Game Programming - University of Brawijaya
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Transcript Game Programming - University of Brawijaya
Eriq Muhammad Adams J.
[email protected] | http://eriq.lecture.ub.ac.id
Informatics
University of Brawijaya
Making games fun
Adams & Rollings
50% Avoiding errors--bad programming, bad music and
sound, bad art, bad user-interfaces, bad game design.
"Basic competence will get you up to average."
35% Tuning and polishing--attention to detail
10% Imaginative variations--level design
4% True design innovation--the game's original idea and
subsequent creative decisions
1% An unpredictable, unananalyzable, unnamable quality-"luck, magic, or stardust"
Making games fun
Adams & Rollings
50% Avoiding errors
35% Tuning and polishing
10% Imaginative variations
4% True design innovation
1% Luck, magic, or stardust
Implications:
A well-tuned game with no
major problems and
interesting levels but no new
ideas could be 95% fun.
A novel game idea that is
(very) poorly executed could
be only 4% fun.
Finding the fun factor
Adams & Rollings
Gameplay comes first--give people fun things to do
Get a feature right or leave it out
Design around the player
Know your target audience
Abstract or automate parts that aren't fun
Be true to your vision
Strive for harmony, elegance, and beauty
The hierarchy of challenges
Adams & Rollings
Complete the game
Finish a mission
Finish a sub-mission
Finish an atomic challenge
Player will usually be thinking about current atomic challenge.
Awareness of higher-level challenges creates anticipation.
Challenges
Victory conditions and atomic challenges are usually
explicit.
Intermediate challenges are usually implicit.
Players get tired of just following instructions.
"The most interesting games offer multiple ways to win" - Adams & Rollings, p. 284
More than one way to accomplish intermediate
challenges
Capture the flag (p. 284): defensive approach,
aggressive approach, stealth approach
Reality Check
Almost no one makes a living designing games
Most who do work for a game company, not freelance
You could spend the same time as profitably by picking up
bottles and cans for deposits and recycling!
Most publishers don’t make a lot, either—and it’s risky
Many publishers exist largely to self-publish their own
games
Reality Check 2
So if you design games, do it because you like to, or
because you must, not because you want to make
money
Alan R. Moon, two German “Games of the Year”, would
have had to get part-time job if not for Ticket to Ride
winning
Recognize that your “great idea” is probably not that
great, not that original, and not that interesting to
other people
Finally, it’s extra-hard to get into video game design
OK, How much do you make?
In my experience, royalties are a percentage of the
publisher’s actual revenue
5% is most common
Publisher sells to distributor at 40% of list price or less;
distributor sells to retailer for 10% more
Internet sales are becoming significant—then publisher
makes 100%
Shipping costs may be subtracted from revenue
Royalty example
$40 list game, 5% of $16 = 80 cents
Per 1,000 copies, $800
$20 game, $400 per thousand
Wargame typical printrun is a few thousand
“Euro” games might go up to 10,000
Most games sell poorly after first six months, most are
not reprinted
German “Game of the Year” might sell 250,000 or more,
after award
What about the biggies?
In general, the really big companies have staff to design
their games
Many will not even accept outside submissions
Virtually all will require you sign a statement relieving them
of all liabilities
At least one only works through agents
In USA, Hasbro owns all the traditional boardgame
publishers such as Parker Brothers, Avalon Hill
Do I need an agent?
Whatever for?
Yet, I did for my first game back in the 70s, in England
Unfamiliarity
I could meet and talk with him locally (London)
Shady “agents” and “evaluators” abound
Don’t ever get an agent who wants a fee “up front”
Practice and get others to evaluate
Diplomacy variants and D&D material in my case
Post such things on your or other Web sites
Analogy:
Jerry Pournelle (SF writer) says be willing to throw away
your first million words on the road to becoming successful
SF writer
Similarly, be willing to make lots of games/mods that don’t
make any money on the way to making (some) money as a
game designer
Intellectual Property Rights
Ideas are not important, and not valued!
Ideas are a dime a dozen: execution is what counts
Copyright now inherent
Forget that “mail to myself” idea
Registered copyright makes suits much easier to
pursue and more remunerative
Ideas cannot be protected, only expression of an
idea
The idea is not the game
Novices tend to think the idea is the important thing
Ideas are “a dime a dozen”. It’s the execution, the creation of a
playable game, that’s important
The “pyramid” of game design:
Lots of people get ideas
Fewer try to go from general idea to a specific game idea
Fewer yet try to produce a prototype
Fewer yet produce a decently playable prototype
Very few produce a complete game
And very, very few produce a good complete game
Licensed Properties
Tie-ins with movies, comics, books, etc.?
Much too expensive
Not even worth the IP owner’s time to do the processing
for a boardgame—there’s not enough money in it
Submitting Games
Read the publisher’s requirements
Some require you to sign a form and seal it in an envelope
Some won’t accept unsolicited proposals at all—this is
common
Expect it to take a long time
Expect to get rejected
May have nothing to do with how good your game is
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings rejected many times
Two forms of game design
Video games and non-video games
Scale is different
“big time” video games are produced by dozens of
people, cost millions of dollars
“big time” non-video games produced by a few
people with budgets in the thousands
Yet a few sell more than a million copies
July 21, 2015
Prototypes—”testing is sovereign”
To best improve a game, you must have a playable prototype
Firaxis’ Sid Meier-Civilization series, Pirates
The sooner Firaxis got a playable version of Civ 4, the more they could learn
A playable prototype includes “artwork” or physical components, and rules or
programming
The rules for a non-video game are the equivalent of the programming of a
video game
Programming must be precise and is very time consuming (game engines may help
in the future)
A playable set of rules can be much less precise, relying on the mind(s) of the
designer(s), and notes
It’s also much easier to change the non-video prototype to test different
approaches
It’s much easier to produce the physical prototype, than to create the
artwork for a video game
Learning to design
So we can have a playable, testable non-video game much
more quickly than a computer game of similar scope or
subject
Consequently, it’s much easier to learn game design with
physical games than with video games!
