Category: game design

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.

When I worked at Elixir and Lionhead I often got really distressed over how much artwork got thrown away. It seemed mad to spend so much time and money on getting artwork, only to ditch it and start again. Some of this was just typical inefficiency, but some of it becomes more understandable the longer you work in games.

games are very visual things. We can rant about game play vs graphics all we like, but the first impression of 99% of games is visual. It’s REALLY hard work to slog away 10 hours a day, every day on a game that actually looks really bad. Most coder art is really bad, so in order to get an idea of whether or not the game will feel any good, and to inspire you to work hard and believe in the current game, it’s important to have something that looks nice as soon as you can.

There are two approaches to this. One is to spend a lot more time than you usually do on really polishing your ‘coder art’. I’ve spent some time doing this. I know my way around photoshop, and I’ve read hundreds of tutorials over the years on how to do all sorts of arty things. I still do some of the artwork for my games (less and less of it each game. The problem with doing this is it takes up a lot of time.

The alternative is to pay an artist to do some work before you really know what style you want, or if you will keep it. This can bexcellent, because they can prompt you into a new direction, or just turn out higher quality stuff, but it also obviously costs money. Indie games are done on a shoestring. Wasting money on artwork you know you will not ship with the game is scary. But right now, looking at my mystery new game and it’s crappy coder art, I am tempted to spend a few dollars and get a proper artist to mock up some basic stuff for me…

A few days ago I started work on what i thought would be the basics of my next game. I had a basic design document, and had thought about the game a lot. But the moment I started coding it, I started getting flashbacks to an older game idea I had tried ages ago and stopped work on. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be cool to do a game like that again.

I started coding it, and within a few hours had something on screen that made me smile. I’ve been working on it ever since, and I’m quite pleased with how it’s coming along. I almost can’t work on it without smiling.

it makes NO commercial sense for me to make it. I have 3 game ideas prepared which build on my current ‘reputation’ for doing complex simulation / management / strategy games with a real-world setting. They are all good ideas and I think they would all sell. One of them would be great for the ‘casual’ crowd. One is a potentially hugely popular and funny game. Another is more serious, maybe even political.

But this one just triggers my inner geek endorphin levels too much. People who think of me as ‘the Kudos’ guy, will wonder if the game is made by the same person. It’s very geeky, very old-school in some ways. It’s still 2D and it’s still strategic (in a way). It makes me feel 7 years old again.

I almost feel duty bound to make it, because I wish there was a game like this. For once, it’s a positech game that will look much better in video than in screenshots.  If in a few weeks time I’m still working on it (and thus am more sure I’ll stick with it), I’ll drop some hints about it.

It’s not Democracy 3 or Kudos 3.