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          <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1">- <a href="../1.14">Contents</a><br>
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              <p><font color="#0000FF"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000CC">volume 
                1, issue 14</font></b></font></p>
              <p><font color="#0000FF"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000CC"> 
                </font></b></font></p>
              <p>  <p><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono"><b><font color="#339900" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Today 
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<P><font color="#000000" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1">New!!</font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> The Archives have been cleaned up, fead links fixed, and printable versions restored! Also, don't miss the new comments <a href="../../index.html">on the front page</a>!</font></p>
              
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        <p align="LEFT"><img src="../images/beak.jpg" width="196" height="246" align="RIGHT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0022A8"><b><a target="" href="../corner/index.html"><font size="-1">Beaker's 
          Bent</font></a><font size="-1">:</font></b></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="+3" color="#0022A8"><br>
          Game Design Philosophy 101</font></p>
        <p align="RIGHT">&nbsp;</p>
        <p align="RIGHT">&nbsp;</p>
        <p align="RIGHT">&nbsp;</p>
        <p align="RIGHT"><font color="#804000"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">By 
          Rich &quot;<a target="_self" href="mailto:rich@loonygames.com">Beaker</a>&quot; 
          Wyckoff</font></b></font></p>
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        <p><font size="-1"><i><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">I've been 
          designing games professionally for three years and thinking about designing 
          them for most of my life (when not playing them). I tend to present 
          strong opinions, but I want to make it clear that these are only opinions, 
          and I don't want to come off like some of the famous names in the industry 
          who seem to think that selling a lot of copies of a game and getting 
          attention from the press makes them an expert on everything about making 
          games. My tenet is that if you claim to know everything, you're missing 
          out on the fact that there's always something new to learn, some other 
          opinion which is worth considering, some experience you are still lacking... 
          </font></i></font><i></i> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><img src="../images/letters/c.jpg" width="26" height="40" align="LEFT"></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">omputer 
          game design is not a subject which you can study in most colleges, and 
          even those few that offer courses in it aren't offering the kind of 
          training in critical thinking that you can get for creative writing 
          or film directing at most of the better schools out there. If you want 
          to become a game designer, or even a game artist or game programmer 
          who can have more to do with the overall shape of the game than just 
          doing some textures or coding a new 3D engine, however, you need to 
          know how to be able to think critically about design. To a large extent, 
          there is no common &quot;language of game design&quot; yet. Nonetheless, 
          some common principles of game design have worked on many games in the 
          past, and being aware of them is helpful not only in entering the industry, 
          but also in making the best game possible. </font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> The rest of this column 
          will be a list of some of the principles and philosophies that I and 
          designers I have worked with typically use when planning out a new game, 
          or even just to guide us day to day as we take our plans and build them 
          into game. If they all sound very basic and obvious to you, then good, 
          you are already a step up on a lot of the game designers working professionally 
          out there. Clearly if all the industry's designers had a set of guidelines 
          and were actively following them, we'd see less terrible games. Yet 
          for all the years I've been playing games, I haven't seen very many 
          games at all which don't have at least one huge problem with their designs 
          - and of those games that are nearly perfect, many have come from Japan. 
          (This is not to say that Japanese designers are just better than American 
          or European developers, because they produce their share of crap as 
          well, but their best games, like <b>Metal Gear Solid</b>, are almost 
          on a higher plane of design than even the very good American and European 
          games, and design is what makes a game fun, not technology, not &quot;attitude&quot;, 
          not a license - it is always about design). Of course there are always 
          different viewpoints on this subject, just as there are with any critical 
          theory, and sometimes even people with a well-developed design philosophy 
          can lack the skill to actually translate that philosophy into a game, 
          but those are problems I can't address here. Some time in the future, 
          designers will be able to go to school and learn both how to think critically 
          about computer game design as well as how to communicate their thinking 
          and implement it in a successful product. For now, plenty of mistakes 
          will continue to be made, and designers will do most of their learning 
          from their own mistakes and those of others. </font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <b><font color="#0022A8">Game 
          Start/Interface </font></b></font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> Making sure the player has 
          an enjoyable first hour or two of gameplay is critical to getting them 
          to play the rest of the game. While the view of some marketers and execs 
          is that the only thing that matters is making a sale (given that the 
          majority of games are sold at stores which don't allow returns), that's 
          typically short-term American business thinking. I have several games 
          I've bought but couldn't or didn't return which were so poor that I 
          think twice about buying anything else from the same company, whereas 
          an exceptional game will almost certainly get me to buy the next product 
          made by the same people. You might be surprised to learn that more than 
          any amount of expensive advertising, it is still primarily word of mouth 
          that sells games, and word of mouth will quickly spread about a crappy 
          game. </font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <b>Allow the Player to Start 
          Playing Quickly: </b>without even getting into the installation hassles 
          which still plague computer games, once the game is successfully running 
          the player should be able to start playing with the minimum amount of 
          effort. Even complicated games like strategy games and flight sims should 
          allow the player to be playing the game in minutes instead of performing 
          chores like loading weapons on their airplane or configuring their army. 
