Game design laws

[hooglese]

I've been hearing a lot about game design recently with my courses and interests which led me to devise this list of how games need to be developed to be successful.

1. Do not restrict game-play: Extraneous cut-scenes, pop-up tutorials, graphics requirements*, or stupid gimmicks are all things games seem to need to add to games to make them more appealing when really, they all cut from the resources for the game, except the pop-up tutorials, those are just annoying.
2. Don't copy another game. I know this is what like %90 of games being released are and I don't want a clone of a game that's already been released and inevitably better and therefor, going to make no revenue. NOTE: I don't mean sequels.
3. Engage the player. This may seem obtuse but this its the most important. MAKE THEM THINK. If the game doesn't make the player think, or think they can do anything, they won't play the game or think it's fun. I call games that don't make me think/engage me TLC games, because they both lull you into a stasis. Here are a few examples of how to do this: Make the player solve problems, give enemies clever weaknesses, combos, difficulty, fear, fast paced gameplay, and/or make them want to see what's yet to come.

Here's some examples of games who obey and games that break these rules.
Obey:
Metroid/megaman/castlevania
Metroid Prime
WoW/Guild Wars(1 and 2)/LoL
Starcraft
Diablo 1/2
Zelda
Monkey Island
Shadow of the Colossus
Ninja Gaiden
Rayman (ps3)
Dead Space
Borderlands
Minecraft (I think this game is the best example)
Crysis
Magika
Limbo
Metal Gear Solid (original)
Most fighting games
Silent Hill
Amnesia
Dark/Demon Souls
Breaks:
Playstation allstars
Conduit
Haze
Battlefield
Syndicate
Diablo 3 (lack of engagement)
GTA 4
X-Blades
Call of Duty >5(copied Counter Strike)
you know these games when you play them, that and I have things to do.

*HD modern engines leave less processor space for programmers to work with than what was on the game cube. That being said the game should still look good through artistic rendering.

 

[DoPo]

2. Don't copy another game. I know this is what like %90 of games being released are and I don't want a clone of a game that's already been released and inevitably better and therefor, going to make no revenue. NOTE: I don't mean sequels.

Ri-i-ight.

LoL

DotA: Allstars? Or does that not count as a "game" even though it was one in all but actual implementation?

Starcraft

So, the similarities to Warhammer 40k are totally accidental.

Most fighting games

I maybe haven't played enough fighting games...heck I barely played any aside from Mortal Kombat, some Guilty Gear and a bit of Tekken but they do seem pretty similar. Sure, it's not "copying" but...if CoD copied CS, then I'd consider "most fighting games" definitely qualify.

 

[Keoul]

Dude rule 2 is already in effect... just look at that Triple town vs Yeti town case.
[link]http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/115568-Triple-Town-Dev-Sues-Over-Cloned-Game[/link]

Other "clones" should be allowed as new versions would be improvements on the previous, exhibit A your goddamn list with LoL on it, League of Legends is a "Clone" of Dota: Allstars. It revived a dying genre and made it remarkably popular and profitable.

Also rule 1 sounds silly, iunno the way you wrote it sounds iffy...

 

[sanquin]

About rule one:
I can agree with that. When cut scenes, tutorials, gimmicks, etc actually get in the way of the gameplay then that's a problem. Though they can also add to the game if they're used properly.

About rule two:
Copied games can be better. Or still different. Take LoL vs DoTa. Some swear by one, others swear by the other. Both are good and successful games. Same with the Warhammer and Starcraft series. Also, CoD (the first) did not copy CS (1.6). They were very different games back then.

About rule three:
Not true. Take quake or quake 3 arena. Back in my LAN-party years we used to play that with like 6~10 people at once. After a while, sometimes, our mouths would just start to droop and we would go into a stasis as you called it. It was that mind-numbing to play. Still it was a lot of fun and even to this day at least Q3A is still popular.

 

[BrotherRool]

I don't think Metal Gear Solid fits with rule one. Even before the crazy cutscenes got added in, it still had pages of codex conversation.

And maybe 'restrict gameplay' is the wrong word, because you can often create a stronger game by restricting the possibilites open to a player. In one of this articles (I can't find the right one) the head person in charge of designing Magic The Gathering talked about how giving people choice and options harmed the game to a certain extent. By restricting gameplay to more streamlined decisions and more specific situations, you make the decisions available much more calculable and so more meaningful. And the people who designed Portal, were very careful to try and restrict every puzzle to one solution, when testers found solutions they hadn't thought of, generally they would remove that solution.

