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

Category: game design

unit deployment and undocumented features

Posted on March 20, 2012

There is one big usability failing in Gratuitous Tank Battles that I need to address. It’s something even as the designer that I notice mid-battle, so it must irritate a lot of players. It’s the unit deployment bar at the bottom of the screen. It works great with 10 or less units, and functionally, it handles hundreds, because it has a scroll bar and you can also rapidly zip through it using the mouse-wheel. But it has two issues:
1) It has no specific order to the units.
2) It shows you ALL your units, you cannot filter them.
I am investigating possibly strategies for improving the usability of it, maybe including some filtering options, allowing you to ‘hide’ units on it before a battle, maybe a system that lets you put together ‘armies’ of units that you can select pre-battle, I’m not sure yet.

More interestingly, I get the impression that hardly any players have realised that you can just mouse wheel anywhere over the bar and it will scroll. I obviously need to promote that more, but I think I have fallen foul of a popular designers dilemma, which is assuming the player thinks like I do. Family members always ask me how their DVD player / ipod / camera etc work, even though they have the manual and I do not, because they know I can work it out instinctively in seconds. I am a GUI ‘explorer’ and a usability geek. I am in the tiny percentage of people who have actually read ‘the design of everyday things’. I’m that sad.
What that means is, I need to remember that I am far more experimental and make far more assumptions and guesses about how GUI’s work that the player. I need to draw more attention to stuff like that.

Unsure trade-offs in game design

Posted on March 7, 2012

Here’s a thought.

Good games are ones where we make unsure trade-offs. Most games are either about reflexes or decisions. Decisions are more common in the kind of games I make, such as strategy and sim games. I think the two basic approaches to strategy/sim games are plate-spinning and trade offs.

Plate-spinning is where tons of stuff is happening at once and you are trying to stay on top of everything and keep everything from falling apart. Democracy 2 is very big on this aspect of design.

Trade-offs are much more common. Even games that are conventionally reflex ones, such as First person Shooters have a lot of trade-offs. You choose to be a medic, trading ammunition capacity for the ability to heal. You choose to be a scout, trading everything for the ability to move fast. Choosing to have more of X, means less of Y.

Where this system goes wrong in games, is where it is too clear, too obvious, too analytical, to decide exactly what the trade-off is. In other words, the number are a bit too explicit. If I *know* the details of every variable in the trade-off, then it simply becomes a matter of Vulcan logic. It’s when there is a suitable amount of fuzziness around the numbers, that the trade-off becomes one filled with uncertainty, anticipation, risk and excitement. You *think* the best choice is to risk building a new factory in the city, trading off increased pollution against lower unemployment…but you can’t really be *sure* that the numbers will go your way…

To me… that makes for a fun game. I don’t always need to know the numbers. Sometimes, just a hunch makes for more fun.

Gratuitous Manual Battles

Posted on February 9, 2012

A lot of people really liked the manual for Gratuitous Space Battles, and I’m conscious of this fact when working on the one for GTB. As with all complex strategy games, there is a ton of stuff to tell the player, and they will likely want to reference it after playing for an hour or two, in order to look-up or clarify stuff. It’s also a good place to put stuff like lists of hotkeys, or unit stat comparisons, although I probably won’t be doing the latter.

Some trendy designers would suggest that ‘a game that needs a manual is badly designed’. This is just silly. We don’t all want to play games as simple as Bejeweled, and sometimes, a separate reference manual is a good idea for a game that has real depth and a ton of features. I also like doing a manual because it means people can read how to play the game on their laptop, or a work PC, where maybe actually playing through a tutorial isn’t an option. Plus it means people who are really on the fence can read the manual before deciding to buy the game.

The manual is maybe half done. It’s mostly all there, but it will need some more images, some proof-reading, spell checking, and a second pass for actual humour and flavour text to make it more in-keeping with the blackadderish spirit of the game design. I might change my typewriter font to make it more typerwriterish, a tradeoff between authenticity and legibility. I like the idea of a 1914 army document that never got updated during 200 years of war. maybe the army spent all it’s effort on making more deadly lasers and none on word processors?

On the technical side, it looks like the server move went ok. Just quadruple checking it all before I turn off the old one. That still scares me…

Theory: The best game designers have little fun playing games

Posted on January 14, 2012

Here is a theory, tell me what you think. I’m sure it’s rough around the edges.

The best games are made by people who feel ‘compelled’ to make a certain type of game. Invariably, this is because that sort of game does not already exist. If the perfect game (to that designer’s eye) already existed, they would

a) Waste a lot of their free time playing it

b) Not perceive there is a market for another game like that, and not feel as motivated or driven to make it.

If this theory is true, it follows that the designers that are churning out consistently original or refreshing stuff, are amongst the most frustrated and miserable game-players. They are constantly living in a gaming world populated by other people ‘doing it wrong’.

Now that theory is a bit arbitrary, and I am well aware of the fact that I’m just trying to rationalise my own opinions and convince myself that the fact that I find 90%+ of modern games to be rubbish is because I am perceiving flaws others do not. The other option is that I’m going off games, which I’m pretty certain is not true, judging by my huge addiction to Anno 2070 (dammit I WILL get enough fruity drinks to get that next level of eco inhabitant!!!!), or that I have unusual taste in games (quite likely).

Any other game designers out there who feel let down/ dissapointed / depressed by most modern games? I have maybe 20 games in my steam account (I admit, I tend to buy retail or direct from developer so that’s only a snapshot) whereas I know many people have 100+ 200+ games. I find most games to be unappealing, at any price. I judge games more by the time required, than the asking price. I’m not saying other games are *bad*, just that they do not appeal to me. Maybe the designer in me has just evolved to constantly find fault in games?

Comparing stats

Posted on January 9, 2012

One thing I reckon is pretty neat about Battlefield 3 and other modern man-shooters is the stats stuff, and comparison thereof. I like the idea of beating my friends highs cores in a game, and the great thing about lots of stats, is that even if your buddy is 10x better than you, can always say “yes but who has the ‘fallen in a ditch achievement? it’s me isn’t it?”

Many of the things I’m excited about in Gratuitous Tank Battles are things that I wish I’d done from the start for Gratuitous Space Battles. GSB had some online integration built around challenges, but not much. The center of the GSB community is the modding forums on my website, not the game itself, which means a lot of people miss out on it.

GTB will correct this a bit. There will be integrated friends lists in the game (hurrah!) so you can add some people as your friends, and then filter online challenges only to show your friend’s maps etc. Their comments should probably show up with an icon when you read their thoughts on other maps too (must make a note…)

One feature I put in today (still needs some tweaking) is this in-game ability to compare stats with a friend:

Right now, the comparison is between XP, rank and achievements. Maybe I’ll add other stats in there too at some stage. Like battles played etc. The UI needs a little love too. The biggest issue for this sort of thing is the multithreading and php web coding, two areas I am relatively inexperienced at, compared with normal C++ game coding.

In other news, Ubisofts shit DRM meant I couldn’t play Anno 2070 for 7 hours this weekend. Online DRM doesn’t bug me *that* much, I understand the argument for it, and so do the shareholders earning money from MMOS, but I understand why people hate it. What really makes me hate and despise ubisoft is not their usage of that DRM, but their total inability to fix it within 60 minutes (absolutely TOP whack requirement to fix a server problem if you have dedicated server staff). And where is the big grovelling apology to all their players for their screwup?

Maybe we should just look at funny pictures of tanks* to bring back a smile eh?

*thanks andrew :D