Daily Deal: School Of Game Design
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
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Modern game design 101:
Control configuration is completely optional and unnecessary. Just set the controls the way you like and everyone else will love them. In particular, nobody in the world plays first person games with inverted vertical aim anymore, so make sure not to include an invert option.
Always hard-code your game for widescreen resolutions. After all, everyone in the world now has a widescreen display.
Make sure that your game is in permanent tutorial mode so that it always tells the user what button to press and when to press it. Modern gamers are too dumb to remember complicated controls, like pressing "X" to interact with everything. Also make sure that it outlines everything that can be interacted with in bright, neon colors so that the user can't possibly miss them.
If your game tells a story, it shouldn't go more than 30 seconds, 60 at most, before having a lengthy, unskippable cutscene. Always use cutscenes for anything out of the ordinary that the player's character has to do, such as setting off an explosion, sliding down a ramp or diving out of a window. After all, it's more fun to watch the computer do it for you than to actually do it yourself. Besides always remember that "games" should be a cinematic experience first and that the gameplay is secondary.
Include lots of quicktime events, gamers LOVE those!
Never include a manual save option, only checkpoints. Gamers will appreciate having to replay tough sections of the game over and over.
Only include the base game and make all the rest DLC. Gamers will appreciate the extra content more if they have to pay for it.
Include intrusive online-based DRM. It really won't protect your game from being pirated, but it will give the impression that you're a serious game designer.
Don't waste time having people test your game on a wide range of systems, just give it to a few friends and then release it if it mostly works for them. Your paying customers won't mind being beta testers. In fact, they'll probably enjoy getting a behind the scenes look at the development process and they'll appreciate the finished product more if they help to perfect it.
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Regarding #4, what I hate is that these cutscenes are *unpausable*. I have to pee, damn it!
#10 actually worked back when games were difficult enough that beating them felt like its own reward. I still haven't beaten Battletoads to this day and I really won't care if the ending sucks, I'll just be happy to cross that off my list before I die.
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I often wish that in addition to skipping cutscenes (I've seen them once, I don't need to see them every time I die and it reloads a checkpoint), you could pause them, or even rewind them. Sometimes I see something cool and I'd like to see it again, but don't want to sit through the entire cutscene for it.
That one was inspired by the PSP game The Treasures of Montezuma. It's a Candy Crush style game and when you finish all the levels, all it says is congratulations, now try the game in hard mode, and it starts over. Except that "hard mode" doesn't seem any different. If you beat all the levels again, it just starts over. The thing is that it starts over from the first level as if you started a new game, so not only do you not have the benefit of the upgrades you chose, the first few levels are ridiculously easy again.
Games don't need to have long, elaborate endings, but maybe a pretty image, or a short screen of text telling you something interesting would be nice.
And I wouldn't even oppose DLC so much if you could actually back it up in a way that it could be re-installed in the future without the need to re-download it or re-activate it. If you buy a game on disc, you can use that disc for the rest of your life, provided that you have a working console to use it on. If you're "buying" DLC, it should be the same. As I understand it, the limited backup options that exist only allow you to restore that content to the same console. If it dies and you replace it, all the stuff you thought you backed up is useless.
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Very interesting article to read. Thanks for sharing your views.
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*sigh*
Time to flag another one.
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