Category: game design

Game design is a pain. But ORIGINAL CONCEPT game design is like a pain intensified with pain amplifiers set to MAXIMUM_PAIN.

90% of games have very little originality. Some of them have some original ideas or twist ion existing concepts, and very few of them are totally utterly new. The Sims was a reworking of little computer people, and Kudos is in some ways a new take on the Sims, albeit different in fundamental ways. Democracy is a bit of a weird one, being influenced mainly by neural networks and watching TV debates over politics, but it probably looks like some other game to someone. I’ve heard talk of ‘shadow president’ but never seen or played it.

The last 3 games I did were Kudos 2 Democracy 2 and Kudos:Rock Legend. These are all games I worked hard on and am very proud of. D2 and K2 are my fave games, and I think they are the best I’ve done so far. But the last time I released a totally ‘new’ game was the original Kudos.

I’m determined not to coast on past successes, so this new game is totally different. I’m trying to carve out a new idea for a game again, and it’s a pretty tough job. The problem this time is technical, not conceptual. I can see the game in my mind, how it plays and how it works. Translating it into code is tricky. There is a lot of conventional AI to code (unit AI, as you might get to some extent in an RTS), and that stuff is a pain to get working consistently at reasonable speeds, especially with the pretty big number of units I’m hoping to support.

So this next game will take a while, hopefully getting done before the money runs out. But it will be pretty origianl (I think). That will give me 3 strings to my gaming bow (kudos, Democracy and NewGame). On the positive front, it’s also got me coding more hours than ever before, because I hate it when the game looks like it’s a mess…

I always thought these looked kinda cool, and the people working there didn’t get enough of the glory

A lot of people have said to me they think it’s a bad idea to allow cheaters to edit files for a multiplayer game, especially my next game. Let me clarify:

The next game *will have a multiplayer element to it*. To some extent. But not in the way you generally get in multiplayer games.

Although you will have free reign to edit files for modding purposes, there will be no way to ‘beat’ another player by doing so.

I might introduce some element of file checking and CRC gubbins at some stage, but I want a hugely moddable game, and if you let people mod stuff its hard to then prevent them cheating unless there is a central server blah blah, and I don’t want all the hassle and cost associated with that.

I’m not making an FPS style game where the normal worries about aimbots are a concern. When I explain how the multiplayer bit works, you will see what I mean :D

Could it be that the best way to deal with jerks in online games is to just make their efforts futile by doing way entirely with the idea of anonymous massively multiplayer competition?

That’s what I reckon, and here are my expanded thoughts on the topic.

I’ve learned a lot from the success of Kudos, from making kudos Rock legend and Kudos 2. Especially Kudos 2. Those 3 games have taught me what polish really means, how to ship a product once it’s finished, rather than when I’ve had enough, and how to make games easy to learn and balanced enough for most players to enjoy right out of the box.

But most of the casual games out there bore me to tears. I want games that make me THINK. Not in a predictable, mechanical way like sudoku. Not just give my eyes some boring seek and find workout such as in the hidden object games. And certainly not in the click-fest time management sense.

I want a game that makes me think creatively. that challenges me to think outside the box, to evolve strategies and plans and tactics.

that’s what I hoped Kudos and Democracy did. Democracy was mroe clearly a strategy game, but Kudos was one too. My next game is all about strategy. Not TACTICS. That’s what most RTS games are about. This one will be about STRATEGY. But it will be (hopefully) as polished and accessible as the casual games.