I’ve gotten [a lot of questions] over the years from hopefuls who want to start with game development. One of the members on our Discord server brought up a good question - aside from the technical aspects of choosing an engine and learning to how to do stuff, how do you actually do the “softer” side of the creation process? How do you actually come up with what core gameplay should be for a game? How do you recognize when you’ve got a good and/or feasible idea? How do you go from a high concept like “flying” or “building” to actual game mechanics? And what exactly is “core gameplay” anyway?
We’ll begin with coming up with the concept of the game. Your game concept should be short sentence or two that describes exactly what the player will be doing, like “Cartoony kart racer on fantastical courses with deep drifting mechanics and kart-to-kart combat” or “Real Time match 3 puzzle game with attack mechanics and battle royale”. You may have heard of this as “the elevator pitch” - something you can say to somebody to get them interested in your game within the span of a few seconds. This is crucial for any game project to have - you absolutely need a strong concept to serve as your goal that the game’s development moves toward. You need something simple and unmistakable that you can refer back to and think “Will this idea help move the project toward this goal?” Once you have a concept locked in, you move on to creating core gameplay for that concept.
Core gameplay is the collection of literal actions players will perform in order to drive progress in the game forward. We call each of these actions a “core mechanic”. Core mechanics are usually verbs, like:
Fight
Run
Jump
Build
Explore
Trade
Match 3
Loot
Equip
It’s really important to have an understanding of [gameplay loops] as a concept for this part, because you cannot have core gameplay without actions the player initiates at these different time frames. Your core mechanics will be the actions your players perform most often while playing your game. They will be the elements that other stuff is built on. They should also be the first prototypes you build. Each of these needs to be tested for feasibility and engagement. If the core actions aren’t fun, it will be very difficult to make the stuff that you build on top of the core mechanics fun.
Good core mechanics will interact with each other in interesting ways, leading to players to explore them and feel out how they synergize. For example, Call of Duty focuses on fast-paced run-and-gun action, which is the combination of two elements - running and shooting. How do these interact with each other? There’s a lot of play between player locomotion (mantling, crouching, proning, walking, running, sprinting) and player shooting (accuracy, weapon effective range, weapon type, reload times, magazine size). Good core mechanics will feed into each other to provide a rich tapestry of things for players to learn and have fun with.
There are apocryphal stories about Shigeru Miyamoto asking for plain, nearly-empty levels when playing new game prototypes just so he can experiment with the core game mechanics. The story goes that Miyamoto wanted to make sure that playing the game at its most basic level was fun by itself without adding in things like textures, graphics, lighting, bells and whistles. That’s what your core game mechanics should be - the game should be fun at some basic level without a lot of additional fluff. When you are starting off, you need to figure out just what it would take to prove out each of your core mechanics, what a prototype of that mechanic would encompass. It needn’t be production quality anything, this is just a test to make sure that the mechanic is compelling and interesting to the player on its own.
This is how you get started building a game. You need to establish a clear concept, then break that concept down into core mechanics. Once you’ve decided on your core mechanics, build prototypes for those mechanics and see if it’s fun enough. Then, once that’s done, combine your core mechanics into a single cohesive prototype to demonstrate how they interact with each other. That’s a demo of what the game should be, and a starting point where you can expand from organically by building more - more variety, more enemies, more things, etc. for the players to act on with those core mechanics.
You mentioned that developers leave studio's for numerous reasons. How do some devs stay there for very long periods then (think 10+years)?
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Most people choose to leave a job when their needs aren’t being met for some reason. These reasons tend to fall into one of four broad categories:
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Personal reasons, e.g. caring for sick family, having children, pursuing a lifelong dream, wants to move out of the city/state/country, etc.
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Compensation/Career advancement reasons, e.g. being passed over or given no opportunities for promotion, pay does not rise with cost of living, pay/job title is not commensurate with the worker’s responsibilities, etc.
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Job satisfaction reasons, e.g. hostile work environment, burnout, boredom with the role/responsibilities/project, does not get along with other team members, friends on the team are also leaving, etc.
