#keith burgun

[brightatmidnight]

Talking about The Chaser's Voyage with Game Designer Keith Burgun

Talking about The Chaser’s Voyage with Game Designer Keith Burgun

Happy New Year everyone! We’re hard at work finishing The Chaser’s Voyage, but first, to start off the year, I got to chat about The Chaser’s Voyage with game designer Keith Burgun on his livestream: The Clockwork GameDev Show. We talked about the narrative of the game, influences, and dived a little bit into the necessity of good marketing. (By the way, if you haven’t wishlisted The Chaser’s…

[indiecade]

IndieCade #ScreenshotSaturday Showcase

Push the Lane! by Keith Burgun

Push the Lane is an endlessly replayable single player strategy game designed and created by Keith Burgun, the designer of 100 Rogues and Auro: A Monster-Bumping Adventure. Choose a character, defend your lanes, fight monsters, and purchase items as you push out procedurally generated lanes and destroy enemy towers.

See more indie game screenshots: [IndieCade #ScreenshotSaturday Collection]

Submit screenshots from your game: [Weekly Features Submission Form]

[atrahasis]

Well that’s 2 games I purchased solely on the basis that their developers are some of my favorite podcasters.

[tomkail]

Expanding the information horizon

What is the information horizon?

One of Keith Burgun’s many wonderful design concepts is the information horizon. It describes how far ahead you are able to calculate potential moves. With a short information horizon, such as in RPS, the player can’t usefully predict counterplay to a considered move. In a long one such as in Connect 4, the player has to do the rote calculation of “I do this, they do that, I do this...” for several moves ahead before they’re able to work out of the first step of the move is sensible. Burgun suggests designing a horizon somewhere in the middle so that the game requires some thought, but isn’t just a calculating contest.

I recommend reading about it since I’m not doing the idea justice. The rest of this article will drill into a key part of it that I don’t think has been broken down elsewhere. 

Deep vs wide

The horizon’s limit is effectively the number of calculations the player is able to (or can be bothered to) execute. 

The horizon has two key dimensions - width and depth. 

Depth is how many turns we look ahead. 

Width is the number of options that must be considered for each turn.

The total number of calculations can be defined as width ^ depth. The player needs to execute increases exponentially the further they look ahead, making it incredibly hard to do so.

In practice

The width and depth of any game’s information horizon can be very different.

The Connect 4 example becomes a clear case of low width. A move changes the game state in a very contained and predictable way; so we often only need to work out what happens if they stack a piece on top of ours.

Burgun’s commonly suggested solution for designing an information horizon is to add fog of war. Since its impossible to know what might be beyond the fog, the number of responses to a move into it is infinite, meaning that the number we can plan (the width) for is 0. He likes this since it prevents the player from being able to play a calculation contest at all.

The other way of designing the information horizon is to add more predictable uncertainty, increasing the width, as in the case of James Lantz’s response to the idea, where he suggests a game of chess where a King has a 50% chance of becoming a queen. For each move, assuming only one obvious response for each king/queen outcome, the width is 2. This increases exponentially, making it impossible for a human to see far (This is effectively how brute force AI works).

I would agree with Burgun’s criticism of this sort of design, in that randomness makes it hard to see who the better player was. You might have simply gotten unlucky. In a better game, the uncertainty might stem from not knowing where an opponent might be, or what their strategy or play style is. What dividing up depth and width does is allow us to consider how we can design for a more or less “solid” horizon. With a high width, the number of calculations increases so fast that we fast approach infinity, which is equivalent to our fog of war example.

In LOL, players have more knowledge of what might be lurking in fog. It can only be one of the living, visible enemies. In this case, they might assess the odds of a particular branch. What are the odds of a tough opponent coming out of the jungle? In response, could they deal with it if it happened? Rather than adding noise to the outcome, mapping both odds is fundamental to the learning process of the game. The player might consider another possibility - all the enemy champions might attack them. This would be disregarded by most players, but if it were to happen it wouldn’t be right to call it “noise”, but rather a refinement of the player’s internal model of the risks and rewards of the games. This said, in a non-real time game, a player could feasibly calculate the odds of such a thing occurring to get an edge over their opponent.

In a more effective soft horizon, there are so many likely counters to a move that it becomes worthless to consider a specific one in depth, and the better response is to consider all the options without assuming one will happen. In the first fog of war case, this might mean keeping your units away from the fog, rather than planning for a specific encounter.

As with Flow theory, the optimal information horizon defines a number of choices for the player to consider that are not too simple or too complex. The “hardness” of a horizon is defined by the number and probability of responses to a certain move, where a hard horizon prevents analysis past a certain depth, and a soft horizon allow players to deeply consider the result of a small set of moves.

[linuxgamenews]

Gem Wizards Tactics will bring the strategy to Linux

Gem Wizards Tactics turn-based squad strategy to get support for the game on Linux with Windows PC. Thanks to indie developer Keith Burgun Games. Who are gearing up for the release next month on Steam. Keith Burgun Games are eager to announce their turn-based squad strategy game Gem Wizards Tactics. Which is due to arrive on Steam in February 2021. Designed around endless single player play. The game has seven factions each with their own unique abilities. These not only combine within factions, but you can also pick up units from other factions. So you can combine them into your army to create strange team compositions and strategies. Gem Wizards Tactics is also due to arrive on Windows PC next month. But reaching out to Keith Burgun Games, we are due to see the game on Linux as well.

