Design Deep Dive - So What's a Game Designer Anyway?

For the most part, I love telling people about my job as an indie game developer. It usually garners a lot of attention, and people seem genuinely curious about the details of my job. I also enjoy describing Alkanaur, and I’m (slowly) getting better at “pitching” the game to non-gamers. However, one thing is always tricky when people want more details about how I personally contribute to the project. From anecdotal experience, many people think any game development team is a bunch of programmers. Perhaps an artist or two. I make sure people know that on any small indie dev team everyone wears a lot of hats. I help with the art of Alkanaur, and I help with the programming. But my number one job is game design. Which begs the question: what is a game designer anyway?

Image found through GIPHY

To me, game design comes down to two things: questions for consumers and answers for development. 

I’ll try to tackle each of those topics in depth through a pair of back-to-back blog posts. So if you endure today's post, check back tomorrow for part two!

A good game asks its players compelling questions. I don’t mean Professor Oak asking you for your name at the beginning of Pokémon Blue (although I could certainly write a separate Design Deep Dive about that). By questions I mean choices offered to the player. Returning to our example, in Pokémon Blue the player makes an important and iconic choice early in the game—choosing from one of three starting pokémon with distinct strengths and weaknesses. (In case you’re wondering, I’m a bulbasaur guy through and through). Sid Meier, one of the more well-known designers in the video game industry, famously stated that “games are a series of interesting decisions.” That quote caused quite a stir in game development circles, perhaps because it can come across as overly reductive. But I think it’s a useful train of thought because it always brings the designer’s focus back to the consumer.

Image found on this Metro UK article

I end up doing a lot of user interface and user experience work in Alkanaur (again: our tiny team wears a lot of hats). To me it’s crystal clear that our game’s menus and controls should feel intuitive and comfortable for the user. But with games it seems easy to lose track of the player as you decide how the game works. Forgetting the player often leads to bad design decisions, and consequently a bad game. What are some examples of games that fail to ask the players compelling questions? Let’s eviscerate two games I developed before I could shave (let alone grow a beard as magnificent as this one).

Image found on my iPhone because it's a selfie.

First up is The Lost Reindeer. I think I was probably seven or eight when I made this one. It’s a classic-style board game played with dice and a homemade game board. Players take turns rolling dice and moving that many squares on a path (clumsily) drawn on the game board. Every once in a while a space will tell you to move forward or back based on some type of Christmas-related event. If the average person was tasked with quickly designing a game, they might come up with some variation on this theme. Similar games like Candyland or Chutes and Ladders have existed for decades, so this game tends to stick in the collective consciousness of Americans.

But what interesting decisions are offered to players in The Lost Reindeer? Are there any at all? The only real questions available are “should I participate in this game?” and “should I try and cheat?” Any one over the age of eight will quickly grow bored of such a game, because it does not challenge him or her tactically, strategically, or creatively. So why do games like Candyland or Chutes and Ladders endure? While neither game offers Sid Meier’s “series of interesting decisions,” they do offer a limited sense of progression and a simple example of cause and effect. When young children tested out Alkanaur at a convention, they enjoyed the demo because they could move a character and watch the AI-controlled enemies chase them. I think the love for Candyland (beyond its theme and visuals) comes from a similar place. You draw cards and watch your game piece “move” through the world.

My next fully-developed game fares slightly better when it comes to asking the player compelling questions. I made Beastmaker for a middle school shop class, and no matter how long I end up designing games I’ll always brag about getting an A on that project. My evaluation sheet showed 100% and a short comment from my somewhat gruff teacher: “I don’t know what the hell this is, but you obviously worked hard on it.” I co-created the collectible card game Beastmaker with a friend. It was based off of one of those short teasers at the end of a book for a series we never read. (I did some research for this article, and it looks like the series is called The Seventh Tower by Garth Nix, who also authored the fantastic Sabriel.) Thematically, the game is about combining several fantastical beasts into one powerful, conglomerate beast and then challenging another player’s chimeric beast with your own.

