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Hello,

My blogging style evolved a lot these past months and Tumblr looks now way more adapted to me.

Now www.enterthusiast.com redirect you to my Tumblr blog.

See you soon on Tumblr!

Busy time

Credit : arseni.deviantart.com

Hello there, it's been a long time !

As you can see, I wasn't in the mood to write article recently.
Parts of my life needed my full time attention and still do. Anyway I find a solution to keep you entertained.
For now on I'm going to share with you meaningful articles I read as many as I can. Don't be afraid I'll give you a short pitch for each of them, so you'll easily pick the ones you like without wasting you time !

I hope you're not to disappointed with this move, but nowadays I need my time for other things than writing.

Enjoy and keep on the creative work !

--

We're going to start with two short but very practical article from Raph Koster :

• This first article is mostly about basics, but it's always worth keeping in touch with simple meaningful guidelines so read it ! Oh and it's quite short, so there's no reason not to read it.
  The fundamentals of game design
• The second one is a list of small thoughts that could help you trigger good ideas or resolve method flaws you could struggle with while making games. Keep it bookmarked it could help you one day particularly if you get stuck with a game design or creative issue.
  40 ways to be a better game designer

Happy reading !

Meaning as a game design rule

Discussing some game mechanics with a friend he told me something like : "We need this mechanic, so I'm going to do it as every one else did". I was choked.

Anyway I'm agree about one thing in his sentence : we don't always need to reinvent the wheels. But what if we still had wooden wheels on our modern cars ?

In fact that's where I strongly disagree with my friend, not that we always need to build new and different game mechanics to fit the same goal, but that we have to smartly adapt existing one to perfectly fit new games.

For example, what about a merchant mechanic in a game ? Should we copy/paste a standard merchant with standard buy/sell mechanics ?
I used the car metaphor before so here's the same question for a car : what about an energy source for the car ? Should we use the standard oil energy ?
You can obviously respond yes to these questions. But will this response perfectly fit your game and your car design and purpose ?

I want to point the truth that copy/paste is the best way to get wrong. Before making any choice you must evaluate your need :
Why your game needs this mechanic ?
Is this mechanic fitting in your game rules and background ?
For what purpose player will use it ?
Will it be useful for the player ?
Could it be a more enjoyable way to present it to the player ?
Etc.

When you are sure you need this mechanic ask yourself the same questions and adapt it to your game until it seems to be indispensable.

To conclude my little though, don't let some copy/paste features kill your game uniqueness. Features are good only when they have meaning; when they fit and serve the game. For me, no feature is always better than bad feature.

The school of mandatory polish

Since I work in the industry I have mostly work on what is called casual games. Most of the dedicated video game audience see this kind of game as crap and for some title they’re obviously right. In fact it’s not the fault of casual game but of the investors thinking "let’s sell some poor game to an ignorant audience, and let’s call that casual game as an excuse". Sadly it sometimes works; or mostly it worked until mass market clients was upset by the scandalous quality of these games.

Anyway good casual game design is a school I’m proud to be part of, and mostly for one reason.

Many game I play this days are targeted for core or hardcore gamer and a lot of them share the same default : a big layercake of indigest features. Ok, I’m a core gamer and I should like that, but when layers of features rhyme with bad polish, artifiacialy stretched lifetime and hidden weak features; I’m sad.

I will not discuss again the way items was designed in Mass Effect and Dragon Age; but that's what I'm talking about, some basic and essential design features are regularly overlooked in this kind of games.

So now here is the reason I’m proud to be working on casual game, not because I’m a fan of the genre, but because in casual game design you can’t have too much feature; unless you want to dread your players.
This way you are forced to polish your small design feautre until they are flawless, delicious and delightful.

That's a shame but a lot of big games fail to polish their main features at the same level as some of the best casual games do; like the ones by Pop Caps (Plants vs. Zombies, Bejeweled, Peggle) or some successful iPhone games.

As a conclusion I would say that even few features and simple game design mechanics are enough to make an incredibly good game for core gamer. For example take a look at Diablo 2 few features or recently at Mass Effect 2 killed or simplified features.

So please; exchange more features against more polish in my next favorite hardcore titles !

Cut up your game in "time pieces"

Recently I played more games on my iPhone than on any other platforms. Realizing this frightening fact -I'm a gamer, please understand me- I started asking myself why I was relying this much on my iPhone games. I started to figure out when and why I was playing my iPhone games. And as you might have guessed my conclusion was mostly time related.

First I realized that I played iPhone game in places or at moments I almost never played before : waiting for someone in a public place, in my bed just before sleeping, during TV ads, walking to the subway station, before the movie in theater, etc.
Asking myself why I was playing in those situations was pretty obvious, I had small time to kill, very small time to kill. The kind of time my Nintendo DS or PSP can't kill for many reasons : I don't have any of them always in my pocket, they're too slow to boot, their games are not made to kill this kind of time, I don't carry a dozen of cartridges or UMD anywhere with me, I can't buy a new game anywhere and anywhen, etc.

Then I take a look at iPhone games charts and, as expected, the vast majority of successful game (sales are a special case) are designed to allow short play session : Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Tetris, Doodle Jump, Flight Control ...

So it's a whole new world for games, a world that started with flash games played at coffee time and now expending to every small moments we often lost doing nothing.
Well, aiming to "short play session game" while making an iPhone games seems to be one way to success. But what about "play session duration" for other platforms and products ?

I'm convinced that well crafted (game) experience is bound to a good management of the time consumer has to offer.
I mean that games should help player managing their leisure time by cutting the game down to many layers of timed gameplay loop. Why I think it is so important to me and many others ? Because when I start to play a game (or any entertainment) I like to know if it will fit in my schedule and when I could stop playing without being frustrated or lose my progression.
(Talking about entertainment, look at the success of TV shows, 45 minutes session instead of 1h30 for a movie. I bet that's one part of their success)

As an example I'll take a game I'm currently playing : Alpha Protocol. First because it's fresh in my mind and second because those layers I spoke of are easy to spot and understand in this game.

Alpha Protocol cut up time this way :

A Checkpoint takes less than five minutes to complete, a Mission a maximum average of an hour, an Objective is about 5 missions and so approximately 5 hours, and a Game Acts is nearly 3 objectives approaching a duration of nearly 15 hours. I voluntary extrapolate on some durations but it gives you a good view of how the game cut down its gameplay sessions.

The way Alpha Protocol is divided help player to manage her goals and schedule easily for each play session which is a great advantage. In fact the player knows she could start a 5 minutes play session or a lot more if she likes it or has more time.

Moreover this way of cutting up gameplay could help the game to reach numerous design objectives as a well balanced reward system, game pace, puzzle complexity, quest design, etc.

In summary I think that dividing a game with a "time knife" adapted to its target expectations and free time is something that should not be underestimated.