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Job security reasons, e.g. the company/team/leadership/project is not doing well
We’ll set aside personal reasons here because those aren’t really something that the working environment can really affect too much. These other three categories - compensation, satisfaction, and security - are all things that the employer can affect. As long as a worker feels like their needs are being met - i.e. they have enough job satisfaction, compensation, and security to feel comfortable - they are quite likely to stay at their job. As long as that situation remains true for 10+ years, some employees will choose to stay there for 10+ years.
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Amusingly enough, my current studio employer collaborates with other studios on a well-known AAA franchise. I actually used to work at one of these other studios 10+ years ago. I was reunited in cross-studio meetings with some of my former coworkers who are still at that same studio 10+ years later. It does happen!
How do you evoke the emotion of anger without making the player frustrated with a game?
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Strong emotional response is a key factor in player engagement in most cases (sadness/despair is the notable outlier here). A strong anger reaction has a lot of potential for an engaging player experience, as long as we create the experience carefully. We do this by creating a specific target for that anger that isn’t the game itself, and by giving the player a satisfying way to release all of the tension that anger has built up within them.
Let me illustrate this concept in two gifs. First, we create a very specific target for players to focus all of that anger on.
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We want the player to feel that anger, just not at the game. We want to present a character or challenge that the player can get angry at. We want it to be frustrating, but not break the flow band into anxiety. This will build tension very quickly and pull the player in - an angry player will be many things, but won’t be bored.
Once we’ve built up enough tension, we then create an encounter for the player to release all of that built-up tension in a satisfying way.
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That release of all that tension is then replaced within the player by catharsis, which feels great. Catharsis is that sense of satisfaction and relaxation you get after releasing all of your pent-up rage in a good way, without any of the regret or hurt that releasing anger normally causes. The more tension we built before releasing, the better the release feels.
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If the game doesn’t provide an adequate release for that tension, the player has nowhere else to vent except at the game itself. This often transforms the tension into disappointment. This is why both steps are equally important. We need to build the anger up at a target, and then we need to lead the player to the best place to release all that anger on the target, achieving catharsis. That results in a memorable and engaging experience.
Is there something you wish you had known before starting to work in computer games? Is there something you'd like to share with people wanting to become game devs? (Besides your usual advice of "do something yourself!" which both sounds good and still stands)
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The thing I most wish I had known is that starting a career in AAA game development meant that I would not have an opportunity to work on my own game ideas for a very, very long time. I wish I knew I would be spending the majority of my time working on other peoples’ ideas and making them a reality. That’s something I wish all the young ‘uns hoping to get into game dev as a career knew.
When I started, I would get very specific tasks without much wiggle room. The general tasks were mostly already planned out for me by my leads. Any creativity was limited to within the confines of the task I was working on. I’d occasionally have to do some thinking on my own to resolve small ambiguities or figure things out, but it was mostly just leveling up and familiarizing myself with the problem-solving process. As I leveled up, the scope of my tasks and responsibilities broadened and I had more freedom to create my own ideas within the boundaries of my assignments. The more I learned, the easier it became to take broader requests or vague ideas and turn them into functioning systems and features. I was still limited by the confines of my task, but the space within those confines is greatly increased since my junior days. It was only at this skill level that I was actually capable and experienced enough to make my own ideas a reality in a feasible manner from start to finish.
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Even the most talented hopeful that manages to obtain a coveted entry-level game designer position on their favorite AAA franchise won’t be given the keys to the kingdom. There are hundreds of devs on most AAA teams, each with their own batch of ideas. We all have ideas. We have no shortages of good ideas. We don’t often get the opportunity to work on our own ideas because we’re getting paid to work towards the leadership’s ideas.
It seems like sequels and games in similar genres are usually, if not most of the time improving on the games that came before. In longer terms at least it seems reliable. Is there a limit, do you think? Will we ever reach a point where a sequel can't reliably be "better" than the last entry?
