Jesse's Design Blog

[jesseschell]

Thou Shalt Not Covet

I'm always reading funky little creativity and business books, because you never know where good ideas are going to come from. On a plane back from the Dare to be Digital festival in Dundee (where there was a cool game jam, that submitted Relative and Dragon Eyes) I read the book It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be that I picked up in a funky bookshop in Edinburgh that only sold books about design. 

The book was written by Paul Arden, who is an advertising guy, and it had lots of good creative tips, but the one that struck me more than any other was this:

This is the best advice I'd received in a while. And it's totally true. Novice game designers always worry about sharing their ideas -- after all, what if someone runs off with your great idea, before you've even had a chance to make it? Everyone has heard stories about Zynga stealing ideas from indie developers, maybe that will happen to me, so I better not share my ideas with anyone!

Here is why I believe this is completely wrong. 

1) No one has time to steal your idea. I have never met any professionals in the game industry who sit and stew and say, "If only I had a really great idea, then I could make a game." EVERYONE who has been making games for more than ten minutes has a giant bag of ideas that they WISH they had time to make. Every game designer goes to their grave with the regret that they never had time to think through all the amazing ideas they came up with over their careers. So, the last thing anyone needs to do is to steal your new, unproven idea. 

2) Raph Koster makes an excellent point: Even IF someone did steal your idea, by the time they were done working on it, it would be so different as to be unrecognizable. Surely you won't be mad if someone steals your idea and then turns it into something you'd never make, right? 

3) But, wait, I've heard stories of Zynga stealing ideas from indies! Are you saying that didn't happen? No, it totally happened. But think about it for a minute -- did they steal little baby unproven ideas that were sleeping in the cradle? No -- they waited until the ideas were already turned into successful games, and then said, "Hey -- we should copy that already successful game!" Zynga is not interested in stealing unproven ideas, they only seem interested in stealing proven moneymaking ideas... and there's no way you can keep those secret!

4) As an indie developer, you need the world to believe that you are capable of creating great ideas. How can they believe that if you keep all your ideas secret? More and more, indies are realizing that the best way for them to build a rep is to get their games out there, even if they just give them away for free, because once you have a following, you are much more likely to find ways to make your games profitable. 

It's for these reasons that I am not shy about suggesting to anyone working on a game idea that they post it on GameSprout, even if (especially if) they are planning to take it to market. And to show I'm serious about this, Schell Games is going to start doing something new. All of our internal IP games, which used to be developed in secrecy, will be developed publicly on GameSprout from now on. We'll be doing an internal game jam (a Schell Games tradition called Jam Week) between September 9 and 13, and all the new ideas from that will go up on GameSprout, and whichever ones we choose to move forward with will be developed publicly, so everyone can see the updates in real-time. I figure, the more eyes on the games, the better! And hopefully, it will get others to follow our example.

I still believe the tenets of the GameSprout Manifesto: 

1) Anyone can design a great game. 2) All of us together are better designers than any of us alone. 3) The more we all share, the smarter we all become.

So, stop coveting, and start sharing!

8/28/13 update: There must be something in the air! Daniel Solis just backed me up!: https://opensource.com/life/13/8/stealing-ideas

[jesseschell]

One

When you are creating a new game, the most important thing about it is the part that is unique. This is why, on the GameSprout design document page, we list “Favorite Thing About This Idea” as one of the four critical aspects that you need to submit. It can be very tempting for novice designers to pile on as many features as they can, with the idea that more is better. More is not better, more is just more. 

But think about this – if that one new feature is so great, why do you need all that other stuff? It’s true, if you have $50M, and a lot of experience making a certain genre of game, you can sometimes succeed by creating a new version of it, with one more feature. But if you are trying to stand out as an independent developer, it is always in your best interest to focus on keeping your game as simple as possible. 

Look at these successful games that started as simple ideas – each has ONE key idea, polished until it is bright and brilliant:

World of Goo: What if you built towers out of little creatures that climbed on towers?