Even in terms of taking control away from the player for extra cutscenes.. there's normally a time and place where it's appropriate. Half Life 2 isn't as emotionally resonant as the Walking Dead and if it were trying to be, it still couldn't if it kept it's format for cutscenes. And then as the sliding scale tips closer to visual novels, the cutscenes become the focus-


I think gamespace is huge and it's really impossible to define any laws that would suit it, because there are just so many types of engagement. 'No extraneous cutscenes' sounds good, but the reason it because 'extraneous' is by definition a bad word, it doesn't set any sort of guideline on what counts as an unnecessary cutscene so I think you need to push deeper to find the issue that makes you label a cutscene as extraneous


As far as 2 goes, a lot of the very best games have been copies of other games. The lifecycle of every genre starts with Doom, and then Doom clones, and then we realise that every game is unique and that an idea isn't some sort of one-shot thing and we start calling them FPS'. And then we had GTA and then we had GTA clones, and then we realised that no, that again was an idea with lots of space for flexibility and exploration and we realised they were just sandboxes. And then we had DotA and then DotA clones and finally we realised they were MOBA's. And now we have CoD, and CoD clones and the term Modern Military Shooter is on the ascendancy.


Sure you should always understand the idea that you're taking from and use that idea to suit the purpose of your game, rather than just copying it blindly, but ideas aren't this finite resource. When someone discovered Dutch Angles we didn't refrain from copying that technique, we studied it and incorporated it into our repetoire. In the same way, when people copied Dune, that wasn't a bad thing, they were just discovering the RTS spectrum.


3 is fair game. Player engagement should generally be the end goal of a game (although not always, there are films, books and plays ever now and then that seek to deliberately not engage their audience as part of their point. But that's pretty rare)

 

[Professor Lupin Madblood]

I cannot honestly think of any laws. As laws always have exceptions.

Actually, actually.

You're thinking of rules. Rules are the ones with exceptions.

Laws don't have any exceptions (in theory). That's what makes them laws.

 

[burningdragoon]

I'm going to have to disagree pretty much entirely with #2. Sure, basically reskinning a game isn't good design, but "like x, but better" can be a pretty good starting place I'd say. "Like x, but with twist y" also is not too bad depending on how deep the design is.

#1 is... okay, though of very little substance. Basically just "games should be good and not have bad stuff".

#3 is fine I guess.

Personally, I'd probably go with there not really being rules for the most part. At least not in a broad, all-encompassing sense.

 

[ThriKreen]

Geez, in my experience, there's only ever been one rule for games: Fun trumps everything else.

 

[WoW Killer]

Geez, in my experience, there's only ever been one rule for games: Fun trumps everything else.

Even that's not true because many will cite some excellent games that aren't fun.

E.g. the horror genre, where the point is to scare you rather than entertain you.

I think rules of thumb are more appropriate. #1 is pretty agreeable as a rule of thumb; it's better to progress a narrative during gameplay, combining it with the gameplay, than having some sort of stop/start action in among cutscenes. That can mean turning the narrative into a gameplay feature through dialogue choices and mini-games (e.g. Mass Effect, LA Noire) or having speech occurring over the top of combat (e.g. Bastion, Borderlands). Basically, this is something most developers have picked up on, and it's something you'll find modern games doing quite a bit better than they used to. There's a technological side to it as well, of course. I mean when games were lower tech, you couldn't have much in the way of facial animations occurring without a pre-rendered cutscene. Therefore, your narrative progression could either be dynamic but less expressive, or expressive but static. And before voice acting was so prevalent, speech meant text, so having that over the top of a combat situation would detract from the gameplay (one, it clutters the screen, two, it's harder to multitask). I'm sure there are some counterexamples, but as a rule of thumb it seems solid.

I can't agree with #2 even as a rule of thumb though. Game design is mostly evolutionary. Most games go just one or two steps beyond games that proceed them. Without a certain amount of copying we'd be just throwing around random ideas rather than refining them.

 

[hooglese]

Well I forgot one thing, the internet. CoD>5 copied CS's multiplayer style (search & destroy) and violates the OTHER RULES, namely #1. As people seem to be forgetting, rule 3 means when your playing, your thinking and reacting. Violators of this rule are most casual games. Poker is a good example, it's not very popular in the virtual medium, unless you have a gambling problem. Why? All skill in poker comes from the "poker face" and tricking people the rest is almost entirely luck, unless you count cards. You can't really bluff an AI, because an minmax algorithm, i think that's what they use but dont quote me on that im tired, can't be fooled using the same techniques. LoL is a clone of DoTA which is a mod of Warcraft 3, I know, but it does rules 1 and 3 so well I don't care, and I consider them not to be clones. Lets look at some blatant clones: Haze 99% of all MMOs, I know Ultima was first btw. It's okay to be inspired by another game just don't set out to be it, because you'll inevitably fail, like Duke Nukem 2011 did, it copied so many games it forgot to be Duke Nukem. It's more of a rule, but there are like 5 game templates now: realistic shooter, space shooter, medieval rpg, grand theft auto style sandbox, sports/racing game(this is one genre to me).

