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

GTB game mode thoughts.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the different game modes in Gratuitous Tank Battles. Here are my current thoughts:

Classic (Tower Defence) Mode

In this mode, you play a standard tower defence game. The enemies come at you in pre-scripted waves, and have to get across the map in sufficient numbers to win. When the final wave ends, the player has won. The player earns supplies for shooting down incoming units, and spends supplies by placing new turrets and troops in one of the many pre-defined squares along the multiple attack routes in real time.

Reverse (Tower Attack) Mode

This is the same, but swapped over, with you as attacker. The player earns a steady stream of supplies over time, and these supplies are spent on new units. The supply level is capped, so you can’t just sit there for ages and not place anything, as you waste potential troops in that way. The victory conditions are just like classic mode. This requires a fair bit of AI by the defender, who will intelligently (I hope) place defences along the routes that are most under attack, and select defending forces that balance out, and can best deal with what is being thrown at them.

Assault Mode (attack OR defence)

This is a mode that will also work online in challenges. The player, either as attacker or defender, has a fixed budget to build up an entire army in one go (or for attack, possibly in a number of separate waves). The army then tries to storm past all the turrets without any interaction by the player. The army can be uploaded as a challenge either by an attacker or defender.

Pitch Battle Mode

This is like GSB, but without any pathfinding :D Essentially the maps series of paths meet in the middle and big armies start at one end or the other, marching / driving towards each other and blasting away until one army is destroyed, or everyone is out of range of each other. The last (or biggest) army standing wins. This can also be done as an online challenge game. This is the only mode where both sides have moving units.

Of course, it’s impossible to really say which of these game modes will really work, and which will suck, A lot of it depends upon the exact implementation and numbers. I really think I should implement at least this list though, and give them all some decent testing before deciding if they work or not.

There is SO MUCH to do.

Potential game buyers and their attention spans

There is something very tricky about selling games through demos. The problem is, the complexity of interaction required for the full experience.

Take a fairly complex strategy game, like Gratuitous Space Battles. To really appreciate what the game offers, you need to experience the visual excitement of a big battle, preferably two different ones to show the variety of ships, fleets, backdrops and visual effects. You need to experience the way the honor system works, and the shop section where you unlock new modules. You need to see the design screen, and put ships together, try out the deployment screen with the different ships orders, and you need to see the variety of missions to choose from. Plus you need a brief bit of challenge play to see the online integration, and if we are talking all the DLC, you need a run through of campaign maps, campaign repairs etc…
To explain how to do all of this in the game takes AGES, and you only really learn it by doing it. Lets call the time taken to experience brief elements of all of this time ‘T’.

Now lets take a movie, such as…oh I dunno… Enemy At The Gates. This film has a bit of character background (Vassili as a child), it has high drama (the crossing of the river) it has the characters of Khrushchev, Tania, the rivalry with Danilov over Tania, the death of Koulikov, the betrayal of Sacha…etc blah blah.

The difference is, that we don’t need to ‘learn’ how to experience any of that. A 3 second clip of stuka divebombers… CHECK, a 3 second love scene clip CHECK… and we can jump from one to the other no problem. This means that the time taken to experience brief elements of all this is T2. I think T2 is maybe T/10
Where it all gores wrong, is generally peoples attention span is A, and T > A > T2.

What a geeky way of saying it’s easier to sell a movie than a game :D But what I’m getting at is that the very NATURE of games (interaction) means that it’s much harder to provide an effective demo. (although to be fair, books have the same problem)

And this is what I’m worried about with my next game (GTB). It’s actually got a ‘sort-of-backstory’, and to explain the mood and the style of the game will take more than 30 seconds. Gratuitous Space Battles was pretty much summed up in it’s title, and this one won’t be. So I muse nervously on how to hold peoples attention while I explain the background to the game.
The mechanics of the game are pretty simple by comparison. I’m just taking an existing genre, flipping it, scaling it up, and setting it against an original backstory.

Plus lots of stuff blows up and it should look nice, in a GSB kinda way :D

Games are like donuts, so go get drunk.

I think that games designers, especially younger, keener, and possibly inexperienced ones can get hung-up on the idea that games are like puzzles, when in fact, games are like donuts. Even puzzle games.

When you get game design students to submit game ideas, or you encounter their ideas online, (inevitably in any discussion of game design or criticism of game ideas), you get a huge emphasis on mechanics, and on the numbers, the choices, the decisions, and the maths and principles behind game design. Books have been written on this topic. I have several myself. There are a lot of maxims, and serious theories.

The problem I have with all this, is it treats the player like a rational, thoughtful robot that is aware that games must be perfectly balanced. In other words, the player is expected to take an analytical and rational and logical approach to deciding whether or not a game is fun.

This is silly, because ultimately games are about FUN. You can take your fun seriously, and that’s fine, but lets not kid ourselves. Gaming is a leisure activity, done for fun. Choosing the right gun in Battlefield 2 isn’t the same as choosing what university course to take or your pension provider or next career. There are no life-changing implications to choosing ‘Elf’ rather than ‘Orc’.

We all make a ton of really serious decisions in our lives. I run a business, and that’s all about seriousness, contracts, numbers, blah blah. The last thing I want to do when gaming is take on a whole new serious set of decisions. I strongly suspect that a lot of gamers have a similar attitude, especially really young gamers and the 30+ generation. How many times do you pick a certain character class or weapon or role in a game because of some silly reason, some trivial gut ‘feeling’? I’ll always max out my archery stat in a game that offers it, even if it’s a dumb choice, because I find archery cool. I spent all my cash in mount n blade on the helmet with big horns, because I liked the helmet, who cares if I’m not maximising my armor stat? Horns are cool.

