A Crash Course In Game Design and Production
A Crash Course in Game Design and Production
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Week 6 - A Discourse on Production Values
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Welcome back! This is the sixth installment in "A Crash Course in Game
Design and Production. This week we're taking a diversion away from the
Design Specification to talk about what I call "Production Values." This
is a single parter.
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How much you care about your game directly affects people's response to
your game. Too often programmers spend nearly ALL of their production time
on how their game works, and nearly NONE on how it looks or how it will be
perceived by players. In the rush to get a game playable, they neglect the
most important aspect of a game, presentation. Presentation is more than
just what the player sees when he plays your game, it is his impression of
the game and of YOU as a game designer\programmer. It is your reputation on
the line as you try to meet the expectations of your players with every
game you release.
When a player plays your game, he doesn't care about how many hours you put
into it, or what great technological breakthroughs you've accomplished, or
how far you've pushed the envelope in creating it. He's thinking:
1) Is this a "real" game or something cheesy?
2) Does this programmer know what he is doing, and how committed is he to
making a great game?
3) Does this look like it will be fun?
In the first ten seconds of play, he determines what he thinks about you
and your game, and decides whether or not to keep playing. If what he sees
and hears doesn't match the quality of game he's expecting, he will stop
playing, delete the program, and very likely disregard any other games you
release. "Bob's games? Nah, they suck! I played "SectorBug's Revenge"
and it sucked so hard my furniture was piled up all around my computer..."
You don't want this kind of advertising.
Making a game playable is only half of the battle. The rest is making the
game presentable. It's adding the extra touches that encourage your
players to give more attention to your game. It's those little things you
put in just because the game is cooler with them than without them. The
more you care about presentation, the more "perceived value" your players
see in your production, and the more credibility they give you as a game
developer.
I have a saying you should memorize:
"If you're gonna go out, you might as well go all out!"
Committing yourself to go "all out" on your game project is the heart of
what I call "Production Values."
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What are Production Values?
Production Values are the set of rules that a serious game developer uses
as the standard for every game he produces. Just like a moral person will
not do anything against what considers moral or ethical, a game developer
WILL NOT release a game that does not adhere to his production values.
Anyone who writes games has production values of some kind. You may not
realize it, or may not even think about these things, but they are there.
If you don't care about your artwork, if anything is "good enough," that is
one of your production values. Regardless of whether or not you perceive
your production values, your audience perceives them when they see your
games.
Over the last few months, a good number of games have been written in
Euphoria. While all show potential, most seriously suffer from a lack of
conscious positive production values. While they are amusing to the
Euphoria programmers who pass them around, and are useful as tutorial
pieces, they don't stack up to the expectations of players outside the
Euphoria community. It's not a limitation of Euphoria or the programmers
involved, it's production values.
My intent is knock some sense into your heads, and get you to think about
what you are doing. If I offend, good. If you want the world to take you,
Euphoria, and your games seriously, you need to take you, Euphoria, and
your games seriously. You MUST pay attention to details to make your games
great.
In the rest of this lesson, I will talk about production areas where many
developers fail miserably because they give too little thought or attention
to them. As a game developer, it is important to address these issues.
Rant #1: Programmer Art vs Professional Art
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Nothing sticks in my craw more than sucky art in a cool game. I know MANY
programmers that spend 100 hours or more writing code and half an hour on
art and say it's good enough. IT ISN'T. OidZone came about because I was
so bothered that Kurt Dekker's (a friend of mine, shareware arcade game
pioneer and really sucky artist) ROX was the ONLY decent asteroids game for
the PC and its "programmer art" sucked so bad that I had to do a better one
myself. (He didn't have time to do the refit after I offered to GIVE him
new art, so I wrote OidZone instead.)
"Programmer Art" is what happens when a programmer spends five minutes
drawing a picture to "get something" in the game, then never goes back and
refines it to make it better once the game works. Most programmers I know
are lousy artists, but ONLY because they don't care. If you care about
what you do, what you do is automagically better.
"Professional Art" is what happens when the programmer spends a
proportionate amount of time producing the art he intends to use in his
game. It doesn't matter how bad an artist you are on the computer, the more
time you spend doing art, the better your art will be. There is an amazing
amount of programs available to make the job of art creation easier. These
can take a no-talent boob and make him a brilliant game artist. I
typically spend 1/3 of my production time JUST on artwork, and I ALWAYS do
my artwork BEFORE I write any code. If you just can't do the art, there are
a hundred other people around you who can. There are lots of game artist
wannabees who are very good and work cheap, some will do it only for a
credit in your game and a free lunch.