About rule 1: It should be unanimous, it's a game, make the game about the gameplay and make that fun. Don't tear us away from the gameplay, it's counter intuitive, like, I can't believe i forgot to put this, but Final Fantasy>9, when the game was just auto attack auto attack auto attack heal.

 

[al4674]

Your rule 2 is completely unrealistic - there is absolutely no need to constantly re-invent the wheel. What do you even mean by clones - as in after RE4, every over-the-shoulder shooter game is a clone of it? So they should be dismissed? Define ''clone'' and bring examples.

And one rule I would add is a no-grinding rule. Generally I always finish my games, but if I'm required to grind just to finish the main campaign - then that's the cut-off point. There is no way I'm going to do some mundane function that takes no skill and only time over and over again.

 

[Exius Xavarus]

The only game design law I couldn't stress enough is the regulation of grinding. If we have to do a bit of grinding to make sure we can progress, that's fine. I can tolerate a bit of extra gameplay for more story. But don't make us grind our faces off until the sun rises for the next segment of story only to make us do it again in 5 minutes. That's awful.

Grinding can be good sometimes, though. Grinding is good when you're actually rewarded for grinding. Grinding to reach the next story segment = bad. Optionally grinding for the sake of being Über-Powerful and bulldozing enemies and bosses for fun = good.

But of course, that's just me. I love me a good JRPG, but I can't stand having to grind for hours on end just to be on par for the next boss(I'm looking at you, FFXIII and fuck you, Dahaka).

 

[asinann]

WoW was nothing more than an inferior copy of Everquest, and almost everything else on your "obey" list was a copy of something older (everything short of the first Zelda, Metroid and Castlevania. Even Metroid Prime was nothing more than a Doom clone.)

 

[Smooth Operator]

Sorry mate but when it comes to Blizzard all they do is buff up existing games, but because they know how to put things together well it's perfectly fine.

You don't need to reinvent the wheel every time you just need to use that wheel for something of value, or possibly make a better wheel.

 

[Fluffythepoo]

No one tell OP about casual gamers, he wont like what he sees.

and the one law for game development should be "Is there a market for this"

 

[Zeh Don]

http://www.finitearts.com/Pages/400page.html

The 400 Hundred Project deals with Game Design Laws, 400 established rules of thumb created by the best minds in the industry.

Enjoy!

 

[hooglese]

Thank you Zeh Don

 

[Itdoesthatsometimes]

I think these laws that you are learning are suppose to inspire you as a game designer. Not to actually reflect what you will be doing immediately upon graduating. To me they sound more like words to sustain you through the inevitable drudge before tech and industry catches up with the hopefully happy place that is to come, with game design and the fulfillment of. They are but inspirational words to help you keep with your chosen career despite how bleak it may seem now or in the projected future. Take from it what you would. I for one like the ideas.

I apologize if this topic was specifically intended to analyze every point. I think that however the intent is to provoke thought in yourself as a game designer, when and where you find yourself frustrated. Kind of like the Bible. You can not get behind it all, but try to find what makes you happy and inspired. They are not laws.

 

[Twilight_guy]

I feel as if you through out some rules without understanding why they are important. For example both 1 and 3 are the same thing. They have to do with engagement and player agency, both essential parts of any game electronic or not. Number 2 isn't a law and in fact is the antithesis of how a medium grows. You don't reinvent the wheel every time you need one because "copying the old one would be a clone and thus bad!" you keep the core concept and you build on it. Yes, shame-less ripoffs exist but that doesn't make them bad games, what makes them bad is that they copy another game without understand why its fun and screw up because they change something that made it fun. If you understand what makes a game fun, you can create a similar game with improvements, reskin it so you don't get sued, and release it as a potentially more successful product (assuming you don't lose sells because 'RRRRIIIPPPPOOOOFFFFFFFFF!' keeps getting lobbed at you). On top of that, there are no rules, only guidelines (que people quoting me to post Pirates of the Caribbean Youtube videos) and these guidelines are numerous. Additionally, there is a, admittedly haphazard and informal, field of study into game development, and another field into game theory that is related though its applications are different. Trying to squeeze this down into nuggets of wisdom is a hard task.

 

[DoPo]

and yet, no one cared to help to fund wildman with some possibly quite unique gameplay.

Well, at least from what I heard explained - no, not really. The ARPG section would be...like an ARPG. At least it was advertised as such. The RTS section was also not something new and unique - I've played several Flash games that did it already (Age of War, I think the name was) only without "move to a new area and play it again" part. And the blend of the two I've seen in Warcraft 3 custom maps...I can't recall names I think it was Ages of Strife but maybe that was the more DotA lookalike. At any rate they were like DotA but closer to what Wildman was claimed to be. Well, none had the "more areas" but still. And speaking of DotA - it did sound like DotA, too - only you have more control over your creeps. Which the other custom maps had (you could upgrade them, repair the building and I believe build new ones, too).