Humor a game dev student?

[Tarthus]

I'm a game development student currently attending Westwood College and I've been tasked with tracking down two people involved in game development in order to ask them three questions. The instructor said I could ask more, but I don't want to ask for too much of your time. He even gave me the questions:

• What game design principles do you think are most important when creating new game?
• Which area of the design process do you find the most difficult and why?
• What element of game design do feel gets neglected the most?

Thanks for your time. Looking forward to Project Eternity!

Edited June 4, 2013 by Tarthus

[sorophx]

you'd better track down Josh Sawyer, George Zietz and a bunch of other and ask them on their Formspring. you stand a better chance of getting your answers there

[babaganoosh13]

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/63646-the-funny-things-thread/

[J.E. Sawyer]

• What game design principles do you think are most important when creating new game?

I think it's important to consider both what you are setting out to accomplish and who your audience is (and isn't).  Game development can take as little as a few weeks or as long as several years.  If you get lost along the way, you can always return to these two questions: what am I trying to accomplish and whom am I making it for?  The answers to these questions may change over the course of development.  If they do, they allow you to change course.  If they don't, reminding yourself allows you to refocus on the big picture when considering even small details.

• Which area of the design process do you find the most difficult and why?

Pre-production.  A lot of people like pre-production because it's a "blue sky" phase.  The problem comes when questions aren't answered in pre-production and production begins.  Then those blue skies turn grey and black and then the tears flow.  Pre-production should be harder than production.  If it winds up the other way around, not enough time was spent figuring out the big issues up front.

• What element of game design do feel gets neglected the most?

The player experience.  It's ultimately the most important thing to consider, but game development involves the creation of so many things and the troubleshooting of so many problems that the player's thought processes and emotional changes often drop out of sight.  It's important for developers to play their own games, but that's not enough.  We also have to consider how different members of our audience are going to think and feel their way through the game.  There's not one way, but many ways.  We don't have to accommodate them all, but at our best, we should consider them all and make an active choice based on the spectrum as we understand it.

 

[Tarthus]

Awesome. Thanks for taking the time to respond and for the insight.

 

I'm glad you mentioned pre-production, as I'll be turning in projects soon that will be reminiscent of actual games, and I want to make the process as streamlined as possible. I'm glad to see you guys focus on the player experience. I know that all companies do it to an extent, but I think that many lose their way and end up making something that could have been great but ends up lacking for one reason or another. Two that immediately come to mind are Mass Effect 3's ending and Diablo III's ridiculous difficulty on Hell mode.

 

I asume that ME3's endings were a design choice, but the fans were outraged when the endings didn't pay off for what was a $180 experience for many of them. In their defense, however, Bioware did get the extended endings out quickly. Diablo III's difficulty has since been lowered, I've been told, but I know a lot of people played before the fix and would clear the first room then restart to do it again, as they couldn't kill anything beyond that. I didn't really have an issue with either, as I only played ME3 after the extended endings were released and I stopped playing Diablo III well before I reached the Hell difficulty. It was too repetitive for me.

 

Thanks, again!

[anubite]

The element of game design I think gets neglected the most is "emergent play" - too many games these days are "linear cinematic experiences" that are highly polished and tested, but offer the player no real choice. There's a hallway, some whack-a-mole-based-gameplay, an "epic" story with bells and whistles, but you end up a passive entity in the "experience". You aren't playing a game so much as interacting with a movie.

 

I think all games should enable the user to make choices that have tactical or strategical worth.

 

Recently made a thread about what I sort-of mean: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/63960-level-design/