          Set up tasks like these are likely to not be understandable or interesting 
          to the average player until they've played the game some, and even the 
          experienced player who might understand all the preliminaries would 
          most likely rather try the game out some before worrying about the details. 
          Everyone wants to get some instant gratification after they've installed 
          a new game, and it is the job of the designer to make this gratification 
          as instant as possible. Even after you've played a while, a game which 
          doesn't let you load your saved game from the very first screen or requires 
          you to do a lot of button pushing to try a new mission is going to be 
          less attractive than one you can just jump into in one or two clicks. 
          </font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <b>Wow the Player Immediately: 
          </b>This goes hand in hand with the previous statement. Not only should 
          players get into the game and be playing as soon as possible, they should 
          be shown some of the most impressive things your game can do as quickly 
          as possible. This is especially true of 3D games, and a mantra among 
          a lot of designers is &quot;make the first and last levels the best 
          levels.&quot; It can be harder with strategy games and flight simulators 
          and other games of this type to show the most impressive parts of the 
          game immediately. Sometimes cutscenes are used, although players are 
          becoming less and less impressed by (or tolerant of) the kind of excessively 
          long, poorly directed game intros you used to see a few years ago, and 
          many games nowadays have only very short intro cutscenes or nothing 
          at all. In my opinion, this is great. <b>Half-Life's</b> introduction 
          which is in-engine and first person but allows only limited interaction 
          on the player's part is a perfect example of a great intro sequence 
          for a modern game, and for strategy games look to <b>Final Fantasy Tactics</b> 
          on the PlayStation. This game starts with a cutscene which sets up the 
          first map, and the player immediately enters a battle full of dramatic 
          dialogue and characters displaying powers which the player won't earn 
          for hours of gameplay, and also tells the player how to play, fixing 
          it so they can't lose even if they don't understand the controls well. 
          You don't even really have to have read the manual to get through the 
          first combat, and once you complete it, the tutorial information you 
          can access from the menu will suddenly make a lot more sense. </font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <b>Put all Game-critical 
          Information in the Game:</b> in the bad old days when interfaces were 
          primitive, memory was an issue and it was much easier to copy a game 
          (not everyone has a CD burner and blank CDs, whereas anyone who could 
          play a floppy-based game could potentially make a copy), manuals and 
          even paragraph booklets were essential parts of a game. Today, publishers 
          attempt to keep manuals as short as possible to keep manufacturing costs 
          down, and due to printing delays the manuals almost inevitably contain 
          some information which became inaccurate in the final weeks of shipping 
          the game. In my opinion, everything you need to know about playing a 
          game should be contained within the game. A manual is nice, especially 
          for looking at tables of units and combat charts and the like with a 
          strategy game, but a truly great strategy game will go the extra step 
          and add in a unit encyclopedia that is good enough that it can actually 
          be used to do unit comparisons, as opposed to the more standard and 
          often useless &quot;one unit per page, no tables, no options&quot; encyclopedia 
          format in more run of the mill games. A good example from another genre 
          is <b>Half-Life</b>, the only First Person Shooter (FPS) I've seen to 
          actually include a tutorial. Any game which hopes to attract new players 
          needs to show them how to play the game. Other FPS games just set you 
          wandering around, and if you've never played an FPS before you can easily 
          get stuck because you don't know how or why to duck (for instance), 
          and you can quickly die the first time you meet an enemy before you 
          even know what's going on. There are differing schools of thought on 
          this, but I think that for 3D-type games, the basic controls should 
          be introduced in the first levels of play in as slick a way as the first 
          <b>Final Fantasy Tactics</b> mission described above, because most players 
          are going to skip any optional tutorials in favor of playing the full 
          game (see the first point). If the tutorial information is designed 
          and developed as part of the full game, you have the added <br>
          as a regular level, instead of becoming one of the typical &quot;oh-oh, 
          it's the last month and we suddenly realized we need a tutorial&quot; 
          tutorial. </font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <b>Ramp Complexity and Difficulty</b>: 
          Even if you don't agree with my thinking that the game controls themselves 
          should be introduced in the first few minutes of play, it is at the 
          very least good practice to follow what was commonly called the <b>Sonic 
          the Hedgehog</b> principle among the designers at <a href="http://www.lglass.com">Looking 
          Glass</a> when I was there. In other words, look at the example Sonic 
