Design Blog

Monday, November 17, 2008

After 4 weeks of work

I finally manage to get around to posting on this blog again. I definitely need to shoot for once a week from now on, otherwise I'll start feeling too complacent.

So first how the job has been after 4 weeks, in a word: AWESOME.

In more words: SUPER AWESOME

Seriously though I think working at Big Huge Games is a fun and interesting place to work where I can do all the stuff I studied for back in Guildhall, except now I get paid for it! The only odd part is that now I seem to be much more of a money hoarder than before even though I have income coming in instead of going out, it's a very strange effect.

I mentioned before that I can't say much about the game I'm working on due to the NDA I signed, but will say that I work with great people in a relaxing and casual environment that is pretty amazing when I remember that in addition to all this I'm working on stuff for a video game and getting paid for it.

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I promised I'd talk about YANPA this time so here's the idea.

YANPA stands for: You Are Not the Player's Adversary

It's a funny acronym that I always try to remember when working on a level. The goal of the game is not to torment the player or to make a puzzle that the player is going to have to try very hard to solve (although this second one may be part of it). The point of the designer is to provide fun. Now I said previously that I don't really agree with the entitlement mentality that some people have. I believe that as a designer, the player is entitled to the chance to have fun, and that the designer should make every effort to provide that fun to the player. However I don't think that the player deserves to win because he bought the game or regularly pays a monthly fee (in the case of MMOs). Winning with skill is part of what creates fun, and it's the designer's job to work that fine line between fun and frustration to create a challenging experience for the player without becoming the adversary of the player.

The term YANPA was coined by an instructor I had when I was in college at ASU taking the first iteration of a "programming for game design" class taught by some graduate students. Admittedly, the class was fairly rough and I didn't have the best of experiences in it, but I did learn some important lessons about game design that I still keep in mind today.

I hope the instructors for this course have been improving their teaching methods and class structure in order to get more students interested in game design.

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Next time: Left 4 Dead and why it is one of the most awesome games I've played this year.

Labels: big huge games, design philosophy, entitlement, left 4 dead, YANPA

posted by Saikyo at 4:31 PM

Monday, October 20, 2008

First Day / Design Thoughts

My first day of work at Big Huge Games just completed and I came off with the impression that this job will be pretty fun. I'm still learning a lot of things about the game (not that I could really say much about it on a public blog due to NDA) and I'm looking forward to working on it. Unfortunately I got very little sleep the night before due to my air mattress getting a hole in it and me spending half the night trying to find, and then fix it. Sometimes I feel like have very awkward luck.

I had a conversation with my lead near the end of the day that I wanted to expand on a bit. It comes from the idea about making games easier for players to complete. In general I think that games (with the exception of a lot of MMOs and the notable Ninja Gaiden series) have been lowering the difficulty scale so that it becomes accessible to more people.

Back in the day of the arcade, games were made difficult on purpose to get the player to keep shelling out more quarters, but the idea that was presented here was that nowadays when a player buys a game he is giving the designer all his quarters up front. So he's entitled to beat the game.

... Honestly I don't agree with this.

Now I understand that yes the player is paying money for the experience and entertainment of playing the game. Further, if the game is too difficult for them and they cannot complete it, there is a chance that they will feel that they didn't get their money's worth.

I look at it a little differently though. First of all I don't think that purchasing a game should entitle the player to experience 100% of it. Certainly 100% of the game should be available to the player, but to believe that the game designers should try and please every player is absurd. If you pay to watch a movie and then don't like it, you can't get your money back, if you buy a basketball court that doesn't mean you can suddenly become an NBA player and putting money into a slot machine sure as heck doesn't mean you're gonna get a jackpot. In the end though, people still enjoy movies, basketball and gambling.

I believe that part of being a game designer is being able to anticipate the needs of the player, and that good design is one that takes a challenging, but not adversarial relationship with the player. (I'll talk about YANPA in my next blog entry.) The designer shouldn't be a person who tries to frustrate or foil the player, but I don't think that he should be a person that sacrifices the challenge that defines video games for the sake of reaching a few extra people.

Labels: arcade games, big huge games, design philosophy, entitlement, YANPA

posted by Saikyo at 4:58 PM