A glimpse of my hand-drawn Beastmaker cards (bonus appearance from the better game Star Wars Epic Duels)

The game is for two players and consists of two phases. First you draw cards and place beasts into various slots each turn. At the end of the first phase you tally up your final beast’s stats based on the cards in those slots. Then you alternate taking swings at one another with your beasts in the second phase. At first glance, the game does provide the player with some fun choices. During the first seven turns, the player decides where to allocate his or her beast cards. And in the second phase, the players choose from different “special attack” cards or rolling a pair of dice to perform a normal attack. However, as I covered in a previous blog post, generally the game offers only an illusion of choice.

Most cards were only good in one or maybe two slots, so really the player only needed to plop down a card in a slot that made sense. If no good beast/slot combinations were available then you just sighed and put the card down in a sub-optimal spot. And in the second phase, you didn’t have many choices either, since you usually played a special attack if you had it, and if not you just rolled the dice for a normal attack. Interestingly, some (not all) of Beastmaker’s issues could be fixed if the game were expanded. Card games that require deckbuilding “frontload” some of those compelling questions before gameplay even starts, because players need to choose which cards make it into their deck. As it stands, Beastmaker is a bit of fun to experience once, but lacks any sort of strategic depth. It fails to ask the player any good questions on repeated play-throughs.

So now that we covered some bad examples, what are some good questions to ask? Some video games ask the players interesting strategic questions, like Hearthstone or League of Legends. How do different combinations of cards or champions synergize with one another? How does my knowledge about the meta game—how other players play the game—affect my choices? Based off the current information I have, how should I plan out my future moves?

Other videogames ask tactical “in-the-moment” questions. Turn-based games like Alkanaur or The Banner Saga give players time to make the perfect tactical choice, while real-time games in popular series like Zelda, Dark Souls, or Halo force players to make several quick choices in succession, challenging their reflexes and mental library of game knowledge. Should I attack now or retreat? What is this specific enemy’s weakness? How can I maximize my current character’s strengths? Where should I explore next?

Finally, a growing number of video games ask players questions about themselves. Narrative-focused games such as The Walking Dead or Life is Strange challenge players to create their own guided stories, and those decisions often challenge a player’s personal value system. Which of these two arguing characters should I support? And why do I support them—is it for a desired outcome or because of my personal beliefs? How would I respond to a traumatic event such as this?

Some questions are more profound than others (Image found on Nerdist)

Of course, many of the best games—video or otherwise—blend many different types of questions into the gameplay. That’s certainly something we’re trying to accomplish in Alkanaur. In the next Design Deep Dive, I’ll discuss how game designers not only need to ask players compelling questions through their design decisions, but also answer an endless stream of development issues, big or small.

Dev Take Tuesday - Game Dev Glue

At the recommendation of a good friend—and seemingly the entirety of my Twitter feed—I finally started playing Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. I’m glad I did. I’ve yet to finish, but so far the game has been fun and challenging—not only mechanically, but narratively as well. As you boot up the game, some screen text informs you that professional therapists provided input during development, since the game features a protagonist suffering from mental illness. From the opening credits, this aspect of the game becomes clear. Your protagonist, a young woman named Senua, receives nearly constant input from various voices in her head.

Screen capture of my own play-through of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

I strongly feel that those voices are a glue that holds the rest of the game together. The game does dazzle visually, but I think the alternating mechanics of melee combat and puzzle solving would fall a bit flat without the key representation of Senua’s psychosis through the competing voices in her—and consequently your—head. These voices, of course, fit the game’s narrative themes. But they also bond the narrative to the mechanics in elegant and intriguing ways. During the puzzle sequences, the voices occasionally provide helpful feedback, but more often than not distract with you doubt and deprecation. During combat the voices become a great assistance, giving you supernatural awareness and the chance to avoid strikes from any enemies behind you. Additionally, the voices replace a tutorial UI rather seamlessly, giving the character instructions in a fluid, conversational way. I’ve found myself both grateful and vexed at their constant chattering, and it’s obvious from the narrative that the dev team wanted to highlight this internal struggle.