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We can look at history for the answer to your question. Some franchises have been running for decades and remain extremely strong today - Call of Duty, FIFA, Madden, the Sims, and Grand Theft Auto all span decades, lots of installments, and multiple millions of players. Some franchises have been relegated to specific niches - no longer the headliners they once were but still remain reliable, like Mega Man, Street Fighter, Battlefield, Civilization, and Just Dance. And finally, we must consider the franchises that have essentially been relegated to the dust bin of history. They’ve had their day in the sun, but a new game announcement in the series won’t really generate a significant amount of interest - Tony Hawk, Guitar Hero, Turok, Castlevania, SSX, Medal of Honor, Prince of Persia, Wing Commander, Ultima, Unreal Tournament, Command and Conquer, and Twisted Metal.
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If you consider the context, it should be clear that franchise games that are able to find an audience consistently, even if that audience isn’t massive in size, can carve out a sustainable niche for themselves. The dead franchises are those that were unable to find sustainability with their audiences and generally fielded more than one failed game. In each of those cases, the publishers looked at the total costs they thought would be necessary to create a game within that respective franchise and compared that to the expected return on that game and decided it wasn’t worth the risk.
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That said, hope springs eternal. A lot of publishers will leave a franchise fallow for a long time. The longer a franchise is dormant, the lower the bar for a revival success. As we’ve seen with the revival of formerly-dormant IPs like Crash Bandicoot and Killer Instinct, fans can always hope that maybe someday Golden Sun will rise again.
Cyberpunk 2077 was released in a reportedly very buggy state. A couple of years later it seems to have righted the ship and is having a resurgence. Any comments from a developer perspective?
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It is not impossible for games with troubled launches to recover and become successful later in life. Theoretically, with enough development time and funding spent on a project, the salvation of just about any game should be possible. We’ve seen other come-from-behind success stories from other games as well - No Man’s Sky, Final Fantasy 14, Street Fighter 5, Elder Scrolls Online, SWTOR, to name a few. It’s difficult for sure, but not impossible.
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That said, no publisher has an infinite amount of time and money to pour into each and every faltering project. For every success story, there are loads of failures and cancellations. Businesses have to make money, after all. Burning a bunch of money in hopes of saving a sinking ship is generally counterproductive. The more money spent on a project without success, the higher the bar for success becomes - the game needs to earn back the initial investment, all the additional time and money spent to rescue it, and still needs to earn a profit beyond that. The real question is how much time and money the publisher is willing to pour into a project before they either achieve success or accept the loss and move on.
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Remember, publishers are limited by funding as well. Every dollar spent trying to fix this project is a dollar that could have been spent on a different project instead. That’s really the measure of success that the publishers are weighing each project against - will saving this game be a better investment than green lighting a different, totally new game? Or should they invest those resources into expanding development on another live game that’s doing better? Ultimately, it’s a question of the priorities and decisions of the executives as they choose between tradeoffs. It takes a lot of faith to risk the company’s survival on fixing a bad game. Sometimes it pays off, but the road to success is paved with the corpses of those who didn’t make it.
Bit of a nebulous question. For series of 3 or more entries, how do you guys make a game feel like..."definitive"? I didn't play Wario Land as a kid, but playing Wario Land 4, I look at this game and go "yeah that's how Wario should be aesthetically" despite it being his 4th entry. What goes into getting an IP to elicit that response from players?
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Most of that comes from careful brand management. Well-established franchise characters have lore bibles - established rules governing their appearance, behaviors, mannerisms, backstory, and other relevant details. These rules can clarify things about the character’s personality like “This character maintains a sense of honor and will not kill a helpless enemy in cold blood”, as well as “this character’s color palette includes these shades and may never wear these colors”. It is the purpose of these rules to define and establish what feels like the character and what does not. We developers then use these rules as constraints within which to create an in-game representation that conveys the desired experience.
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The higher the commercial value of the character, the more important the managers of these lore bibles become. For new characters, the responsibility of maintaining character bibles usually fall to specific designers on the team - usually leads and seniors. For well-established franchise characters across multiple games, the bible is often maintained by a chief creative officer or creative director type. In the case of licensed characters like James Bond or Scooby Doo, there are often entire licensing teams dedicated to maintaining and enforcing the bibles.
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Going from the set of rules to the actual gameplay experience is where people like me come in. We need to take a character outline and turn that into a set of game mechanics that, when played, feel like the character. This is exhibited through a variety of different aspects. Let’s run with the Wario example. Wario is heavy and weighty. Wario is selfish, gluttonous, and greedy. Wario is short-tempered and does not think long-term. Wario is willing to bend the rules in order to achieve his goals.
