Game Design: Week 9 - The three player problem

Have you ever been playing a three player game and noticed that the better or more successful player is set upon by their opponents in unison.This is a symptom of the three player problem, the three player problem is simply referring to the extreme difficulty one can have in balancing a three player competitive game. This particular example of two players teaming up on the lead can result in a stalemate as the pairings rotate to account for each new player taking the advantage or if the game is limited by time or score than one player may make the decision to sabotage someone else's victory rather than pursue their own.
This is why most competitive games are made for two or four or more players, as when the number increases each players individual actions make a smaller effect on the game as a whole and thus either everyone would need to collaborate to bring down the lead or risk teams breaking out.
Sometimes a game might just work better with only three players, so the challenge is for the designers to find a way to around these pitfalls.
Sometimes something as simple as the type of game can completely negate this effect, take a first person shooter for example. Say its three people playing what ever your favourite shooter and they are playing the deathmatch mode and two players have agreed to team up on the leading player, not many shooters are made with three people in mind so many maps are too large for you to really control when and where you are going to come into contact with one of only two other players so the the leading play is likely to never be outnumbered in a gun fight, so all that has effectively happened is that the teamed players have limited their potential scoring options by refusing to attack each other and have created a more efficient pipeline to get shot in the head since they are hunting down a player we are assuming is potentially better than them. This creates a scenario where you are better off taking an 'every man for himself' stand and just kill whoever you see. To counter the attitude of those who just choose to sabotage an opponents win, how can they? If you are that bad to be that far behind you can't hope to hunt down and repeatedly beat one of the other players, and it's pointless to just run around let the other guy kill you, there is no fun in it and secondly you are likely to give as many points to the leading player as the person they wanted to.
So sometimes the answer to this dilemma can be simple, or at least accidentally solve itself through coincidence. But that shouldn't be relied on, solve the issue if it comes to fruition, but don't fret over it if it ruins the game. Trios may be a film quote but you should really have more than two friends.

Game Design: Week 8 - Simulation through Games

Simulation is a game genre that has no specific mechanics, aesthetic design or a shared purpose. Now that I think about it, simulation is more of an adjective than a genre. Forza is a racing simulation but has more in common with need for speed than Sim City. This genre/adjective is less about how a game is played and more about why a game is played; the generalized reasons people play them outside the standard reasons for anyone to play anything, might mostly boil down to, some more grounded fantasy or just wanting to see what would happen if you tried some really stupid stuff but there is some greater uses of simulation games than just seeing how long it takes your sim family to set themselves on fire.

Depending on the level of simplicity the game applies to any given scenario, a scenario should be able to reflect reality if such a scenario were to really play out. In racing simulators such as Forza or Gan Turismo, the cars supposedly behave as realistically as possible in any given scenario; if you and a friend is arguing about which of your dream cars are better, race them. Games like Sim City are supposed to show you vaguely how to run a city, minus a lot of red tape of course. Military sims such as Arma give players are more refined and realistic experience than a shooter like Call of Duty, instead of mowing down every Russian, German or Middle Eastern in sight like an Arnold Schwarzenegger knockoff, you can't aim to save you life, all of your equipment is too complicated to use in a gun fight and you are cowering in a tool shed hiding from six guys from a morally ambiguous nation state and praying to god back up gets there soon, just like the real military.

The idea for a simulation game can come from two trains of thought, making a game more realistic for fun or for training. Now the simplest introduction to simulations for training, aside from hearing the american army has been playing games for years as a form of training (even making a Doom mod for it), would be the training simulations everyone knows about, flight simulators.
Flight sims weren't made to be videogames, they were made to train pilots without the risk of crashing a real plane, they don't even seem to use the same technology, even the ones the ADF use still look like crap, but they get the job done. The entire cockpit has been built to be the exact copy of some real aircraft so when the pilot in training enters a real plane, they know exactly what they are doing.
The idea of using simulations for training is not a new one; remember back to any war film where they are moving little tokens around a map to represent troops, well that's basically a game of risk. Using a form of board game to assess as many actions and outcomes is a form of simulation, of course its not a very accurate one as for it to work properly one would need to think like the enemy, which we all know would require some kind of mind swapping device like from a cheesy 80's movie.

In conclusion, the best movie ever would be a WWII Freaky Friday, Lindsay Lohan running around acting all like Hitler, behind the scenes it would just be her taking acid before stepping on set.