I hope to have the Linux version out by March. Don't have a hard date for it yet though. It's being made in Unity, so Linux should not be a problem.

Obviously Gem Wizards Tactics will not be a day one release. And we don't have a solid date for the build. But since Unity 3D is used for development, this should make the porting process easier. Plus it's also a pleasure to have a unique turn-based squad strategy with native support.

Gem Wizards Tactics - Gameplay Trailer

The gameplay behind Gem Wizards Tactics offers playful tactics. Including weird magic and endless challenges. So you can lead an army to liberate your people from an ancient evil. In many ways, the gameplay will feel familiar to fans of Advance Wars, Fire Emblem or X-Com. But unlike these games, the maps are entirely randomly generated. While enemy units are spawning randomly as well. This means that the challenges are much more emergent and surprising. So your Gem Wizards Tactics strategies will have to be forward thinking as well.

Features::

Wild powers with fun and surprising side-effects! Drill for oil, which is slippery and lights on fire. Spray water around until you create new rivers. Freeze those rivers over with ice magic.

Randomly generated maps! The map geometry, enemy squads you're facing off, and Unit Rescue rewards are different every time you play.

Three distinct factions with LOTS of asymmetry: the classic royal high fantasy knights of the Azure Order. The resource exploiting, terrain burning Business Demons. And the nature and weather controlling Potatoes. Each Gem Wizards Tactics faction has their own unique playstyles and abilities. There's also cross pollination between the factions. Maybe you can find some neat combo for your Azure Knights sliding over a bunch of freshly fracked oil slicks.

Three modes are available: a short tutorial, a custom game mode, and a longer-form campaign that has you fight a long series of battles while you level up units and permanently lose others!

Colorful pixel art Gem Wizards Tactics offers an original melodic soundtrack

Lots of developer support in the form of new patches, balance changes and more.

Gameplay introduction

Gem Wizards Tactics will be available on Windows PC on Steam for $14.99 USD. With squad strategy to get support for the game on Linux in March. To learn more, visit the official website or chat with the developer on Discord

[seigasuggestion]

Cancel all “Biggest Scrub in the Universe” contests, Keith Burgun has won every single one of them.

[pixelpoppers]

I often don't care about point scores in single-player games, even when they aren't ruined by multipliers, and this article (and its two linked predecessors which are apparently not still up on that site but are available via the Wayback Machine) convinced me it's because most games use scores badly. Keith Burgun, lead designer at Dinofarm Games, discusses the philosophy of score that informed the design of then-upcoming game Auro, and it's one I can get behind.

[notadevblog]

¿Qué caracteriza un juego?

He anotado las ideas principales del texto “What Makes a Game?” de Keith Burgun. En el texto propone  definir un juego como algo en específico, es un ejercicio analítico de conceptualización frente a la amplia diversidad de cosas que suelen incluirse dentro de esta palabra, es importante aclarar que el problema que abarca esta enfocado en los videojuegos de un jugador!. 

Secciones del texto: 

Definir para comprender.

Jerarquía y clasificación de los sistemas interactivos

Enemigos de las decisiones significativas

¿Entonces, que deberiamos hacer?

1. Definir para comprender.

“Este algo es - existe algo especial, algo que no es un juguete, no es un rompecabezas, y no es ninguna de esas otras cosas que mencioné. Es algo que ha estado  presente a lo largo de la historia, y todavía prospera hoy. No tenemos otra palabra para ello, en realidad, que "juego" (...)

Yo defino este algo - un juego - como "un sistema de reglas en el que los agentes compiten tomando decisiones ambiguas".” El autor argumenta que las decisiones ambiguas son la parte más importante de un juego, ¿por qué? Su capacidad de generar en el jugador la sensación de que sus decisiones son significativas (enfocándose en los single player)

“Los juegos tienen un tipo  especial de toma de decisiones. En un buen juego, las decisiones tienen las siguientes cualidades: son interesantes, son difíciles, y la mejor respuesta es ambigua. Por encima de todo, las decisiones tienen que ser "significativas".

Significativo: Las decisiones tomadas por el jugador tienen significado y repercusiones en el sistema de juego. Hacen surgir nuevos desafíos y tienen un significado con respecto al resultado final del juego.

2.  Jerarquía y clasificación de los sistemas interactivos.

Con el propósito de hacer más claro todo lo que usualmente engloba la palabra videojuego, el autor creo un gráfico que ilustra algunos de los diferentes sistemas interactivos que la gente suele clasificar como juegos, pero para él, no lo son. 

Simuladores: (Ejemplos: Flight Simulator, Sim City, Dwarf Fortress) Un simulador es un tipo de sistema interactivo cuya principal responsabilidad es simular algo.  Las diferencias a señalar frente a un simulador y un juego, es que un simulador no tiene que ser divertido y más específicamente, no hay ningún tipo de “contest” -competencia-, mientras en un juego, sí. 

Concursos:  (Ejemplos: Un concurso de alzar pesas , Guitar Hero, Simon) Los concursos  añaden competición, pero a diferencia de un juego, no necesariamente tienen desiciones significativas, suelen basarse específicamente en medir una habilidad.   

