5 [Misguided] Tips for Making Games That Don't Suck
Wired online features Ted Castronova’s 5 tips for making games that don’t suck. Unfortunately, it seems Ted still has a lot to learn.
Don’t Be Overly Ambitious “We thought it wouldn’t be too hard to design a realistic War of the Roses-era economy, complete with swords, armaments, horses, food, and clothing. You want to create a suit of armor? First you have to smelt brass to make the bolts and gather fibers to make string … We soon learned why most designers don’t do that level of realism.”
[Immutably Me: You can be ambitious within the limitations of your situation (budget, team size, experience, etc.)]
Go Low Tech “If you can’t find a professional game studio to partner with, start small. There are lots of simple development platforms to experiment with. Look at Tribal Wars — it’s an HTML-driven online game with hundreds of thousands of users. It can be played in a browser window.”
[Immutably Me: Web Games are not inherently low-tech, neither is Nintendo DS. Low-tech would perhaps be a card game.]
Think About Your Audience “We put Arden in front of Shakespeare experts and they loved it. We put it in front of play testers and they yawned. We’d get feedback like, ‘I talked to that Falstaff guy for a while and got a quest to go repair something. I logged out and never came back.’ Too much reading, not enough fighting. Arden II will be more of a hack-and-slash Dungeons and Dragons type of game.”
[Immutably Me: It’s foolish to assume that because players didn’t wish to engage in boring quests that they will be happier with killing instead. Look at the Myst series, The Longest Journey, etc. Players love exploration and discovery. It just takes skill to pull it off.]
Get a Full-Time Staff “I love my students, but they just don’t have the schedule to do this. I have a very able lead designer and an excellent lead artist, but they had to pause for midterms. You need a core group of 60-hour-a-week people.”
[Immutably Me: Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Great game experiences can be created with two people or 200. How much over time you force them into does not make a better game. Look to Fez as an example.]
Concede Screwups “You face a moment where you can admit something isn’t working or you can lie about it. It’s like in Shakespeare’s plays: The tragic heroes keep making new mistakes that compound their original mistakes. The comic heroes muddle around and find themselves in ridiculous circumstances, but in the end they accept their own humanity, and the audience respects them for it.”
[Immutably Me: Post-mortem evaluations of a game can certainly be helpful to avoiding future errors but in my experience many people don’t learn and repeat the same mistakes again and again. I would say avoid foolish errors by surrounding yourelf with appropriate professionals and learn to trust them to do their job well.]