Something every game dev should read

bump, but also note: if you're easily offended by vulgarity, this article is pretty PG-13, but the site in general can be much more vulgar.

And there you have it.

If a game designer dons't know super basic stuff like this, you can't call them a "game designer" but rather "rabid fan who joined the customer service department of a company then got promoted to tech support, then to QA and finaly became the prodcuer at which point they start LOSEING customers...".

All I have to say is SOE's SWG NGE to illustrate my point.

hahaha, well... i'd say the real issue at hand, which i'm sure isn't any new idea, is that so many games are made simply to siphon money. some companies (such as stardock) made good games because they want to play good games, and if they can make some money in the process, great.

but then there's the increasingly common EA business model, which goes something like this:

1) get some footage of a new, pretty 3D engine

2) hire MTV engineers to market said footage

3) BS something you might be able to pass off as a game (to a dyslexic chipmunk)

4) add the current year to the game's title so that next year you can throw in higher-res textures, change the year and call it a new game.

i think there are a lot of companies that know exactly how bad their games are. but i think there are plenty of other times when a development company really wants to make a good game, and problems occur when they start focusing on one really cool element. their creative and technical energies become so focused they forget to cover some of the basics (plot, reduction of tedium, play testing on all settings). so i think a basic list like the one i linked is actually a good thing. go through the game and check to make sure you've dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's.

but yeah, if you can't even live up to these basics in most cases, you should probably ride the short bus with your employees to work

Maybe there should be a new defitition for EA style employees then: the "Interactive Media Profit Margin Engineer".

It would even come with new raks, rather than "lead" "head" "senior" "junior" (and "Junior Assistant Dispatcher Trainee") you could have "Money Bags" "Cheif Cash Train" "Credit Card" "Walking ATM" and "Safe Deposit Developer" (also probably "Incompetent Fool" unoffical of course).

I want to work for EA and become the Cheif Cash Train Interactive Media Profit Margin Engineer!

I actually have a lot of issues with that article. Obviously a lot of the stuff is just opinions, but there are some things where I think he didn't think it quite through.

I do not see games as a single huge category for which you can create universal rules for. The rules that apply for Scrabble differ from those of GalCiv which in turn differ from those of Halo which differ from those of Geometry Wars.

The two big dividing factors I see derive from the focus the game requires (casual vs 'hard-core') and whether the game requires constant attention (real-time vs turn-based).

Certainly there's universal stuff, but that's more about understanding people than it is about understanding games.

7. I disagree with the playing with friends part. I take a well made single player game any day over a game that forcibly tries to include multiplayer. The result is almost invariably crappy multiplayer. And often the single player part suffers from it as well, due to misplaced resources.

6. Obviously the writer does not like open-world games. However, padding the length of the game means that you _force_ the player to repeat same tasks over and over again, with only minor variation. Open-world games are by definition almost immune to this, in the sense that they do not force player to do much anything. They can be boring, and repetitive, yes. But that's another issue.

Not to say the artificial lengthening of the game does not exist. I suppose I could blame Devil May Cry 4 of it. I'm easily bored, and I dislike Oblivion for a lot of reasons. But I do recognize the merit of the game. If you like hacking those monsters and enjoy those bland quests, as a lot of people seem to do, you can do that for a fair while. Depending on how much you like that stuff, you play it either for a short while or a bloody long while. And I thought the driving sequence in Half-life Episode 2 was a lot of fun. Haven't played Zelda or Metroid.

5. Regarding repetition I do agree with him, except that I think games need to force a degree of repetition on players. It's a wonderful tool for teaching players stuff. Valve has become really good at this, imo.