Certainly Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice would be a solid game even without this one important design inclusion. But the voices show how one simple aspect of the design can really cement the video game into one cohesive piece of art. I believe it’s vital as a game developer to constantly search for anything that will help “glue” your narrative and mechanics together, especially if you want to cover a challenging topic in your game.

Dev Take Tuesday – Be a Star Baker

Can’t say I thought I’d ever get into a reality TV show again. Can’t say I’d expect that show to be about baking. But my wife and I just started the third season of the Great British Baking Show on Netflix. I’m not much of a baker specifically, but I do most of the cooking in our home. I know I’m overly cavalier when it comes to following the recipe, and one thing that has stuck out to me on the show is the need for balance between adherence to formulas and a creative touch.

Image from PBS via Collider

With cooking at an amateur level, I think you can get away with simply knowing some basic cooking principles and then putting stuff together that tastes good. But baking is more precise, more scientific. If you decide not to include the eggs this time around, you’re going to end up with a vastly different texture and taste. Still, on the Great British Baking Show the “star bakers” tend to be participants who find those little ingenious flourishes that wow the judges.

While some game developers do take my make-it-up-as-you-go approach to cooking, I think the best approach is usually the star baker technique. As a designer that means looking at what’s expected in the genre and fulfilling those expectations. That’s why (thoughtfully) playing games is imperative if you want to design them. Once you’ve learned how to follow the recipe, you can then add your own flourishes that will wow customers and critics. As someone who studied writing, I heard some iteration of “you need to know the rules before you can break them” in almost every creative writing course I took. I believe that’s solid advice for game design as well.

For Alkanaur, we’re aiming for that star baker tactic. From the early stages of design, I knew I wanted to make a tactics game that was faithful to the genre’s predecessors. In my opinion, there were three things our tactical RPG needed, no matter what: an empowering sense of progression, skillful use of positioning and abilities, and a robust class system that encouraged diversity. I’m excited for the creative flourishes we’ve added to Alkanaur, but I’m also excited to simply showcase how our small team can deliver the exact experience our audience is looking for when they hear the words “tactics RPG.”

Indie Illuminator - The Iron Oath

As someone who loves the painstakingly crafted pixel art animations of Duelyst, I was immediately drawn to the images I saw of the Iron Oath, a tactics game—like Alkanaur—that is currently in the early stages of development. While in the end I believe our games will play out quite differently due to distinct gameplay emphases, I think we share a lot of game design principles, and I’m eager to try the game once it comes out.

Image from the Iron Oath's Kickstarter page

Art is the first thing that stands out for Iron Oath. The handcrafted pixel art world is dark and gloomy, but the sprites, backgrounds, and animations are beautiful. As someone currently working on pixel art sprites for our game, let me tell you: it’s a lot of work. But the results are certainly worth it.

Image from the Iron Oath's Kickstarter page

As for gameplay, the Iron Oath’s turn-based combat takes place on a hex grid. The more compact terrain (from the images I’ve seen) make me think the combat might play out a bit like Darkest Dungeon, with less room to maneuver and plenty of close-quarters combat right away. I love the addition of traps and destructible environment that should allow players to make some clever moves. If you’re interested, head on over to their Kickstarter page. As I post this, they are at about two thirds of their crowdfunding goal with over a 1,000 backers. I’m confident they’ll reach their goal, and I’m looking forward to the game’s release in 2019.

Indie Illuminator – Discover Play Share

While we occasionally cover indie game favorites in this blog, today I’d love to highlight a dedicated indie game review site: Discover Play Share. The website’s tagline is “light, digestible (indie) game reviews,” and I think they execute that idea to perfection. I admire a well-organized but excruciatingly exhaustive review that extensively covers all the minutiae of a game. But I also love a simple, succinct review. That's exactly what Discover Play Share offers.

Screen cap from the Discover Play Share review section.

