iCombat

There is a great post in ngmoco’s blog from several months ago that talks about the complexity behind tuning games.  Specifically referring to Star Defense, Allen Ma talks about how any one factor when changed impacts the entire flow and resulting difficulty level of the game:

“For example, if the game allowed you to pause it while you placed towers or if there were a few more seconds between wave launches, Star Defense would lose its fast pace. If we altered the strength of the towers or how much it cost to upgrade them, it would influence how you played the game. If we handed out more credits for each enemy unit killed, it would change how you managed tower purchases and upgrades.”

Players underestimate just how difficult it is to design a game with a nice balance between being rewarding to play but challenging enough to want to continue playing.  Even with iCombat, which has a very simple game mechanic, it took several weeks to refine the level design and lay them out in a way that provided a steady progression from level 1 through 60. And this initial design has been refined and tuned throughout every update.

Aside from the level design which is the most visible factor that can affect game play, there are things like enemy AI (firing frequency, movement paths, speed, etc), the scoring mechanism, the frequency of power-ups or bonus items, the number of lives, upgrade prices and so one that are crucial to getting the game right.

An example of just how intentional these design elements are can be seen in iCombat’s score system, where many users wondered why we chose to go with a countdown (Enigmo style) method where each level begins counting back from 10,000.  The decision was focused at creating a scoring mechanic that rewarded speed, thus creating a nice interplay between playing it safe to preserve lives or playing fast to get points.  The result is that no 2 scores are ever alike.  This might seem like a small detail, but for the avid users it creates an entirely different decision tree when facing the harder, more involved levels.  Do you hide to preserve life, let the time expire, and then execute a level safely?  Or do you go guns blazing to finish with as many points as possible?  To extend this decision tree further and equalize players across difficulty level we made the countdown 12,000 for Hard mode, 10,000 for Medium and 8,000 for easy.

Another great example of where we made a decision to point the user behavior a certain direction came from the fact that one shot equals a player kill.  Here the logic was to force users to play more conservatively, pushing creative calculations with ricochet’s and bonus items.  And by limiting the map size, we managed to create a campaign mode that could be done in bite sized chunks, 5 minutes here and there.

So the next time you play a game think about how every single detail in the game was deisgned intentionally that way.  There are no default game layouts or settings so if it is in a game then the developer wanted it there.  Whether it was the right choice or not is a separate issue, but sometimes it helps to remember just how difficult it is to get the balance right.

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For anyone interested in creating an iPhone app but wondering where to begin, I think the best thing you can do is just sit down and lay it out.  I have always been a big fan of whiteboards and as of late the huge Post It Easel Pads but these are impossible if you travel a lot and are of limited use when trying to collaborate over long distances.  The answer for me has been to use Balsamiq, a tool that allows you to quickly create mock-ups of both websites and iPhone apps.  With Balsamiq I can work through the mechanics of how an app should work, and visually see the flow from action to action.

In previous posts I have suggested to first time app developers the importance of creating proper specs when planning to create an app.  I think mockup tools like Balsamiq are even more useful than making great specs and writing out usage scenario examples.  Not only does it help you better develop your idea but it also gives you the ability to share your mockups with other people instantly.  For example, if you are thinking about outsourcing development or are talking to other team members, Balsamiq will let you share your mockups and convey clearly what you want to do (for info on how to protect your idea with outsourced developers read this post).  And by visually demonstrating the flow of how you want your app to work developers will have a much better idea of what you are looking for.  This will pay off in terms of the quality of developer you manage to get and it will also improve the accuracy of the time and budget estimates you get from developers.

Even if you plan on developing the app yourself, you can benefit from working through the fuzzy parts of your idea.  A mockup tool will give you the simple tools you need to work through EVERY aspect of your app structure before you begin the development process.  This is important because it can alert you to fundamental flaws in your idea or logic before you put the time and effort into building it.

In addition to the sketches of the iPhone and its main interface tools you also have sketches of dozens of buttons, switches, icons and other items that you can customize.  For example, when you drag an iPhone image to the drawing area, a box pops up where you can select whether to include the status toolbar at the top, change the orientation, the background look, etc.  You can even drag call out boxes into the picture as well to insert commentary about your mockup.  Check out this video for an example of what is possible.