Angry Birds: What if you used touch and physics to knock down a tower with projectiles?

Braid: What if you could manipulate time?

Words with Friends: What if you could play Scrabble with your friends, one turn at time, at your convenience?

Portal: What if you could traverse a world through two connected holes?

Minecraft: What if you could build EVERYTHING in a world out of simple blocks?

When your idea is new, you should spend as much of your energy as possible on the unique element – showing how cool and interesting it is. Don’t worry about all that other stuff until it is really obvious that you need it. For example, check out this recent GameSprout submission: Snowball in Hell 

It’s a very simple platformer, with one interesting mechanic. This game could have all kinds of additional elements – enemies, abilities, a deep story, etc… but it doesn’t need any of that for us to see how fun and interesting it is. In fact, if all that stuff was presented at this early stage, it would cloud what is so amazing about this game, which is the fun tension of growing and shrinking. 

Let’s contrast that to another recent submission: Agent Chimp

This one is really in very early stages, but the core mechanics make me nervous: 

“Agent Chimp is stealth game with some action elements. All the standard elements are there, crouching, crawling, disguises, sneaking, etc. However, Agent Chimp has the added advantage of being a chimp and having full use of his feet, allowing him to use his feet to dangle from the ceiling while reading documents and grab documents under heavy objects while lifting them.” 

What’s the unique part of this? When I look at it, I think that the notion of being able to use hands and feet at the same time is what really makes this special. But that gets lost in the business of reading documents (?), disguises, etc. My advice on an idea like this is to dig into the unique part – which I think is the simultaneous hands and feet manipulation, and figure out how that works, and what is cool about it. A stealth game is cool, sure, and a game about disguises could be cool (that sounds like a whole other proposal!) but whatever you focus on, the more you can focus on ONE idea, the better. 

Check out this video talking about the upcoming game Murdered: Soul Suspect, and why it compares favorably with L.A. Noire (hint: because it has LESS gameplay, not MORE!)

Unnecessary ideas dilute a good idea. So, as you are having a discussion with the community, don’t ask “what else does this game need?” Instead, ask – what could I get rid of to make this game stronger?

[jesseschell]

Primality

Recently I was asked to give a talk about why it is that young children can learn touch interfaces so easily. The obvious answer is “because they are intuitive.” But that’s really a pretty vaporous answer, since the definition of “intuitive” is “easy to understand.” So the question becomes “why is it that touch interfaces are so easy to understand?” And the answer is this: they are primal.

Until the advent of touch computing, every computer interface took the form of tool use. I would interact with some physical object (keyboard, mouse, button panel, punch card, etc.) and some remote (not near my finger) response would take place. Gradually, like with all tools, we learn how they work, and become accustomed to them. But tool use is not primal, by which I mean, pre-human. Human started using tools about three million years ago, which is a pretty good run. But, still – animals have been touching things, intuitively, for much longer. Probably something like 300 or 400 million years. And our brains, of course, are evolved from those brains. When you think about the three-layer structure of the human brain, it becomes clearer – the lowest level “reptilian” section of the brain is able to process touch, but tool use probably requires help from the neocortex, the highest level of the brain.

    When you think of it that way, it becomes obvious why touch is more intuitive than using a mouse or game controller. But then, of course, it raises a broader question – what parts of my game are primal, and what parts require higher brain function? It seems certain that the more you can engage and involve the primal parts of the brain the more intuitive and powerful your gameplay will feel. Which helps to explain why so many games contain elements like:

Gather fruit-like items

Fight a threatening enemy

Find your way through an unfamiliar environment

Overcome obstacles to get to a mate (how scientists say “rescue the princess”)

To really know what parts of the brain are involved in a given activity, you need to be a brain scientist doing MRI research. But to make an educated guess about whether your game activity has low-level primality, just think about whether it is something that animals can do. If they can, there’s a good chance you are tapping into the power of primality.

