alazyamateurgamedev

[alazyamateurgamedev]

Respect your player’s time

This is a long one guys. I Feel like I needed to do this rant, so I hope it works out

Coming from MMOs, I’ve noticed a trend in many of the AAA companies that I feel like is a mistake on their part and talking amongst my friends, it generates some pretty negative feelings towards them.  I’ve somewhat touched on this briefly, but I wanted to expand on it, since it is something that seems so disconnected from the player experience, which comes down to a very simple sounding concept, which is “Respect your player’s time”.

The reason behind this complaint is a simple one.  Most people don��t have a lot of time to play a particular video game.  Most people have plenty of stuff to do in their lives and generally are playing a video game as a way to have fun.  This means they need to budget in video games into their lives, and therefore the limited resource for players often comes down to their time, though money can also have an important aspect to this too, but I won’t go into this at this point.  Having only so many hours in the day for video games and having so many video games to choose from means that a player needs to choose to play your game.  And once they start playing, you probably want them to keep playing it.  You can make the argument of “Hey they’ve already paid for the game, I don’t care if they play it”, but that isn’t a good long-term strategy.  You want players to want to play your game, and recommend it to their friends, and then later look for more games by you.

Now for what I mean, exactly, by respecting your player’s time.  It basically comes down to anything your player does in game should be meaningful and at least somewhat fun, and it should be consistent with the style of the game.  This concept really should apply to your entire game, not just how your player spends time in game, as in all reality, your goal should be to make your systems fun enough that it isn’t even “a grind” to play your game.  This terminology technically has an inherent negative connotation to it, but I don’t exactly mean it that way in this ramble.

Now there are two places where I think a lot of companies mess this idea up.  One is the idea of adding grinds into a game to extend gameplay, especially on how a grind is managed.  The other is adding in time-gated material, that requires the player to wait in real life to progress.  Both things can be done right, in the right situation.  But you really need to think about what it is doing and why you want to delay players from completing whatever it is.  However, they do separate things, so I will talk of them separately, and I think since this post is now so much longer than I meant, I’ll discuss grinds later.  My main point (at least right now) will be grinds need to be meaningful and you should be able to make visible progress on a grind over a relatively short period of time. Or your game needs to be designed around grinding as a core mechanic.

Now lets talk about time gating material.  There are basically two types of time gates.  The first is adding/unlocking new content after a certain period of time. This limits what a player can do before having to wait in real life (not in game time) to be able to proceed with the game.   An example of this is in WoW’s current expansion Shadowlands, patch 9.1.0, they only allowed you to advance the main plot by a little bit after each reset (1 week). This meant you could only do some amount of story, and then once you were done, you had to wait until next week to proceed.  

The second kind of time gated material is removing content after a set period of time.  This limits how long a player has to do content. Most commonly this is something like a holiday event, where the content is removed when the holiday is over. However, this also shows up as a weekly reset of content.  Anything a player doesn’t complete before the reset is lost to them.  Additionally, you create an artificial removal of content when new stuff supersedes the old (Example raising the level cap).

Some of these mechanics are definitely necessary.  You can’t have holiday events running all the time, it just wouldn’t make sense.  In something like an MMO, the reset creates a good, consistent point in time to regenerate and repopulate content, as well as implement new stuff.  I think the phone games that give you a limited number of attempts/lives and then your lives regrow over time is a good use of time gating stuff to limit and keep players roughly on a level playing field, and is a good way to monetize the game in a relatively fair way.  I’m describing something like the Two Dots or Toy Blast phone games.  

Now, why does this all matter?  And the short answer is that it can ruin the flow of game and generate negative feelings from the player.  By putting a timer on these things, you create a schedule for players.  For some players, they don’t care.  However, forcing someone to play a game on some external schedule doesn’t always feel good.  It forces a player into either play a game when they don’t want to be, or not be able to play the game when they want to.  

Say you are a player. You know that this week, you have plenty of time after work to play your game, but next week, you’ll be busy with something and will have little to no time to play the game.  Let us also say the game you are playing resets once a week, right as you start becoming busy.  You play your game all you want in week 1, and do all you want to achieve, except now you’ve completed a quest chain, and it says “Wait until next reset to be able to continue”.  Well, now, you can’t do the quest chain.  And then next week, you’ll also be unable to do the quest chain.   You don’t have time to do the quest chain next week. However, you have time now, but you can’t do it.  It doesn’t really feel great.  Additionally, once the reset happens, you know won’t be able to do any of things happening in the reset.  Maybe you’ll miss out on a chance for something to improve your character, or miss the chance to do a particular rotating event that happens once every few weeks.  None of this feels good.  And if it is a permanent removal, that is just the same problem but 100 fold.  

I’m not saying that these are cardinal sins either.  As I mentioned above, there are some very good reasons to use these sorts of time gates. However, put a lot of thought into why you think you need the time gate.  If it is for some sort of balance mechanism between players, that is a good reason.  If you think your game will break down if everyone runs the top end dungeon and gets all the loot in one week, that is a good reason to have something like a limit and the reset.  However, if you gate an inherently single player thing, like playing through your story, you had best have a really good reason why.  If it is just “I want to extend how much players play my game” then you are not respecting your players time, especially when by creating artificial scarcity, you make people feel bad.

[alazyamateurgamedev]

Inaugural Post

I’m going to ramble a bit about some basics of game design on a far too philosophical level, but I think it is something to consider if you are considering game design.   I end up feeling like this is something developers end up ignoring when they develop their games. For this particular rant, I’m going to focus mostly on video games, since by and large, they don’t have to involve other people, which makes the overall experience much different.  So as I refer to gaming below, think mostly of video games, but I also think it still applies to all kinds of game design.

