Game design (and art) and audience compitency
polycounter lvl 18
Hi guys, I wanted to get some different input on this.
I'm DAMN close to finishing a small casual game that's based on Bloons -- that 2d balloon popping game (it's a ton of fun).. my game was a marketing project: I did it basically "IN 3D!!!".. which obviously is a different ball game.
One (expected) critique i got back from a good friend (who is NOT a gamer) is that bloons is a lot easier to pick up, and thus a lot more fun for him. for me, this brings up a tricky topic:
While I don't mean to be an elitist here (and believe me, I respect this guy, and his opinion, tremendously), surely when we make art, there's a definite level of audience competency that is REQUIRED before they can experience it. Consider the half-life 2 series, which i think are tremendously well refined. If you take a causal or non-gamer and plunk them down in front of it, they simply won't experience it.. they'll miss everything (i've seen this, as i know you all have too).
The difficulty here is that I'm not sure that that gap CAN be bridged. if you've got to navigate in a 3d world, differentiate between important shit and NOT important shit, AND suspend your disbelief.... Well, that takes a little bit of competency... and if i make games for everyone, then i'm stuck making 2d games with retard level controls.
I think that the answer is to know what market you're speaking towards. some people aren't sophisticated, some people are.
thoughts?
I'm DAMN close to finishing a small casual game that's based on Bloons -- that 2d balloon popping game (it's a ton of fun).. my game was a marketing project: I did it basically "IN 3D!!!".. which obviously is a different ball game.
One (expected) critique i got back from a good friend (who is NOT a gamer) is that bloons is a lot easier to pick up, and thus a lot more fun for him. for me, this brings up a tricky topic:
While I don't mean to be an elitist here (and believe me, I respect this guy, and his opinion, tremendously), surely when we make art, there's a definite level of audience competency that is REQUIRED before they can experience it. Consider the half-life 2 series, which i think are tremendously well refined. If you take a causal or non-gamer and plunk them down in front of it, they simply won't experience it.. they'll miss everything (i've seen this, as i know you all have too).
The difficulty here is that I'm not sure that that gap CAN be bridged. if you've got to navigate in a 3d world, differentiate between important shit and NOT important shit, AND suspend your disbelief.... Well, that takes a little bit of competency... and if i make games for everyone, then i'm stuck making 2d games with retard level controls.
I think that the answer is to know what market you're speaking towards. some people aren't sophisticated, some people are.
thoughts?
Replies
A lot of people commented on the quality of voice acting and writing in games, and how it seems that the huge majority of games these days are trapped in some sort of terrible dialogue / awful acting timewarp, and I think that audience is largely responsible.
Playing through Arkham Asylum (again), it struck me how good the voice acting is compared to other recently-released titles, and I got to wondering - how many gamers even noticed, or cared if they did? I'm sure many of us here did, and found it made for a much more immersive, engaging experience, but does the average gamer even give a shit what Batman or Joker (for example) were saying? That's before we even get to games like Metal Gear and their lengthy cutscenes.
I'm not trying to take your thread off-topic, John - I thought that this kind of thing ties in pretty well with what you're saying / experiencing.
Good point. I guess that the decision to cater to wider appeal or a niche market of player is at the core of any project. Look at games like Machinarium or Braid - great games, but not exactly crafted for the mass market, even though they've both proven popular.
I don't play browser or iPhone games (except Canabalt, which was pure awesome), so I don't know much about the complexity of the average game for a mobile device. It seems like most of them are 2D puzzle or platform variants?
TF2 was a game I had a fair bit of beef with originally because as an experienced FPS'er it was all too easy to jump into. Sure, I had come from TFC but it didn't have the competition of TFC... what few clans made the crossover either got bored because they didnt like the change of pace or now.. are at the top of the game. I'm extremely competitive and its rare that I play a game without aiming to improve within it... I get fun from it sure but I will also be playing to win.
I guess where im going with this is that I expected TF2 to be a new challenge, for example, a while ago I gave Natural selection a bash after years of not really playing it and it was like jumping in at the deep end. NS has so much stuff to learn and to some it may be daunting but to me its what makes playing a game like that so much more worth while. Although it doesnt bother me it would deter some, however, I dont think things need to be simplified about NS per se, however things could be done better with map layouts/objectives and all that to make it feel a little less oversaturated. It was only thanks to a good commander that I had any idea as to the role I was required to play and I was still deadweight.