In each game review, you’ll generally find (quick-as-a) bullet-point lists of likes and dislikes, gameplay screenshots, a breakdown of cost and hours of amusement provided, as well as a “final word” section that provides a few insightful paragraphs on the game. At the end of the review, Discover Play Share offers a simple yes or no recommendation instead of a traditional 1-10 rating system. From what I’ve seen, most of the games reviewed are also recommended, so it’s probably a good idea to at least glance through the other parts of the review. And that’s exactly why their “light and digestible” format works so well—I think it encourages the reader to not simply rely on an inadequate numerical rating by keeping the rest of the review easy to scan through.

I also appreciate the unique, colorful layout of the website, and you can tell the designer built the site with mobile users in mind. If you have a moment, pull out your smart phone and check out the current reviews on Discover Play Share—you’ll likely find some sweet games you haven’t heard of, and who knows…you might just find one of my own reviews on there some day.

Dev Take Tuesday - Webs and Layers

Well-written characters, much like onions and ogres, have layers. When making characters for a book, film, or video game it’s easy to settle on one key motivation for that character. But a character with one or two extra layers of motivation really starts to come to life. I saw a great example of this recently in the latest reboot of everyone’s favorite neighborhood web-slinger, Spider-Man: Homecoming. The film does many things well, but it was villain Adrian Toomes (a.k.a. the Vulture) that stood out to me. Of course actor Michael Keaton deserves some of the praise for excelling in the role, but I think the Vulture was a great villain because the writers decided to add one additional layer.

Concept Art (Image found on Screen Rant)

The Vulture could easily have been a simple reboot of a previous Spider-Man movie villain: the Sandman. (I’ve also heard that villain-turned-hero Deadeye in Suicide Squad fits this bill.) Both characters talk about needing to make money for their family, and prompt some measure of sympathy from the audience as a result. While a desperate need for money is a reasonable motivation for villainy, that motivation lacks depth. It will work, and the audience will feel some sympathy, but the story likely won’t go anywhere new.

Fortunately, Spider-Man: Homecoming provides an extra layer to the Vulture. Yes, after striking out on a somewhat risky business venture, Adrian Toomes definitely needs to find a way to help provide for his family. But why not turn to a less dangerous and unpleasant job than making and selling deadly weapons to criminals? The Vulture explains that part of his motivation is fueled by his hatred for the government—they callously ruined him when they appropriated his alien salvage, and the consequence in his mind was to return that callousness. I’m sure in Adrian’s mind he’s a less idealistic Robin Hood, stealing from the heartless “big guy” to benefit others (as well as himself).

 I’m glad that Adrian’s antagonism went beyond one simple motivation. More than any other Marvel movie villain so far, the Vulture kept me thinking as I drove home from the movie theater. I think it’s important to note that these extra layers don’t always need to absolve the antagonist of any crimes—I think Adrian Toomes was a clear villain who showed little remorse for how his selfishness might affect the innocent. But his character complexity certainly added some oomph to the storytelling in Spider-Man: Homecoming, and it’s something I’ll keep in mind as I write villains in Alkanaur and any future games.

Indie Illuminator - Crashnauts

Some games make great thematic decisions, and others make great mechanical decisions. The best games do both. Locally-developed indie game Crashnauts, now available on Steam Early Access, seems to be a game built around one choice that is clever both thematically and mechanically: what if your respawn were another weapon in your arsenal?

Screenshot of Crashnauts (found on the official website)

Any shooter or arena game that isn’t a simple sudden death match will involve some sort of respawn. Most respawns just boringly drop you back into the game a few seconds after your death. But Crashnauts doesn’t drop you back on to the playing field—it hurtles you down to the playing field with crushing force. After dying, players get a targeting laser that lets them aim exactly where they’ll respawn. If they crash on top of another player, they get an instant kill.

If you enjoy fast-paced arena shooters like Quake or Unreal Tournament, or if you’ve spent way too much time (like me) playing arena fighting games such as Super Smash Brothers or Rivals of Aether, Crashnauts might be up your alley. The game is still growing in its Early Access mode, so you can check it out here if you want to add it to your Steam Wishlist or give it a try right away.