VectorStorm Blog

In part one, I said that I was going to focus on awesome gameplay, as opposed to awesome graphics or sound or etc.  And since awesome gameplay rests on having an interesting and unusual gameplay mechanic, this means that we need to think about ideas.

It’s often said that in the game industry that ideas are a dime a dozen;  they’re virtually worthless on their own.  And to a certain extent, this is true.  In terms of time and manpower, implementation details are far more costly and make a far greater impact in the bottom line;  that is, whether or not a game is good.

People say this because there is no shortage of good or even great ideas. Brainstorm for a minute or two and anybody even vaguely familiar with the gaming industry can generate a dozen or more, just by copying and recombining elements of existing games in a slightly new way.

But if our goal is to make an awesome game — not just a good or popular one (and let’s not kid ourselves;  awesome games frequently do not do well in the market, despite rave reviews) — then we need an awesome idea to start with.  I’m going to assert that the difference between a good game and an awesome game rests entirely in the quality of the initial idea.

(I’ll also assert that the difference between a good game and a great game is entirely unrelated to the core idea.  And since great games sell better than awesome games, most game makers don’t even attempt to make awesome games — awesome games usually require a lot more work, and usually earn a lot less!)

So what separates a good idea from an awesome one, and how can you distinguish between them?  More beneath the fold.
Continue reading “How to design an awesome game, part two : Ideas are a dime a dozen”

Well, it’s a few days late, but I finally got to the game design musings. In the interest of the common good, I’m going to try to lay down some simple and easy principles that show how to design an awesome game. This first article discusses some basic types of Awesomeness, in an effort to work out a more reliable system to develop great games.

Of course, the easiest way to create an awesome game is to already have an awesome game, and to just make a sequel which is exactly like the original, only more so (God of War 2, Halo 2, Guitar Hero 2, etc). Or alternately, to make a game which is exactly like somebody else’s awesome game, only more so (Duke Nukem 3D, Rock Band, etc).

It’s interesting to notice that both Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band were attempting to make something like Guitar Hero 2, only more so, but ended up with very different offerings; The Guitar Hero 3 developers said “What’s awesome about Guitar Hero 2?”, came up with the answer of “the music tracks” (Awesome Music, below), and so decided that “the same thing but more” meant adding more tracks, whereas the Rock Band guys said “What’s awesome about Guitar Hero 2?”, came up with the answer of “the guitar controller” (Awesome Gimmick, below), and so decided that “the same thing but more” meant adding more types of instrument controllers.

Being able to spot the quality in an awesome game which actually makes it awesome is very, very important (and is often also surprisingly difficult)! And you need to keep an open mind. As software people, we’re generally biased toward seeing the awesome part as being something in the software, when it very well might not be. In fact, many extremely popular games are awesome for reasons which have very little to do with the game mechanics themselves. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s assume that we’re not going to rip off an existing awesome game, and must instead start from scratch with our own, original game design, and that the only constraint on our design is that it must be Awesome.

So where do we start? More beneath the fold.

Continue reading “How to design an awesome game, Part One”

You’d think that this is self-evident, but many people (both inside and outside the industry) seem to be labouring under the confused impression that video games are in some way like movies. I’m writing this rambling little essay so that in the future I can point people to this page when they tell me that they have an idea for a game, and then proceed to tell me a cinematic story.

And also so that my friends can point and laugh at me, when I’m the one who makes that mistake.

I’ll confess in advance that this really has a lot more to do with professional games than independant ones, or the type of games that I tend to make here on the VectorStorm site. Sorry about that, but it’s my soapbox, so I can say what I like.

More beneath the fold.

Continue reading “Video games are not movies”

It’s pretty easy to divide all video games into two groups. “Good” vs. “bad”, for example, is a fairly common (albeit subjective) division. And people like dividing things on that axis, so it’ll probably always be the main one, even if nobody can agree on precisely which games belong in each camp.

But there are other, more descriptive ways to categorise games.

One that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, during my creation of Game in a Week games is the difference between process-based and content-based games. These days, nearly all professional video games are content-based, whereas a high proportion of independent and freeware video games are process-based. Virtually all traditional tabletop games are process-based, but some newer tabletop games are content-based. Here’s what I mean by these terms:

Continue reading “Two types of game”