It is cold here in Belfast, and if you’re anything like me, the icy anxiety that prefigures the impending onset of the so-called Holiday Season has begun to seize you in its claws, whispering “Ooh, you’ve got quite a lot to get done before the end of the year, haven’t you?” insidiously into your soft ear hole.
Enough of this! Here is a collection of game development miscellany that has swirled around my addled brain over the last couple of weeks which you may find interesting, useful or completely trite. I didn’t mean to write 10 but 10 happened anyway. Good luck.
Why do all game developers want to do crazy things with structure? Resist this tendency by getting really cliched with it.
I really enjoyed this video on The Five Room Dungeon (here’s another take on the same idea in case you’d rather read something) as a structure for developing classic TTRPG dungeons. It’s just this very Hero’s Journey framing:
Entrance with Guardian
Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge
Trick or Setback
Climax or Conflict
Resolution (sometimes with a twist or revelation)
That’s everything you need for a quest or core loop really isn’t it?
Narrative framings can be very helpful for design in general. If the player can go through…
“Once upon a time…and every day…until one day…and because of this…until finally…and ever since that day”
…then you might be on the right path. Keep it stupidly simple.
Factions should have a realistic explicit goal and faction NPC’s should have strong, differing opinions about how to achieve that goal.
(Paraphrased from Tim Cain - one day I will write this newsletter without mentioning him.)
I really enjoyed working on the factions in Frozen Synapse 2. We had a structure where they were all competing for the same resource but each had a very different take on what they would do with it: some wanted to destroy it, some wanted to distribute it and so on. This is very broad brushstrokes but really helped galvanise both the single player design and the narrative.
I’ve seen quite a few art-led teams recently struggle with getting to the meat of their actual game. Early-stage art development is cool and can lead to some much needed attention for your project but you really need to be able to actually have fun without any art.
Game dev is something of a procrastination generator: there’s always some tedious task which needs to be slogged through only to discover two hours later that your efforts were fruitless, prompting a despairing and never-ending cup of tea.
Something that’s helped me in the past - and again recently - is to lean into the boredom. Usually, if you’re confronting something dull there’s a reward on the other side which is worth having, and the process is about the confrontation. Keep walking forwards and actively simplify anything which is taking too long.
I recently missed an important bit of unrelated information hiding in a very boilerplate “this is the remit of our engagement”-type disclaimer! Luckily nothing too bad happened but it is always worth checking these things in detail.
I heard a streamer talk recently about getting into WoW because he saw a “mage soloing a dragon” in a YouTube video shortly after the game came out. While we should definitely take a moment to acknowledge how amusing that phrase is in abstract, it is worth thinking about what the equivalent might be for your game: is there something you can show which players can point at and go “I want to do that!”
I’m slightly apologetic about mentioning Escape from Duckov as it’s a bit of a LinkedIn hot take darling at the moment but it is a very cool idea: can you take the dynamics of a game you love but place them in a new - possibly ludicrous - context? I think a bizarro-world clone of a game, where you stick incredibly close to the original mechanics but bend them into a new framework, can be very interesting. The phenomenal Doom RPG comes to mind.
Can players with different playstyles or personas take a defined path through your game? Sometimes we get a bit abstract with this and try to vaguely gesture at different types of player but it can be helpful to be explicit about it, especially if you’ve seen how players are behaving during testing.
I don’t think I’ve posted this great talk on reputation systems from Josh Sawyer previously - as usual from Josh, he takes a holistic and pragmatic view of how an individual mechanic relates to the rest of a game.
I’ve recently done a couple of interviews and panels about Stop Killing Games after my recent post. I didn’t see anyone speaking from an indie perspective which takes a sympathetic but critical view of the campaign (and its industry response) so I decided to express that myself. I’m not a technical or policy expert but I would say the response (when adjusting for the usual internet fart noises) has been largely positive from both “sides”.
I think there are quite a few of us who have been hanging around games for a while and don’t really talk about process or the overall context of the industry very much, and I really would encourage everyone in that boat to speak up if you have something more considered to say. I’m really enjoying Cliff Harris’ series on coding at the moment, for example. I don’t want the only sources of game development insight to be dubious YouTubers hawking courses or LinkedIn smuglords.
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