Designing a Game for Brendan

WARNING 

When I say I’m designing a game for Brendan, I mean me. My opinions will be very subjective. If you relate to these opinions, then it will make the reading experience all the better. Thank you.

Let’s make a game for myself. That is a difficult thing to do because I am two people. Not actually, but I find that there are two different attitudes I have when I approach a game. I have a designer side of me and a gamer side of me. Both want different stuff. What exactly is that?  I will break it down here.

Let’s talk about desire. 

As a game designer, I want players to have fun with the games that I make. 

What is fun anyways? 

Unexpected surprises of pleasure? How do you even do that? I find the definition to be too hard to put into practice, let alone wrap my brain around, so I always go back to a small checklist for what I want out of my games. As a designer I want my players to:

1.) Be engaged with the content I create.

2.) Have to think about the choices in the game.

3.) Appreciate the hard work I put into making the game.

For engagement, I simply ask that the player spends an appropriate amount of time playing the game and feel/want to play it again for one reason or another. 

How long is an appropriate amount of time? 

It depends (like everything in life). For example if I make a puzzle game, I would hope that they at least spend 5 – 10 minutes thinking about each puzzle. If it’s a board game, I would hope they spend at least 10 – 20 minutes on the whole experience. The point is if they walk away thinking, “That was it?” or “Wow that was way too long.” I’m doing my job wrong. 

Why do I think about this in terms of time?

I feel time is not something we think about when we play a game, but rather, it is a metric we use to reflect on our gameplay experience. Think about any time you talk to a friend about a game and say they “I sunk like 200 hours into that game.” Call it sunk cost fallacy or not, for some reason, it is always one of the first things that people say when talking about a game.

How do you design for that?

You can’t. You just have to hope that the system you build is tedious enough that players will want to put that time into getting better. The best way I can think about that is through making the player make choices.

For choices, the best shorthand is trade offs, trade offs, trade offs.

Well, aren’t all choices tradeoffs?

Yes? Actually no. In some cases, choices are arbitrary or based on preference. Which color do you want your spaceship to be? Which path do you want to take first? Was six hours enough time to sink into this game or should I play another match? Those are all still choices, but that’s not the choice I’m talking about. I’m talking about choices that affect your gameplay forever (or at least for a while). Do you choose rock, paper, or scissors? Do you stock up on medkits before going into the next round? These choices are important because they ask the player to shoot for a certain goal based on their actions now.

How do you make a trade off?

It’s very simple actually. Every choice should have something good and something bad to go with it. If a choice didn’t have something good going for it, then why would you pick it? Conversely, if a choice didn’t have some bad effects, why wouldn’t you pick it? You could say a choice could be between two good things, but the tradeoff is that one will be better and the bad part of each choice is the fear of not making the right choice.

Let’s take a look at an example of a choice: Push A to gain money.

Why is this a choice?: You don’t have to push the button, but you can. Therefore choice.

What’s going for this?: You get more money.

What’s bad about this choice?: ….. nothing.

Everybody loves money, so why not push the A button?

Let’s add something bad to it: Push the A button to gain money, but YOU DIE.

This is a bad example, because (hopefully) you realize that dying is a little too harsh to ever want to gain money. So lets reel it back: Push the A button to gain money, but your movement gets a little slower.

Why would that happen?

Because the money is heavy! It makes sense contextually too. That’s a bonus. 

Is moving slower worse than gaining money? 

In a normal sense, maybe you wouldn’t want to move slower, but all you have to do is make up reasons why the answer to that question is: It depends. For example, what if you were moving through quick sand? You probably don’t want to move slowly through that. What if you were at an expensive restaurant? You better hope that you push A button fast before the check arrives.

But what if the floor of the expensive restaurant was quicksand?

It depends!

At the end of the day, you as a the game designer don’t need to know the right choice for every situation. You can let the players do that for you. You just have to hope that they feel smarter after making that choice (the best way to find that out is through playtesting. I learned that the hard way).

Now that the player is thinking and spending a lot of time on your game, that last thing I can hope is that they appreciate that I too spent a lot of time on the game as well, just from the other side of the screen.

What is there to appreciate?

If you are a fellow game designer, you might appreciate all the “clever” tradeoffs that we built into our mechanics. Most of our audience aren’t designers so most appreciate the raw moments (the fantasy) of our game, the clever story, or the beauty of our game.

How do you appreciate the raw moments of the game?