Rompecabezas:  (Ejemplos: Un nivel de Portal, un rompecabezas, un problema matematico) “Los rompecabezas no son juegos, porque mientras que algunos rompecabezas permiten a los jugadores tomar decisiones, esto es en realidad bastante irrelevante para el resultado (No son decisiones significativas). Todo lo que importa para un rompecabezas es si el jugador dio o no dio la respuesta correcta.”

3. Enemigos de las decisiones significativas

Crecimiento del personaje. Idealmente, un juego debe incrementar su dificultad a medida que el juego progresa. pero es frecuente que se caiga en un desbalance donde no se tiene en cuenta qué tanto se incrementa el poder del personaje principal junto con el mejoramiento de las habilidades del jugador. En esta balanza desequilibrada, los desarrolladores prefieren que caiga hacia el lado que termina por hacer el juego más sencillo, esperando mantener satisfecho al jugador. Por supuesto, si tu juego es demasiado fácil, entonces tus decisiones ya no son significativas.

Partidas guardadas En esencia se refiere a que guardamos la partida en un punto, tomamos una decisión significativa y si el resultado es negativo, decidimos volver a cargar la partida y seguir por la otra puerta. “El problema con los juegos guardados es que nos aíslan de tener que tomar una decisión significativa, una decisión que tiene efectos en el juego. Si puede volver a cargar después de hacer una mala elección, entonces esa opción no tiene oportunidad de tener efectos en el juego. Si puedes guardar el juego justo antes de cada desafío, entonces ya no es un concurso. Una vez más, es una conclusión inevitable.”

Estructura basada en la historia “En primer lugar, la mayoría de los juegos basados en la historia son bastante largos, con respecto a los juegos que han surgido tiempo atras. Aunque la mayoría de los juegos históricamente han tomado entre diez minutos y un par de horas para terminar una partida, los videojuegos modernos no se consideran "terminados" en ningún sentido de la palabra durante veinte o más horas. Esto por sí solo no es un problema, pero significa que se convierte en un acto cruel y duro dar a un jugador una condición significativa de "pérdida". Por lo tanto, todo lo que pueden hacer es ganar, con esto la significación de sus decisiones se destruye. Todo lo que pueden hacer es batir el juego más lento o más rápido; Ya no es una competencia.”

4. ¿Entonces, que deberiamos hacer?

 Elementos aleatorios

“Si tu juego no tiene aleatoriedad, entonces tiene una respuesta correcta, y si tiene una respuesta correcta, entonces realmente no hay decisiones significativas para hacer (se asemeja más a un rompecabezas descrito anteriormente). Además, si te importa tener decisiones significativas, entonces "perder" tiene que existir de alguna manera, y tener “varios sabores” de ganar no cuenta!” Algunos ejemplos de juegos de un solo jugador que para el autor,  tienen desiciones significativas: Klondike: (el juego de solitario de cartas que viene en windows, usualmente llamado “solitario“)  Es un sólido ejemplo de un juego para un solo jugador que tiene decisiones verdaderamente significativas. (...) me doy cuenta de esos momentos en que tengo una opción real que cambia los retos del futuro e incluso el resultado del juego. Más recientemente, Spelunky de Derek Yu uso este concepto. (...) Debido a que los niveles son aleatorios cada vez que juegas, ser bueno en Spelunky no tiene absolutamente nada que ver con la memorización o cualquier tipo de "proceso de eliminación". Tiene que ver con tu habilidad para tomar decisiones en Spelunky.” Desktop Dungeons: No es sólo un juego con decisiones significativas, sino que lo hace de una manera brillantemente innovadora. En el juego, ganas una bonificación de experiencia por derrotar a un monstruo que es de nivel superior a ti. Por lo tanto, puedes optar por usar pociones en una etapa temprana (generalmente estas son reservadas para el jefe final) con el fin de derrotar a algunos monstruos de nivel medio y obtener esa experiencia extra. Esto es un gran ejemplo de una "decisión ambigua" - no sabes con certeza si la poción gastada valdrá la experiencia extra o no.  (...) Si podemos estar de acuerdo en que las decisiones significativas son importantes, entonces podemos perfeccionar, concentrar nuestros juegos en la oferta de tantas decisiones interesantes y significativas como sean posibles. Llamo a esto "eficiencia en el diseño del juego". Si bien Klondike tiene algunas decisiones significativas, tiene muchos no-brainers, o decisiones falsas - por lo que yo diría que tiene un nivel bastante bajo de eficiencia. Spelunky es un poco más alto, ya que es en tiempo real y en realidad estás amenazado la mayor parte del tiempo, pero todavía hay algunas situaciones que no son inteligentes. Desktop Dungeons es muy eficiente, y aunque puede parecer a los recién llegados que no hay brainers, mejores jugadores se dan cuenta de que los movimientos más obvios rara vez son los mejores .Y aquí hay otra manera de ver toda la cosa de "decisión ambigua" - esto es lo que hace que los juegos sean especiales e interesantes: incluso cuando ganaste, siempre había espacio para que hubieras ganado más, y no estás seguro de cómo. (...) Este sentimiento de "Me pregunto cómo podría mejorar" es lo que es tan mágico y sorprendente sobre los juegos. De alguna manera, los juegos nos piden que subamos a nuestro desconocido nivel teórico máximo de habilidad, y esto es realmente valioso. Propongo esta filosofía sobre los juegos para no ser pedante o controlar cómo vemos los juegos. Es mi sincera creencia que la única manera en que podemos mejorar realmente nuestros juegos es mirando de cerca lo que hace que un juego sea un juego. No veo a mucha gente realmente haciendo esto; En cambio, veo a mucha gente simplemente haciendo eco de ideas seguras pero conversacionalmente inútiles como "los juegos son cosas diferentes para diferentes personas". De nuevo, propongo que recordemos que hay algo llamado juego, e incluso si no estás de acuerdo con mis ideas, espero que persigas tu propia verdad sobre lo que son los juegos, para que puedas concentrar en tus juegos la mayor eficiencia y diversión que pueda ser posible. Para citar al autor Robert McKee en su libro Story, "Necesitamos un redescubrimiento de los principios subyacentes de nuestro arte, los principios rectores que liberan talento".” Autor:  Keith Burgun. Keith Burgun es el diseñador principal de Dinofarm Games, los creadores del juego para iPhone '100 Rogues'. Tiene un grado universitario en música. Actualmente se dedica a enseñar música y artes visuales. 

