Busy time

Hello there, it’s been a long time !

As you can see, I wasn’t in the mood to write article recently.

Parts of my life needed my full time attention and still do. Anyway I find a solution to keep you entertained.

For now on I’m going to share with you meaningful articles I read as many as I can. Don’t be afraid I’ll give you a short pitch for each of them, so you’ll easily pick the ones you like without wasting you time !

I hope you’re not to disappointed with this move, but nowadays I need my time for other things than writing.

Enjoy and keep on the creative work !

—

We’re going to start with two short but very practical article from Raph Koster :

• This first article is mostly about basics, but it’s always worth keeping in touch with simple meaningful guidelines so read it ! Oh and it’s quite short, so there’s no reason not to read it.
  The fundamentals of game design
• The second one is a list of small thoughts that could help you trigger good ideas or resolve method flaws you could struggle with while making games. Keep it bookmarked it could help you one day particularly if you get stuck with a game design or creative issue.
  40 ways to be a better game designer

Happy reading !

Sell your soul to offer your heart

Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Diablo, Fable and many more have shrunk down their RPG mechanics and content in order to reach more cutomers and to be more competitive. Others like Bioshock and Dawn of War II have at the contrary use RPG to give a bit more depth to their game.

Is the recent trend of simplified RPG mechanics a give up or a smart move for the genre ? Could it be use with other genre ?

Diablo was one of the first to use only a part of the RPG genre. It takes the most understandable RPG elements -character customization and progression- and melts them with a frenetic action game. Years later a lot of games followed this path.

The Mass Effect success was in part due to his TPS combat system. Using this feature allowed Mass Effect to appeal to a wider audience than the RPG players. In fact RPG as they’re known are a scary genre for mass market consumers. Introducing a simple known and understandable gameplay as a TPS combat system give the game a chance to reach TPS customers and then to charm them with RPG mechanics.

Then Mass Effect 2 hit the market and despite its poor equipment system and its new TPS gameplay, it has improved strong RPG systems like dialogs and choices.

Fallout 3 was also mostly marketed as shooter; a bloody one. This politic scared RPG fans but excited the console FPS player base, resulting in 5 millions unit sold. Despite his marketing Fallout 3 is still a strong RPG at heart : character customization, numerous secondary quests, branched dialogs…

More recently there was also a common tendency to put RPG elements -mostly character customization and progression- to new genre.

For example there was Dawn of War II with a squad looking like a typical RPG group, or Bioshock with his character’s powers and Dante Inferno with its light equipment system, even Call of Duty Modern Warfare multi-player offered the possibility to gain rank and unlock new classes.

That’s a lot of RPG in our modern video-games !

Well, I asked in the first paragraph “Is the recent trend of smaller/simplified RPG a give up or a smart move for the genre ?”. I definitely think it’s a smart move.

RPG have always struggle to charm the mainstream consumers, in part because of the undeserved bad reputation of his pen and paper counterpart. And mostly due to its complexity.

Take the character creation phase, first thing you do in an RPG, you’re asked to choose who and how you want to play whereas you didn’t played the game for now !?

Imagine you create Super Mario with 0 in dexterity, Super Mario couldn’t jump and the game would be like hell ! Some novice RPG players live that, most won’t came back to the genre.

This way I think that simplified RPG or small RPG features in other genre are a good way to accustom players to our beloved RPG. In the meantime it will be easy to drag them into greater RPG experiences.

And I also asked “Could it be use with other genre ?” . Yes it should ! Take small and simplified parts of other genre and melt them together. Do it with caution,  prototype smoothly, iterate gently, something great could happen !

What about a bit of real time strategy in my racing game ? Or a bit of tactic in my FPS ? And a bit of music game in my platform game ? Etc ! As I share it with you earlier, Idea are new combinations, don’t be shy and try.

So I’ll conclude with  this article title, taking Fallout 3 as an example :

Sell your soul -make your RPG looks like a shooter to reach customer- to offer your heart -make the rest of the game as RPG as you can to reach your expectation-.

Making of a card game : the skeleton

First I must say that the first article about my card game was about a new version of it; a kind of second iteration. So don’t be confuse when I’ll start presenting you a quite different version of the pitch.

Yes it’s awkward, anyway I think a lot about how to share with you my journey trough the making of these games and I’d start with a piece of my work which is not in an advanced enough state to be used as a material for my writing.

