PLAYTEST
Get your partner, friends and family.. to play the game whilst you sit in the back taking notes (keep your mouth shut too!). Probably the hardest thing for me whilst making games is the difficulty curve, when you’re so close to a project for so long its impossible to know how others will react to it, i’m always amazed when people play my games in development and can barely get past the first few levels; whilst obviously i thought it was too easy. You can never do enough playtesting, i always wish i had done more on my games before i release them.
PREDICTABILITY
Things should work how the player would predict, and be obvious- everything should work how its “supposed” to. For example, most platformer characters are square, so it is very clear where the players feet will land, and the collision box on the player. If there’s a ladder in your game, it should be climbable, it there’s a gun it should kill things, if there’s an non-player character you should be able to talk to them or kill them. Basically when the player sees an object they will have certain predictions/expectations about how they can interact, and if your game doesn’t deliver, it disappoints or confuses the player. A popular comment on Bat Country is: “I tried to bomb the guys in the shark, as soon as i saw them!” because the player expected to be able to kill them, it makes sense because the bombs kill the bats, but the player then is dissapointed and immersion is also broken. If you set up a “rule” in your game, you should try your best to keep it consistent throughout.
DESIGN FOCUS
Not sure what the picture is about here, but it reminded me of a japanese movie.. “you must focus sensei!!”, anyway… stick to your core design! The experience you want to deliver, write it down in a sentence, i think my one for Use Boxmen was: “a challenging and satisfying puzzle game, focused on interaction between characters to reach a goal”, the point behind this is that every aspect of your games design should be there to compliment the core focus. It helps you stick to your vision and keep the game to its simplest form, instead of packing it full of filler content and copying other games you may have played. You will know a game that does this well, because the whole package just feels right, examples off my head are: valves games and team ico’s games. Sticking to the focus also helps make sure that every part of the game you work on, needs to be there to enhance the experience- and you wont be stuck working for a long time on parts of the game which are unnecessary or add nothing to the experience. Simple is better.
” if theres anything you want me to write more about (i really have no clue about this blogging stuff), or if you have a suggestion as to what game i should make next im happy to hear it.