4. Most of the stuff regarding killing being fun was in the opinion category. If you demand graphical finesse (funnily the guy later says graphics don't matter, yet here he demands cuts to be visible in swordfights). I do however think that starting with a crappy gun is perfectly fine. A well known simple weapon establishes baseline. And the gameplay can still be fun. I thought the Half-life 2 crowbar trainyard run through was a lot of fun. Basicly it seems to me he's complaining about the cool factor here. A cool gun can have very boring gameplay. The end of Half-life 2 for example was rather boring gameplay with the super gun. Even if the stylish vistas of the citadel worked well. Gameplay is king, who cares if it's rubber dildo you whack the enemies with if it's fun to use. although I guess this is an opinion as well. Melee combat in games is about mobility, which I've mostly considered as fun. I guess the writer doesn't.

His 3rd point seems to be mostly about hyberboles, although I do recognize the basis from where it stems from. Although I haven't had a problem with 1st person jumping puzzles, the legs would be nice for the immersion, I agree. Even if it's kind of bitching about graphics.

2. Buggy games. Well, yes

1. Ignoring the exaggerations, the writer himself complained about graphics related issues a couple times. I don't have anything against graphics, per se. Gameplay is king. No one thinks that graphics equal innovation, even if the press releases might say something to that effect. Everyone, however knows that graphics do correlate strongly to sales. Comparing DS games to PC or console games does not change this fact. It does reveal that gameplay matters. And perhaps from a development perspective it's easier to concentrate on gamplay when working with stuff like PSP or DS. But if you made a game like the DS Mario Kart on 360, it most likely would not sell, compared to it's fancy graphics brother. (Strange how he has depicted as if PS3 would have sold more than X360, even if his own source material seems to indicate differently)

So the success of DS and PSP does prove that graphics are not an absolute requirement, but it doesn't tell us how things are in the horsepower category. Even Wii doesn't change this. Sure, Super Mario Galaxy has sold a lot. But if you'd make Halo 3 or Unreal 4 on 360 that would look like a DS or even a Wii game, I don't think it would sell. And I don't think Mike Capps is wrong in presuming so. The markets are entirely different. And Halo players demand graphics. Even if there are people who play both Halo and Wii Fit, the markets for the most part diverge greatly. I strongly believe that the industry is merely responding to the player demands and attitudes.

In the future, almost certainly, the market will diverge and splinter. How the hardware will respond to this, I do not know. I suppose with handhelds and Wii and Ps3 & X360 we already have three camps, so perhaps that too will splinter. Games are not a unified field, nor will the industry be unified.

And for the most part, this is a good thing for everyone.

of course it doesn't apply to every game ever. and i don't think even a PC or console adaptation of scrabble would fall under these 'commandments.'



i think the real issue here is that if you're going to include multiplayer at all, supporting multiplayer in person should get primary attention over net play. obviously MMOs don't count here. but there are plenty of games that have no reason not to offer in-person multiplayer.



but i think you've lumped "graphics" into one monolithic category. i think when he says graphics don't need to be awesome, he's talking about multi-gigabit textures and the most advanced shader techniques. when he's talking about 'killing being fun,' it's as much an immersion sort of thing. it's the difference between what's being rendered, and how well it's being rendered. he points to that 10+ year old game where you could see zombie parts getting blown off.

i think there's a deeper issue here, and it comes down to the fact that game devs seem often to treat living MOBs as simply wireframes. i haven't seen many games where a headshot did any more damage than shooting someone in the hand. while a graphic representation of this sort of thing would be nice, i wouldn't mind seeing that kind of attention to detail in games like Oblivion. i fell somewhere between your two extremes. i played it a bit, and i'll probably go back to play it more. the ES games have a lot more replay value than he credits vz. fan mods, though on the other hand a game shouldn't require fan content to become good.

on the whole you raise good points. i'm of the opinion that PC gamcing will die, but not for any of the hysterical reasons people think. truth be told, the PC will die. in another 25-50 years we'll have enough computational power in a device the size of a cell phone to do everything we want and need. at that point the difference between console and PC gaming will be rather moot.

but that aside, i think it's important to remember the article was written to be funny. i take it as a list of 7 of the most common frustrations gamers experience, frustrations that in many cases could and should have been easily avoided with a saner allocation of budget, more attention given to the player, and some simple forethought and common sense.