The reason I’m saying games are like donuts, not puzzles, is that when asked what food we want, we pick what we ‘like’, we don’t get too analytical about whether food X has 15% less calories for the same quantity as food ‘Y’. Food ‘X’ has got better reviews than food ‘Y’, but ultimately we don’t care. We like pizza, more than salad, so we choose pizza. We don’t feel like we have to justify it. In this case, the academic game designer is like a nutritionist. The customers decision makes no sense, they have picked the ‘wrong’ food, the lesser food, for completely silly reasons. Can’t they see that the salad contains a better balance of the different calories and proteins and vitamins, and thus is better than something that is all pepperoni and cheese?????? Can’t everyone see that Beethoven is better than the spice girls????

Game design is about fun, and making the player FEEL good (or bad/scared/guilty/powerful..). It’s not a puzzle of stats for the player to win. If you enjoy gratuitous space battles, then you have WON. It’s not about scoring points or beating challenges really, it’s a game that (I hope) makes you FEEL like you control a big space fleet. I’m selling your the feeling of power, not a spreadsheet. Battlefield 2 makes me feel like a cool soldier, and that’s great. It doesn’t really matter if the game is unbalanced, or if it’s just another shooter, or if Call of Duty has more guns, or cost more, or has a better plot. These are bullet points. We don’t have them on donuts.

I strongly think game designers are selling feelings. This is why I find it worrying so many of them are insular, shy, introverts with a limited range of interests / experiences. Game designers need to get drunk, have sex, get into fights and jump out of airplanes. Stop watching firefly for 10 minutes and go something that generates some different emotion in you.

What about you. Do you play and choose games for seemingly trivial reasons? Because you like the wood-chopping noise in age of empires, or because you  like the background music in eve? What’s the silliest most peripheral non-‘game-design-theory’ reason lying behind your choices?  and how does your favorite game make you FEEL?

Grinding and unhappiness and clue #5

I’ve been playing some World Of tanks. I’ve played before in the beta, now I’ve started for real. I haven’t spent any money on it yet. For those unaware, WOT is a free + microtransactions game. You earn gold and experience in the game to buy and research better tanks and crew, or you can just go and buy them with real money.

I don’t play normal MMO games any more because of my dislike of the tedium of ‘grinding’. To me, grinding is a failure of design. It’s an admission that the actual game isn’t very fun, so you need to stretch it out as slowly as possible so people pay a lot in subscription fees to you before you run out of content. It’s cynical. Imagine any other medium of ‘entertainment’ introducing a grind. Imagine a crime novel where you had to read through 12 almost identical chapters of the detective interviewing a witness before you could ‘level up’ and get rewarded by a chapter with a new clue. It’s just silly. We don’t do it in TV, Movies, or Plays, but in games, making the player do a tedious job to earn the next bit of entertainment is considered fine.

I found when playing WOT last night that I wasn’t having any fun at all. I wanted a better tank than the tractor with a pistol that you start with, and It seemed I got points for just being ‘in’ a battle and spotting an enemy tank before I died, so I played 10 quick battles where I just hurtled towards the enemy and died, to get the points. No fun for me, or them. No entertainment was had. And yet, at the same time, people whizz past me in better tanks, not because they are better at the game, but because they have more free time, or more money. I could sense that as a player, this subtly makes me unhappy, frustrated and jealous. This is not fun.

In Gratuitous Space Battles you sometimes get a player-designed challenge with faster ships, but that speed has come at a tradeoff. The player had the same points and the same components as you, they just re-arranged them differently using their own judgement and skill. That is what games should be about. A level playing field, and instant fun with no grind. I sadly accept I’m in the minority on this :(

Anyway, time for another clue. Nobody had a clue what clue#4 was did you? I’m dissapointed in you :D It’s  a very very specific form of art, from a very specific point in history.

 

Clue #5

 

Unit Variants and next game clue#4

One of the things that GSB lacked, was visual unit customisation. You could customise the hell out of your ships, and that worked great, and of course people loved it, but aside from the visual deployment and choice of hulls, one GSB challenge pretty much looked superficially like another. In terms of holy grail, a system like that used to build ships in Galactic Civilisations 2, combined with the GSB engine would have pretty much kicked ass.

Sadly, that is not what I’m working on.

However, I am at pains, in the mystery new game, to ensure that people get a chance to customise their forces (yes there are forces…) so that they look at least slightly different and personal. I wanted, in my minds eye an incredibly modular system of putting together sprites to build things, but although it sounds great, it’s insanely difficult in practice, without severely crimping the art style. This is one of those phenomena that you only really encounter when you MAKE a game, rather than being a frustrated designer. No game design survives contact with the programmers, and the artists.

The system I have ended up with, and I really need to move on, so it’s the final system now… Is one where units have a basic design, and then a large number of variants. In GSB terms, it would be like picking an imperial centurion cruiser, but then picking variant_d, which has a different look, in terms of weapon attachment points or engines. New graphics cost money,  but no more programmer design or effort, so once the system is in place that makes ‘imperial centurion cruiser’ work, then adding  few new variants based on new engine styles is easy, and has no gameplay balance impact at all.

Hopefully this will mean the game has a lot of unit combinations visually, if sadly not complete freedom. There will also be an opportunity to pick unit colors in pretty fine and cool detail.

Ready for another clue? here it is…

clue #4