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
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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
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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
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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
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$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:
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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
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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:
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Intro
Description
Key features
Genre, spin, flavor
Platform(s) / market data
May also include:
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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:
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"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:
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"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:
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Revised concept
Market analysis
Technical analysis
Schedule
Budget
Risks
Cost and revenue projections
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Pessimistic, likely, optimistic
Art
Technical Specification (cont.)
 Must include:
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Tooling
Art / Music / Sound / Production pipeline
Technology detail
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Platform & portability issues
Networking or special tech
Server details
Software engineering info
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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
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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
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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