Aneesh Varma

The Poetry of Game Design

Note

I attended the NASSCOM Summit this past week (November 6th & 7th) on Gaming and Animation as part of my trip arranged by the British Council for the UK’s Young Interactive Entrepreneur 2009 programme. The conference was a good gathering of the who’s who in the gaming and animation sector and also brought about some interesting dialogues through the various forums and panels.

The keynote speaker on Day 2 was Ernest Adams, a well-known authority on game design, author, co-founder of the International Game Developers Association, and a regular lecturer at the Game Developers Conference. Ernest has been a lead designer at Bullfrog Productions, and the audio/video producer on the Madden NFL product line.

He has developed games for the IBM 360 mainframe, the PlayStation 2, and many other platforms. He is a member of the International Hobo game design and narrative consultancy, and the author of Break Into The Game Industry. He also wrote two books with Andrew Rollings: Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design, followed by Fundamentals of Game Design (2006).

Summarized below are some of the points from his keynote. While I disclaim that this is not an effort to capture all his key points, I hope it’s a useful summary of his speech (his lectures can be found here).

Ernest started with a very simple but important topic:

How does a game entertain its players?

He went on to list some of the elements that help create that entertainment value. These might not all apply to all games, but it’s easy to see that most successful games have covered several of these bases.

  • Game play remains the most important aspect. Content is king.
  • Story is equally paramount to get the user entrenched in the game
  • Exploration adds the required challenge and curiosity
  • Progression: hardness, new avatars
  • Risk & reward: again fundamental to user experience
  • Novelty
  • Learning
  • Creativity
  • Role playing
  • Socializing: becoming a bigger factor in recent years with the growth of social gaming platforms, whether on social networks or otherwise with increased connectivity.

One of the issues that Ernest reasoned is important in the growth of the gaming industry is being able to start creating long games (those beyond 12–15 hours). So it raised the obvious question of how to make games longer?

  • Themes & variations
  • New challenges & complexities
  • Progression: difficulty should increase steadily, not spikily. Character upgrades — power ups, new moves
  • Good pacing: periods of high activity, low activity
  • Change setting
  • Player achievements change the story plot (adaptive games)

One fundamental issue that Ernest highlighted was that the very core DNA of short games is different from long games. You cannot just extend a short game to make it a successful long game. And the rationale is in the purpose with which each type of game is made:

  • Short games are intended to be played repeatedly, yet should be different at every start (ie: shuffle a deck of cards)
  • Long games are once through and never back. Should be a realistic goal — but yet challenging.

So what is so unique about long games? What makes them their own special class of games?

  • Long games are a means of escaping reality — bringing a dream to life
  • Reward the investment of time from the player. Let them live something they can’t do in life (eg: own a farm, own a team, be an F1 racer)
  • Take care of your players — user interface and usability are key
  • Usual budgets of about 5–10mm (EA, Ubisoft, Namco)

Player-centric game design: actions and game play arise out of the player’s choices.

Animation is also something that game designers have to be extra cautious about, especially in this increasingly competitive environment. Expect users to try to do weird things. Smooth transitions are your saviour — eg: what happens when a character is jumping and a user presses Crouch? Be ready for that.

In storytelling, animation is controlled. However in gaming, animation has to be ready to adapt to the changing demands of users. Animation data is stored on the objects, not on the game. Each object has its own dynamics, behaviour, procedural animations. This has led to the following features in the development cycle:

  • Inverse kinematics — produces graphics on the go (ie: characters shouldn’t have their feet sink into the floor as they walk up the stairs)
  • Ragdoll physics — falling and gravity
  • True locomotion — the speed of a character moving should match the speed at which their legs are moving (ie: the skating effect is unwanted)

(Games now create character animations on the go. However there are often pre-rendered motion graphics.)

There are only two film companies that have made it in the game area, Lucas Arts and Disney. And this has been because they understand software engineering, not just creative and animation.

Ernest also talked about a major challenge for the gaming industry: “How do you go from outsourcing to IP development?”

  • Design a brand
  • Begin with characters — create a character that is a strong symbol of the game (ie: Lara Croft)
  • Requires more dedication as a game publisher than a game service provider
  • Everything matters, anything can make it fail
  • Skilled game producers — if you don’t have them, get them from somewhere (internationally)
  • Testing, tuning and polishing — spend 50% of time on this. The difference between a good game and a bad game is the amount of QA and refinement
  • If development is N days, then testing & polishing is 2N days
  • Don’t promise what you can’t do. Don’t hurt your reputation. Honesty wins
  • Know your audience’s tastes. Understand local styles of entertainment — what works in India works because India works that way. You can’t just bring in western thinking and implement it. eg: German games don’t have blood. British humour is different from American.
  • Don’t hire just gamers, hire game developers (it’s a different thing)
  • Don’t copy — improve
  • New features alone are not improvement. Do things better, faster, richer, cleaner. Fix the issues — don’t just add things.
  • If you can’t do a thing well — then don’t do it at all. A smaller, beautifully built and polished game is better than an average longer game

How do you transition into a game publisher in a couple of years (ie: 5 years rather than 30)?

  • Education towards game development: education provides a place where students can make risk-free mistakes and grow (see Ernest Adams’ 10 Game Development Commandments)
  • Professional game development training: there are experts and freelancers to teach large-scale asset management, SCRUM management, division of tasks

The core issue right now is that the game design industry needs experience — but that will come with training and time. Till then it’s prudent to take steps to help foster the culture of game design by looking inwards as well as outwards and attracting talent where required.

Game companies are mostly making games based on North American stories (ie: Tolkien) and a bit from Japan (medieval & shogun). The rest of the world’s stories never make their way into games.

P.S.: Of all the questions he got at the end of the speech, probably the most interesting one was about his all-time favourite games. To which he replied:

Tetris. It’s absolutely perfect. It’s simple. If you make any changes to it — you will make it worse.

— Ernest Adams, November 2009