Balsamiq includes a free trial version so you can test it out today…give it 5 minutes and you will see how quickly you get the hang of it.

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I posted to Twitter about this but think it deserves mention here as well since it is such a great resource for game developers.  Ngmoco’s blog is short but incredibly dense in high quality advice from successful and experienced iPhone gamemakers.  The most recent posts aren’t so heavy on design advice but if you go to earlier entries you will find some awesome entries about game design and development.  The best post was from Kristine Coco titled With doing comes learning that gives some great insight into what works and what doesn’t for geographically distributed teams as well as for certain aspects of game development.  As an aside, Kristine will actually be giving a talk this year at the Game Developers Conference on working with external teams (clearly a topic important to me as I work with a team in the Ukraine!) titled I Say Green, You Hear Purple: Avoiding a Game of Telephone When Working with External Teams.  While I cannot attend unfortunately, it sounds like the ngmoco website will be posting the talk and slides after the presentation on their blog (update: see slides here). Read more…

It occurred to me as I sat here going through dozens of game sound effects and game graphics that I don’t have the foggiest idea what I am doing.  Sure I have played plenty of games and have a clear vision of what this app should look like but beyond that, I have not read one book or one article about good game design.  I did stumble across The Hummingbird Manifesto but this is little more than a cheeky bit of pretty intuitive advice.  As my game development gets further along though I find that I have made dozens if not hundreds of decisions and all I am going off of is my past game play experience.

Atari Pong Screenshot

I am fairly confident I have limited just how much I can screw this up by keeping the game simple and without too much of a plot as this seems to add another layer of design complexity. This is why I chose to do a game based off of some of the original gaming platforms: these focused on the quality of in game play rather than depth and variety of sound or visual effects (of course there was no choice back then).

After just building what we have, and you guys will get to be the judges of how well we have done soon, I can say I really respect professional game designers.  To have the vision to not only create a fully developed plot but then to fold in the complexity of quality sound and graphics really is a huge effort.  Especially when you are inventing a new theme or world from scratch.  No wonder game budgets are becoming so enormous like Spore’s estimated $35 million and there are tons of Bachelor’s degree programs for game development and design like this one. Read more…

It’s 6am and I just spent the last 14 hours mocking up my 20 levels so that the developers can have a foundation on which to build the game.  I did the entire set of levels in Powerpoint, it was surprisingly easy I guess I got one decent skill out of Investment Banking (still wasn’t worth it).  For anyone who has never cared to or ever tried to lay out a game, even a simple one like mine, let me tell you it is pretty impossible to have any sort of intuition around what will play well.

Level mock-ups

Of course you have to consider user habits, the quality of the enemy AI and so on, and even knowing that and expecting future revisions it is still frustrating how much of a shot in the dark it all is

The question I grappled with most was how will the accelerometer steering affect game play…impossible to really know until we start fiddling with different filters to find the right blend of speed and control.  I definitely want to avoid making a Labyrinth style experience, where the low friction coefficient makes steering so difficult.  Another thing I didn’t really appreciate beforehand was how little real estate an iPhone screen actually has -  you do have to be efficient in your design when it comes to games.

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I have had an idea for a while now to create a tank game that would utilize some of the new features of the iPhone such as the accelerometer and tap firing.  I had always been fairly certain that it would be a 2D game, as I assumed 3D costs would be much higher (I don’t actually think this is true at this point but I never did really check into it), and I wanted to replicate some of the playability of the games of my childhood without screwing up the game play with unnecessary gimmicky features.  My last console was the Sega Genesis and I had owned many of the preceding consoles from the 90’s and 80’s including the N.E.S. and Atari 2600 so I was used to simpler graphics, fewer keypad options, but much better game design.

I decided to develop a basic tanks game that would leverage the 2 player via Wifi as well as accelerometer and tap features of the iPhone, but include little in the way of characters, story line, etc.

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