Another thing to memorize:
"There are two ways to do anything: Do it yourself, or Pay someone to do it
right."
How much you care about your artwork is directly proportional to how long
you spend developing it.
Rant #2 Cutouts vs Characters
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Some programmers have a single static image that they move around in the
game and want you to make believe that it is menacing. Maybe its a game
object that just sits there and does nothing while waiting for you to get
it. It's like a cardboard cutout of the object. It LOOKS like the real
thing, but has none of the attributes of the real thing. It's dead and
boring.
A Cutout is something in your game that doesn't animate and doesn't change
appearance in the game, regardless of what its doing. It may be an enemy
swooping down to kill your ship, yet it doesn't "do anything" while it's
swooping. There's no life displayed in the art, since the art doesn't
change. The thing is a corpse flying at you.
A Character is something that is "alive." It does things, even when it
isn't "doing" anything. Maybe the coins you need to pick up are spinning
around in place while they wait for you, maybe your enemies blink their
eyes every once in awhile, maybe your game logo spins around during the
game. All give your objects character, they are alive. Living characters
are always more fun than corpses. ("Dead puppies aren't much fun...") In
Euphoria especially, you can have as many animation frames for an object as
you want, so there's no excuse not to do it.
Every sprite in your game should be a character and not a cutout. Even
your Game messages "Game over" or whatever should be animated. I like to
color cycle my game messages, its easy to do, and looks way cooler than a
cutout.
NOTE: If you have many of the same kind of character on the screen doing
the same thing, they MUST NOT all be doing it at the same time. It looks
REALLY bad if all 10 of your StarThieves blink their eyes at the same time,
and looks REALLY cool if they do it at different times. If you have 30
animation frames say, have each one start on a random frame and keep track
of where they are in the animation individually. In OidZone, every oid
looks different from the others, they are all using the same animation
images, 1-30, but every oid can be in a different place in the cycle at any
given time. Oid 5 may be doing 26,27,28,29,30,1,2... while oid 6 may be
doing 3,4,5,6,7,....
I was playtesting StarTrek: 25th Anniversary, and when the party of five
characters beamed to a planet they could look left, right, up, down, flip
open their communicator, use their tricorder, etc., so they would look busy
while the game waited for you to do something. The first time this was
tested, ALL 5 characters went through this cycle at the same time together.
My bug report stated that it looked like a Michael Jackson video. I was
laughing hysterically. Unless you're Michael Jackson, make sure your
characters act individually.
Your characters should keep busy while waiting for the player. If the
player waits too long, they should do something in response to that. In
Sonic the Hedgehog, if the player sits and waits for a minute or so, Sonic
turns to face the player and taps his foot repeatedly, looking pretty
annoyed until the player does something. This is a VERY good thing to do.
Rant #3 Static vs Dynamic Screens
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Some game screens look really boring. Aside from the action of the game
itself, the player information and feedback screens just sit there in the
background. Ideally in a game, something should always be happening on the
screen to let the player know the game is running. It could be anything,
blinky lights here and there, an animated logo in the corner of the screen,
anything. Just break up the monotony of the screen.
In OidZone (and Starthief, etc.) I have the logo and the infoBar at the top
of the screen animating at all times. These are simple additions, but make
a huge difference in how the game feels, a huge difference in production
quality.
Always have some blinky lights somewhere.
Rant #4 Consistency in Presentation From Game to Game
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Many programmers give little thought about consistency in presentation from
game to game. What I mean is that there is no common thread tying all
their games together, no similarity in presentation to let players know
that they are all "their games" Similarly, people play around with
controls, move player feedback displays around, and just make things
different from game to game. This makes the learning curve a little
harder, as the player has to learn new controls or to look in different
places to find the information they need. Certainly sometimes this is
necessary, depending on the nature of the game, but similar games should
have similar presentations.
It's a stylistic thing. If you are going to be producing multiple games,
some thought should go into making them recognizable as YOUR games.
Signature Pieces
When you do something the same way in all your games, its like an artist
signing his work. If you intend to do more than one game, do something
stylistic that you can put in all your games so people recognize your work.
It could be anything, your signature in the bottom right corner of the
screen, or the way you animate your game logo or maybe all your games have
similar titles (like OidZone, SlalomZone, TankZone, CombatZone, etc...), or
whatever. Do something, standardize the way you do it, and always do it
that way. Then when someone plays your game they'll recognize your
"signature piece" and transfer some of the respect he had for the last game
to the new one.
On the flipside, you don't want all your games to look exactly the same.
That gives your player a "been there, done that, got the t-shirt" feeling.
You want there to be some familiar consistency without giving them deja-vu.
