A rhetoric I see occasionally regarding games with a user-generated content focus in an established franchise, is that the devs have somehow run out of ideas or gotten lazy. Jokes about Mario Maker meaning Nintendo doesn't know what to do with 2D Mario next, Sonic Forces' OC maker meaning SEGA have given up trying to make good use of the franchise's bloated cast. "Let's just get the player to do it". I assume these ideas are completely baseless, but do you have any useful insider thoughts on it?
I’ve been thinking a lot about user generated content in the past year, and there’s really nothing nefarious or lazy about it. If anything, it’s more of a new set of challenges for a different kind of team than what you may have expected in the past.
Here’s the thing - AAA professionals like me usually build most of the game’s content for a large target audience. In order for us to make the most efficient use of our development resources, content designers have to build content that is aimed at the broadest spectrum of players. This generally means that we don’t have the sort of bandwidth to experiment with more creative themes or level ideas. We can’t include a kaizo-style stage in the critical path. We can’t include more than one or two kaizo stages at all, because we have to spend the majority of our time building for the major audience. But do you know who isn’t beholden to those kinds of business and production constraints? Do you know who doesn’t have to make content for everybody and can instead focus on the small niche that really enjoys that sort of stuff?
The answer to these questions is players like you. Players aren’t beholden to revenue targets, production schedules, or bug triage. Players have a lot more freedom to experiment with things than we do with the final product.
This brings me to the first core pillar of a “maker” project - the challenges for a “maker” project are different, so we need to field a different kind of team. Instead of staffing up with a lot of content and level designers to build a lot of levels, a "maker” project needs a lot more system designers, UI/UX designers, and engineers who can build the systems for the players to create the levels and content. This is a really big challenge in and of itself! Most level design tools are super duper complicated because they have to be - the designers who use those level design tools need a lot of fine tuned control in order to create extremely nuanced environments, placement of objects and AI, and so on. But players don’t have that kind of training or time to learn, and the kind of tools we have to use usually require weeks of training before people are proficient with them. This means that our main goals here are to condense all of these details into a user experience that does most of what the players will want and keep it easy and simple to pick up. User experience and user interface work is the most important thing for any user generated content element, because it’s the main factor in the percentage of players who will engage with the creation elements.
The second enormous challenge for “maker” projects is distribution. Making content isn’t very fun if nobody can find or play your work. Only a small percentage of the total player base will ever seriously engage with the creation tools; most will only ever play the game… and that’s only if they can find new things to play with. That means that the second pillar of any “maker” project is some kind of online back end system for players to upload their creations, for us to vet them for things like playability and presence of penis, and then put them up for distribution among other players who might want to play them. Players need a way to find levels or content to play. Maybe that’s through a robust search feature, keyword tagging for levels (e.g. “kaizo”, “automatic”, “traditional”, “water”, “weird”, “boot”, etc.), favorite creators (with a subscription or RSS style list for their latest uploads), player ratings for creators and content, featured content, and so on. These are not trivial issues by any means - they’re quite substantial technical challenges! We need a substantial back end to store and distribute the game data and we need a significant investment in the UI/UX of the system so that players can find the content they want out of all of the stuff that’s available. It’s an entirely different set of design and technical challenges from building an ordinary platformer.
The primary goal of the “maker” project is to create a self-contained ecosystem of players and creators that can build interesting types of content that is a little too weird or different for us to include in a mainline release. We usually also get to add additional content to the pool over time for post-launch support (as well as our own professionally-designed levels to showcase ways to use that new content). Overall the paradigm lets us get a better return on development resources in terms of player engagement by empowering the players to make the sort of content that we can’t realistically spend our resources on. It really isn’t that we ran out of ideas, it’s that we wanted to try tackling a different set of challenges and have a different team makeup to do it.
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