Kevin O’Gorman’s concurrence
Art vs. Science
As in many other creative endeavors, there are two ways
of approach
These are often called Romantic and Classical, or Dionysian and
Apollonian
Or: art and science
Some people design games “from the gut”
Others like to use system, organization, and (when possible)
calculation
Mine is the “scientific” approach; and that is more likely to
help new designers
Game design is 10% art and 90% science
Who is the audience?
A game must have an audience
What are the game-playing preferences of that audience
Short or long?
Chance or little chance?
Lots of story or little story?
“Ruthless” or “nice”?
Simple or complex?
There is no “perfect” game
Genre
Video games are more limited by genre than non-video
games
Most video games and many others fall into a clear genre
category
Each genre has characteristics that come to be
“expected” by the consumer
Much easier to market a video game with a clear genre
How to design games
Limits lead to a conclusion:
Characteristics of the audience (target market)
“People don’t do math any more”
Genre limitations
Production-imposed limitations
“Board cannot be larger than X by Y”
Self-imposed limitations
“I want a one-hour trading game”
Publisher-imposed limits
Some are publisher preference, some are marketdictated
For example: many publishers want nothing that
requires written records in a game
Another example: consumers strongly prefer strong
graphics, whether in a video or a non-video game
Self-imposed limits
You have your own preferences
Don’t design a game you don’t like to play yourself
If you don’t like it, why should anyone else?
Limits/constraints improve and focus the creative process
Great art and music is much more commonly produced in
eras of constraints, rather than eras without constraints
Example of a limit: I want to produce a two-player game
that lasts no more than 30 minutes
Do it!
Too many people like to think about designing so much,
they never actually do it
Until you have a playable prototype, you have nothing
(Which is what makes video game design so difficult)
It doesn’t have to be beautiful, just usable
Design vs. “development”
“Development” has two meanings
In video games, it means writing the program
In non-video, development (often by a person other than the
designer) sets the finishing touches on a game, but may
include significant changes
Development takes longer than design, in either case
The designer’s game vs. the game
that’s published
Video games are often overseen by the publisher, who is
paying the bills; so it is modified to suit as it is developed
Non-video games are often unseen by the publisher until
“done”; some publishers then modify them, often heavily
Self Publishing
Do you want to design, or do you want to be a
businessperson?
But often it’s the only way your game will be published
Most self-publishers will lose money NOT counting the
time they spend
Virtually all lose money if you count the time they put into
the business
See http://www.costik.com/selfpub.html
Brief “What’s Important” on the
business side of game design
Most people in the business are honest and try to do good
It’s too small a business to get tricky, word gets around
It really is a small business, and mistakes are common
Barring long apprenticeship and great good luck, you
won’t make a living at it
Resources about the business
Game Inventor’s Guidebook by Brian Tinsman
“All about publishing” thread on ConsimWorld
Lots of books about video game publishing
Come to my seminar on Saturday at 2 about process
of game design
Types of Game Design Docs
Concept Document
Proposal Document
Technical Specification
Game Design Document
Level Designs
Concept Document
Used to explore game idea in more detail
Often used as a proposal within an organization
Developed by designer or visionary
A short sales pitch: 1-3 pages
May have no art, or amateur art
Many ideas never get farther than this
Concept Document (cont.)
Must include:
Intro
Description
Key features
Genre, spin, flavor
Platform(s) / market data
May also include:
Background / License info
Concept art
High Concept
The key sentence that describes your game
MUST get the concept across concisely and quickly
If you can't, it may be too complicated to sell
High Concept (cont.)
Not so good:
"MindRover is a game in which players build and
program robotic vehicles to compete in a variety of
challenges including battles, races, puzzles, and sports."
Better:
"MindRover is like Battlebots ... but with brains."
Proposal Document
Used to get a deal
Shown to publishers and 3rd parties
Enough detail to show that the proposal is viable: 5-50
pages
Sales oriented
Big picture
Polished!
Proposal Document (cont.)
Must include:
Revised concept
Market analysis
Technical analysis
Schedule
Budget
Risks
Cost and revenue projections
Pessimistic, likely, optimistic
Art
Technical Specification (cont.)
Must include:
Tooling
Art / Music / Sound / Production pipeline
Technology detail
Platform & portability issues
Networking or special tech
Server details
Software engineering info
Major design elements
Key areas of technical risk
Alternatives to risky or expensive sections
Game Design Document
Functional spec: The 'What' of the design
Describes the player’s experience and interactions in
detail
Could be quite long, several hundred pages, but
"enough" is the goal.
Artistic feel
Owned by the game designer
A living document
"The Bible"
Game Design Document (cont.)
Must haves
Game mechanics
User Interface
Visuals
Audio
Story (if any)
Level Specs
Interactive fiction
A way to try out some principles of game design with
relatively little overhead.
Text game engines:
Inform http://www.inform-fiction.org
TADS http://www.tads.org
Adrift http://www.adrift.org.uk
References
New Riders - Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on
Game Design
New Riders - Chris Crawford on Game Design
http://jmonkeyengine.org/wiki/doku.php/jme3
Worcester Polytechnic Institute – Game Design
Documents
Dr. Lewis Pulshiper – Getting Started in Game Design