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We can demonstrate his weightiness through his animations. When he changes direction, his large belly should probably continue with some inertia in the old direction. He should probably cause dust clouds to poof when he lands from a jump. His jump arc should probably be shorter than other, lighter characters. His facial animations should be very expressive - he should demonstrate his desires very clearly on his face when approaching game elements he likes - food, treasure, etc. This combination of visual storytelling and game mechanics as metaphor for aspects of his character combine to make the character feel like Wario to the player. We try to do this for all major characters. Most of the time we do a decent job. Sometimes we don’t. The bible enforcers try to keep us honest about it.
Is there anything fans could realistically do to get dormant game series rereleased or remade? Especially ones from small companies that have long been subsumed by larger ones. Is there any way for us to increase legitimate accessibility to the history of games?
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It feels to me like you’re asking two different questions here:
Is there a way for fans to signal to game publishers that they really want more games in a particular franchise?
Is there a way to force an IP owner to grant public access to historic games?
These two questions are asking for very, very different things! It’s super important to have clarity for what it is you want! I’m going to assume that you asked #1 and not #2. For an answer to #2, you can check [this post]. Otherwise, read on.
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I have good news and bad news for you. First the good news: yes, there are absolutely things that fans can do to signal their interest in the remastering or revival of dormant franchises. Most publishers keep eyes on these signals, so if there is significant community interest shown in reviving these games, the publishers will take notice. Now the bad news: these signals only work if there’s enough interest shown, and that usually means a significant amount of money changing hands. Even if these signals are received, it won’t guarantee that something will happen and it certainly won’t guarantee any kind of time table.
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The kind of signals that game publishers are interested in seeing are typically financial. If, for example, old copies of games from the franchise sell very quickly on the secondary market for high prices, that is a signal the publisher will pay attention to. Another attention-grabbing signal is really good sales for remasters of games from the franchise. If there are really large engagement numbers for the game or franchise on social media, streaming viewers, etc. then that’s an attention-grabbing signal. Capcom green lit the development of Street Fighter 4 in large part because of the strength of the sales of SF2 HD Remix and SF3 Third Strike Remastered.
I should note specifically: Piracy numbers are not attention-getting in the way you want. Publishers want to know they can make money. Piracy will not encourage them reach that conclusion.
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The unfortunate reality here is this: for the publisher to react favorably, you must show that large numbers of players are interested, and you must prove that these players are willing to spend on the franchise. If the numbers and money aren’t shown to be there, the publisher probably won’t bite. Even if these conditions do line up, it still isn’t a guaranteed deal. Other ducks must also line up favorably - the old games probably need to have been preserved reasonably well if there’s to be a remaster. The IP rights for the franchise must not be in some kind of legal purgatory. The publisher must have funding, a development team capable of doing the job, and a slot in their release schedule to put the game out. Then the project has to begin and we have to hope that the development manages to deliver within the schedule and budget.
Why do developers make features that are resource intensive but not what the majority of players play or finish (for example, single player campaign's in multiplayer games)?
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Sometimes certain features are expected by the general player population. Mark Darrah, former Bioware general manager, calls them “table stakes”, as in they are stakes required to play at the table. These kind of features might not actually be popular or particularly good for the kind of game we’re building, but the expectations are there among players, and the game’s reception will take a hit if we don’t include them so leadership decrees that we must spend the resources to build them.
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This is often why we’ll spend a lot of resources on a particular feature or mini game even if it doesn’t really add a lot to the intended game experience. One of the most common complaints about Street Fighter 5 at launch was the lack of story mode, even though fighting games like SF5 live and die by the long-term multiplayer, rather than the single-player content. We also see this phenomena manifest in expensive minigame features like driving or stealth subsections of games that aren’t primarily about driving or stealth. The fiction of the game suggests that there should be driving or stealth segments, so they’re table stakes even if they aren’t very good.
