when designing a game, my inclination is to isolate myself from similar games. I don’t want to end up subconsciously duplicating other peoples ideas. I want my game to be my own creation.
on the other hand, one could immerse oneself in similar games and build upon others ideas.
should I isolate myself or should I immerse myself? what do the pros do?
I wouldn’t know since I don’t make games, I’m more into creating stuff that could be put in games. A newborn baby put into the world today without no inspiration would turn into a cave man. We stand on the shoulders of giants, if you are capable of recognizing what makes a game great emulate as much of it as you can. If you have bad taste it’s best to refrain from drawing too much inspiration from what you’re into. As a wise man once said; The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
So I think it boils down to what kind of game you want to make. If you want to write a good book it’s adviced to not study harry potter but the classics. If you want to create nice music it’s adviced to not study Justin Bieber but classical composition. If you want to create great art it’s adviced to study realism and not mangas or cartoons. Same thing applies to games I think, problem with games is that they haven’t really breached the kiddy barrier yet. So many games are still designed for kids, that’s why in most of them you run around pretending to be a great knight.
Here are some games that if I would make a game I would try to draw inspiration from:
•Dragon Lore II
•Final Fantasy 8
•Dust: Tales of the wired west
•Monkey Island
•Heroes III
•Mass Effect series
•Croc: Legend of the Gobbos
I think you should try to identify what makes the game you like the most so enjoyable to play and then ask yourself what would make it even better to play. Unfortunately games aren’t like books or art, you’ll need a team of talented individuals to make the game great. So if you’re not particulary into the artsy side of game making and prefer to just dabble in the technical aspects of game making I would suggest you learn to replicate features seen in other games with code instead of dreaming of making a game on your own, because it won’t happen. It could be a shitty game but it won’t be a great one.
Great games are made by hundreds of people working for years, if a great game is made in two years with a team of a hundred people how long do you think it would take one person to do. I think about 300-400 years. So instead of dreaming of making your own game I think you should try to become really good at one part of what is required to create a great game. What do you prefer to do, create graphics, compose music, animate models, program game play features. Choose one and concentrate on becoming good at it.
Also it’s important to emphasize maturity, the highest form of any art is always very mature. So if you’re into some childish game, try make a serious version of it. For example in Mass Effect you would remove the whole american space marine routine. Try to elevate the characters beyond merely macho guys and steretotypical ninjas and shit. This is not something that is easy to do, I suggest reading great litterature, because it’s often in those old dusty books you find most maturity.
Find a friend to talk to. One with sound reasoning and logic who has a similar aesthetic (sense of design) as you. Sit down and doodle, talk about games, play a couple. Talk about their strong points and weak points.
The reason I say “sound reasoning and logic” is to prevent features that sound cool becoming the point of the game. You need to critically analyse. Say “what would happen if” and then follow it through to the conclusion that “actually, that won’t be fun” and throw it away.
See if other people have critically analysed games you’re interested in. For example, here’s a link to a very deep analysis of one of my favourite games. That person evaluates the playstyle of the game in various dimension rooms in levels. Once you have that knowledge you can build on it. Yes, you could try to figure out how things would work yourself, but sometimes taking a little of other peoples analysis is a good idea.
AAA games take hundreds of man-years of work, but the most played, most fun games were developed over a weekend. Flappy bird, while hardly the pinacle of game design, took the world by storm. The best games are, in essense, very simple. If you can’t explain your game in one sentence, it’s too complex for an indie dev to make. So instead of throwing in zombies, monsters, aliense and tunnel digging worms, see if you can throw out the enemies altogether, or chuck out the HUD and see if having less information makes a more compelling experience.
One final note:
It’s the final game that counts. Not the WIP, not the research. Getting it done is the most important part of developing a game. It will take years. I spend, on average, four years per big game I make (along with a couple little games over weekends on the side). But at the end, well, you get a game.
It depends on your goals. Typically you have a vague idea about what you want to do. This can be:
Are you aware that you need a main menu in your game? Yes?
I’m sure this is not the “feature” you want to develop. So why not use an existing menu? Or at least something that makes creating your custom menu easier? Think about the perspective from the audience. They do not want x different mechanics for menus. Different visual appearance - yes. But the basic concept should remain throughout different games.
This belongs not only to the aspect of a menu, it belongs to other aspects too.
Think about the costs (mainly time) that you need to spend by “reinventing the wheel”. You will reinvent - that is a fact. You will need a lot of different wheels. So, it is valid to use existing things and focus on what you really want to do.
Since I’m mainly an artist I approach things from the point of view of doing studies.
Say I wanted to draw a hand.
If you work in isolation, you’re stuck at point 1. This is a false start and usually leads nowhere. Someone has done the research you need already, it’s unlikely you’re going to discover something they didn’t just by thinking really hard about it. So in game design, as in drawing it’s better to move on to point 2 and start looking at games other people have made and how they did what you want to do.
Here’s a really great blog where a game designer looks at AAA games and tries to work out how they did some of the tricks.
An import ant part is not to get stuck at point 2. If you can’t find out how something was done in a game, try doing it yourself in the way you think they did it. Try a few different experiments. You don’t have to worry about making a full game, just a gameplay demo.
When you’ve got a whole bunch of working gameplay demos you can try to fit them together in to a game.
@Smoking_mirror
Nice resources, and I agree we should not shut ourselves away from the world or learning
What I do is immerse myself in the other’s game until I learn everything about how it works. Then using that knowledge I build my own original game but with similar and improved attributes
Thanks for all the responses! this has been a very helpful thread.