          sets: introduce elements of gameplay one at a time, making the player 
          use them in order to proceed. Sonic makes the player apply one of their 
          character's moves at a time, starting with the most basic (moving and 
          jumping) and proceeding to the more complicated, like learning to use 

          run so you can make it over the loops, then having to do a spin-attack 
          (which starts by running) to get through a tunnel filled with enemies, 
          and on and on. Perhaps the best example of the learn-by-doing school 
          of game design is <b>Super Metroid</b> on the SNES, where almost to 
          the end of the game you acquire new powers and abilities which let you 
          get to previously inaccessible parts of the world, and once you are 
          good enough at using the new ability to get past the initial barriers, 
          you come across more complicated situations which may call for a better 
          use of the ability or perhaps a combination of different techniques 
          you've already practiced individually. With a little bit of thought, 
          you'll see that this kind of design is directly applicable to almost 
          any kind of game, and is the most transparent way of teaching the player 
          without compromising the gameplay. When complicated rules of gameplay 
          are merely described in excruciatingly dull detail in a manual or set 
          forth as a lesson in a dry tutorial, many players turn off their minds 
          and refuse to learn because they aren't having fun. When the rules are 
          set forth one by one in the context of playing the actual game, people 
          will have fun and become prepared to deal with the most complicated 
          challenges the game has to offer without even realizing they are getting 
          educated. (Education rant: I have long been a believer in learning with 
          enough of an emphasis on its real-world uses, as if &quot;applied&quot; 
          mathematics is somehow an unfit subject. High school and undergraduate 
          math and science is actually useful all the time to ordinary people, 
          even English majors like me, but these subjects are often taught, especially 
          in college, more as a means to determine who is eligible for higher 
          level courses and graduate school than as actual tools to be used.) 
          </font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <b>Interface: The Most Commonly-used 
          Options Should be Easiest to Access:</b> we've all played at least one 
          game where something you need to do all the time, maybe even something 
          as common as saving your game, requires going through three different 
          menus or clicking through a dozen menus and pop-up windows, with buttons 
          all over the screen. At times it can be hard to determine ahead of time 
          which options in your game are going to be the most-commonly accessed, 
          but this is what playtesting is for. To ensure you can really be responsive 
          to the issues that come up in playtesting, though, care should be taken 
          to ensure that it is as easy as possible from a code and content-creation 
          side to rearrange, take out, or add in entire menu screens. A lot of 
          the awkward interfaces out there are a direct product of bad code and 
          content-creation procedures which made it more difficult to fix the 
          interface than to keep the awkward one. This is still no excuse for 
          having a bad interface, though. </font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <b>Interface: Minimize Screen 
          Switching:</b> this is another design goal which has become easier to 
          achieve with the increases in memory and screen resolution, but even 
          in the comparatively ancient days of game design, the easiest-to-play 
          games were the most clever about how they fit as much information onto 
          the screen as possible. Doing this right is as much a matter of selecting 
          the most important information as making it all fit: there's no sense 
          in using screen space for some stat which only needs to be referenced 
          once an hour. Like all other interface issues, being able to tune your 
          screens to perfection requires a flexible code base and art team so 
          that the interface can be fully redesigned if necessary. It also helps 
          to have designers who are talented enough to put a lot of advance thought 
          into the interface before it becomes playable and solve as many problems 
          as possible before anything gets coded or drawn. </font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <b><font color="#0022A8">Game 
          Play </font></b></font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> It is hard to resist the 
          temptation to jump ahead and start planning out the bulk of your gameplay 
          before even dealing with the basics, and often initial game proposals 
          are based on just this kind of thought, but a game that plays well but 
          starts really poorly may lose players before they even see the good 
          stuff, so don't overlook all the previous items in your hurry to make 
          the game itself. </font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <b>Don't Bore the Player:</b> 
          the designer's first commandment, really. This sentiment underlies most 
          of the following design principles, and can always be applied on its 
          own. The word &quot;frustrate&quot; can also be used instead of &quot;bore&quot; 
          - they are both facets of the same problem: the player isn't having 
          fun. A small amount of frustration can occasionally be a useful tool 
