Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds 174
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U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
Keeping this in mind, there are also several commercial realities to consider. The
licensor had better be satisfied with your game or they can choose to terminate the
license, thus ending your ability to use their well-known characters or worlds. This
can effectively kill your game. Your publisher may not want to pay for the development
of a game without a well-known character universe attached. Sometimes licensors
are not familiar with gaming, game genres, or player expectations at all, yet they have
plenty of power over the game you’re building (after all, it’s using their well-protected
characters or worlds!).
If you are a developer building a game that isn’t somehow independently funded,
you’re probably building it for a publisher. The publisher covers the cost of development,
so as an independent developer, the publisher is your valued client. In any
business, you must strive to provide for the needs of your client. The publisher’s vision
for the game may be slightly or significantly different than your development team’s
vision. This “division in vision” is best reconciled early in development, but it often
causes friction, factions, and egos to take center stage.
Marketing departments have considerable influence in modern game development.
In fact, the marketing budgets to promote a game can far exceed the total game
development costs. Marketers sometimes spend millions of dollars on TV and print
ads to market a game. If they conduct formal or informal focus groups to get player
feedback, and start to hear common complaints or frustrations, you can bet that these
potential problems will find their way right back to the design and production team.
Development team members themselves usually have strong opinions about design
direction. These recommendations are voiced passionately, and can cause “design factions”
and team fracture if not addressed immediately by a producer capable of
building bridges between people and ideas, and paying attention to their concerns.
Art directors and other designers, working on other simultaneous game titles, will
often voice opinions while offering critiques and suggestions. These comments can
be very helpful when a fresh perspective adds new insight into solving a problem.
These comments can also be distracting and dividing remarks that start to build
unnecessary tension between development teams.
Writers for gaming magazines and web sites, reviewers, and editors get many
game previews to consider as a game gets close to its gold stage. Marketing is always
trying to get magazine and web features for upcoming titles to create a buzz that will
lead to sales. Negative reactions to these game previews will also rifle their way back
to the design team.
Finally, you might have the luxury of having access to an internal test team. This
team can be a reality check against your own individual testing and the comments
coming at you from the various sources just considered.
Knowing that your design team will be receiving plenty of player feedback information
from a number of sources, you need to be ready to handle it all. By necessity,
it becomes a matter of priority ranking. You need to triage the information coming at