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.
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something outdated with a ton of nostalgia value, I found an excellent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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
A reprint from the April 2013
issue of Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine, this
article rounds up several mini-postmortems for a variety of high-quality
indie titles.
If there is one thing we've learned over the last year at Game
Developer, it's that dev studios need to stay current on every potential
game platform out there, or risk missing opportunities to reach the
widest possible audience.
That's why we've put together a collection of
four shorter postmortems, each for a game developed for a different
platform: Muteki's Dragon Fantasy (mobile), Subset Games's Faster Than Light (PC), KIXEYE's War Commander (social), and RSBLSB's Dyad
(console).
So whether you're a single-platform dev wondering if the
grass really is greener, or you just want to learn more about what went
right and wrong with a handful of standout games from last year, read on
for the mini-mortems.
Mobile: Dragon Fantasy
By Adam Rippon and Bryan Sawler
We started on Dragon Fantasy on April 1,
2011 as a tribute to Adam's late father, Tom. Adam started making the
game as a way to cope with the depression and stress in his life. While
it probably wasn't particularly healthy to be as obsessed as he was with
one project, he sure did get a lot of work done in a surprisingly short
amount of time!
The first chapter of Dragon Fantasy launched on iOS on August 23, 2011.
What Went Right
1. Regular Content Updates
The game was a modest success, and we immediately
set to work on adding more content to it, hoping that by continually
adding new content we could keep sales consistent.
While we weren't hugely financially successful from
all of our free content updates, the goodwill and reputation that it
earned us was a huge benefit. We've made a lot of friends in the indie
developer community, which has been a huge help. We learned a lot about
how to market our game via shows and via the press.
Also, we bumped into
Sony several times during the development of the game, and I believe
that it was our dedication and cult-favorite status that led them to
decide to include Dragon Fantasy Book II in the Pub Fund. Had we put out chapter one and called it a day, I wouldn't be writing this article right now!
2. Great Press Coverage
If there's one thing you absolutely need to have on
your side, it's great reviews -- and we got lots of 'em. We enjoy a 4.5
star rating on both iOS and Android, despite the perpetually entitled
rage of the "OMG WHY ISN'T IT FREE" crowd.
We got great coverage from
RPGamer, whose editor-in-chief absolutely loves the game.
Joystiq gave
us some great shout-outs. And our crowning achievement was our interview
with Kotaku Australia -- Adam has a copy of it printed and hung up on
his wall, and his mom even mailed a copy of it to his grandma. (It was
that good.)
Apparently it wasn't that common for Kotaku U.S. to run
Kotaku Australia's articles, but they ran this one. Oh, and the sales
bump from that beautiful article? Very, very nice. Great press goes a
long way.
3. Good Tech Helps
Dragon Fantasy may not look like it's a
super high-end engine, what with all the ginormous pixels and whatnot,
but you'd be surprised! We've always rolled our own engine and tools,
and the work on Dragon Fantasy was a serious boon to the production of our very powerful and very easy-to-use UI system.
While we didn't make a ton of money on the game
itself, we did make a fair bit by using the tech we built for the game
on other contract projects. We've done numerous paid projects for larger
clients using our MuTech engine, even going so far as to use it in a
political news app!
And despite being reviewed by dozens of blogs, not a
single one noticed that it wasn't a native iPhone app. We're pretty
proud of that. So while we probably could have just done Dragon Fantasy
with some off-the-shelf engine, there are some serious benefits to
building your own cross-platform, application-agnostic engine if you
have the means.
Blue Team and the other teams, too, are working on constructing a working tabletop game design from items given to each team in a little brown bag. I've uploaded what notes I've remembered to our shared Google Docs and am waiting for edits and / or corrections from teamers. Surprisingly, I'd forgotten how easily one can generate game rules [remember childhood?], although it is a little more difficult as adults who aren't play friends tp work out the details. But it is doable.
Postmortem: DrinkBox Studios' Guacamelee!
6
Monsters from the Id: The Making of Doom
1
Postmortem: Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
11
Postmortem: Game Developer magazine
8
Postmortem: Resident Evil 4
8
Postmortem: Treyarch's 2002 hit, Spider-Man
2
Postmortem: Pangalore's Knightly Adventure
3
Postmortem - Sony Santa Monica's God of War: Ascension
11
Postmortem: Appy Entertainment's Animal Legends
7
A Mini-Postmortem Roundup
5
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