          in keeping the game interesting, but it's almost never a good idea to 
          deliberately bore the player. Both, of course, are very subjective issues, 
          and that's why even if you feel that it is completely and utterly vital 
          to your game to have three screenfuls of purple prose in a barely legible 
          font at the beginning of every mission, you should make it possible 
          for the player to skip through that text yet still get all the game-relevant 
          information, just on the off chance that somewhere there is a person 
          who doesn't find the text quite as you do. This also applies to things 
          like levels with a lot of empty space with nothing to do, real time 
          strategy (RTS) games which consist of twenty minutes of building your 
          base and technology, and then forty minutes to wipe out every last enemy, 
          RPGs where you have to put the plot on hold for an hour so you can build 
          up your party through random encounters, and a hundred more boring parts 
          of games we've all come across. </font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <b>Constant Goals and Rewards: 
          </b>I talked about this two columns ago, but one of the best ways to 
          prevent boredom is to ensure that the player always has a clear and 
          short-term goal to strive for, coupled with a reward for attaining the 
          goal. A goal of &quot;finish the game&quot; with a reward of &quot;cool 
          cutscene&quot; is not sufficient, because if the player hits a tough 
          section they can't get through or that is slowing them down a lot, they 
          can easily decide that if all they have coming is a cutscene all the 
          way at the end of the game, slogging on is not worth it. Rewards can 
          be fairly simple, but they need to be relatively unique (gaining some 
          ammo for reaching a high ledge or getting a standard skill point bonus 
          when you go up a level don't quite cut it). I also don't feel that unclear 
          or player-imposed goals, like &quot;I know I need to get to the end 
          of this level&quot; or &quot;ok, I'm going to get my character to 40th 
          level&quot; work well enough to stave off boredom, mainly because as 
          goals that weren't specifically planned, they won't have specific rewards. 
          If the game makes the end of the level special in some way and at least 
          hints that to the player or gives some special character benefit only 
          at 40th level, then you have a reasonable goal-reward set. If there 
          are not enough goals and rewards, players without a lot of self-motivation 
          (which is a lot of gamers, myself included - the last thing I want to 
          do with my time is play make-believe about why I should be continuing 
          to spend time on some computer game) may very well not want to keep 
          playing. If your game runs out of goals and rewards too quickly, negative 
          word-of-mouth will definitely spread - probably not enough to hurt current 
          sales, but quite possibly diminishing your market in the future, and 
          much as I hate to use horrible business speak like that, games are products 
          which have to be sold. Making good games is the purest way of selling 
          games (unfortunately, not the only way, but the fact that bad stuff 
          can be sold by the ton is one of the most depressing aspects of our 
          society). My personal feeling is that there should be some game-defined 
          goal, no matter how small, at least every hour of gameplay and preferably 
          every half-hour. My favorite games keep them coming at about this rate. 
          </font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <b>Continual Player Power 
          Growth</b>: this is almost just an example of goals and rewards. The 
          player should continue to become more powerful as they play through 
          the game - this could mean more weapons, new types of units in a strategy 
          game, more hitpoints, new moves, etc. I suppose this could be categorized 
          as one of my personal opinions about game design, as there are successful 
          games out there, especially among RTS games and platform games, where 
          the player attains all possible units or moves or whatever as early 
          as half way through the entire game, but there are plenty of counter-examples 
          within each genre where you don't gain your last powerup/unit/weapon 
          until very near the end of the game. The best games have even found 
          ways to avoid the frustration factor of getting something cool and not 
          being able to use it very much because the game ends soon afterwards, 
          by allowing you to keep playing even after the end, or by allowing all 
          weapons to be used in multiplayer, or by giving you the end-game weapons 
          or units near the start of the inevitable all the steps even when the 
          answer is obvious, it is probably just too difficult. I find it much 
          more pleasurable to continue to make progress through a game while dealing 
          with a string of easier puzzles which I can solve in no more than three 
          or four attempts than to be stuck at one tough bastard of a puzzle trying 
          over and over again to solve it. I'm guessing that most people would 
          agree with me. Random-guessing puzzles are almost as bad as learn-by-dying 
          puzzles, and should always be avoided. Combination locks, for instance, 
          should always have their combination available somewhere in the game, 
          even if determining it requires deciphering a bunch of other hints. 