Back to TF2 though - after spending ages playing it I can really appreciate the design and how well made it is all the way down to the core, and in all fairness there is depth and plenty of skill in it. It gets a bit harder to word but with TF2 the design of maps/colours/characters everything aids the gameplay so well and it strikes me as really appealing to more people. I dont think that TF2 has the skill level of Quake3 but I do feel it is less intimidating to newer players, and I know of Q3 duellers who entered top clans in TF2, won and quit - or went straight to the top. On the other hand top players from other DM games started playing quakelive and it took them a fair amount of training before they started to play at a top level. Still, I think design can be used in such a way (as in TF2) that it can do a great deal to help players and im really interested in seeing what NS2 pulls out its sleave.
- Another thing about TF2 that I've started to appreciate after getting frustrated by the way people play in Modern warfare 2 is just how well it forces a role onto the player. A friend of mine compared TF2 to playing as chess pieces and i thought that it fit it fairly well. My point is though that in TF2 I can have bad players on my team and itll still feel like their contributions have meaning, either as a support role or damaging players. This isnt the case with MW2 as there will be people who take the camp approach or play slow and barely contribute by the end. I guess it'd be like people playing quake3 without realising it was a deathmatch - in TF2 people are made aware of their objectives and points/rewards come from supporting the team and I find this in nearlly every server i play on.
/wall of text
- A shorter version probably equates to design being there to aid the player in getting started. As dumbed down as it may appear it doesnt need to equate to no depth. Ive been chatting to my mum lately and shes really jumped on the casual game bandwagon and talks about how she plays to Bejewled to beat her friends scores. I guess that means shes getting better at Bejewled... hell, Tetris appealed to a shitload of people and when you watch top players in that its fucking crazy.
Interesting subject though!
Of course, voice acting has a lot to do with how well defined the characters are. In TF2, for example, it's all very over-the-top and it fits perfectly, and that really helps getting the idea that the characters talk, and you are not just hearing sound samples.
Personally one of the biggest challenges for me is that I want to be creative and innovative and artistic, but I'm competing in a market where LCD content wins. As a result I'm not really the biggest player around because I'm always going to exclude people for stylistic reasons, but I'm still doing alright because I'm self-aware enough to keep things somewhat accessible. It's a tenuous balance, and somewhat frustrating, but not entirely unreasonable. There is value in something so braindead simple anyone can play it.
Just because someone is too incompetent to play your game doesn't mean that's everything is fine and dandy and they won't mind that they can't play it. They will be frustrated and annoyed at you, regardless of whether it's their fault or not. If your market is incompetent; cater to your market better or find a different market.
I would love it if the masses started taking a little responsibility for their own enjoyment, but life is not so fair.
man-o-mule -- that's the trick though -- what's easy to someone is going to be hard to someone else. at a certain point, shouldn't we just pick our audience and say "fuck you" to everyone else?
danshewan -- yeah, i dont think that's a topic derailment at all. putting content into our stuff that gets noticed is pretty much directly related with knowing who your market is i think. if you make slop for pigs, don't invent in voice acting. Thankfully, the majority of people, i think, have grown to expect more from gamers.
The difficult thing about this shit is the issue of MONEY. If i want to make art, and there's no market for it, then that's some sketchy territory.
I think you should just look at what your friend said more closely.
He didnt say "this game is hard thats why its not fun."
He said "this game is not fun"
so just work on that, and you should be good. its a large generalization, but if you make the learning curve fun, and the game fun, your audience will create itself, not the other way around IMO>
My question is, why can't your friend pick up your game? Is the camera hard to navigate because it's in 3d? Is the interface hard to pick up? Is the initial difficulty too hard? Fix any of those now, because it's annoying even for verteran players. A game isn't enticing to hardcore gamers because it has a boatload of buttons and options stairing them in the face overwhelming them. It's because the game engrosses them overtime with depth at a steady pace. Eventually even the simple begginings of a TD play into an overall grand scheme in the best tower defenses (upgrades).
I'm actually a huge fan of Tower Defense games, Been playing 'em since some of the first ones emerged in starcraft. One of the great pulls of the genera has been that they're easy to pick up. In the initial levels you should be able to place a couple towers, get tons of kills and lots of money whether you know what you're doing or not.