You actually don’t. At least, the player doesn’t appreciate the moment until it’s long gone. I find that designing a moment to be appreciated is the wrong approach. Instead, focus on making the moment as strong as you can. Whether it be juice, choice, mastery, progression, or all of the above players are watching with their subconcious just as much as their conscious is.

How do you appreciate the clever story of the game?

I honestly don’t know. I’m not a writer, but I can say as a player (more on that later), clever stories tend to hit you with a twist that changes the gameplay or how you think about the gameplay. If you were in a war simulator and you found out that the city that you were grinding for exp had your relatives on your mom side, don’t you think you would think carefully now about what cities you farm for resources in the future? I certainly would. 

Another thing that always gets me is learning that a world actually does make sense. When people write video essays of a game, one thing they will always talk about is the sensical nature of a plot and what NPC 945 said and how that minute detail finally proved that devs cared to make a good game. When you watch the essay it’s mind boggling that the story would even make sense from 7 different levels of context, but there it is. Making sense. I strive to make a story that is good for people.

How do you appreciate the beauty of a game?

That’s easy. If you make good art (or get somebody to make good art), and display it properly in the game, people will eat that up. How many times do you think I stopped to take in the sights from Breath of Wild? The answer is a lot and I’m sure I’m not alone on that answer either. Sometimes beauty comes from the UI, the background art, or character designs. Wherever it is in your game, if you put a frame around your art, people will at least glance at it. 

In total, as a designer if I can get my player to think, put in time, and appreciate the work I put into my game, I will feel rewarded. There’s one fatal flaw to this desire: all these motivations are selfish and a player almost wants the complete opposite out of a game. Let’s talk about player desire.

As a gamer, I want the game to be fun, but we already talked about how bogus of a metric that is, so let’s break it down. Keep in mind what I want as a gamer is highly subjective. Every gamer wants something different. If you don’t know what you want out of a game I highly recommend you take the Gamer Motivation Profile 

I want 3 things:

1.) For the game to be completable

2.) For the game to be satisfying

3.) For the game to be easy

For completeness, make the game finite and not take 60 hours. My brain in particular loves the idea of upping a counter to the point that even though Twitch’s channel points system is so obviously gamification of viewer retention and channel loyalty, I still click the “add more points” button every 15 minutes it pops up. This is why when I play an RPG, I will grind out the game until I can beat it by pushing A. If a game has sidequests, I will complete them. If a game has collectables in each level I will find them. If a game gives me a goal and then rewards me for doing it (a cutscene, an alternate ending, a skin), it’s the best feeling in the world.

For a game to be satisfying, it usually comes down to game juice or appropriately matching mental build up with a good release. As a gamer I almost can’t describe what that means, but the example I can always come back to is the forward air for Mario in Super Smash Bros. Melee:

Without getting too much into animation, look at how far the wind up is, the shine before the punch, and how big the actual punch is. When you time that with sound effects, that feeling is amazing when the punch connects. Anytime I think “What is satisfying?” if it doesn’t compare to that feeling, then it’s not.

For difficulty, I want the game to be easy.

Does that mean you select easy mode when playing a game?

No. That messes up the priming of a game. How game difficulty is presented in games is a whole different discussion, but to put it simply, if I enter a game on easy mode, I won’t think I earned the win fairly. I’m not saying I’m a masochist and play games on extreme difficulty. I just hope that if a game developer says “Yep this normal difficulty is what should be expected from an average player,” then who would I be to complain?

So you want the normal mode to be a challenge?

No. I want the normal mode to be easy. It’s really weird how our brains work. If we are told what we did was hard and it was actually easy, we feel amazing. If we’re told what we are doing is easy, then we feel like it’s almost expected of you to do it. Completing the challenge doesn’t feel like a triumph anymore, but rather a check on list to ensure your not stupid. So if I’m told that the game is a normal difficulty, but I feel like it’s easy, then I feel good about competently passing (games are very much about mental manipulation).

Now that I’ve defined what I want as a designer and a gamer, lets go make a game.

…. Well as you can see, we have several conflicts of interest.

Where do these boundaries collide?

I want the gamer to think about their choices, but I want the game to be easy. It’s easy as a designer to sit there and think “Ah ha, I’ve created the ultimate rock paper scissors spell system that always makes the players guess about what spell to use” and think this will make for a good experience. As a gamer this can be a nightmare. While that system works great for replayability, gamers want the path of least resistance. They want dominant strategies. They want to be able to win an RPG encounter by pushing the A button (especially if the encounter is the 493rd encounter from set piece A to B). Having dominant strategies makes a player feel good. You as a designer proposed a puzzle (the game mechanics and system), and the players solved it (the dominant strategy).

