for people to play it were really good decisions.

And it has been paying off. Hundreds of thousands of copies have sold, mostly online, in the first few weeks of release. The game is in retail stores now, so I imagine that sales have increased even more now that the game is much more easily available.

As for what went wrong, most of the issues raised deal with technical issues, such as providing lower-quality artificial intelligence or a single-player campaign due to a lack of time. One problem was a feature of the game that was removed due to the feedback coming from beta testers. I wish the post-mortem went into detail on this point. All I know is that the feature was considered “better left untouched”, but there was no information to suggest how they came to this conclusion.

Stardock wasn’t able to finish Impulse, their digital distribution platform. I’m not so sure it is a problem. Many people already have Steam, and Penny Arcade is releasing its game on Greenhouse. Not that I don’t think competition in this space is a good thing, but does everyone need their own platform?

From Stardock’s perspective, the experience on Sins of a Solar Empire cemented its commitment to ensuring that any games it publishes are developed by studios that view game design as an iterative, collaborative process where the strengths of both teams are combined.

So what can an indie game developer learn from the post-mortem?

Your paying customers matter more than the non-paying non-customers.
As Stardock’s Brad Wardell said on piracy and PC gaming, people who actually buy your games don’t want to deal with the hassles of copy protection. Most of them don’t upgrade their hardware every few weeks. They also appreciate it if you put together a good game, even if it is delayed. If you focus on satisfying the customer, how can you go wrong?
Do it, then do it better.
Ironclad spent a year working on prototypes to make sure that the game mechanics would work well before starting production in earnest. PopCap’s James Gwetzman also promotes prototype-heavy game development. Create a small prototype that is meant to be thrown away. It is better to learn early on that something isn’t fun or just doesn’t work than after millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours have been sunk into a project.

While Sins of a Solar Empire may be benefiting from a lack of competition from major titles, I am sure that the above two practices, focusing on the customer and iterating the game design, helped create a hit.

One side note: why isn’t there a game demo available? Or rather, why is news of it buried in the forums instead of the front page of the website? I mean, at least provide a link from the front page to let me know that it exists. The Sins of a Solar Empire demo does exist, so why not tell people who aren’t already on your forums?

[tags] post-mortem, video games, indie, game design, marketing [/tags]

Game Design Games Geek / Technical

The Golden Ratio in Video Game Music

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 4/28/2008

During the Ludum Dare #11 competition, someone posted a link to Zelda Music of Golden Proportions at TheTanooki.com.

Christian is studying music theory and learned about “golden sections”, which are marked by the point in the piece corresponding to the Golden Ratio. That is, if you have two segments of a line, x and y, then y is in proportion to x as x is in proportion to x+y. I have forgotten most of what I learned about The Golden Ratio in grade school. I vaguely remember that by using it you can mathematically come up with musical harmony and visual aesthetics. Math is art sometimes.

Initially, there were many game themes I wanted to check for a significant golden section. Unfortunately, the Mario songs I checked didn’t exhibit this, but low and behold, several Zelda themes do. It seems most of the pieces that do are written as actual pieces, and not as short melodies meant to be looped over and over, and Zelda games have a lot of those. While I can’t say it’s for sure, Koji Kondo probably doesn’t incorporate the Golden Ratio consciously into his music, but the fact that Zelda music holds more of a masterpiece status compared to Mario music or other video game music likely isn’t a coincidence. Let’s look at the music from The Legend of Zelda.

The rest of the article walks you through specific music pieces from various Zelda games, and it is a fascinating read (and listen!) Still, I imagine Koji Kondo DOES incorporate the Golden Ratio consciously. I mean, Christian is learning about it in music theory, wouldn’t Kondo have learned similar lessons elsewhere?

UPDATE: ProjectPerko has a related post called Music. It seems that Craig has found a number of music pieces that happen to have golden proportions. Whether it is coincidence or not is up for debate in the comments section.

[tags] zelda, video games, music theory, music, nintendo [/tags]

Game Design Game Development Games

Game Design for the Color Blind Player

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 4/25/2008
2 Comments on Game Design for the Color Blind Player

Thanks to ButtonMashing.com, I found Gaming While Color Blind, a post at the Amazon Game Room’s blog. The author talked about the problems he had playing the beta for Battlefield: Bad Company:

Starting out by the blue people, I saw a green guy, and shot him… minus 10 points for killing a team member. I re-spawned and move out again. There’s a green guy. I won’t shoot him this time… oh, he shot me. Eventually I became hesitant to shoot as I didn’t want to be a team-killer. Instead I wandered the fringes playing with the destructible environment. Taking out half a building is great fun. Not knowing who to shoot isn’t.