Enough explanation, let’s talk about my first card game. Not a very good one but a finished one. It will be better as a source of examples. It contents many flaws I think, but that’s not devaluating the lessons learned.

First the pitch : “Create a RPG pen and paper experience without a game master”

After brainstorming on this pitch I ended up with ideas and objectives.

- Give each player the possibility to build his character.

- Give each player a personal objective.

- Build a system which automatically narrates the players’s journey.

- Force the players to play together in order to win solo.

Let’s see the rules I found around these objectives.

• Give each player the possibility to build his character
  Each character will be build around three elements : Origin, Class and Destiny.
  Origin : give the player a special power and three characteristics : Charisma, Fight, Cunning.
  Class : give the player an other special power and three characteristics : Charisma, Fight, Cunning. Moreover class could influence some parts of the player journey.
  Destiny : give the player his personal objective; this card is hidden from the other players.
• Give each player a personal objective
  See Destiny above.
• Build a system which automatically narrates the player’s journey
  Events will be drawn in order to build a new story each turn.
• Force the players to play together in order to win solo
  Each Event is a challenge requiring to match its three characteristics to be achieved :  Charisma, Fight, Cunning. Most Events can’t be achieved solo, forcing players to cooperate.
  Events have consequences which could help or prevent each player to reach their objective. This way each player must carefully choose when to participate or not to an event.

You can already see one flaw in my rules; the strong likeness between Origin and Class. I’ll discuss this later, as I said, I already have started a second version of this card game.

The game seems also very static and deterministic with not much place for treachery, strategy and tactics. That’s why I choose to introduce Action cards. They give randomness, tactic and strategy to the game.

• Action cards give the player a special action and/or characteristics modifier. Action cards can be played at any moment and can be put on an other card in order to modify it. Action cards are removed when the card they modify are or at the end of turn.

Now we have the core rules of the game. Most of the other rules will come by testing it with friends or just by emulating a game in our mind.

But in order to be playable this game need content, in our case cards with characteristics, power, action, consequences… This will be our next subject, a tough one.

What did I learn writing the first set of rules of this game :

• See your ideas as objectives, then build rules that could match them.
• Don’t blame yourself if your ideas are not 100% new, forced novelty could ruin the entire thing.
• Seek coherence, each rule must help the others to make sense.
• Run games in your mind, then search your rules for flaws and correct them.

A Technique for Producing Ideas

I’m quite busy recently but I’d really like to share with you this tiny book made of golden advices.

The knowledge I’ll share with you know is easy to find for nearly five decades or if you prefer so, half a century.

Written by James Webb Young this book (A Technique for Producing Ideas) gives a simple method to find and use good ideas.

As I like to do it, let’s go for a small personal summary of this technique.

The basis :

• Ideas are new combination of material.
• In order to help the birth of new combination, you need to build relationships between materials.

The technique :

1. Gathering and sorting raw materials
   First there is two different kind of material; general and specific. The general material is directly related to your personal interests; who you are and what you like. But the specific material is specifically matching with the subject you are searching an idea for.
   Then don’t hesitate to classify and order your materials using any storage you prefer like notebook, computer… You can even try to sort them in different ways until you find the best organisation for your current subject. 
2. Focus your mind on your materials
   Now you can start to think hard about your materials and push your brain to the limit. Write down any piece of idea coming from this step.
   Also J. Webb Young advices us to do this step twice. In fact from his experience, the brain has a second wind so push harder when you think your done. Who knows what could came to your mind !?
3. Let your subconscious works for you
   That’s as easy as doing anything you like : reading, watching a movie… or sleep. Above all you must stop thinking about your idea.
4. Eureka !
   Yes it should be as simple as that. The idea will brilliantly come to your mind when you’re the less ready for it. Write it down as fast as you can !
5. Shape, grow and use your idea
   That the final stage; the stage during the one your idea will fought for life in this world; fighting through requested innovation, feasibility, budget, etc.

That’s all, just five tiny steps.

Truly these points look like something everybody already know but don’t really do.

An that’s why this book is great since 1965. It remember you what to do, what you usually do; it prevents you from forgetting any steps in your process.

So which is the most important step of this method which most of us forget way too often ?

