#rockethands

Well, the Glyf Blog has been updated with an exciting announcement! You'll have to go take a look for the full details, but the long and short of it is that RocketHands will be at Supanova 2012, and we will be demoing (among other things!) our new game, Glyf!

 It's official, Glyf is going to be at Supanova 2012!

I'll be down there in the Artists Alley, sharing a table with my good buddy Andy from DrewFX. Each of us will be showing games from our respective games companies. So from RocketHands (me), you can expect to see games like Rocket Fuse, Space Crash, Halogen, and of course, a demo of the upcoming Glyf.

I am really hoping people can come down, play the game, have some fun, and give us some useful feedback on various aspects of the look and feel of the game, and what we could do to make it better. We still have heaps of development to do, so it will be a fairly restricted demo, but it also means there is plenty of scope for us to take people's ideas on board. So come down and make your opinion count*!

Also, I am really excited because of the art that we get to show off. Luis and Bec have worked really hard on the art for this project, and finally people get to see it. Here is a preview of the Glyf poster (done by Bec!), which you can see at Supanova on Sat 23rd and Sun 24th of June.

Last night I gave a presentation at The Velvet Lounge for the IGDA Perth Chapter. The topic was 'Design', which is a pretty immense beast to tackle, and there are people far better qualified than me to impart their pearls of wisdom on the subject. What I can offer though, are the lessons I have personally learned from my time in the industry.

There was a really good turnout - The 50 or 60 people there were a very kind audience. For the rest of you that couldn't make it, shame on you!. Even so, here is a quick summary of my presentation.

I started with a little bit of background on myself as a gamer, and the gaming systems I have owned. Turns out I was the only one in the room who has a Vectrex. I gave a quick rundown of my time at Interzone, explained how Gamejams work, and plugged RocketHands, the indy games studio I have started with friends. Then I talked about The Eight - the eight 'points' I wanted to make.

1. Everyone's a designer.

Anyone who has played a game and thought 'That was good but heres what I would do...' is essentially a designer. This doesn't mean they are a good designer though. And it's not all about 'coming up with ideas'. That is almost the least important part. To cut the mustard, you need have the vision to see a concept through to implementation, to be able to work out instinctively which ideas will fly and which will die, and to be able to tweak the knobs for maximum fun.

2. Games > Toys

Nick Lowe wrote an excellent post on this very topic just a few weeks ago. Really all I was getting at here is that making robust game experiences can be tough, and it can be tempting to tear all the internal walls down and just erect a huge cage around the play area, and end up with a sandbox - this is generally a loss for the player. The idea of a toy (the example was a spinning top) is not as appealing as the idea of a game (Monopoly), and the difference is short term goals, long term objectives, which the former lacks. Tim Best happily supplied the audience answer that I needed - that conflict is the driver of drama, and by extension, it is the choices that characters make in the face of conflict which is interesting. I urged potential designers to give their players choices.

3. Don't Innovate Too Much

Innovation is good, and I am not a fan of games doing the same thing over and over. But if you are going to innovate heavily try to keep it focussed in its 'sphere of relevance', rather than delivering heavy innovation in a bunch of areas. Why? Because it freaks people out, Man! It can be too much for the mainstream to take, and all you will end up with is a tiny (but fanatical) fan base (i.e. your mum), and 'Retro Reviews' in five years time that will state that your game was "ahead of it's time", which is a nice way of saying it sucked. This doesn't mean you shouldn't do bizzare things in games, or challenge convention - by all means go nuts. Just make sure it is focussed and relevant to the goals of your game design, rather than innovating in every area just for the sake of feeling like you need to be different.

4. Finding Fun is Fractal

A lot of the time, as a game designer, you don't know if something will definitely be fun. You are pretty sure it will be, but it will probably need some tweaking - it is rare that these things are perfect 'out of the box'. So you need to jump in there and try it - find what is fun, what is not, iterate on it, and try again. This is a pretty well known process, and the general rule here is that you tend to find the rich veins of fun pretty quickly, after which you can move onto the smaller 'tributaries of enjoyment'. The point here is that timewise, you get diminishing returns: It doesn't just start being more fun because you spend more time on it. Learn to know when to move on to the next thing.

5. You Ain't Gonna Need It

This is exactly the same as the programmer maxim. Video games often have mechanics modelled on real world behaviours. With a knowledge of the workings of those real world systems, it can be tempting for designers to want to simulate these sorts of systems accurately. Once you have played D&D, everything becomes a nail, if you catch my drift. The reality is, often you can get away with just faking it. In fact, often it feels more realistic to the player if you do. And the programmers hate you less. And there are less bugs. In conclusion, never simulate anything.

Ok so that last part was a joke. But seriously Seamus Young has a similar story.

6. Balancing: The Endless Road

Not much to say here except that balancing gets harder as your game gets bigger, and takes longer than you think it will. Hopefully producers know this too, and allocate time in the development budget for it. You will probably find you need programming support to provide you with the data you need for balancing, and possibly a bunch of focus testing.

On the subject of balancing, it always blows me away to think of what I heard one of the World Of Warcraft designers say on their forums. He said (and I am paraphrasing) 'The objective of our game balancing is for every class to say that the other classes are all overpowered'. Not only is that right on the money for what they need to be doing, but damn. Tall order.

7. Positive Reinforcement

This is also a pretty simple point. It is tempting to punish players when they don't 'play the game right'. It is better to use encourgament and reward as your learning tool though. A related concept is the Candy Shop Girl. This relates psychologically to the positive reinforcement idea, but even more so to managing player expectations: It is especially relevant for games that release new content and features via periodic updates on the web.

There is a candy shop with two candy girls behind the counter. Their job is to measure out the correct weight of candy for a customer. Candy Girl #1 fills her huge scoop and empties it into the bag and weighs it. She successively subtracts portions from the bag until the weight is correct, and then gives the customer the candy.

Candy Girl #2 works a little differently: Initially she only fills her scoop a little bit, and empties that into the bag. Being underweight, she needs to keep fetching more scoops of candy and adding them to the bag, till it is the correct weight.

Now, in the end, the customer gets the same amount of produce, but Candy Girl 2 is the favourite, because she is always giving, rather than taking away. The lesson here for Games Design is that if you have features or game elements that are at all at risk of needing to be pulled (they are buggy, they aren't fully tested, you don't know if they are quite right), then don't put them in. If you release them and have to pull them, players will get annoyed - you really don't gain anything by having put them in your game. If you hold your cards close to your chest and only release when you are really sure you won't have to pull any content, you won't have to be a 'subtracter', like Candy Girl #1.

8. Become a Baby Killer

A very simple one to finish things off. The golden rule is: Ideas are cheap. Do not get emotionally attached to them. As a game designer, you will go to many a meeting where game ideas are tossed around on a table like baseball cards, and the ones that don't make the grade will be shredded. In a shredder purchased from the OfficeWorks in hell. You need to be comfortable with the reality that every idea you come up with can and probably will be shot down. Most often by your co-workers, and sometimes by yourself. Let it go, learn from it, and move on. You need to be able to kill your babies, and feast on their tasty experience.

That was pretty much the end of the useful content, but I also touched on something much more sinister: the dark underbelly of my presentation was to expose something that has been kept quiet for far too long. A festering sore on the face of games development: The ancient enmity between Games Designers and Games Programmers. It was time to speak up. But I could only express it with Lego. Anything else would simply cut too deep.

Thats really how it happens folks. These short documentaries channel a vicious reality that you really don't want to experience. Thats why I had to do it in plastic - I am protecting you.

These are my first brickfilms, so be kind ;)