Lens #102: The Lens of Primality

Some actions and interfaces are so intuitive that animals were doing them hundreds of millions of years ago. To capture the power of primality, ask yourself this questions:

Could an animal play my game? Why or why not?

[jesseschell]

Nobody Wants to Read Your Design

[jesseschell]

The Power of Funk

There is something incomparably alluring about funky game mechanics. By “funky”, I mean mechanics that are weird and unusual… ones that take what we normally anticipate from a game, and pervert it in a direction that we don’t expect. The mechanics are Portal are certainly of this type. The slogan that Valve has given it, “Now you’re thinking with portals”, is very appropriate, because that’s what is funky about funky mechanics – they make you think about the world in a whole new way, because, even though it’s the same old world, you have a new way of interacting with it – one that never occurred to you because it didn’t seem possible. But suddenly it is possible, and not only possible to interact that way, but urgent that you do so.

It doesn’t take that much to make a funky mechanic – the best ones are simple. They give you ways to be powerful that never would have been powerful before. The “row-making” mechanic of Tetris was certainly a funky mechanic. We’d seen block fitting puzzles many times before – but never ones that required us to make neat rows just that way under time pressure. Tetris addicts can’t look at a tile floor without seeing patterns in the blocks, and finding their minds hunting out ways to make the patterns into neat rows. A friend of mine, in the throes of Tetris, and in the throes of an illness, once had a fever dream, half asleep, and half awake, that he had to write a complicated computer program – and in his hallucination, each line of code was completed by completing another Tetris line, and blocks were moved and turned by contorting his body into weird shapes in his bed. His roommate observed all the twisting and turning, and asked, “What’s wrong with you? Are you alright?” to which the fever-gripped game player could only respond “Quiet! If I don’t get this program working tonight, I’m going to fail the class!” Such is the power of funky mechanics to seize and grip the mind. Somehow this new ability solve problems works its way deeply into the subconscious. We are a problem solving species, and a funky mechanic is a new tool for seizing the world, manipulating it, and making it right. 

                            (As a side note, there has been interesting research about how videogames such as Tetris have the power to command our dreams. I would posit that games with funky mechanics are most likely to bring about this effect.)

So which mechanics are funky, exactly? Will any new interface change do the trick? Could I, for example, just substitute up for down and left for right, and have a funky mechanic that will seize the mind and imagination? The answer is no, of course. A simple change like that does nothing to let me manipulate the world in a new way – all it does is provide an unnatural impediment to something I already know how to do. It gives me no new powers, and provides no rich new problem space to explore.

I bring all this up because the popularity of one of GameSprout’s first entries, “Frozen Frame”, got me thinking about it. Its proposed mechanic, that lets the player slide time forward and backward at the same time that they move through the world, effectively allowing the player movement in four dimensions, is unquestionably funky, and that seems to be the primary appeal of the game. I think that the very best funky mechanics, when people hear about them, make them immediately say, “Oh, I see – yes, I would love to manipulate the world that way!” I certainly felt that way, and I look forward to seeing a working prototype of Frozen Frame – I keep thinking about what it would be like to play it – which is a definite hallmark of a great new funky mechanic. You could argue that what is described there so far is not that different than some of what we’ve seen in Braid, or in Blinx the Time Sweeper, but I feel like the appeal of Frozen Frame is a more direct simplicity than either of those games were able to deliver.

In many ways, thinking about funky mechanics reminds me of the maxim of science fiction writers, often known as “Wells’s Law” that an author is allowed exactly one impossibility per story, the story becoming an examination of how that impossibility makes the world a different place. For as H.G. Wells himself put it, “Any extra fantasy outside the cardinal assumption immediately gives a touch of irresponsible silliness to the invention.”

It’s been a long time since we had a new lens. Let’s call it Lens #101.