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It’s a little odd because it’s these sorts of invisible pressures tend to be invisible with hindsight. Darrah’s example of a table stakes feature was adding mounted movement to Dragon Age Inquisition. They really only added mounts in DAI because it was expected of their contemporaries and players expected them. However, the feature didn’t really work well in DAI - the player lost out on the follower banter, they didn’t actually move all that much faster than when on foot, the player would constantly stop to pick up loot and gather resources while exploring, and so on. The DAI player experience without mounts would likely have been totally fine, except for missing the expectations of the time period. Were the game to be released today, we’d probably be fine with it not having mounts in it. But back then, mounts were considered table stakes, so they did it.
"Please accept X premium items/currency as compensation for Y mistake" I've played a lot of online games and I have seen this a lot. Sometimes VERY generously. Does this hurt the studio or game at all?
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One-time compensation gifts for problems usually can’t move the needle significantly. Any financial harm caused by compensation gifts is usually seen as part of the cost of fixing the problem. Even if the gift is generous, it is still a one-time occurrence. It is highly unlikely that we’ll give compensation that is enough to invalidate an entire resource management system forever. The point of creating systems of resources to manage is that we want players to manage them.
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The cost becomes a problem to the health of the game if the problems we compensate for become so common that the developer must offer compensation gifts constantly. In such situations, that usually short-circuits the game and reward loops and hurts the game experience for the players. If we’re giving compensation gifts that often, it means that we’re pushing too many problems live. That means that our validation processes need serious re-examination and suggests the game itself is likely in trouble.
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Compensation will probably mollify most of our player audience but, depending on the egregiousness of the bad experience, that compensation will likely be insufficient to appease everyone and some of that audience will churn out of the playerbase permanently. The more bad experiences we give, the greater the churn. Getting freebies in a buggy, broken game only goes so far. Many players will eventually stop putting up with it and move on to another game.
As a AAA dev, what is a task *outside* of the actual game development that is underrated but super critical to your job? Beyond coding, arting, programming, modeling, and QA...ing. (Obviously aside from hiring people.)
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This might sound contrived, but one of the most valuable skills for any developer will always be communicating effectively. The vast majority of my work is collaborating with other people - people with differing attention levels, goals, personalities, priorities, and internal ways of thinking. Being able to understand their stated and unstated intentions and feelings is important, both for me to cooperate with them as people and also to do the work.
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When I’m working with others, I need to be able to convey my ideas to them in order to generate their buy-in on my ideas and plans. They need to be able to communicate their ideas to me, so I can understand where they are planning on going next. And we both need to communicate our acknowledgement of what we’ve learned from each other so that the they recognize what I mean when I say “I think I get it, but can you please explain that second part again?”
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This goes beyond a simple and direct speaking and understanding the words we say to each other. Humans communicate through many different channels - word choice, tone of voice, body language, visual imagery, and so on. I need to be cognizant of these additional clues when communicating with teammates - is Neelo telling me she gets it because she really gets it, or is she disengaging because she’s tired and frustrated? Did I come across as confrontational and argumentative when I didn’t mean to because of the phrasing I chose? Am I feeling annoyed because of something Bayn said, or was I already irritable going into the meeting? Was that comment intentionally sarcastic, or is there another underlying issue that should be addressed?
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Communication is a constantly-evolving skill alongside workplace relationships. Now that so many of us work remotely, our communication skills must likewise adapt to take advantage of the strengths and compensate for the shortcomings of long distance collaboration. Misunderstandings during the development process can become extremely expensive mistakes to correct, especially if these mistakes take time for stakeholders to recognize them as such. Good communication skills are exceedingly valuable, both for preventing misunderstandings from happening and for working out solutions to past misunderstandings. The more one’s responsibilities increase in scope, the more valuable communication skills become.
This question might make you angry, but I ask it anyway. Should the industry drop voice acting to use AI instead?
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Your question doesn’t make me angry. It just shows me that you don’t really understand what it is we want when we hire voice actors.
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We wouldn’t use AI-generated audio, just like we wouldn’t use AI-generated art. When we’re trying to build something specific like a narrative, a character, a world, etc. we’ve got something in mind that we need to iterate on. We try to control just about every aspect of our creation - visually, thematically, contextually, narratively, in motion, in performance, in audio, and so on. That means that we’re looking for a very specific kind of performance out of the voice actors we hire.