As an avid TD player i absolutely LOVE playing tower defenses that are "too easy" for me, because i can set up a choke hold at the spawn areas, upgrade the hell out of the towers and blow through early levels, since well made TD games allow for the player to control NPC wave spawns, some even allow to control the speed.
I can only imagine that "noob" players enjoy tower defenses because they are eased into the game and get to make many, many mistakes before they are defeated in the end. It's an interesting dynamic i haven't seen in any other genera where both types of players benefit from a very easy start, this is usually very mundane for advanced players.
I really could go on and on, if you want to truly make a revolutionary tower defense game, you need to come up with a TD that can't be dominated by a player who watches a youtube video about how to build the perfect defense. Maybe some kind of randomly generated terrain with towers that have random stats every match, that balance against each other dynamically so you're never gimped or overpowered. Or as many warcraft III maps did, a well done player vs player tower defense, where players send enemies at each other rather than having them spawn randomly. I was actually thinking of making a TD where rather than having to actively send enemy waves, players would just build towers that spawn enemies that would automatically go after the opponent, some towers would send npcs adept at killing other npcs, some at killing buildings, where you build the tower would affect which direction the tower would send npcs from. Even thought of having "critical spawns" where the tower would sometime send a super strong unit, the player could upgrade the odds of this unit spawning, or the strength of the super unit. Just never had the time or knowledge of the warcraft editor to put it together.
Anyway, I always liked bloons but it was never one of my favorites, the best in my opinion were in the warcraft III editor, that engine was perfect for tower defenses, and there was a huge player base building on the concept. Some mind blowingly good online versions that cater to a more hardcore demographic are gems tower defense and xeno tactics, just 2 off the top of my head. Gems especially had some revolutionary ideas, if a bit complicated for new players.
Quick edit: The best games offer the full range of difficulty but allow the players to throttle it. Try their hands at the harder stuff and if defeated get right back into the easier stuff. This was always one of the key descisions in my favorite tower defense games. Do i stock up my money, build resource gathering structures and go for the long haul, or do i Build some over the top area effect towers now and stock up in a couple waves? The player had to decide how easy or hard to make the game, and in the long run, if they were careful with their investments, could eek out an incredible run, even if defeated in the end.
Reedit: Check this tower defense out, just came out today, very informative and easy to get into.
http://armorgames.com/play/4962/bubble-tanks-tower-defense
By all means make the tutorials skippable, tooltips hideable, etc. But don't default to that kind of mentality.
The "other people don't understand because they are stupid" mentality is the worst fucking mentality, and it shocks me when I see experienced, professional developers think that their target market is stupid for not figuring out their (usually convoluted, awkward, or completely undocumented) systems, instructions, goals, etc.
This isn't saying that puzzles should point to their solution, combat shouldn't kill you, games shouldn't be hard, etc. But they need to be fair at all times, and clear at all times. A puzzle where you can't ID the pieces/objective, or combat where the feints, opportunities aren't clear or the moves are unknown, etc, suck. They are bad designs.
If you look at a game like Ninja Gaiden, it demonstrates what I'm talking about re: difficulty. The game is incredibly unforgiving, and punishing, but they telegraph moves, have (eventually) obvious openings, etc.
As another example, look at Tetris - at no point is the objective unclear, the controls unclear, etc. The game is incredibly challenging at high levels, requiring forethought, planning, and dexterity under incredible timelimits. "Bad Tetris" would be one that obscured the screen or colored the background the same colors as the blocks so they could not be differentiated, had 20 different buttons with no explanation of them for rotation, etc.
If you're taking a 2D gameplay concept, it will not translate to 3d without ramping the difficulty significantly. If you look at most games nowadays, even the 3d ones play primarily on a 2d playing field - most enemies in a FPS are on more or less the same level as the player, they are rarely right above him or far below him, and certainly not both at the same time. Most platformers contain the platforming to a relatively 2d path through the level, etc. The interesting bits are when they change this up, obviously, but they can't deviate too far.
If your game is too hard and not fun for most users because you've got unfamiliar systems, new combat mechanics, a new dimension, etc, it is never the user's fault.
Granted you will have the occasional dumb user, but if you're doing any kind of focus/playability/usability testing with 5+ people and two or more of those are having issues, you really need to reconsider your approach.