• Part 1 of course ! Gathering and sorting raw materials, is in fact the most overlooked part of the process.
  Knowing your subject and having other knowledges to mix it with is really important because ideas are new combinations !
  The less material you have, the less combinations you’ll find, the less ideas you’ll have.
• Part 5 is also a good answer. In fact a lot of ideas will never be revealed to the world. So don’t be shy and give a try to your ideas !

Well I hope you’ll try this method and give me some feedback.

Personally this technique helped me improving my way of finding ideas by rationalizing steps I did instinctively. Moreover I totally agree with the author, the first step is the toughest step and the most likely to be skipped.

About equipment in RPG

A few weeks ago I finished the Dragon Age : Origins extension Awakening. I enjoyed the trip, a bit less than Mass Effect 1 or 2 but it’s not the subject of today’s post.

During my journey through these games I felt something was missing. In fact empowering my character through outfits is an important part of the fun I get while playing an RPG. And more than that I like when gears help me to customize my avatar’s aspect and to improve the way I like to play the game.

What I definitely didn’t find with Dragon Age and Mass Effect equipement was :

- Empowerment

- Aspect customization

- Gameplay orientation

And above all this points : diversity and choices !

Now I’ll try to analyze why.

Empowerment

Playing Dragon Age, the items I found wasn’t very powerful.

As a result the pleasure to equip a new item was not really present. Moreover underpowered gears didn’t give me the will to find better ones. And sadly the boost of power I should have when equipping a supposedly great piece of equipment from one of the most powerful boss was null.

In Mass Effect equipment was even more secondary.

I found only a dozen armor pieces. Weapons and upgrades was obtained via recipes; requiring resources and forcing me to play a repetitive mini-game on each planet I cross during the game. And aside from some damage upgrade or new weapons, the entire system wasn’t very engaging and improvement was nearly imperceptible.

Aspect customization

I’ll be short one this one, visual customization was very poor in Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Most of the gears had the same visual pattern declined with some very light variation. Clearly I didn’t play to admire my avatar awesome outfits; particularly with Dragon Age Mage. On this precise example I remember myself finding only three different robe design.

To be fair, I want to congratulate the Mass Effect 2 colors customization feature which did a great job to palliate the lack of armor design styles.

Gameplay orientation

This point is the most important to me because it’s not only related to Mass Effet or Dragon Age.

However the problem is huge both in Mass Effect and Dragon Age where equipment never appears helpful enough  anyway the game is played.

So I think we agree that having a lot of powerful gears with great visual style is useless without well designed statistics. In fact item statistics should help players to strengthen their choices and their way to play the game.

Now lets illustrates my point with some examples.

I’ll start by introducing you to the “you can do everything” item breed : +10 Force + 10 Dexterity +10 Damage +10 Critical Chance +10 Dodge.

If you are a rogue you want it, if you are a warrior you want it, if you are scout you want it… only a kind of mage doesn’t want it ! Good Swiss knife anyway, but what if I want the Rambo knife, without the useless stuffs ?

As I said, for me, good items should help the player making choices and improving the way he likes to play the game.

So instead of the previous items, let’s make three gameplay oriented ones :

- +10 Dexterity +10 Critical Chance, for a fast and agressive character

- +10 Force +10 Damage, for an average melee oriented character

- +10 Dexterity +10 Dodge, for a quick and hard to catch character

And voila now you have three items instead of one, each of them helping the player to define his own game style. Moreover I could also compensate the lack of the other statistics to have this items even more appealing.

Of course, this is not perfect, and I’m not a fond of Critical Chance, Damage and Dodge kind of statistics because they should obviously be respectively calculated by Dexterity, Force and Dexterity.

Anyway that’s far better than the elemental resistances statistics which make no sens in most RPG. They could be useless like encountered in Dragon Age or artificially used to create new needs for equipement in World of Warcraft.

What could have been done ?

- Empowerment : To give a great boost in power through equipment at some key moments through the game journey. The game would have been a bit easier from these moments, but tweaking enemies toughness to match this new power a bit later in the journey could have conclude the trick and give the player the will to find more powerful gears to feel powerful again.

- Aspect customization : I understand the cost behind more visual and aspect customization. Anyway there’s a balance to find between cost and taking the power of identification through visual customization off the player’s hands. So the solution seems obvious, strengthen outfit and weapons design style and create more of them.

- Gameplay orientation : To create more engaging gears that help specializing avatar the way talent trees do and to avoid the far too polyvalent items; this seems to be the easiest way to give equipment more impact on gameplay.

