Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

� The game is feature-complex but somewhat hollow in moment-to-moment
content
� The design itself is too wide in scope or span and forces an out-of-balance
play situation
The items mentioned here are just a survey of the kinds of considerations and feedback
issues that a game development team commonly deals with. Many specific examples
of these items are written up into formal bugs, while others are considered
topically or conceptually. Many of these issues, despite several attempts to resolve
them, continue to plague or gnaw at developers throughout the entire development
cycle for any given game.
Listening to Feedback
C H A P T E R 7
Feedback isn’t very useful if it doesn’t make its way back into the game. Hard feedback,
in the form of solid and obvious bug reports, takes priority. If you have a bug
that is crashing the game, characters that are inexplicably stuck in the wall or floor,
or an inventory update error, the reason to fix these problems is clear: it impairs basic
gameplay.
It’s the softer forms of feedback that often remain ignored, for many reasons.
These softer forms include differing player reaction to game-wide difficulty, levelspecific
navigation issues and preferences, and a somewhat personal or subjective
reaction to level layout, pacing, and continuity over many levels. Developers spend
large amounts of time building up the play experience for a game, and many find it
hard to take strongly voiced or constant waves of criticism. It’s entirely understandable.
You’ve just spent five weekends in a row at work, only to hear that the game still isn’t
testing well and still isn’t getting favorable feedback from testers (or, even worse,
from any number of other armchair critics). As I’ve tried to make clear, some criticism
and feedback is useful, and some is not. You just have to learn to be a good feedback
filter. Good producers always try to shield their team from unproductive or unsettling
“mission-irrelevant” feedback.
To the extent that it’s possible, developers shouldn’t take pattern criticism (where
“the many” comment on the same potential problem) personally. Pattern criticism
should be evaluated quickly because it is a potential red flag. If several people are
voicing similar concerns or frustrations with the play experience, you must work to
reverse these negative patterns. It’s okay if an idea you fell in love with for a level section
isn’t really panning out. It doesn’t prove that you’re a bad designer. Game design is
fundamentally about experimentation, evolution, and risk. More likely, it means
that you took a chance and can use what you’ve learned as a result to help inform
your future ideas. In the observation of player feedback, you can learn to build your
gaming intuition.
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Quality Assurance and Play-Test Feedback