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6 creativity tips in an established genre |
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Monday, March 19, 2007
Tips to good design in an established genre 1: Cut been-done features. You want your players to focus on things that are new and original, not the standards of yore. There is nothing wrong with taking an FPS and adding a new type of weaponry. But if you really want to be creative, you'll gut major parts of the FPS design, and fill it back in with original concepts and ideas. Everyone have a sniper rifle of some sort? Remove it. Everyone playing with a medic? Gone. A lot of modern designs are so well balanced and tuned, that if you don't gut it first, there aren't really any design holes that need filling. To be creative, you also need to free up time in the schedule. While every game out there has a rocket-jump, that won't make it any faster to implement again, it will just make it less worth doing. Cut things... your coders and artists will thank you for it. 2: Balance the originality of your setting against the originality of your gameplay. It's difficult for a player to figure out both the rules of a completely original game and how those rules map to a completely original world. If you're firing sticky balls of goo at opposing players, and different balls combine to form different effects, the rules will be a lot easier to figure out if you are playing in a cheese ball factory in Detroit rather than in a maltzkano malifluator from the planet zorkon 5. Give the player lots of things that they can latch onto and understand, and you can throw an equal number of curveballs at the player. They can Ore No Ryori 3: Do everything but play games in your genre. No game is truly original, and the faster you get over that ideal the better your games will be. Street Fighter 2 was a sequel. Dance Dance Revolution was based upon Bemania, which in turn was based upon earlier rhythm games. There were block puzzle games before Tetris. Katamari Damacy used traditional tank controls. Know all of the games out there. This is especially important when you are planning on straying from prescribed formulas. Avoid their mistakes and steal their moments of brilliance. The best original ideas are stolen from unexpected places. Pikmin was an original RTS that was based upon a stroll that Miyamoto took through his garden. Dual-fisted weapons have been a mainstay in Hong Kong cinema for years before gaming discovered them, and there are still more ideas to be taken. There are a million great, unharvested cultural and stylistic ideas out there, and no reason why you shouldn't be the one to spot them. You just have to look in unexpected places. Why haven't we seen a game that resembles a bollywood musical? Or that captures the feel of mountain climbing? As a side benefit, if you can reference what you're stealing from, you can convince the rest of your team (and your publisher) more easily to go with your ideas. 4: Engage the player emotionally. There are thousands of games out there, but most don't make the player feel any emotion. To really "get" the player, you need to convey a mood. This can be as complicated as romance or as simple as panic. Pick an overarching mood, and let your decisions be based on supporting that mood. Give the players emotional highs and lows. Dada, Stagnation in Blue No matter what you do, it will be done better if you grab the player's attention emotionally whenever you can. As a side benefit, this helps simplify design decisions down the road. For further reading, see creating emotions in games. 5: Foster a culture of communication. Most gaming companies are surprisingly insular. QA people who speak are shut down, major communications mediums are if not explicitly regulated have implicit controls... What you need to do is foster a culture of communication at your company / indie studio / group of friends. Ideas are the bread and butter of a company. Even if an idea itself is flawed, the person pointed out the idea in order to try to cover a flaw in the larger design which may have been overlooked. Creating a culture of communication takes a lot of time and effort, and comes down to the sum total of little decisions like how you respond at 1 in the morning before E3 to an idea that is being posted for the 30th time and that you've hashed and re-hashed to death. Shaping the flow of communication without squelching it is essential to the freeflow of ideas at your company. And yes, maybe 95% of them will be things already discussed, or you're already doing, or they're not worth more than a cursory glance. But 5% of the time people will come up with the ideas that make your game. Carefully grow that communication, or you will miss out on a great resource. 6: Sweat the details. Every little detail of your game should have meaning and enhance the effect on the player... from the Cursed Sword of Ultimate Power to the little hut on the side of the village by the latrine, fill your world from moment to moment. Why is you player doing this? Why are your characters doing that? Examine every moment of gameplay as if it were the only one the player was going to have. A hallway shouldn't just be there because you need to get from point A to point B, it should be a choke point, a moment of closeness, a welcome shelter, a dangerous trip into the unknown... Always be asking yourself "what could be the entertainment value of this?" Looking at every moment of a game in closer detail can help spur ideas that will lead towards more originality. The player needs somewhere to heal... why not have neutral healing spikes set around the landscape by clerics, where both the players and their enemies can heal but can't attack? It would be the perfect place for an ambush, or an uncomfortable temporary truce leading to a Mexican standoff, and you would be forced to go there as a matter of course. By just examining this one little detail, how to give the player health, you've created an effective, entirely new system that enhances gameplay more than having random health paks would. - Chris 1:35 AM [+] Comments:
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