Design Blog

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Game Design and Cooking

I started thinking today about how I could describe game design to people in a simple way. It seems to me sometimes that the intricacies of this industry are difficult to comprehend and that results in a lot of misconceptions about how this job works and the effort and knowledge that is required to get things to go well. When I was growing up and wanted to get into the game industry I had a lot of these misconceptions about what goes into a good game. I don't think that I'm fully there yet, but I think that I have found a decent way of explaining how it works to others.

Video game design is like cooking.

It sounds a little weird at first but I think it's something that most people can relate to. First of all both of these professions involve a lot of creativity on the part of the designer/cook. Both professions can seem deceptively simple on the outside, but have deep intricacies that take time to learn. They also both rely a lot on the subjective opinions of their customers to be successful, and as a result, both of them need to have a good degree of understanding when it comes to the "tastes" of their patrons. Finally, and I want to emphasize this part, being able to consume and enjoy the product does not inherently make one an expert on it.

Knowing what tastes good is not the same as being able to cook something that tastes good. Similarly, knowing what in a game is fun, is not the same as knowing what makes a fun game.

I'm a little worried that last sentence came off as a bit arrogant, so I'll clarify that I'm not saying that game players or their opinions are unimportant. Far from it, as I think it's imperative for a game designer to take feedback from the players of his game as well as his peers in order to improve his skills. However, I think that often times the feedback that a game designer receives from players and beta testers is highly skewed and cannot be taken at face value. What I am trying to get at here, is that the feedback from players is something that needs to be tempered by the game designer's own opinions and thoughts.

To get back to the cooking analogy, let's compare a game to a full course meal. The designer does his best and tries to prepare a meal/game which is balanced in flavor, nutrition and texture. He then asks the customer what he thinks could be improved.

The customer tells him, "I really liked the chocolate cake that I had for desert! Chocolate is really delicious, I think you should make the other dishes more like the cake and put in more chocolate. That would make them taste better."

This is difficult advice for the cook to follow. In his mind he realizes that putting chocolate in the salad or the mashed potatoes is a bad idea and wouldn't really help the dishes very much. Beyond that he also knows that if he were to feed someone a full course of chocolate dishes that they would very quickly tire of the flavor and the impact of his later dishes would be lessened. The customer may have eaten the food of a lot of famous cooks from around the world and knows what he likes and what he doesn't like. He might even think that he can make something that delicious by combining a lot of the dishes that he's seen before. But this isn't what makes a good meal and the cook knows it! So how can he use this seemingly useless comment?

The first step is to examine the origins of it. Why did the customer focus on the chocolate? Is it because the other dishes had too much salt and not enough sugar? Perhaps the other dishes were too bland and the sharp taste of the chocolate cake stood out more than the others. Was the dish that the customer had before the cake particularly good for complementing the flavor of the chocolate? All of this can come from simply analyzing the question in a little more detail, and there's a lot of lines of thought that can come from it. The cook also needs to be able to ask better questions as well. Perhaps the chocolate answer wasn't useful at all, maybe he should have specified that he wanted to know what the customer thought of the texture of the food, or if he felt bloated after eating it. Being able to realize what questions to ask next time is important as well.

From there it's a matter of exercising his expertise to craft a better dish for next time.

This is where the designer/cook has to put his own thoughts into the matter. As the creator, he's in the best position to know which of these threads to follow in order to improve. Perhaps when he was tasting the soup earlier he also thought it was a little bland. Or maybe he realizes that if he cooks the chicken a little less that the retained water will cause it to be less salty. He could even discover that cooking with a different type of oil produces the flavor that was lacking. There's room for improvement even from such a narrow response, the trick is being able to find it. This mentality and capacity for analysis is something that I think a game designer absolutely has to have in order to be able to improve.

And the end result will be something that both creator and customer can enjoy.

-----

Extra Note #1: Also like cooking, sometimes ingredients that don't seem like they would go well together end up forming an unexpectedly good combination. Perhaps combining the chocolate with the chicken will get the cook the mole poblano flavor that he has been looking for. Combining disparate elements from game genres that don't necessarily go together will sometimes get you something unexpectedly delicious. (Though sometimes it gets you an inedible mess.)

Extra Note #2: There's a saying that bacon goes with any dish. I imagine there may be a game design convention that fulfills a similar role, but I haven't discovered it yet.

Labels: design philosophy, game industry

posted by Saikyo at 12:32 AM

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Anime Expo 2009

From July 2-5 I was in Los Angeles to check out Anime Expo 2009. It was a really fun trip and I had a ton of fun. AX is considered to be the biggest anime convention on the west coast and there were an estimated 44000 people in attendance this year. I saw some great bands, played some games, saw some movies, checked out some previews for things to come from the anime industry and even attended some informative and entertaining workshops.