Does this mean you should intentionally break a game so that there’s only one solution for the whole game?

No, but there should hopefully be one or two solutions for every situation. Make patterns predictable, dumb down AI, make enviromental cues that prime the player in to whipping out their toolkit. They want to feel that they learned something, not spin for 40 hours.

I want the game to be completable, but I want gamers to appreciate every piece of work I did. These don’t sound like they’re in conflict, but believe me they are. As a designer, if you frame your work, people will at least look at it.

What does framing mean?

If you call attention to something I design-wise, did I would consider it framing. For example, a long cutscene showcasing your writing skills, a cliffside that shows off a nice view of the overworld, long animations of the player performing actions for the sake of showing off your eye for detail. These are all things that will call the attention of the player, but we have to be careful as designers to not over do it. 

You may think that cool end encounter animation or voice clips looks super cool on paper, but when a player sees it for the billionth time, it can wear on them. Sometimes we may find that leaving open space for a set piece to be shown can be cool for the player, but if they have to travel over multiple set pieces or back track over them, they might get upset about all the empty space in a game. In short, showing off your work to the player is good and can make for great moments in the game, but it’s a spice like every other one in your design cabinet, be modest.

I want the game to be engaging, but satisfying. Sometimes what makes for a satisfying design experience is finding a way to tie in both story and mechanic, and it’s something we strive for. Why did the money weigh us down? Because it was heavy! With this double layer of meaning, we don’t have to explain any further. This is only good though for getting a player to learn a mechanic though. Let me ask you this:

Why does Pacman eat pellets?

Because eating is a human nescesity? 

Sure that makes sense. But why does eating a mushroom make you big in Mario? Why does putting on a tanooki suit make you fly? Why does hitting the top of a flagpole give you more points?

Some of these have answers, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. What I find I always forget as a designer is that it doesn’t matter how mechanics are explained, as long as the player eventually gets them and they are consistent throughout the player experience, it doesn’t really matter how they work. Players handwave so much when it comes to games so long as it follows some sort of consistency with the rest of the game, they’ll get it. If you can learn to let go of trying to make everything make sense then you can save so much time in the pre-production phase.

What you should be focused on instead is maximizing the feeling you get from each mechanic. Going back to Mario’s punch, you could ask yourself why Mario’s hand gets big in the punch animation (You could probably say because it happens in Mario 64, but that’s not the point), but what matters is that largening of the fist makes the connection of the punch all the more satisfying.

As a designer I also might sit there and think “This maze-like-dungeon makes for an engaging experience, because they will have to work for an hour.” As a gamer this can really suck. Remember what we said about the path of least resistance. As much as I love first person dungeon crawlers, I’m 200% sure the genre died because the monotony of looking at the same six walls is no longer the most engaging thing you can ask your players to do.

Asking players to write down a map can be cool, but most players nowadays would rather pass. Know your audience.

So what can we take from this as a designer?

1.) The majority of players will not appreciate every flower in your garden. Obviously there will be people who look back on your work fondly and maybe make a video essay pouring out their love for the subtle shifts on your game’s start menu, but that will not be the majority of your audience. If you do have time to add that level of polish to your game, go right ahead, but try not to go crazy with detail, because an artist’s work will never be appreciated by anyone as much as the artist themselves. Much like sound design, if the player doesn’t notice the work, sometimes that is the best appreciation you can get from them.

2.) The majority of players are fact checkers. There will be people who will call a game unplayable because they can’t imagine a robot being able to assimilate other robots by picking them up, but at the end of the day it makes enough sense that it really doesn’t matter. If you can get that double layered meaning in your mechanics, hats off to you, but remember, so long as the game is consistent you can make it be about whatever you want.

3.) The majority of players want to feel challenged, not actually be challenged. I’m not saying to label your game as blisteringly hard and then the challenge is just pushing the A button 37 times, but I am saying, the game shouldn’t be hard for you when you ship it. Setting the difficulty up on a game will create its own community, but it will be way smaller than you think. If you can make a player feel smart or triumphant after beating a level, does it really matter how hard it was objectively? Probably not.

In closing, a person once asked,

Why don’t we design more games for designers?

and a wise person responded:

We could, but they’re not the majority of players playing the game.