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The Lens of Funk

People love novelty, and the novelty they love best is the kind that gives them a new way to manipulate the world, a new way to solve problems. Every new tool is a lens in itself, that lets the wielder see the world in a new way, and seeing the familiar in a new way is always exciting, because it means you can examine and explore everything you already know, and make new discoveries the whole time. Ask these questions to ensure your new mechanic is as funky as possible.

Does your core mechanic let you interact with the world in a new way?

Does it let the player do something they never thought of doing before?

Can it be applied to a broad range of situations in your game world?

Does it leverage off of other rules of the world to create many interesting possibilities?

Is this one mechanic, by itself, surrounded by an ordinary world, enough to make for an interesting game?

_______________________________________________________

I wrestled quite a bit over whether the term “funky” was the best term for what I’m talking about here… but I could come up with nothing more straightforward. Better suggestions are certainly welcome – for while I’m not sure about the term – I am quite certain about the premise that some ways of interacting with the world are unexpected, exciting, and open the door to a rich and interesting problem space. 

What do you think? Is "funky mechanic" the best term? Or is there something better?

[jesseschell]

The GameSprout Manifesto

Game design means a lot to me. It's why I teach at Carnegie Mellon, it's why I wrote the Art of Game Design, and it's why I run a game studio. I really believe in sharing the joy of game design with as many people as possible -- and that's why Schell Games is launching GameSprout -- a site designed to make game design and development something shared and public, something we can all do together, and not just for fun, but in a sincere attempt to make, share, and sell great games. 

Myself and many others at Schell Games will be giving specific game design advice to people who submit designs on the GameSprout website, but this blog will be weekly tips on how anyone can make their games better. For the first posting, I wanted to present the three-part GameSprout Manifesto -- the principles upon which GameSprout is founded. 

Principle the First: Anyone Can Design a Great Game

I believe this through and through. Game design is not a talent you are born with, it is a talent you develop through practice. And what drives your practice? The love of designing! If you have that love, and you are willing to practice, your game design skill will grow like powerful muscles. And this is why we started GameSprout -- to connect amateurs and hobbyists with each other and with working professionals so we can all share feedback and ideas, and all help each other to grow. Because the next great game design could come from any one of us -- any one of us who takes the time to share their idea with the world. 

Principle the Second: All of us Together are Better Designers than any of us Alone. 

Good design comes through sharing, not by keeping secrets. The more of us who look at and give feedback about games, the stronger those games will become. Just this week I had a new interface idea for one of our games that I was COMPLETELY SURE was genius, was a massive improvement over and old interface. The team liked it too. We playtested it, just to check, and we were shocked to discover that people outside the team liked the old interface much better. I'm so glad we checked! At GameSprout, games will grow gradually, and everyone in the community will be able to playtest and comment on the works in progress, so we can all decide together what will be best, and all get a chance to get our ideas in about how to make each game idea as good as it can be. 

Principle the Third: The More we all Share, the Smarter we all Become

I love that GameSprout gives everyone a chance to participate, and I really believe that working together, we can make amazing games. But the part of GameSprout that is nearest and dearest to me is the educational aspect: You learn game design by doing it, and by seeing it done well. GameSprout will be a kind of game design dojo, where each contributor will get feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of their ideas, with tips about how to improve them. It will be a place we can all learn from each other, and all grow stronger together. Game design education is very important to me. Anything I can do to help people become better game designers, I want to do, because I really believe that good game design has the power to change the world. And while I look forward to GameSprout producing hit games that make their designers rich and famous, more than anything else I look forward to a future where hundreds of the best professional game designers can look back and say "I got my start on GameSprout." 

This journey will have its challenges. Design is hard, collaborating is hard, sharing is hard, education is hard, and making profitable games is very hard. And we're doing all of them at once. But I have every confidence that if we all believe in this, and we all work together, we can overcome each of these challenges, and create a place that we all love, a place where when each new visitor timidly asks, "Can I be a game designer, too?" we are all there to respond, "Of course you can, because we're going to show you how."