Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

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C H A P T E R 9 TM: What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen in the industry? DW: The biggest change over the years has been technology and what that means to product scope and team size. In 1980, a complete game could be done in three to four months with just one person plus an artist for a couple weeks and a sound guy for a few days. This means that probably 5 to 10 percent of the effort was connecting assets, and the other 90 to 95 percent was game design, coding, and tuning. We would constantly play the games with/against one another during development. They were small enough that integrated technical designs weren’t created, which is now essential; the design evolved as a natural consequence of playing. Think about that in terms of today’s projects, where a much more significant amount of time is spent just “making things work” or “hooking assets up” or “adding effects.” Sure, these are all part of a competitive contemporary game experience, but from a gameplay aspect, the percentage of overall time dedicated to that discipline has dropped relative to the overall effort. TM: How has the climate for game development changed over time? DW: There used to be a certain novelty to it that no longer exists. It used to have lots of late nights, but now because of the interdependence of the contributors, that’s no longer effective. So the climate has become one of planning, teamwork, and communication, where it used to be “jump in and start swimming.” TM: These days how much influence does the “business” of making games have on design choices? DW: As a businessman, I respect that the business of game production should have 100 percent influence over everything. Bottom line, a game needs to make money, or nobody will get to make games. And, the best games always tend to be commercial successes. We have outlets for people who are not interested in making money; they’re called “the arts.” If someone wants to complain about financial pressures in the game industry, then they should stop taking money from the game industry, get a loft in Venice, stop bathing, get a favorite seat in their local coffee shop, and start creating pure artistic endeavors like all of the other poor musicians, painters, and poets in the world. Seriously, business pressures require that designs remain fairly homogenous. To the same degree that TV and film has become all of the same form, so have games. It’s unfortunate on the one hand, but it also creates a sustainable, predictable marketplace. Perhaps there are only a certain number of categories of interactive, and they’re all being well exploited; or perhaps the categorization is all based on “safe market choices,” which only allow those choices. Either way, the consumers are still buying, so it’s good. A great game that doesn’t fit into preexisting categories will always break through; it just has to be pretty darn great. TM: How do you approach game design today, compared with the early cartridge days? DW: One thing that’s much better nowadays is that you can start at a much more theoretical foundation—start with the “second derivative”—of what you want to accomplish in game design. There’s a much wider palette of techniques, a much more descriptive language, available to contemporary game designers. Before, there were fewer, smaller molds: did you want to make a sports game, a maze game, or another kind of game? Now, you can talk about how you want the player to “feel,” whereas before your task was simply to make an engaging game. In the past, due to smaller budgets, you could “afford” to be more iterative in your design. Get the whole thing up in a week or two, play it, decide what was working and what was not, and make changes. 233 Cell Phones and Wireless Gaming
Building Game Worlds 234 U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N TM: What game ideas still excite you? DW: Massively multiplayer games are interesting; they are now completing their first generation and are where console games were in the mid-’80s. Open-ended and nondirected games still have a lot to offer; the typical game in five years will probably be self-directed. I like designs that take risks. TM: What positive or negative industry trends alarm you? DW: The main negative trend is the “more of the same” syndrome. (There are more first-person shooters than there are Phil Collins ballads—and that’s a lot—and they are pretty much just as indistinguishable from one another!) Publishers want to minimize risks by coming up with games in established genres, so they can turn to market data and be assured that a game will sell enough copies to pay for itself. At the same time, they want something different; so just make something that is both different from, and the same as, another success. Another disturbing trend is that games need to be massive to sell. To make a Hollywood movie, you need to spend anywhere from $20 million to $200 million—it’s quite a wide range. But it seems that in games, publishers are only interested in producing fewer, larger games. I like the trend of continuing to capture non-hardcore gamers, like the Sims has. TM: What are you watching for in the near future of gaming? DW: The day that TV network executives are grousing when their ratings for a particular night are down because some Internet-supplied content was released at a certain time and took a significant dent out of their viewer base that week. TM: Where do games go from here? DW: Open-ended games. Dynamically updated content. Multiplayer and massively multiplayer. TM: How do you prepare for the game industry today? DW: Play, play, play, play, play! In addition to enjoying it, tear the game apart in your mind. Figure out what its components are, what design decisions and trade-offs were made. Deconstruct it; don’t just play it. Write reviews for your own benefit. As far as career opportunities, test, test, test, test, test. Getting a job as a tester is a great way into the industry. MEGA TIPS 1. Simple designs, like those forced by cell phone handsets, are good design exercises. Remember to try to deliver on the notion of feeding a player’s desires, despite the gaming platform or location. 2. Among many of your own ideas for games, be mindful of which ideas might be best suited for portable handsets.
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A BOUT THE AUTHOR Tom Meigs is a ga
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Brandon A. Nordin Scott Rogers Wend
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2 THE game design process begins by
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24 AFTER you’ve completed your pr
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54 FOR a game to be competitive the
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86 YOU now understand the developme
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Building Game Worlds 100 U L T I M
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108 UP to this point, we’ve cover
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130 Building Game Worlds 130 U L T
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136 SCRIPTING in games gives develo
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166 ONCE your game environment has
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Page 209 and 210: 188 A whole new avenue for games ha
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Page 237 and 238: 216 ANOTHER new content horizon for
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286 THIS appendix includes useful r
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296 MANY types of software tools we
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304 TO assist you to further define
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310 I’VE gathered together a few
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322 AS a point of reference and as
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