To conclude, I think that gears, outfits, equipement, etc, should be given more attention in modern RPG; in fact they are still a great part of the fun and pleasure the players await when playing them.

The Avatar Hypocrisy

Watching the Avatar Bluray this weekend I remembered one thought I had when I left the theater a few months before.

Discussing the strength of Avatar : rhythm, characters, special effects… Could be a very long essay and maybe I’d try later. But I would like to share my point of view about one of the message the movie seems willing to share : “Protect and live with mother earth”.

My concern isn’t the message itself but the way it have been communicated through the movie.

Avatar show us beautiful landscapes, strong colors, strange animals, tasteful fruits, great dangers, etc. All these things which nature on earth already give us.

In fact having in mind this likeness between the Avatar’s world and the real world helps the message to have a much stronger impact on the spectators (if it could).

But are you drugged enough by the Avatar movie to think that living without great pieces of technology as we are use to this days is OK ? And do you think that nature can provide us with everything we always needed ?

I hope you don’t. Anyway if you do I have a tip about why you could think so. Especially if you just saw Avatar recently.

Here’s my tip : the Pandora’s environment give you an awesome life. And compared to what Earth’s environment as to offer, there’s no match.

There is a small list of services given by Pandora’s Environment Megacorp :

• Free ride : Take a horse-like motorcycle and fly away with your private “jet-sky”. No need for license or assurance.
• Free light : Just walk around or tap some plants and you’ll light up the darkness.
• Natural building : A big tree will be your home and there’s also magic bed leafs.
• Internet substitute : Search for an intriguing place with fluorescent threes, then connect and listen to your people’s memories.

I’m sure there is a lot more examples to be found showing the great advantages offered by Pandora’s ecosystem. And I’m also quite convinced that with a so generous nature on Earth human being had hardly create so many (environment destructive) technologies as we have.

I hope you get my point. Of course we need to change some of our bad habits in order to keep living well on earth. But trying to change our mind showing us an alien nature which satisfied most of our modern needs seemed hypocrite to me.

Making of a card game : the seed

I have written enough about books for now, so let’s make something.

I would like to start with a simple and liberating truth : to be a game designer is to make game. So make what you’d like to play and make your friends play it!

Lesson given, now let investigate what I’m doing.

First don’t take any of my written experience as a truth. I’m just like you, experiencing, learning and improving trough making game.

How did I start to make a card game ?

I had an idea : “How could I give to my player an experience close to a coop tactical RPG game”.

How to make a game with that ?

You thought that an idea could be enough to make a game, didn’t you ? Let be honest, having an idea is easy, the real challenge is to make it real. We will try that now.

So to make a game with my idea I will analyze it. This will help myself finding the core experiences I’d like to give to my player.

At this stage I hope you are one of your futur player. If not it will be very hard to continue the process of making your game.

What experiences are hiding themselves behind : “How could I give to my player an experience close to a coop tactical RPG game”.

For me, as my first player, here are the things I enjoy in a coop tactical RPG game :

- Create my character. (RPG)

- Equip my character. (RPG)

- Tactically interact with my teammates to beat the challenges. (Coop & Tactical)

Now we have more matter to create the game.

As you understood it, these points will be the sources and guardians of the game rules and contents.

This will be the subject of a next post. And I hope you will not wait it to start making your own game.

What did I learn starting doing my card game :

• Stop having ideas, make them real instead !
• Try to express your idea in one clear sentence.
• Analyze your idea, find why she’s so appealing to you. This will give you pillars on which creating your game.

I hope I had written my post in an understandable and usable way. So let me know if I could do anything better.

Change by Design

One more book, and this one is written by Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO a global design consultancy as they describe themselves.

The central subject of Change by Design is Design Thinking. But what is this ?

Put in a very understandable way : Design Thinking is applying Design methods to any subject.

What I liked while reading this book was the many examples I was given. This way I could understand how widely Design Thinking could be applied : entertainment, medicine, marketing, services…

And ultimately Design Thinking is what IDEO sells to his customers.

It could be a bit overwhelming but I’m sure you knew it before I wrote it here. Anyway this book gives you some tools and more importantly the excuses to try Design Thinking in your work and everyday life.

