Do you fancy yourself a game developer or level designer? Do you wonder if you have what it takes to design and build games? The first thing one must realize is: it's not as easy as it looks. A game can have great graphics and sound effects. You can put your blood, sweat, and tears into it. But the bottom line is whether or not it can hook a player. And in today's market, where gamers have tons of games to choose from each month, this can be a hard task indeed.
I'm an old school game designer, though it has been a few years since I've designed anything electronic. I spend my days and much of my nights keeping enterprise systems on-line and there's not a lot of time left over for recreational coding. However, I did cut my teeth writing doors for BBSes back in the late 80s. The first couple of doors I wrote were BBS utilities as that was an easier market to break into and because I was writing doors my father could use on our own BBS. However, it wasn't too long before I started wondering what it was like to write a game that people would like? I had written a lot of simple console games, but never anything intended for an audience. That began a series of dice-based games which did fairly well among our local BBS community. It made me a few bucks, and it was a great learning experience in what worked and what didn't.
I like focusing on the positive, so let's talk about what did work. First, my successful games were designed to be simple to learn how to play, so that a new user wouldn't have to read pages and pages of documentation to understand what was going on. If you're designing a game and your players have to keep referring back to a manual the size of a small city's phonebook, chances are the game isn't going to succeed. One of the games I did work on which never saw the light of day was a game based on first edition Shadowrun's matrix rules. I probably spent more time on that game than any other but after months and months of work, I couldn't get to a point of satisfaction with it. In order to play the game one had to know the Shadowrun rules. I knew most folks wouldn't.
That brings me to my second point: the game must appeal to a solid core audience. The dice game were easy to play and anyone from 6 to 96 could pick up the games in a matter of minutes. Not every game needs to be so broad in its audience. After all, Final Fantasy has its dedicated fan base among RPGers and games like Madden certainly has its sports fanatics. If your game is only going to have a limited audience, it's not likely to be widely successful. Case in point: how many "modern" games have ever heard of Core Wars? However, Core Wars has its own fan base. It was never designed for broad appeal and that's fine. Not every game has to be the next Final Fantasy VII.
Final Fantasy VII, that was a game that was revolutionary for its time. It had awesome graphics and sound. It literally felt like it was sucking you in when you played it. However, the graphics and sound weren't responsible for that. It was the design of the game itself. The game was designed to challenge a player, but it wasn't so hard that people gave up easily. Which reveals my third point: a game has to be fun and interesting. A game is about enjoyment. Usually this means the game has to be challenging but not to the point where it seems impossible. Keep in mind that the challenge must be geared appropriately for your core audience. A game that requires you to know the rules of Bridge is going to fall flat if marketed to seven year-olds. On the other hand, a game a six year-old can beat by button mashing is going to get a yawn from your hard core gamer who knows the intricacies of Soul Caliber. But let me be clear: challenge doesn't necessarily correspond to the difficulty of the game. If you have a simple game like the dice games I wrote way back when, what was the challenge? Getting the dice to roll what you want is always challenging, but that's not what sold the games. What sold the games were they were set up where players competed with each other for monthly high scores. Yes, that's a rather simplistic challenge, but it worked.
Speaking of working, let's talk about my last point: the game must work. Nothing is more frustrating that playing a game that appeals to us only to have it glitch and crash. Street Fighter 2 when it first released had issues like this with Guile's Handcuffs and other bugs. Nothing irritates me more than playing a game and having some bug or glitch force me to either (a) lose something valuable or (b) have to restart the game. If it happens often enough, I just won't play the game. The game may have awesome graphics and sound and may have an interesting storyline. But if it keeps freezing, I'll get frustrated enough to turn the game off and leave it off. There are too many good games out there for me to bother with a game that refuses to cooperate.
There you have it, a short list of what worked for my games: they were easy to learn and play, they appealed to a core audience, they were challenging without being impossible, and they simply worked. This is just a short list. If you're a game developer or level designer, offer your comments in the forum thread for this article.