Game Design: Week 7 IP's

When talking about an IP or intellectual property, in the realm of games and media generally refers to a title or franchise, in reality an IP is really anything that someone thinks of and claims as their own, but in conversations discussing an IP they are generally referring two a specific game or series.
Pre-existing IP's are just games and franchises that exist already and usually have amassed some amount of popularity.
Working with established IP's has both advantages and pitfalls that can make either ridiculous amounts of money or destroy the franchise in the long run.

Working with an established and popular IP almost guarantees your game craploads of sales at launch and generally quite a decent amount of continuous sales later, for example, no matter how much everyone bitches about Call of Duty it still makes a ridiculous amount of money.
There is still one major obstacle with popular IP's and that is to keep the game popular with its fanbase. A sequel or even a spin off is supposed to remind people of why they love that game to being with and putting too much of your original flair in can and often will spoil that.
A pre-existing franchise can have years of built up history, lore and most importantly gameplay standards, and while it can be easy to create a cookie cutter sequel, people can get tired of that and the difficulty is in innovating the franchise. To change the game to much is sacrilege and to not change it enough is boring and stale, to hold you ground with a poor decision is a big fuck you to the fans, to cower and go back on the change shows a week. Are your changes your own ideas to revitalize a dying game, or put your own spin on it? Or are the changes soulless cash grabs from corporate owners of the IP?

Halo is easily one of my favourite video game titles ever, I am very biased I will admit that. I am good at it and I've put countless hours into it, I know what makes Halo, Halo, I also have common sense and can tell what destroys a games art direction and cracks the lore wide open. 343 industries though? not so much.
343 is supposedly made up of fans and former Bungie employees who worked on previous Halo's, now unless the games are built solely for money or each of these employees are selfish pricks who want to sign their name on something I am super skeptical of those credentials because 343 Halo's hit every pothole you need to avoid when you are working on an older IP.
The art style goes from a hard edge olive green not too dissimilar earth military vs foreign aliens to trippy sleek sci-fi vs trippy sleek sci-fi. The lore and the backstory of the series is re-written to events before anything in the games for the sake of slamming the series with new credits. And the gameplay and been completely re balanced for the sake of new trash players, hollowing out the game to reduce the skill gap and any achievement you feel for being skilled, all of the skills I've spent over a decade refining have been rendered mute but bullet magnetism, auto-aim and a button that lets you climb ledges of missed jumps.
Halo is the perfect example of what not to do with an IP and why it should be avoided.

But there is a reason you should use old IP's over an original title, and it's a simple one, brand recognition. Effectively it's free marketing, even if the huge name means the rich publisher is gonna pay for heaps of marketing anyway. You could have the best game in the world but if it's original then you are really relying on word of mouth to get it out there, even reviews and previews are just a bunch of internet bloggers saying "trust me, its good" but if you hear about the new toilet scrubbing sim "HALO: Shit Sticker" you think "Well Halo's a good game, so this must be good too," of course the title doesn't speak to the games quality, it never can, it can convince people to try it though, even when they know it doesn't follow the same structure as the original game.

Honestly just go with what you think the game you want to make suits best, if it can slip in as a spin off, make the pitch and see what happens. If it needs to be original make it original you just might risk the initial sales, but if you make a game withing an existing franchise, please don't make Halo 5.

Game Design: Week 5

Full disclosure I'm not sure what I can really add here since this more of luck vs skill, though the readings did put me off playing Candyland.



Mixing Strategy and Randomness allows for more varied and exciting gameplay. On hand a game of pure luck is boring and technically no one wins except for one grinning tool who did nothing to earn what he got, kind of like life, and on the other a game of pure skill no matter how complicated has a "correct answer", there is a perfect way to play, the mathematically most efficient move for any scenario can be determined and if you and your opponent know them it will be boring. So the key is to strike that balance between them, which as I have previously mentioned is all preference, there is no right or wrong way to go about it, just avoid making a game exclusively about one or the other.

Randomness doesn't need to be on a linear scale of values that equate advantage to disadvantage like flipping a coin, rolling a dice or drawing a card, it can be much more uncertain or random in how this aspect of luck can effect you. It could be the layout of the game board or map for instance which will effect what strategies you should use going ahead and also provide you with a new scenario so even if there is a "correct answer" no one is going to know it if the boards layout is one in a hundred.

There are methods randomness that can be applied to a game that doesn't involve a strict good or bad connotation to and are just modifiers to the experience to suggest players alter their strategies to allow them to gain the upper hand from their own merit, which brings the pride in victory from a skill based game, but also brings the tension, excitement and anxiety from an episode of Scooby Doo luck based game.