¿Hay algún elemento que añadirían a su descripción de que es un juego?

En lo personal llevo un buen rato tratando de darle vueltas a la idea de un “sistema simplificado” que representa una abstracción personal, de la manera en como creo o el jugador entendera que funciona algo, ficcional o real.  No tengo muy claro que estoy diciendo, pero seguramente todo esto entra dentro de “ reglas“

¿Qué otras soluciones son posibles además de la aleatoriedad?

Por alguna razón relaciono lo significativo con la posibilidad de sorprender y hacer que el jugador no tenga una gratificación en base a un resultado comodo.  Si la aleatoridad permite que el triunfo no se base en la memorización, sino en otro tipo de habilidades, vale la pena pensar cuales son esas otras que determinan la victoria o el fracaso, o si debemos  no pensar en el fracaso sino en otra vía más bien menos esperada, dar continuidad respetando las elecciones y lo que usualmente se considera un error. No lo se Ernesto. 

[brickroaddx]

Logic vs Intuition

I was watching a Lewis Pulsipher game design video where he talked about players who like to use Logic vs Intuition in games. He broke things down as follows

Logic Players: -Tend to balk at randomness -Tend to like to “figure things out” -Tend to want to come to a definitive conclusion -Tend to like more serious “thinky” games

Intuition Players: -Are okay with randomness -Tend to go with heuristics or instincts -Tend to be OK with fuzzy conclusions that may be incorrect -Tend to prefer “beer n’ pretzel’ style games

I wanted to push back on this a bit an mention that I like to think about this in terms of Keith Burgun’s forms. Kieth defines puzzles as interactive systems that have “correct” solutions and games as those that feature much more ambiguity in terms of your approach. Basically this means that it is not ever confirmed whether your move was “best” or correct in a Burgun game (as it would be when you have solved a puzzle), but you can have some sense of whether it was good, or whether some moves are better than others through a developed intuitive/heuristic sense of the game system.

These Burgun games - systems that rely on heuristics/intuition rather than calculation - are what I am most interested in playing and creating. For starters, you can circumvent the calculation/busywork involved in taking a purely logical/conclusion based approach, and secondly, because your “solutions” are ambiguously correct, there is a lot of room for continual development of your internal heuristic framework as you continue to engage with the game system!

[fslgames-blog1]

Improving readability in Dragon Bridge - by Keith Burgun

New Post has been published on https://gamedevnexus.000webhostapp.com/2019/10/improving-readability-in-dragon-bridge-by-keith-burgun

Improving readability in Dragon Bridge - by Keith Burgun

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. Dragon Bridge development is going really well! As of this writing, we've

Read full article here -> https://gamedevnexus.000webhostapp.com/2019/10/improving-readability-in-dragon-bridge-by-keith-burgun

[blubberquark]

The value and place of “good game design”

Last year, noted game design theorist, developer and podcaster Keith Burgun softened his stance on the theory of strategy games and game design as a discipline. I wrote 90% of this as a response to his podcasts back then, but when I read my own words it felt too negative. I don’t want to dunk on somebody for a commercial failure from the relative safety of not even having tried.

I’m posting it now though, because it ties into my ideas about Jam Games and Short Games, which I want to develop further, as well as my previous post about starting with simple games like Pong, Flappy Bird, and Minesweeper: Starting with simple ideas might not be enough. Top-down game design might be important after all.

Why not Game Design?

Part of Burgun’s change of heart was for what I would call “political” reasons, and I try to avoid politics on this blog. I hate how the conversation around game design grinds to a halt when some troll says “Aha, this looks like a game a Communist would make!“, and then the designer tries to explain himself and his politics and we stop talking about game design or the game itself altogether.

It’s one thing to talk about the politics, the political ideas and implications of a game, and quite another to look at the author and to try to read the authors politics into every game developed by that author. This is especially important when the author is outspoken about politics. People can be politically active and have strong convictions and just plain fail to convey their ideas through their game design.

Another reason for this shift was trying to give people more space for self-expression. Maybe you want to make something new and exploratory, or something short and poignant, or some “experience“ or “virtual installation” that is game-adjacent, but not even meant to be a game. Trying to ground “game design” in lessons learn from existing games, or trying to be precise with your terminology might be counterproductive. There is little overlap between the mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics, or affordances of Smash Bros and Firewatch (unless you count The Quiet Man, an artsy game that manages to combine worst of both worlds into a buggy mess). This difference between Command & Conquer and Bioshock is huge, and you can only find commonalities in the individual disciplines like graphics, UI design, or programming, and in high-level psychological and narrative principles of pacing and world-building.