First of all, games are, by my definition at least, a form of art.  This is at the core of a lot of my musings about gaming, and it supplies the main challenge in making something good.  Sure, they have an extremely technical requirement in terms of making it, but it is still basically a form of art.  I’m sure a lot of people who don’t get gaming would say “Oh its not art!”, but really the goal with a game is to achieve some sort of emotional response (IE Fun, joy, fear, etc) or possibly intellectual response (IE “Let me stop and think about this), and that is all I think any artist who is trying to achieve. In this particular case, I am defining an artist as anyone who creates some sort of creative work, and can include art, literature, music, movies, architecture, etc.  Medium is not important in this context.

Now, I am also going to focus on the idea that a game designer wants to try to a) Share their game with anyone interested and b) make money.  Now, there are many reasons to make art, and some of them don’t involve public exposure, for example, painting or drawing as a form of therapy.  If that is the case, this discussion isn’t targeted at you.  In completing your project, you have hopefully achieved what you wanted.  So if you are designing and building a game for some personal reason with no real intention of exposing it to the public, then this does not apply to you.  However, I presume most people who publish a video game are trying to achieve something else like making money, accolades of people, or just sharing something they think is fun.  The first two may seem self-serving, but I don’t think it is wrong.  You should get credit for the work you put into something.

Because it is a form of art, that makes creating something “Good” much, much more difficult.  In engineering, you can pretty often easily define “good”.    Your basic goal with a non-artistic product (say a refrigerator) is to make something that does what is expected (It keeps the inside cold at a fixed temperature), and mainly to do it for a profit.   So, you can define your general goals pretty easily, and then test against them to know “Hey I did a good job” or “It does a bad job”. Things like “Does the temperature stay constant while it is running?” “Does it stay on?” and “Do the doors fall off if I open them too much?” are all things you can define and test against.  This is a bit of an over-simplification, as the appearance of your fridge is quite important and subjective and also because it isn’t always easy to define what parameters are acceptable, or how to define the parameters, or how to test for them, but hopefully that doesn’t happen to you as an engineer, or if it does, that is why you are paid the big bucks.  

Now, this long-winded explanation leads to why gaming is hard to design.  At the core of almost any game is the idea that it should be “fun”. But it is extremely hard to define “Fun”.  What is fun? As a baby, sucking on your toes could be considered fun, but most of you probably do not consider it fun now.  Some people think hiking or running is fun, but I do not.  So fun is different to different people, and different to the same person at different times.  This means you have an impossible to define goal post when trying to design a game, at least from an engineering standpoint.  I bring this up, because this is probably why you see major AAA game publishers publish substandard products, and sometimes why you see Kickstarter funded games take 3 extra years to develop (more on Kickstarter in future rants). For a software company, the company’s goal is to make money, and so to make a profit, they will need to sell enough copies of the game to cover the cost to develop it.  Part of that cost basically boils down to time, since it costs money to pay employees, and the more time you take to develop a game, the more it costs the company, and the more copies they need to sell.  

This is just an educated guess (I’m lazy, so I’m not going to do any research on this, but I’m sure it exists), but I expect many of the “Terrible flops” were actually the company defining some sort of timeline for the game’s development that ended up not working out. They either skimped on Quality Assurance (QA, also known as testing) and the game didn’t work right, or they skimped on development, and so the gameplay just wasn’t good.  Sometimes, it is just a flawed design, and you figure that out too late, and you’ve already sunk a ton of money and time into the project and need to decide what to do about it.  Do you go forward with a crappy design or do you go ahead and release a substandard product in hopes that you can make some of your money back?  Most larger companies will choose the latter, because they need to stay in business.  A handful do not, and they are interesting cases:  Blizzard before they merged with Activision and Valve.  Both were notorious for not releasing games quickly, and I think you can see the polish in the Diablo and Warcraft (But not World of Warcraft) series, as well as the Half-Life series.  I made the possible mistake of playing Half-Life Alyx before any other VR game, and its beautifully defined controls have spoiled me as compared to other similar VR titles.  However, I’m pretty sure they worked on that for ages before releasing it as perfect as they could.  However, they have loads and loads of cash and can wait.  Looking at Cyberpunk 2077, to me that looked like they ran out of testing time, and thus why it was such a buggy launch, despite the delays, and they were forced to launch.  Finally, I expect the entire lack of tangible Diablo 4 news is because they think they are missing some major component to make it what they want it to be.

My overall point on all of this is that it can take time to develop something fun, especially something that can be as complex as a game.  And on top of that, a game has technical challenges that other forms of art do not.  Not only do you have to create a fun system, but you have to make it work, and do it in a visually and acoustically engaging way.  So not only do you have to make the Art, sounds, story, gameplay, but you also have to make sure it all works right.  There are some ‘shortcuts’ you can take, like using established game engines (Like the Unreal Engine or Unity) so you don’t have to invent from the ground up, but that both adds cost and a possibly restrictive framework to work in.  

Now, you are probably asking why am I rambling about all of this?  This goes back to what I was originally rambling about, which is why are you making a game.  You are probably aiming for your game to be well received, and either make some money off it, or at the very least, get good reviews and encouragement.  So my point is if you wish to be successful, please make sure your game is, at the core, fun.  If, after you make it, you look back on it and think “I would never play this.” Or “I’d be bored with this after two minutes”, you probably didn’t do a good job. Most of this blog will probably revolve around this idea of what is (and isn’t) fun, so I hope you’ll keep reading it. If you take anything away from it, I think you should aim to make a game that is fun to the audience you want it to be fun for, but just remember that the more restrictive your audience, the less successful game you probably will have, and really to make sure your game is, in fact, fun.