Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: game design

Just one pesky stat

Posted on August 3, 2013

The trouble with designing games like mine, is you often find that the game ends up focusing on just one stat. This is a problem, in my view, because it makes the game a bit too single-minded, and decisions a little too easy, or frustrating.  let me explain what i mean…

In a game like Prison Architect, theoretically it’s a very interesting and fun balancing act. You need to balance your budget the ratio of staff to prisoners, the happiness of the prisoners, the safety level of the prison, the  cleanliness, the number of prisoners you can feed that day, etc etc. It is a great game with a lot of appeal, and theoretically you are spinning all of those plates at once, trading X against Y and Y against Z. This is what makes for exciting, fun and unpredictable gameplay.

prison

HOWEVER. Like all games of this sort, including my own such as Democracy and Kudos, and no doubt Democracy 3 and Redshirt, they often (at least during development and beta) bump into a problem where for long periods, gameplay becomes all about just one pesky stat. In Democracy 3 it is often GDP or the deficit. In Redshirt, it is often happiness. In Prison Architect, for me at least it is always budget.

This is a problem that it’s worth keeping an eye on. Some games deliberately ‘cheat’ it. If your budget has been a ‘limiting factor’ for X turns, why not alleviate it a bit with a grant from the government? If happiness is ‘stuck’, then why not have the player invited to a happiness-inducing random event? The very interesting question is…. Is that good game design?

Personally, I think it is, at least in a single player game (obviously). In the real world, we can become ‘stuck’ and frustrated with one part of our lives, one single problem, but when we are game designers with total control of the universe there is no rule saying we must make the player suffer in this way. racing games often cheat with ‘catch-up’ physics. Is it ok for simulation and single-player strategy games to do so too? I would say yes, but I’m interested to know what people think. When you are stuck with 4,000 fuel and 9,000 munitions and zero manpower in Company Of heroes 2, and this is your tenth go at that mission, would you be offended if the manpower stat artificially sped up a bit?

Polishing what you have

Posted on July 27, 2013

I sometimes think indie game developers get a little bit carried away with new features. They cram in new stuff, in an excited and passionate way, without stopping to think that they should probably get last weeks feature working better first.

I hate to name names. Finishing ANY indie game is impossibly hard. You might notice that generally speaking, developers don’t criticize each others games. I did some twitter ranting recently about how Assassins Creed III seemed to be designed to torture me, but I try to avoid such rants. And most of that was ranting at stupid business decisions (unskippable crap, uplay, etc), rather than poor game design. I couldn’t get far enough into the game to even really play it…

…So I won’t name names, but I have played a few indie games recently where I wonder why they bothered adding new feature X, when old feature Y was half-assed. I am of the opinion that I’d rather have a feature not included until it can be done right. Feature-lists do not sell games. Quality, fun and atmosphere sells games. I thought GSB would sell better if I added the ‘feature’ of direct-control. It made no difference. (BTW the game sold VERY well, I’m not complaining…).

The problem is, developers come up with a new idea, and all they care about that week is the new idea. In a big studio, you have some dude in a suit (metaphorically) with a clipboard (ditto) who says stuff like “Dude, X is not on the approved feature list for this build. We need you to improve the agreed features so they pass QA”. As an indie nobody says that. You dream up some mad idea, and you race off to do it, forgetting that none of the buttons in the game have mouse-over tool-tips or a highlight state or crop text to fit because… fuck that’s so BORING! and the new cool feature is both NEW and also COOL.

I believe this to be a mistake. When you come up with a cool new feature, just write it down. When the game is finished, polished, bug-free, optimized, awesome… if you still have the time/energy and money, you can look at the idea again and see if it still feels so ‘must-have’.

A lot of indie games have historically shipped in an unpolished state because the developer is

  • bored or
  • penniless.

Now we have kickstarter, people can say it’s a beta and who cares :D But I’m still a believer in making sure you polish what you have. There are some hit games out there which are not at all polished, but I’d rather not gamble on making one of them. Polish is GOOD.