Game Design: Week 4

When you play a new game the first thing you need to do is understand how to play it, or else you can't play it, no brainier huh. So I priority of a designer should be for them to create a product that can be understood rather quickly and preferably intuitively. Having a large manual or long tutorial accompanying a game isn't out right the wrong thing to do, especially when the game has many complex mechanics in it, but many simpler smaller details should be as intuitive as possible.

This can be achieved through association with other games and habits, for example thanks to Legend of Zelda whenever I see one section of discoloured wall I am tempted to blow it up, and quite a few other games have used that logic and thus have never needed to teach me what areas of the environment are destructible. How often does a video game outline that red barrels are destructible? Not many, do you shoot it anyway expecting it to explode? Of course. Sometimes it's just building mechanics that just make reasonable sense or just creating an obvious path, such as throwing a barrel of water onto fire puts out the fire which in Divinity Original Sin 2 is never explained, and in the Uncharted series when you can always tell what rocks and walls are climbable. The Assassin's Creed series even has some of it's own internal cues that repeatedly make appearances, such as where ever there is a white cloth or sheet draped over an object then that object is the beginning of a movement path, and even the locations of pigeons indicate you can jump to a hay bail from there.

Sometimes it is difficult to account for this, I can't even think of my own examples right now from board games that aren't just factors borrowed from other games, so it is not a cardinal sin to include manuals and tutorials, but the faster players can learn how to play the faster they can get into the game and the less frustrated they will be with the rules. There is also something satisfying of seeing  something in a game and thinking "what would happen if I did this?..." and discovering new interesting ways to play with clues that have been laid out for them. Honestly though, if someone isn't really willing to learn how to play a game whether it's through a manual or trial and error, they don't really deserve to play it.

Game Design: Week 3

There are two major factors that effect the level of perceived competence a player has in any given game, skill and luck. At any point a decision has been made in a game at least one of these concepts is in play and thus the importance of either of these two cannot be understated.

Skill is the ability to do something well, and that is on point with that is refereed to when skill is mentioned in the context of games. Luck in games refers to any time that chance is a factor in the outcome of any action. These two core concepts are in conflict with each other in determining the result of the game. The goal of a game designer is to find a balance of skill and luck that they feel suits the game, while maintaining a degree of balance on the side.

With games that rely solely on skill the victor will always be the better player, this creates more gratification in victory and recognition of hard work because the player has always earned their victory. Where games that require solely on luck and chance pretty much are just totally random and are pointless, you need a minimum level of choice here, but lets just say mostly luck for now, these games can become very suspenseful as many decisions could have any number of potential unknown outcomes, some tend to claim that luck softens the pain of loss because you can deny your personal failure, but speaking for myself I consider winning through luck cheap and would rather have lost due to my own stupidity.

Ultimately how much a game relies on luck or skill is preference or at least preference of your audience, there are merits to both but the most important thing about a game is whether it is fun or not, that is up for the game designer to find out and tune as they go. The resulting game could have a wildly difference skill/luck balance than what was initially intended because it makes it more fun to play.

Game Design - Week 2

I have decided to keep using this blog for further assignments involving theory classes such as Game Design, that require some sort of weekly discussion. Enough about that on to the actual work.

PS. I realized way to late I never clicked publish on these.



One of if not the most important aspect of game, board game, video game, sports game, war game, development is playtesting and prototyping. If you are a sane and reasonable human being you should believe form follows function, and understand that practical use is logically of greater importance than aesthetic.

To prototype a game is to put together a quick representation of what you intend your game to be with what ever resources you have during the games development, and playtesting is testing the play of that prototype. The reason this is so important is that it will guarantee the quality of play, in showing you the players and developers whether the game actually works and functions as it is intended to. Play testing can let you know that your brilliant and revolutionary idea is a total and complete game breaker and you are useless and Bioware should've never hired you.

I'm not quite sure how much detail i have to go into but not much has to be said here. You as a developer have to give the consumer what they want, fun. You can spend hours on you rules and systems but none of it matter is none of that works or doesn't bring anyone any enjoyment, so it's your job to make sure your game is fun and works, and building prototypes as you go is how you do that and if you can't do that you might end up with a disaster on your hands.

Before I end this I would just like to note that many triple a titles aren't released as absolute shit shows because they don't play test them but usually because developers pressure them to release it anyway and maybe patch it later, they knew Arkham Knight was broken.