And now some lines about three things I will remember about it  :

• Desirability, Feasibility, Viability : This three words could help you get an insight on your product, service, or anything else you want to design. If one of these words is excluded from your design, there is a problem. Desirability : Anyone want what you are designing ? Feasibility : Can you do it, make it, set it up ? Viability : Can you produce it as you want to and earning money ?
• Inspiration, Ideation, Implementation : Three more words, for one problem solving process. Inspiration : Find the problem. Ideation : Find the solutions. Implementation : Apply the solutions. And if anything goes wrong in this process, iterate !
• Empathy, Prototype, Story : Three last words, not quiet related, but grouping them helps to remember. This three words can also be put together because they could be forget in the middle of the designing process. Empathy : Design with your customer in mind, live with them, understand their needs, think as they think. Prototype : I’m sure you’re convinced you’re prototyping enough but as I understood i,t enough is not enough. Start early and dirty ! Story : Human being is driven by storytelling, to share knowledge, experiences, etc. So don’t be shy and use story to design your product, your marketing strategy… and through story build experience.

Well I’m not sure how to conclude but let’s say something true. I did not design this reading experience following the advices this book gave me. And I’m quite sure you’d have enjoy it a lot more If I had take the time to design this experience using Design Thinking approach.

Rework

OK I admit that talking about book could miss the point of a fun reading experience.But anyway, I really want to talk about this one. And another one, the last I promise, but it’ll the story of the next entries.

Well today the book’s name is Rework and is written by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson.

Reading Rework was like taking a strong shot of adrenalin : my eyes open wide and my brain melts.

Each chapter and each advice was an opportunity to learn, analyze and change the way I was thinking about work and business.

Rework is about successful business people breaking down brick by brick the old wall of business beliefs.

This book empowered me. Not like I get superpower only by reading a book, but more like something that give me a boost in confidence and an awarness for new opportunities.

Let’s take three punchlines from the book for example :

• Ignore the real world : As they explain it, don’t listen to people saying “Your idea will not work in the real world.”. In fact this “real world” is just an excuse. An excuse that help this people avoiding to take risk or initiative and even worse breaking your motivation. Well everything is possible and there is far too much success stories to be told for someone to try to hide this real, real world :)
• Make a dent in the Universe! : When creating a business or choosing a job, do something that matter for you and for the others. First for you because it’s the best way to do it well and then for the others because you want customers.
• Inspiration is perishable : An obvious but too regularly forgotten advice. When you’re inspired, whenever it is, catch your inspiration and work on it NOW! Or you will forget it, oh yes you will. With inspiration you can make the work of a week in half a day. So don’t postpone your meeting with inspiration. I’m sure you had already experience that, hadn’t you?

Of course there are many others useful and ready to use advices like them in this book.

As I said at the beginning, more than advices, Rework is also packed with a great bunch of motivation and freedom, so don’t miss it.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading it and share your opinion with me.

The Art of Game Design

As I tease it in my first post, I’ll start writing about books I recently read and learned from.

The Art of Game Design is written by Jesse Schell a designer with a great vision and understanding of his work.

If you missed it listen to his “Design Outside the Box” presentation. It gives a good picture of who he is.

But really why would I like to speak about this book ?

Pretty simple, this book helped me a lot. It still does and will obviously help me again.

I even buy the card game sells beside the book which help me to keep in mind the book’s lenses.

Let’s talk about the lenses. As the book was obviously written to be used, and not only read, Jesse Schell smartly summarize his book’s essence in 100 lenses.

The power of these lenses are not only in their subject, shortness or simplicity.

In fact, the greatest power of these lenses are in their form : they are questions.

Not guidelines, not checklists, not creeds, just useful questions to ask yourself, and every answer you’d have will shape your game in the right direction.

Add to this simple and useful feature a clear and humorous writing tone and you will have an easy to read, easy to use and easy to understand book, for any designer.

I willingly said designer and not game designer. Because in fact most of the lenses could be apply to any product or content creation process.

To conclude, the most valuable thing I learned from this book is to ask myself questions when I make games. Or even when I study them.

Questions beginning by what, why, how, are now by far the most useful tools I use when making game, thanks to this book in particular.

This book also help me keeping in mind my player, and believe me (or not) but it’s sadly way to easy to forget about him. Don’t let your player down, keep him in mind, always !

So if you want to or are already designing games, give this book a try, I assure you will not regret it.