 

The Democracy 3 Compass

Posted on July 24, 2013

So here is a half-finished feature I’ve added to the main menu for Democracy 3. It’s a chart showing the last 50 election wins you had in the game, with the icons representing the countries you were playing at the time, and they are printed onto a left/right liberal/conservative axis so you can see what the state of the nation was at the time. In a way, this is a clue to your own political opinions and prejudices, as presumably you will gently be nudging all the countries in a similar direction.

compass

Next up: finding a way to populate the chart with the average positions of any of your steam friends who are also playing the game…

OH CANADA!!!! LA LA LA

Posted on July 9, 2013

So today I have been in Canada fact finding mode. Would you like to know the average Canadians maple syrup consumption? or the latest estimates for moose population? Forget all that…lets get down to the nitty gritty. A lot of statistical browsing has led me to the rather worrying conclusion that getting the Democracy 3 economic model to make sense over different countries is all but impossible. I am giving it my best shot, but don’t play the game thinking ‘this is Canada’. Play the game thinking ‘this country could vaguely be something like Canada’ and you will be fine!

Right now I am torn between polishing and balancing and adding content that works in the model as a whole (I added some new policies such as flat tax), and making the different countries ‘feel’ more different. I cannot decide which is more important.

For example, Canada is big on mining. Should there be a ‘mining law’ policy to decide how lax environmental controls are? or is that already covered under pollution controls? Are there other issues or events or policies I should add that are Canada specific? or should I worry more about the core simulation and balancing the central game?

Something that is easy to do is to ‘nudge’ the countries attributes more in the direction of the real world, by adding scripts and overrides. I can make Canadians less violent and more law abiding (or vice versa), less (or more) prone to obesity, entrepreneurship or patriotism. I’m open to any commentary from Canadian readers.

BTW I am giving a talk at develop tomorrow. Do come along and say hi if you are at the show.

Crime statistics in Democracy 3

Posted on July 6, 2013

Democracy 3 has two crime measurements. Violent Crime and Crime Rate. Obviously they can vary massively, depending on your policies. I’ve been investigating the differences between the UK and the USA to try to get the policies to all make sense, whilst also presenting the player with roughly sensible crime and violent crime rates in these two countries. This is, of course, totally impossible. But I like to try six impossible things before breakfast, so I am trying anyway. If all else fails, i can include cultural override scripts to nudge the stats in the right direction. Some countries do naturally have a more law-abiding culture than others, so this is fairly acceptable.

Anyway…

Where I live in the UK, people think that our ban on handguns is a good way to reduce violent crime. In the US, many people think that their freedom to own handguns is a good way to reduce violent crime. I won’t get into the argument too much, except to say I can see both things making sense. If there are more guns, surely there will be more crimes using them (especially suicides). I simply cannot kill a burglar fleeing my home without a gun (although I could probably maim him given twenty seconds to grab my bow). Surely gun availability increases crime… and yet… If I was a burglar, I think I’d be far less likely to break into someones house if I thought they had a pistol under the pillow. And I’d be wary of robbing a bank if half the customers were packing firearms. Hmm…I dunno…

You never see this sort of thing in bradford on avon.
You never see this sort of thing in bradford on avon.

Anyway…

A look at the impartial (ish) world of statistics makes for interesting reading:

http://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_by_country.jsp

United Kingdom 39.78
United States 53.44

So *more* crime in general in the USA?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
United Kingdom 1.2
United States 4.8

So a LOT more homicides in the USA?

I’m not trying to argue for gun control. I just want to work out *why* this is the case. Could it be cultural? is the history of the USA (more recent wild west, frontier attitude) making them more trigger-happy? Is US culture more violent than the UK (I doubt it, we watch the same movies). Maybe Britain has less inequality and more CCTV cameras? It’s a really difficult one to analyze. maybe there *is* something to the argument that more guns just leads to more gun crime, but then why is the overall crime rate not lower? Is the lower population density an issue meaning police response times are slower? maybe Americans report crime more than Brits do? maybe the US has more laws to break?

Of course, we could debate this all year. People do. It’s just one of hundreds, probably thousands of relationships in the game I’m trying to get right. Don’t yell at  me if you disagree. It’s all very very easy to mod :D. But out of curiosity, how do you explain the UK/USA crime stats differences?