But the best part was that I got to meet Daisuke Ishiwatari and Toshimichi Mori. Ishiwatari is the designer for Guilty Gear as well as the composer for BlazBlue, while Mori was the lead designer and artist for BlazBlue.

I also got the chance to ask the two of them some questions about game design during the two panels that they had. Because the question/answer period was quick their responses weren't that detailed, but they offered some interesting ideas about the games they worked on.

When I asked about what they felt was important in designing games, Ishiwatari said that he felt it was important for games to have either cooperative or competitive elements to them, since these were the things that would keep players playing the game for longer. After the queestion, Mori then asked me if I was trying to get into the game industry. I think he was a little surprised when I told him that I'd already been working in it. I hope I can design something in the future that will impress them.

Later at the second panel I asked them what the biggest design challenges they had when designing BlazBlue and Guilty Gear. Ishiwatari said that for Guilty Gear the biggest challenge was adapting the game for arcades, since the original game was designed for consoles. He said he did a lot of research into the kinds of things that would get players to keep putting quarters into the machine. Mori said that for BlazBlue the most difficult thing was getting good networking for the game. For fighting games like BlazBlue this kind of thing is fairly difficult, though I've heard that in general BlazBlue's online play is fairly solid.

-----

All in all, it was a great trip and it was pretty neat to meet the creators of the games I've been enjoying for so long. I hope I can make it to Anime Expo next year as well.

I'll end this post with a quote from Ishiwatari from an earlier interview:

"I look forward to seeing new designers come into the industry with a burning passion to create."

Reading this I'm motivated to keep working hard in order to live up to his expectations.

Labels: anime expo, blazblue, design philosophy, game industry, game mechanics

posted by Saikyo at 9:33 PM

Saturday, June 20, 2009

The Three C's of Design

I've been trying to come up with some interesting ways to express how good design works, and I've been toying with this new idea recently I'm calling "The Three C's of Good Design". The gist of it is that it is the three core skills that someone needs to be successful in design. It's still a new idea that I just thought up a little while ago, so there is definitely room for revision, but I'd like to share what I have so far.

The Three C's of Good Design are:
1. Creativity
2. Confidence
3. Communication

I'll go over each point individually, but before that I want to clarify something. There used to be 4 C's the last one being "Competence" but I thought it was a little redundant, since if you gain the other three you will already have competence. Or rather, having these three skills will make you competent at design.

So onto the individual parts...

-----
Creativity

This one is probably the most obvious. The job of a designer is to CREATE new experiences in every game and to find ways to make these experiences fun for the majority of the players.

I think it's a little deeper than this however, since simply coming up with the ideas for the experience is only part of the challenge. The creativity of designers has to extend to all aspects of game creation. Besides just coming up with the experience, creativity is needed to solve problems which come up during implementation, it's needed to come up with ways to use the script to support the experience, and it's even when testing levels in order to find new ways to break the very thing you worked so hard to create.

Creativity is definitely a core skill for any designer, but it's important to be creative when it comes to a broad base of design aspects and not just be someone who comes up with ideas, but someone who can see them through to completion.

-----
Confidence

I think it's important not to take this principle too far, because then it becomes arrogance, which isn't helpful and can be counter-productive in the worst case.

By confidence I mean the assurance to stick with what you think is good design. I think it's fine to look at what the player wants, but also that it's important for designers to understand that even if players say they "want" something, that is not necessarily what the game "needs".

Being confident in your own designs means that you understand what makes them good and recognize when things need to be changed, and also when it's better to stick to your original plans. Changing ideas and levels can happen frequently in the design process, but it's important to maintain a confident stance so that that you know when to stop and finish your work.

-----
Communication

Probably the least obvious of the three, this one tends to end up being the most important. As a designer, it's important to be confident, but also to realize that the majority of your work will usually depend on the hard work of other people, most often programmers and artists. Very rarely does one person do everything himself unless it's something small like a flash game or short indie project.

The final works of designers require many raw materials that are generally provided by others. While the designer is the one who creates the end result it's incredibly important to recognize and understand the work of those that come before you. Being able to communicate effectively with other designers in a confident manner that gets your creative design ideas across is what allows great games to be made.

Communication with artists and programmers can be difficult sometimes as the differences in disciplines sometimes result in designers seeing things differently than artists and programmers, but being able to communicate and understand the people who are not in the design department is just as important (and possibly moreso) than simply being able to communicate with your fellow designers.

Great ideas and a confident pitch aren't going to get you a finished game unless you can get the idea across to your peers and co-workers.