Case in point. All my space games have a pretty nebula background, but I
NEVER use the same background in different games, unless the background
changes frequently. I have my nebula artist create a new one for every
game, in a different color scheme to match the mood of the game. When you
see a pretty nebula, you know its one of mine, but its different enough
that you don't get tired of it, and you are eager to see what the
background of the next game will look like.
If you look at ANY of my games, you know right away they are mine. I have
spent much time creating a "look" to my games that I intend to be
unmistakable. All my games have pretty backgrounds, color cycling logos and
game messages, and an animated InfoBar at the top of the screen. Most
games have a FeedBack Window on the right side of the screen, with player
information and high scores list. My about screens have the same format in
colored text. I make a conscious effort to interchange characters between
games whenever possible. I recently added the StarThief character to
OidZone Registered as a saucer that shoots mines at you. He also appears
in SolarQuest and StarRanger (release date 4/15 and 5/15 respectively) My
characters taunt you in funny voices, and they all have interesting
animated characteristics. When you play one of my new games, you remember
how good (I hope) the last one was and you go in with a certain respect I
wouldn't have earned if the games were very different.
You don't need to go that far if you don't want to, but consistency is a
plus in getting repeat players.
Rant #5 Sound FX Laziness
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I can't believe how many shareware game people steal sound effects from TV
shows or movies rather than record their own. While having a recognizable
sound bite here and there is amusing, there are problems that are raised by
using them.
First, you can be sued for it. If you are releasing your games to the
general public as shareware or whatever, you need to be aware that the
people who you created the recording you sampled have rights to it.
Generally they won't do anything about it, but they can send you a nasty
letter if they wanted to. If you intend to sell your game commercially,
they will want a piece of the pie at least.
Second, by having all your SFX come from different sources, there is no
consistency in theme and tone for your game. I feel the same way here that
I do about having too many fonts in a document. It looks like a ransom
note. Every sound is different.
A similar problem is relying on a SoundFX CD-ROM for all your samples.
They are very handy, and I use them frequently as a basis for SOME of my
SFX, but there is a danger that your sounds come off as too generic. You
definitely don't want someone to play your game and know where you got your
SFX! It takes away from their impression of you. Your game is cheapened in
their eyes if they know you got your SFX from a $10 CD-ROM.
Everyone with a sound card can record and process SFX easily. Take that
photon torpedo effect, trim it, add an echo, and raise the pitch a bit to
make it your own sound. Plug a microphone and record "You SUCK! TRY
AGAIN..." and make it sound funny. Do your own SFX. It's easy and fun to
do.
Voice Characterization
I like to make my characters talk. Either to have them cheer you on, or
taunt you relentlessly, it just adds something to the feeling of the game.
For StarThief, I have about 12 different voice samples for my characters,
from "Ouch! That Hurts!" to "Hello? is anybody home?" to "Are you even
trying?" All of them are recorded the same way, and processed to a funny
high pitched, slightly sped up sound.
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Production Values are the standard you try to meet with every game you
release, and the standard your players come to expect from you. Sticking to
your Production Values earns the respect from your audience to see you
standing up for quality. They also make YOU feel better about what you are
doing, knowing that you are doing all you can to create the best game you
can.
My Production Values
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1) Presentation is as important as game play. My screens will be clear,
my controls will be easy to figure out, my players will know I care
about every game I release.
2) My art the most important part of my presentation, and my audience feels
cheated if I skimp out on art. They expect the best, so I'll do my
best.
3) If it is important to the game it will animate. If it is alive, it will
have character. If it must be cute, it will be cute.
4) If it is cute, it will have a funny voice, and should talk to the player
when possible.
5) No two of the same character will show the same characteristic action at
the same time if I can avoid it.
6) My information screens will be animated. If a blinky light or other
animated object will enhance the presentation I will add it.
7) My games will have familiar consistency without cheating the player by
rehashing the same old thing. Similar features will have similar
controls across all games, similar games will have similar feedback
systems. I will be consistent with my signature pieces.
8) My audience knows where I steal my SFX from, so I will customize them
for my needs and create new SFX whenever possible.
I Think that about covers it. Next time we'll look at the AI
specification.
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End of Week 6 - A Discourse on Production Values
If you have any questions for group discussion post them to the list
server. E-mail any other questions, comments or suggestions to lgp at exo.com
Mail monetary donations large or small to
Lord Generic Productions 1218 Karen Ave Santa Ana, Ca 92704
A Crash Course in Game Design and Production - Euphoria Edition
(C) Copyright 1996,7 Lord Generic Productions - All Rights Reserved
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