You can’t beat learning from personal experience… but learning from someone else’s experience is often less painful. In this post, I’ve collated some of my favourite post mortems, game design documents, and design analyses for mainstream games, from Mario, Sonic, and Zelda to MGS2, The Sims Social, and Portal.
Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda
The NES was the Wild West of game development, I thought, lawless and free. [...] As it turns out, I was totally wrong! Instead of finding something outdated with a ton of nostalgia value, I found an excellent primer in the fundamentals of non-linear game design.
Ratchet and Clank Developer Commentary
Tony Garcia and Mike Stout play through the Ratchet and Clank games they worked on, discussing the creation of the games as they do.There are hours of these videos to watch, so here are a few moments that stuck out for me:
- On focus testing: They don’t dumb down elements because focus testers can’t figure out how to use them, they cut them out when they realise they can’t afford to put in the time and resources to get the resources right.
- On side-quests and mini-games: “If the player didn’t sign up for the thing you’re designing, you really shouldn’t make that thing super hard.”
- On focus testing levels in “block form”: It’s really hard to get testers to look past unfinished art and test the gameplay alone; it invites simple criticism of “it just looks unfinished”.
- On puzzle design: It’s more important for a puzzle to make the player feel smart than it for the puzzle to require the player to be smart. (Also touched on in this video.)
- On hard vs. fun: “It’s really easy to make something hard, but making something that’s fun and difficult is different.”
- On pathfinding: Tony discusses getting the Tyhrranoids to behave.
- On jobs: Mike and Tony discuss the state of the games industry, and getting a job in it.
Chrono Trigger’s Design Secrets
By allowing the players to travel freely through time and space, the developers opened up the game world to exploration. Although most optional narrative sections are inaccessible until the player finds the Epoch – a time machine which also allows for fast travel through the game world – the player is allowed to find their own way through the main narrative with minimal interference.
The Light of Day (Jill of the Jungle)
The player’s mechanical actions – a slow climb, gaining a small bit of ground every time she hits her jump key and manages to grab the next power-up token – mirror the protagonist, jill’s situation. and central to the experience is upwards motion (reinforcing the metaphor, each token is an arrow pointing up). jill is trying to climb out of the underground and into the light; the player is jumping her avatar higher and higher to unlock the level exit.Also see to the right, hold on tight and low overhead, each about the design of Super Mario Bros.
Lessons From Doom
The lesson for future games might be this: make your technology extremely simple, easy to modify, ship it with a diverse enough pool of content that people can extend it to create a variety of settings and styles, and promote the sharing of this content as a way to add value to your game.I know this quote is about Doom, but I can’t help but think of Minecraft.
The Invisible Hand of Super Metroid
Whenever a Metroid player aquires a new power-up, her mind races back in time in a way not unlike what happens at a turning point in a movie. When a secret is revealed we are forced back through the story to mentally review everything we’ve seen so far, sometimes changing the interpretation of entire scenes. So that’s why Obi-Wan was so worried about Luke facing Vader. What did this change? This happens in Metroid too.[MORE at http://gamedev.tutsplus.com/articles/roundups/analyses-post-mortems-and-game-design-docs/ ]
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