Lessons in game design implicitly tell you how games should be. General statements about “game design” are bound to alienate some people. Artists who make short interactive pieces that are both experimental and personal at the same time, like Tale of Tales, Robert Yang or Anna Anthropy, are most susceptible to this particularly easy to disparage by accident if you don’t choose your words very carefully.

Lastly, it looks like the long development of Escape The Omnochronom, with many iterations on the game design and player feedback in early access, has informed his new approach to game design - just like Auro was the game that embodied the Clockwork Game Design theories. This quick look back on the development of ETO is interesting and sobering: https://keithburgun.net/escaping-the-omnochronom-and-moonshot-game-design/.

Wasted Design?

From a commercial point of view, it looks like a lot of the game design effort on ETO has been mis-spent: More than about interesting decisions and carefully balanced gameplay, players on Steam seem to want tons of content, random loot, and an epic, tragic backstory.

Most indie developers probably wouldn’t have completely scrapped all four prototypes, but released some of them as stand-alone games or as prototypes - either on itch, on Newgrounds, or a on mobile app store. One iteration of the concept - then called “Push The Lane!” - looked and felt more like a puzzle game, and might have been developed into a somewhat successful puzzle game on a mobile app store.

I might be wrong about this. There are many old, failed prototypes of mine that just didn’t work. True artists hate to see their practice pieces, and I don’t want to polish my all of old failed ideas that didn’t work until I can release them. I know why they don’t work. I’d rather try to make the ones that already work better. I’d rather start from scratch than working on a game idea when I know that it won’t work and why.

If you’re looking at somebody else’s failed prototype, you may think it warrants further exploration, or that it can ba salvaged, when the dev has already tried most of your suggested easy fixes and found that they don’t quite work. Ideas and game mechanics that work well in a short game, interesting based on their novelty alone, often cannot sustain a long-form game on their own - and that’s where game design as a discipline comes in.

If you’re just starting out, I can only urge you to fail faster, within days or weeks rather than years. Get feedback from players and other developers! See what works and cut your losses early! Don’t try to make a failed design work if you can use a better one! Try to start with a small game that works!

But if your goal is to make a long-form game, maybe the jump from a small jam game to a larger one is not just quantitative, but qualitative. You can’t just keep adding more stuff to Flappy Bird and hope it becomes Half-Life somewhere along the way.

Maybe the commercial bottleneck is not game design, but market research. The cool kids are all playing Fortnite now. By the time you finish developing your Fortnite clone, the cool kids will probably have moved on the the Next Big Thing. (I wrote this before the current wave of Auto Chess games. The next big thing only took half a year.)

Who needs Game Design anyway?

So Good Game Design(tm) seems to be only relevant once people have started playing the game. According to conventional game marketing wisdom, iterating on a part of your design can be all for nothing if you realise late in the cycle that the core loop has to be re-worked, and you need to create new content for the new mechanics.

According to conventional game marketing wisdom, a mechanically bland action platformer with good graphics can sell better than a well-designed strategy game with abstract black-and-white graphics.

An accessible multiplayer game can outlast a well-balanced multiplayer strategy game: You need your player base to grow beyond the critical mass to sustain online matchmaking and a competitive scene in the first place.

A game idea that is a great fit for a mobile game, small prototype, demo, or coffee-break browser game cannot always be turned into a long-form game. Many long-form games are impossible to distil down into a five-minute slice.

All that doesn’t mean that there is no market for good game design. There is certainly a market for well-made games, for good design in games, and for carefully designed games. These are not the same as game design though, if you go by the ideas from Burgun’s podcast. Game design is more fundamental, more about mechanics and interactive feedback loops, not about visual design, game feel or intuitive user interfaces.

The bigger your game gets, the more urgent a concern the actual game design becomes. If you’re aiming for a big commerical release, you need to make a long-form game. If you’re making a long-form game, you need better game design than you can get away with in a shorter one. When you start with a small core and add content and features, game design can sneak up on you, and you may end up with No Man’s Sky or Anthem.

My Funnel Model

First Impression: The first thing a player sees of your game is probably a pithy description of the game, and then screenshot, maybe a short video. What gets him interested in installing is a novel, clever premise (like ”puzzle MOBA” or “you play a crazy cat lady”), and your promotional screenshots.

When your potential new player looks for reviews of the game, only opinions, sound-bites and screenshots will reach him, because good game design cannot be easily captured in words and pictures. If the game design is hard to explain or doesn’t translate well to trailers or screenshots, you already have a problem. Labels like “fantasy“, “noir“, “battle royale“ or unique visual aesthetics can give you a way in, or they can turn players off.

Accessibility: This does not mean accessibility to people with disabilities in particular (which is ”Barrierefreiheit” in my native German, the freedom from barriers which exclude certain groups of people), although that kind of accessibility is also important. Accessibility in general means how easy it is to get into the game, in a similar way to how certain books can be very inaccessible by starting off with weird jargon you need to get used to, or fifty pages of dry exposition before the plot gets started.