-----

And those are the three C's are the things I'm thinking are really important for being a good designer. They are aspects I try to focus on when designing and when working with others. I may think up more in the future, but for now I think these sum things up nicely.

One more thing before I sign off for today. BlazBlue is slated for release 6/30/2009 in the US. Pre-orders are currently available here. I'm still trying to figure out which version I want and where I'm gonna end up shipping it. But I'm definitely going to make sure I pick it up.

Labels: blazblue, design philosophy, game industry

posted by Saikyo at 2:32 PM

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Standard Practices, and Lack Thereof

Well it looks like I'm officially unemployed now. I've been looking for a job for a little while now, but things have now escalated a bit.

In that vein I've been taking many different design tests in these past months, so far I haven't had too much luck with them, but I'm always hopeful that I will do better on the next one.

However it's brought to my attention an interesting problem with the game industry.

"There are no standards."

Now I don't necessarily mean standards as in pricing or genre, as those things are somewhat established. I refer more to standards when it comes to hiring and best production practices. This is partly the fault of the type of work that is done in the industry and partly a result of the young age of the industry.

The fact of the matter is that every single company I have ever applied to has had radically different design tests, procedures for their interviews (and in the ones that I've visited) significantly different working practices and environments. Naturally you would expect different companies to use the interview procedures based on factors such as size and the nature of the work, but even within similar companies you get very inconsistent results. Similarly when you get a design test, it can range anywhere from six hours in one block to several weeks to complete a level, and the content varies as well, sometimes its a questionnaire, sometimes it's a paper level, other times it's a level built in an editor, and occasionally you get a test that asks for just about all of them at once.

Now I want to be clear that I'm not blaming the companies for this, as they each have developed their own way of doing things. What I am concerned about however is the isolation that has resulted in these types of differences and the results on people interested in getting jobs.

When every company does creates their own special way to create games the result is that workers become incredibly specialized to a certain way of working. If company A has their own procedure for creating a game of a certain genre that involves specialized job descriptions and certain procedures, then it becomes difficult for the company to find new workers and it becomes difficult for workers at that company to find new jobs should they want/need to move on.

For example, say company A has designers wear multiple hats and design levels, script scenarios and write the dialouge, while another company B has a separate jobs for designing, scripting and writing that are fulfilled by specialists. Designers from company A will not be specialized enough to work at company B and workers from company B will not be experienced enough in the other job aspects to handle work at company A.

This is probably more of a designer issue than an artist or programmer issue however, since designer jobs seem to be the ones that differ most significantly from one company to another. However the testing procedure for hiring new workers is something that seems inconsistent for all development disciplines.

While I understand the value of testing potential applicants and I don't think it should stop, I simultaneously question why the transitions between companies is so jarring. I can be working on a week long written exam for one week and then follow it the next week with an intense 3 day design work in specific level editor. With jumps in productivity like this I think it only makes it more likely that the odd pacing will result in lower quality work overall in the long run. Additionally because of the length of time some tests take it makes it difficult to apply for multiple jobs at a time, this again, can result in a lower quality of results. Finally because the content of an employment test can vary significantly from test to test it's impossible for a job seeker to practice or prepare himself, which means the test will not necessarily be an accurate measure of his abilities.

Personally I'd like it if there was some kind of standardized way to test for certain qualities of design in a way that did not result in the guessing game that seems to happen from both sides when an employment test is issued. Of course, I realize that it's not likely to happen for a while, since part of what makes this industry so vibrant and changing is the spontaneity that pushes the limits of gameplay and design.

In the end, game design ability isn't easily measured because it's not like building a house or fixing plumbing; it's creating fun experiences from nothing but imagination.

Which unfortunately can't really be measured with a ruler.

Labels: game industry, job

posted by Saikyo at 11:03 PM

Friday, May 8, 2009

Hard Times

Seems like pretty difficult times for the game industry. Not that I wasn't aware of this from being laid off, but I recently read an interesting article that estimates the number of layoffs to be around 8450 since last July. It's a pretty staggering number when I think about it, and it only makes me realize how much harder I need to work to find a new job.

The interesting thing about that article is that the author also talks about a Gaming Renaissance movement that is taking place. It's an interesting read, and makes me a little concerned about the my future in this industry. Although at the same time I suppose I am also cautiously optimistic about the changes and the new studios that are springing up...

...though I'm not so optimistic as to stop applying for jobs and make my own company just yet. I'd like to get more experience in this industry before I can do something that radical, but it's definitely something to consider in the future.

Gonna be putting of the next BlazBlue installment for a little while since I have yet another design test I need to work on. I'm hoping to finish that set of blogs before the game actually comes out on 6/25. Well assuming it comes out on the same date in the US...

Labels: blazblue, game industry, job

posted by Saikyo at 10:25 PM