          If the hints for the combination are particularly subtle, the combination 
          should also be given explicitly in a very difficult-to-find location. 
          The player can always go through resort to random guessing if they want, 
          but they should be trained by early puzzles in the game to look around 
          until they find themselves frustrated. It is better still to give the 
          player a way to occasionally bypass entire types of puzzle altogether, 
          like in <b>System Shock</b> where you could find electronic lockpicks 
          to open the puzzle locks - but finding the picks themselves could be 
          as much of a challenge as finding the combination. The more options 
          players have, the better. Unfortunately, one of the main reasons that 
          obnoxiously tough puzzles with single solutions are deliberately put 
          in is to extend the play time of a game which would otherwise be quite 
          short. To that, I can only say that an hour of play time spent trying 
          to get through one puzzle is not equivalent to an hour spent making 
          progress through a game, unless the actual playing of the puzzle is 
          transcendently fun even when you repeat it fifteen times. This does 
          occasionally happen, but not, for instance, in <b>Myst</b> or <b>7th 
          Guest</b>, and I am incredibly glad that the &quot;we got our design 
          from back issues of Games Magazine&quot; game is almost dead. I used 
          to subscribe to Games Magazine until I figured out that it was really 
          supposed to be called &quot;Puzzles&quot; magazine. </font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <font color="#0022A8"><b>End 
          Game </b></font><b></b></font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> And finally, the topic of 
          ending a game. This is an issue I'm still cogitating on myself. None 
          of the work I've done on end games has made it into a shipping product 
          so I don't have any real experience to draw on yet, and I can't even 
          point out many games final sequences that truly satisfied me. The only 
          guidelines I've come up with so far are loose ones, as follows. </font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <b>Great last level:</b> 
          as mentioned above, in games that have levels or areas, the first and 
          last levels should be the best ones. Not all players will see the final 
          level, but the last thing you want to do is disappoint those people 
          who do manage to play all the way through. It usually pays off to construct 
          the first and last levels at the very end of your project, so they can 
          benefit the most from any last-minute improvements the programmers may 
          have made, and so that the experience everyone will have gained in building 
          the game will be best displayed. </font> 
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <b>Satisfying endgame:</b> 
          so many games end with boss fights nowadays, and so few of those fights 
          are even good. Many of them wind up being boring slugfests, and in a 
          lot of games you can even find ways to dispatch the final bosses in 
          seconds. I think the way to go is a really involved and satisfying non-combat 
          sequence, but you don't want the end of the game to be incredibly frustrating, 
          either. Yet if you make the final puzzle too easy, finishing will become 
          anti-climactic. Ending with an &quot;escape&quot; sequence is another 
          promising alternative which has worked in a few games, but again, if 
          the player has to try it too many times it will just be frustrating, 
          and it could easily become as much of a cliche as the boss fight. There 
          aren't any tried-and-true methods here yet, and finding the perfect 
          ending for the perfect game is going to take a lot more work. </font> 
        <p> <font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br>
          There's probably plenty more to be said, but this has already become 
          my longest column. if you end up entering the industry and in some way 
          referring to this info, I hope you someday find a way to publish your 
          own two cents about game designing. The more designers writing and thinking 
          critically about design, the better chance all designers have of improving 
          our skills and being able to make better games. </font> 
        <p> 
        <p>&nbsp; 
        <p align="RIGHT"><i><font size="-1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">- 
          Rich "Beaker" Wyckoff is a game designer on the game <b>Trespasser</b> 
          for <a href="http://www.dreamworksgames.com">DreamWorks Interactive</a>.</font></i></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><i><font size="-1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">.</font></i></p>
        <p align="LEFT">&nbsp;</p>
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