Tetris gets difficult quickly, but stays accessible, whereas Dear Esther is impossible to fail, but quite dense and inaccessible in its own way. Whenever possible, it makes sense to introduce complexity and difficulty only gradually.

Innovation: Next you have to compete with all the other games in the user’s game library. If the novelty of the elevator pitch doesn’t translate into innovative gameplay, your player might just go back to playing Minecraft, Fortnite, or Hearthstone again. If the game is not accessible and engaging early on, then the player might quit early and not even get to the novel or innovative part. The innovative part must be accessible in itself, without feeling forced or tacked on, and it must feel natural to use it.

Some AAA games try to solve this by early on giving the player “a taste” of what’s to come, for example by giving all the spells in the magic system to the player during a flashback sequence in the first level. Then they take away the innovative game mechanics and proceed with a bunch of boring third-person action adventure RPG shooter things for half the game. 

Core Gameplay Loop: This is where the good game design comes in. This is also the part that makes your players recommend the game to their friends.

In addition to good game design, adjacent qualities like responsive control design/game feel, clear visual feedback, legible game state, and quality-of-life features also become relevant when the player goes through the core loop a couple of times. Even when the controls and mechanics of your game are easy to learn, they can still be boring, tedious, or distracting.

Earlier this year, a game with an interesting premise, cool visual aesthetic, and some innovative mechanics on top of the classic JRPG formula was released on the Nintendo Switch. Unfortunately, neither the mechanics of combat nor the NPC dialogue were very engaging, or fun. The game got a lot of attention, but that attention culminated in mixed to bad reviews.

Getting the steps up to here right will give your game more eyeballs, and will get people to try it or even write about it. Getting the core gameplay loop right will make people enjoy and play your game more after that.

Scope: The more content there is - that can be quests, levels, guns, monsters, puzzles - the longer you can keep the core loop going. The amount of meaningfully “new” content you can put into your game is limited by the game design though. Just adding “two billions of guns“ won’t cut it if the gameplay difference between different pieces of content is not meaningful. The value of additional content also depends on the game design. Some games get more value out of their content. Mario Kart 8 for the Nintendo Switch has ten pre-arranged tournaments with for racetracks each. That doesn’t look like a lot of content, but the game gets a large amount of replay value out of them.

Sometimes the scope of a game is limited by the design and the core loop. Some puzzle game mechanics have only a handful of interesting puzzles in them, and are more appropriate for a one-off puzzle set piece in a larger action game than for a dedicated puzzle game.

Some game genres, like point-and-click adventures, are mainly constrained by the scope of the content, and a piece of content can only be used once. Puzzle- and strategy games can often squeeze a lot of value out of content by re-using the same units and mechanics in a new context or a different combination. RPGs are somewhere in-between, by re-using monsters, dungeon architecture, loot, and crafting elements, while quests, NPCs and villages must be uniquely crafted.

“Elegant” game design is not only good for its own sake, it also allows you to add more stuff into your game in a cost-effective way.

There is a flip side to this: Prototypes, jam games, mostly story-driven games, and demos don’t really need good game design at all. One can build a small game prototype based on novelty alone, without a way to expand the scope, maybe even without an engaging core gameplay loop. The core gameplay loops two or three times and then the game just ends.

If you want to make a long-form game, you have to think from the beginning about scope and longevity.

Grand unified theories of game design(tm) become more applicable the larger the scope of your game is. In a small game, individual aspects like game feel, visual design, music, “funny/edgy” dialogue or characters, and novel mechanics outweigh balance, level design, world-building, and well-written characters.

Depth: I am using “depth” somewhat loosely and colloquially: Depth is what keeps players coming back, and talking to each other. That can be endgame content, high-level competitive play, lore, or a modding/mapmaking scene. Depth can be speedrunning, or finding new, clever solutions to puzzles. Depth is finding new meaning in content you already know or played.

After I beat Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, or after Waking Mars, I uninstalled the game and moved on. Nothing is making me come back to Mark of The Ninja, Dear Esther or Thomas Was Alone. I don’t think I will ever want to revisit Torchlight, the first or the sequel. I enjoyed each of these games - or in the case of Dear Esther at least I appreciated it, on a detached, intellectual level. I played Nuclear Throne until I had beaten the game, unlocked every character, seen every gun, and gone to most of the secret stages. Then I quit playing. I have no interest in looping.

I played a lot of StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty. I played custom matches with my friends, I played on the ladder, I looked up strategy tips on TeamLiquid, I watched live streams of competitive games, and then I watched Day[9] analyse competitive games in-depth.

Back when I was a child, I played lots of multi-player games of WarCraft 3 and Worms: Armageddon. It never got stale for me. I played some multiplayer matches of Swords & Soldiers, but there is not a lot of variety, and it got stale rather quickly.

I know this evaluation of games and my concept of “depth” are both rather subjective. In content-heavy games, this kind of “depth“ can be hidden content, endgame content, side quests, and lore. In mechanics-focused games, depth and longevity are facilitated by game design(tm).

The recipe for popularity?

The funnel goes like this: First Impression > Accessibility > Innovation > Core Loop > Scope > Depth. At every stage, you lose some players, or potential players. If a potential player doesn’t hear about your game, that’s it. If a player looks at a let’s play or a review, and doesn’t understand what the game is about, that’s it. If your game is reviewed by a professional site, you can expect that they play through the main content. The longer players stay with your game, the more relevant game design(tm) will become.