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While AI might be able to create the kind of performance we want someday, AI is absolutely unable to meet those needs today. AI-generated stuff is interesting for sure, but in a novelty “that’s kinda cool for a prototype” way and not a “this is ready for prime time full production” way. There’s a tremendous gulf between a proof-of-concept idea, and something that’s usable for putting out the kind of work we need done for a full scale production. There are no plans to drop any of our sound designers, voice actors, sound engineers, concept artists, texture artists, or any other artists for AI.
This is a few years old maybe, but what's with builder games (or level design tools)? I'm not a game designer and the community content shows that most of the audience isn't, either.
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You are quite correct - there’s usually maybe only ~20% of players who ever try making anything in a maker-type game at all, and less than 5% actually continue to engage with the tools and create content for others to play with. “Most of the audience” definitely qualifies as not really engaging with the tools.
However…
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The number of creators who engage in content creation, however small relative to the total number of players they may be, is probably still going to dwarf the size of the game’s entire development team several times over. If you consider a game like Mario Maker might sell 500,000 copies. If even 1% of that player base regularly creates content, that’s 5,000 level designers with a broad variety of ideas and interests working on content for players to play. 5,000 people is going to be at least one, probably two orders of magnitude greater than the number of designers on the dev team for a maker game.
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Further, these amateur designers also aren’t constrained by the same set of rules we are - it’s ok if their levels are unintuitive, super difficult to complete, don’t have a solid throughline, are off-the-wall wacky, auto-play themselves, or are just strange. These kind of levels are something that the pros don’t really get the opportunity to build at work, but we very much appreciate when the community builds them.
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I’ve said before that games get more hours of play testing within the first day of launch than they do during their entire development periods. This applies to user generated content too. Unless the game flops horribly, the player base will always dwarf the size of the dev team many times over.
Something I find very interesting in character movement is to make them feel weighty despite models having no physics behind them. How would you accomplish this feeling?
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You should really read my Animation Primer. The first post answers your question:
After the really cool posts about RPG progression, do you think you could talk about progression in games without level-mechanics, such as an FPS unlocking better weapons or an action game unlocking new moves?
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Typically, when we plan out player ability distribution over the course of the game, we need to walk a fairly fine line. When players start a game for the first time, they need to learn a lot of different things at once. We need to give the player enough abilities/weapons/options so they can have fun early on, but we also don’t want to overwhelm them with too much shoved on them all at once. That’s where the pacing of opening up new abilities comes in.
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After a player has played the game for a while, we can safely assume they have internalized the rules up to that point. Once the players know the basic game rules, we can start introducing more complex skills or abilities that build on that basic understanding. When you look at the kind of skills, weapons, etc. that get introduced later they tend to be tools that are noticeably more complex than the initial abilities a player is allowed. This is why most FPS games start with simple weapons (e.g. pistol, rifle) before introducing more complex behaviors (trip mines, grenade launcher, slime gun, plasma rifle).
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Increasing complexity also informs the decision to gate specific types of content and areas within the game behind new abilities/weapons/etc. Newer, more powerful weapons allow for enhanced killing capacity and damage dealing. New abilities might allow for new means of environmental traversal. This process causes the world to open up more for the player and feel larger each time they can take on a new area.
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How far into the game players receive these abilities depend on the game’s core design pillars. In some games where freedom of exploration is a design pillar, we’ll distribute the abilities fairly early and then design the rest of the game around having them - Breath of the Wild is a pretty great example of this. In others, we want a fairly linear progression through the game, escalating the tension in the game encounters like in Doom 2016 where you can’t obtain the BFG9000 in the campaign until the 8th mission of 13.
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Remember, we want to build tension throughout the player’s overall game experience. We want to raise the stakes through new abilities and tougher challenges is probably one of our most important tools in doing this. Choosing the pacing for abilities, weapons, etc. in these games is a delicate balancing act of avoiding overwhelming the player with too much, trying to craft a good player experience, all while trying to maintain certain core design pillars and keeping the player experience varied and interesting. Pacing is an enormously important aspect of the overall game experience.
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