Daily Deal: School of Game Design
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
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Today's rules for indie game design;
Never include instructions for what to do in the game. If you must include instructions, only list the bare minimum needed to interact with the game, such as what keys to use. Never under any circumstances tell the player what they actually have to do.
Hard-code your game for widescreen. Every single person in the world now has a widescreen monitor. Make sure that even if the user can select non-widescreen resolutions, the image is cut off on the sides.
Never include custom control configuration options. What Unity provides in the launcher is all anyone needs. If you absolutely must provide custom control options, NEVER, under any circumstances provide an option to invert the mouse in 3D games! Everyone in the world loves 'push forward to look up'!
Today's rules for large commercial game design;
Make sure to highlight every object that can be interacted with with a bright, impossible to miss marker and then list what key or button to use on the screen. Even if your game only uses a single, generic 'interact' button for everything (which is recommended!), you need to constantly list it on the screen because today's gamers are too stupid to remember such a complex control scheme.
Make sure to insert a cutscene/FMV after every 30-45 seconds of gameplay or the player will get bored. Under no circumstances should you allow the player to skip these scenes! Also make sure to use a cutscene for anything interesting, like turning on a big machine, setting off an explosion, or answering a telephone, rather than letting the player actually do it.
Make sure to include lots of quicktime events, players LOVE those!
Add lots of "achievements" so players can get rewarded frequently. Make sure to add lots of easy ones, like "Standing in place for 10 seconds", "Turning 360 degrees", "Looking up", etc.
Don't let the player aim in third person games. Instead make sure that player movement and camera movement are entirely separate, then add an over complicated lock-on system to make up for the fact that you can't aim.
Most controllers have up to 8-12 buttons, so make sure you use every one of them!
If you're making a flying game, make sure that the player can't crash. First, make sure that the ground doesn't actually exist, but is just a backdrop that they can never actually reach. Then make sure that if they hit anything in the air, it does no more than 5% damage to their plane.
Make sure that the levels are entirely linear and punish the player if they try to stray off the path you've set for them.
Make sure that the player health regenerates quickly so they're never in any real danger of dying.
Don't include manual saves, have the game save automatically at checkpoints. People love to replay the sections they're having trouble with over and over!
Add in-purachases for stuff that should have been included with the game, like weapons, extra levels, etc. People LOVE having to buy stuff for the game they just forked over $30-60 for!
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wow that sounds hugely interesting. Remember having a heated conversation with my the paperwriter company colleague on, in addition to the usual reminiscing about the "early days", on what we can do NOW with the electronic and software palette we can paint with today.
There were a lot more concepts that became products than the video game business. Ralph was not a software jock -- always talked in terms of breadboards and soldering. Simon, which he did with Howard Morrison, became one of the first simple microcontroller-based sounds and lights that inspired a thousand other like amusements. He introduced me to both the defense folks and Hallmark where both the gaming and artificial speech stuff we were doing made sense.
Strangely, Ralph never seemed to age - he looked the same 30 years ago as he did lately.
But great five points that we can learn from someone who never considered himself a superstar.
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