Depth is beyond the scope of a review, but it will make people stick with your game for longer, and can make players show or recommend it to friends.

Depth and scope will make people stick with your game for longer, and make your game show up in Steam and Discord friend lists.

An engaging core loop will lead to good reviews and probably also good user scores.

Unfortunately, good game design is usually not the limiting factor, because we live in a word where we are bombarded with new game releases every day, and we have to decide which ones to buy, which free ones to download and play, or even which reviews to read, because there are just so many games that the limiting factor is time and getting attention in the first place, not how good - or “fun”, or “engaging” - the game actually is.

AAA studios already have our attention, or at least the attention of big gaming news sites, so they can compete for making the game with the best shooting or the biggest open world. AAA studios have an easier time getting a consistent player base for online matchmaking. In contrast to this, indies have to compete for attention in the first place.

However, once you have the attention of players and reviewers, you still have to convince them that your game is any good.

[mahddyboy]

[Review] Gem Wizard Tactics - Nintendo Switch

You gotta love Gem Wizards Tactics as an indie gem potential target. Thanks @GamesRedDeer for wonderful opportunity as always. #indiegame #NintendoSwitch #playinside #staysafe #SwitchCorps

Developer: KEITH BURGUN GAMES | Publisher: RedDeerGames | Release Date: 18/02/2022Price: $12.99/£10.99 | Review Code Provided by the Publishers | Genre: Strategy, Puzzle, Simulation, Other | Platform: Nintendo Switch Story/Description Lead fantasy army in turn-based warfare with randomly generated maps and complex battle mechanics that can be combined to clash enemy in a war over powerful…

[toiletcatiswatchingyou]

【Study-referral】Randomness Research in Game Design

When it comes to randomness, we must first start with the strategy and action in the stg game. If it is to be compared. stg is more like a game type facing a learning project with action and strategy elements at the same time. It's a bit similar to Monster Hunter: every monster you fight is a big learning project. The actions of monsters are random, but when the player is standing in certain places, the probability of monsters using certain moves will increase. For most of the current stg players, randomness must be controlled to a limit: too random will lead to instability of stable planning, and overall too fixed will be boring.Keith believes that if a strategic game introduces too many random elements, it is an attempt to hide incompetent game design in this way (2014). Ikaruga is a relatively strategic stg game. Almost all fixed. The design of the game flow is also excellent.I think that in the development of a game, it is necessary to correctly understand the number of strategic components of the developed game, including the proportion of it and action elements. Even if they are complementary. We must also grasp a degree of randomness, and the stage design must be taken seriously. In order to achieve higher playability.

Keith Burgun. 2014. Randomness And Game Design. [online] Available at: <http://keithburgun.net/randomness-and-game-design/> [Accessed 8 October 2020].

[cardboardedison]

Cardboard Edison’s Favorite Tips & Resources of 2017

Our massive year-end roundup of favorite board game design links and quotes includes a huge amount of useful material for board game designers!  

featured:

The Gen Con Experience: The gaming convention through the eyes of board game designers

The Process: The Expanse by Geoff Engelstein

Meaningful Decisions: Matt Grosso on Design Choices in Dead Last

How to make a name in board games by helping others (video)

industry:

Bruno Faidutti's advice for new designers about game design, playtesting, pitching, the industry and more

Board game industry figures offer advice for breaking in (audio)

theory:

What makes a game good--or bad?

12 skills you can build a board game around

The right and wrong ways to use roll-and-move (audio)

A look at the "crescendo" mechanism where something in a game gets progressively more valuable

Tips for designing microgames

Tips for designing a heavy game

Videos from the 2017 Game Developers Conference's Board Game Design Day (video)

“The optimal move/choice/strategy/character should also be the interesting one. NEVER make players choose between 'fun' and 'effective'.” - Keith Burgun

“Know what words you want to hear players using. Those words are a great way to tell if your design is immersive.” - JR Honeycutt

“You cannot design games in a vacuum. They’re played by game-players, and if some method of play will ruin the game, design the game so that it cannot happen successfully.” - Lewis Pulsipher

playtesting:

“Playtesting, feedback. Playtesting, feedback. Long pause. Repeat. This will never cease to be the secret to making a great game.” - Ben Pinchback

“Your playtesters’ minor irritants of today are your reviewers’ slams of tomorrow.” - John Brieger

“Even if you work alone, you *really* need blind playtesters who don’t care about your feelings. That’s how good games get made.” - Brandon Rollins

“It’s really easy to blame players for a bad test (and sometimes bad tests will be due to the players). But blaming players instead of treating the test like a problem to be solved won’t help your game get better.” - Nat Levan

process:

Managing your time making a game: years, months, weeks, days, hours and minutes

The right ways to steal ideas

Questions to ask yourself before making a game

Game design axioms: starting points for creating good games (audio)

“It’s ok to rip out something you think you’re married to in a game. It’s hard to accept that something you really want to work just isn’t working at all. But sometimes that’s what you have to do to let the game evolve.” - Nicole Kline

“If you want to be a creative, cast as wide a net in your life as you can. Read things, try things, do things. That’s where ideas come from.” - Kevin Wilson

“Don’t stop playing published games. Make it a point to keep informed of what’s going on, what new tools other people have invented. Only playing prototypes will leave you in an information-rut.” - Tim Rodriguez

contests:

What game designers should know about contests such as the Cardboard Edison Award (audio)

rules:

How to write the "setup" section of a rulebook

“If a rule is difficult to explain in words or easily forgotten, consider cutting it.” - Sen-Foong Lim

licensing:

Best practices for attending a designer-publisher speed dating event

How new designers can best spend their time to get their games signed

How to pitch your tabletop game to a publisher (video)

publishing:

Important advice for young publishers, learned the hard way

A crash course on Kickstarter for board games

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

ADVISERS: 421 Creations, Peter C. Hayward, Neil Roberts, Aaron Vanderbeek

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Chris and Kathy Keane (The Drs. Keane), Joshua J. Mills, Marcel Perro, Behrooz Shahriari, Shoot Again Games

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Ryan Abrams, Joshua Buergel, Luis Lara, Aidan Short, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Stephen B Davies, Scot Duvall, Doug Levandowski, Nathan Miller, Anthony Ortega, Mike Sette, Kasper Esven Skovgaard, Isaias Vallejo, Matt Wolfe

APPRENTICES: Darren Broad, Cardboard Fortress Games, Kiva Fecteau, Guz Forster, Scott Gottreu, Scott Martel Jr., James Meyers, The Nerd Nighters, Matthew Nguyen, Marcus Ross, Sean Rumble, VickieGames

[jeremiahingham]

Best of YouTube: The Two Types of Random | Game Maker's Toolkit | From critical hits to random encounters, and from loot boxes to procedural generation, video games are stuffed to bursting with randomness. In this episode, I look at the way randomness is used in games - and why some forms are more contentious than others. Support Game Maker's Toolkit on Patreon - https://ift.tt/1GawOeY Have Mark talk at your studio, university, or event - https://ift.tt/2NB67aE Sources Uncapped Look-Ahead and the Information Horizon | Keith Burgun https://ift.tt/1jD8XxB A Study in Transparency: How Board Games Matter | GDC Vault https://ift.tt/30nD1nb GameTek Classic 183 - Input Output Randomness | Ludology https://ift.tt/387W73G Why revealing all is the secret of Slay The Spire's success | Rock Paper Shotgun https://ift.tt/2Gq3d5K Crate | Spelunky Wiki https://ift.tt/35VjawO Random Generator | Tetris Wiki https://ift.tt/2NqrqyC Level Feeling | Spelunky Wiki https://ift.tt/3a6BZ3A Plan Disruption | Etan Hoeppner https://ift.tt/2rdhD4x Fire Emblem True Hit | Serenes Forest https://ift.tt/38aOMjx The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know Is Wrong) | GDC Vault https://ift.tt/2y6XReT How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games | Nautilus https://ift.tt/2EZfbEc Roll for your life: Making randomness transparent in Tharsis | Gamasutra https://ift.tt/35UTZut 12: Into the Breach with Justin Ma | The Spelunky Showlike https://ift.tt/2soxd0i Find out more Many faces of Procedural Generation: Determinism | Gamsutra https://ift.tt/2uP0cLG Why Our Brains Do Not Intuitively Grasp Probabilities | Scientific American https://ift.tt/2fZj4fD How classic games make smart use of random number generation | Gamasutra https://ift.tt/2Inqi9v Games shown in this episode (in order of appearance) Cuphead (2017) Enter the Gungeon (2016) Octopath Traveler (2018) Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle (2017) Griftlands (In Early Access) Dicey Dungeons (2019) Hearthstone (2014) The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (2014) Darkest Dungeon (2016) Dead Cells (2018) SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech (2019) Into the Breach (2018) Spelunky (2012) Armello (2015) Minecraft (2011) Chasm (2018) Downwell (2015) Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (2014) No Man's Sky (2016) Celeste (2018) Fortnite (2017) Mario Kart 8 (2014) Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (2014) Tekken 7 (2015) Super Mario Party (2018) Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (2019) Borderlands 3 (2019) Call of Duty: WWII (2017) Valkyria Chronicles 4 (2018) Civilization V (2010) Wargroove (2019) Plants vs. Zombies (2009) XCOM: Enemy Within (2013) Chess Ultra (2017) Mark of the Ninja (2012) StarCraft II (2010) Slay the Spire (2019) Apex Legends (2019) Civilization IV (2005) XCOM 2 (2016) Overwatch (2016) FTL: Faster Than Light (2012) Card of Darkness (2019) Diablo III (2012) Tetris 99 (2019) Puyo Puyo Tetris (2017) Phoenix Point (2019) Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019) Tharsis (2016) Music used in this episode Cuphead soundtrack - Kristofer Maddigan (https://ift.tt/2yhkI81) Tharsis soundtrack - Half Age EP by Weval (https://ift.tt/2jLBV0X) Other credits RNGesus original artwork by Dinsdale https://twitter.com/dinsdale1978 Super Mario Party - Luigi wins by doing absolutely nothing | Nintendo Unity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5IyYNI28gM Fire Emblem: Three Houses - New Game Plus Maddening Walkthrough Part 43! | MrSOAP999 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRZuFK3q9Q4 Deadpool 2 © 20th Century Fox Pandemic Card Art © Z-Man Games, Matt Leacock

[nico-glaciea]

Rix from The Tenth Line. Character designed by Karina Phelps. And Sprites are by Keith Burgun.