Eventually I realized there were blue, green, AND red people in the game. *sigh* Green and blue guys are teammates. Red guys are enemies. That seems simple enough, except that I couldn’t tell the green guys from the red guys.

When it comes to the game interface, we try to make things as intuitive as possible. One way to make it obvious that two objects on a screen are different is by using different colors. In fact, I remember going to a Chicago IGDA meeting in 2003 to see John Tobias (of Mortal Kombat fame) give a talk on character design. He said that when he works on character design, he always applies the concepts of shape, size, and color to differentiate characters and objects.

When you’ve locked the shape and size of various objects, such as orbs in a puzzle game or soldiers in an FPS, the other option you have is color. But as Osver points out, color might not be enough for a significant percentage of your players, especially if you pick colors without considering their impact on the color blind. My beta testing for Killer Kittens has uncovered a number of problems, and one of them was the color scheme I used. Currently I have a blue ship on a green background, and as far as I am concerned, it is very easy to see the player’s ship, but I’ve had players complain that the “blue-on-blue” scheme is hard to see. GameProducer.net also documented a problem that a color blind player had during a demo.

What can you do? One tool you can use is this Color Scheme Generator. While it is aimed at web developers to help them pick a good color scheme for the Web, it can also be used to give you an idea what kinds of problems color blind players of your games may have. There is a drop-down menu at the bottom that lets you see the difference between normal vision and any of the various forms of color blindness.

Another option is to actually change how your objects look. Rather than have the same image with a different color, add something unique to each. The version of Frozen Bubble on this site allows for you to toggle “colorblind mode” with a key press. Notice the difference between these two images:

Whether you are color blind or not, you can play Frozen Bubble. As I understand it, the history of this feature came about because a few color blind players really wanted to play Frozen Bubble, and they were able to talk with the developers and add a feature that would allow them to do so.

Snood got around this problem entirely by having different shapes as well as colors. Even if you couldn’t tell the snoods apart by their colors, they had unique faces which made it easy to do so.

One nice side effect of making your game accessible to color blind players is that it also makes it more accessible to everyone. Perhaps one of your players has a monitor that doesn’t display colors quite the way it should. Your game can still entertain that player if your design makes use of more than color as a differentiator.

Another example is my Ludum Dare #11 entry , which involves moving your mouse to the goal while avoiding the randomly shaped obstacles. The goal and your mouse cursor are the same color, and the obstacles are a different color. I picked blue for the mouse and goal, and red for the obstacles. Even if you have some form of color blindness, you should be able to see the difference.

Now, just in case, I could also improve upon this design by making use of shapes. Since the obstacles are going to be randomly sized rectangles, I could make the goal a circle to differentiate it better.

I could even use a very detailed sprite to help differentiate it from the solid colors of the obstacles. There are quite a few options, but the point is that by taking into account the fact that some people are color blind, you could make your game more accessible, which means more people can play it. By ignoring this issue, you are putting up artificial barriers that prevent a significant number of people from enjoying your game.

[tags] video games, video game development, color blind, graphic design, character design [/tags]

Game Design Game Development Games Geek / Technical Linux Game Development Personal Development

LD#11: GBGames presents Minimalist – the final version

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 4/20/2008
10 Comments on LD#11: GBGames presents Minimalist – the final version

I did it! I finished a game for Ludum Dare #11!

You can see my final post at the Ludum Dare blog.

https://www.gbgames.com/downloads/ld11/LD11-Minimalism-GBGames.zip is a 12.4MB download.

It includes the entirety of my project’s source in a zip file (LD11-Minimalism-GBGames-source.zip) and a GNU/Linux-ready tar.gz file (ld11-minimalist-gbgames-linux-x86-r12.tar.gz).

The source is ready to be used to build a linux-x86 distributable tar.gz. I created it using my Ubuntu system. I am sure it can be made to build a Win32 version without too many changes, if any.

EDIT: mrfun was kind enough to create a Windows version of my game. You can get it at the official final version post.

I’ll write a post-mortem after I’ve had some sleep and cleaned my apartment. If I learned anything, it is that the kitchen goes to entropy during Ludum Dare.