Design better games - Read these tips!

findmattgamesfindmattgames Member, PRO Posts: 100
in Miscellaneous

Hey folks!

I love seeing new and fresh ideas in communities like this and I thought I'd pass these tips along. EDGE ran them a couple years ago and there is great wisdom here. Not all apply to 2D design but still worth a read!

Which one sticks out to you?

1. Don’t break your own rules

Ever jumped at a normal-looking ledge only to slide off because you weren’t meant to go that way, or faced enemies that were inexplicably invulnerable until the game decided they were ready to die? No fun, is it? Game worlds are built on a covenant of suspended belief. Game rules can be outlandish or even harsh, but if they’re consistent they’ll inspire us to truly care about the place we’re in. Don’t bend them.

2. Create, don’t clone

The line might be fuzzy between cloning and evolving an idea, given the fact that to some extent every game is built on what has come before, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. If games are to continue steadily improving, it’s every developer’s responsibility to ensure that if it takes on existing designs, it makes them better – be it by honing them or adding new elements. Just copying doesn’t cut it.

3. Free-to-play is just a tool

No one can sensibly question the potential of free-to-play, just as no developer can sensibly say it specifically makes free-to-play games. After all, it’s a business model, not a genre, and thinking otherwise endangers gaming with the possibility that monetisation will get in the way of satisfying design. And whether you’re a player, a developer or an investor, that will never do.

4. Stop perving

Let’s be clear here: sex in games is fine. There’s nothing wrong with representing flesh, passion and procreation. But there’s a difference between sexy and leery, and games too often stray into the murk of the latter. Continuing to so commonly present women as objects to be ogled is just the thing to alienate half of our potential audience, and keep gaming lodged in a long, doleful adolescence.

5. Invest in artificial intelligence

Games today look prettier than ever, but are their inhabitants smarter? Do they make the kind of mistakes and feints that create interesting friends or challenging foes? AI is a vital interface between players and the cold calculation of a computer, and the idiocy of AI behaviour only looks sillier as visual fidelity increases. Whether it’s through R&D or raising processing resources, make AI better.

6. Make hard mode a feature

Difficulty in games is often a product of raising enemy damage-dealing, population or speed (possibly all at once), but forcing us into cover with a hail of super-bullets is stultifying. And yet Hard mode should be inspiring, compelling us to achieve what we thought was impossible. Instead of just upping the sliders, have us apply the skills and knowledge we’ve learned to earn the pleasure of beating a game.

7. Don’t punish us to get to pirates

Piracy is a profound problem for all makers of videogames, but DRM is the daisy cutter bomb approach to addressing it. Make accessing a game awkward and no one wins; paying customers will resent it, and pirates will probably hack the protection out anyway. Region locking consoles and making singleplayer games that only function when you’re online hurt precisely the people who don’t deserve it.

8. A QTE isn’t action

QTEs are just as popular as ever. Loaded with the duty of creating the pretence of interaction in the face of linear narrative sequences, their tendency to combine rich animation with simplistic button presses tends to prove the weakness of the link between onscreen and player action. Make them meaningful, and never put a surprise QTE in a five-minute-long cutscene just to check that we’re paying attention.

9. Don’t fear the reaper

Most games feature death, but too few are designed around it. Some can seem so afraid of penalising players that they fail to make failure meaningful, or they can go too far with unpredictably distant checkpoints. But some make death a feature: Trials’ instant restarts; Infinity Blade’s rebirths; Dark Souls’ incremental advancement. Skirting death is thrilling and failure is instructive, so why not use it?

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