When you develop an entire game by yourself, there is a staggering amount of work to do. Coding, business stuff, marketing, testing, balancing, designing. And I think that the majority of people who ‘want to make video games’ tend to over focus on the design bit. The whole ‘I have an idea for a cool game’ bit. It might surprise people to know that this is the bit that I am least fond of. In many ways I am a cross between an AI/Engine coder and an entrepreneur who realizes he has to design games to sell that code inside. The whole ‘working out how the game will play’ side of things has always been hard and frustrating for me.
You might find this an odd thing for me to say for two reasons: Firstly, I’ve made a bunch of (I think) pretty innovative games. Kudos was the first turn-based life-sim game (AFAIK). Democracy was the first commercial game designed around a neural network and based on the aesthetics of infographics. Gratuitous Space Battles was the world’s first auto-battler game. There is no shortage of innovation there. Secondly, not many game developers would ever admit they don’t enjoy the game design bit. Thats the bit we are supposed to excel at right? Admitting you don’t enjoy that bit as much is almost blasphemy.
As is probably obvious, I’m autistic, and one of the ways this manifests is that I like, and even need… data. You can tweak your ad campaign or marketing strategy and see if sales go up or down by 1%. You can re-engineer your code and check that performance has gone up or down by 1%. But game design? How on earth do you know the game is fun? How do you measure if you are making the game BETTER with all those changes… or worse? And in the absence of such data, what the hell are you doing?
I think most fulltime game designers seem insecure, as they are always asking other people if what they are doing is any good! We have to, because its very very hard to tell. In some ways, designing a game is like writing a joke. You can put a lot of effort in, have some skill, lean on prior experience, but by the time you are finished working on the joke, it stopped being funny to you personally ages ago. If you spend your entire day staring at spreadsheets of weapon characteristics until your eyeballs are sore, the question ‘Is this spreadsheet fun?’ feels almost insane. There is a good reason many game designers are NOT avid players of their own games after release. We are too close to it, too aware of the mechanics, too aware of the areas we are not sure about. We saw the sausage being made, and we do not want a sausage sandwich for breakfast.
This might sound a bit depressing, and it would be more so if this was my first rodeo, but I’ve experienced it before as a musician. For probably 20 years, I was unable to just ‘enjoy’ music. I would listen to it from a technical point of view. I might marvel at the clean guitar tone, the incredible timing, the complexity of the arpeggios, but I was listening to it from a teacher and student point of view, not as an audience member. I can now mostly just enjoy music, but I’m still aware of the keys and scales and techniques…
Being ‘too close’ to your own work will always be a problem. You will not be sure your joke is funny, your novel is gripping, your music is cool or your game is fun. Its just impossible for someone so close to the system to evaluate it in the same way a customer would. There are however, ways to get around this!
One is obviously to ask a lot of people. Friends, family, fellow game devs. The trouble is that these people are normally pre-disposed to worrying about hurting your feelings. Not many people will say to me “Cliff, this sounds boring as fuck”, although over the years I’ve managed to find people who know me well enough to be aware they can be more honest with me than other people. Even so, its not disinterested feedback, and if all your friends are game designers too, you are hardly getting a representative slice of the consumer base.
A second technique is time. Take a weekend off, or a week off. Ideally a month off. Some novelists stick their work in a drawer for a YEAR and then come back to it fresh, and can evaluate it with a far better critical eye. Of course the problem here is you need to earn money, but if you can work on multiple games at once and swap them over, this might be an option. Its definitely a system that works.
A third technique is drugs. Yes I went there. I am quite boring in that my narcotic of choice is just good old fashioned alcohol. Its not like I am permanently drunk when designing (am I making this denial too strongly maybe?), but I *do* drink, and I do my best to learn to ‘channel’ the feeling of being drunk when thinking about game design. The reason? when you are uninhibited, you have a different emotional response, and I think that change in emotional response gets you closer to the enthusiasm of someone seeing your work for the first time. Drunk cliff can watch a battle in Ridiculous Space Battles and have no greater design insight than “WHOAH LASERS!”, and if thats the response to my game, then I am totally fine with that.
In fact ‘Whoah Lasers!’ is a good name for a game.
Anyway, I offer this blog post as counterpoint to the idea that game design is something that you can get from a text book and can be quantified and analyzed with ‘player verbs’ and ‘core loops’. Ultimately what you are trying to do is make something FUN and this is no different to making something FUNNY. Its folly to suggest there is an equation for either humor or fun. Making something with either of these attributes is hard, and fuzzy and it doesn’t come easily to everyone. Certainly not me.
But obviously I need to reassure you that Ridiculous Space Battles will be totally fun. Its currently 92.65% fun by I am optimizing it. You can wishlist it now etc. Wouldn’t that be fun! (am I funny?)