How to Make a Mediocre Game
I found this article at gamedev.net somewhat horrifying. It’s supposedly about how to make your game highly polished so that it will sell many copies. But after a somewhat relevant first point (“Put effort into your demo”) it’s all downhill.
The article is terrible. Let’s ignore the fact that offers advice about polish, but is itself extremely unpolished (the prose is fragmented and there are glaring factual errors, like getting the name of Xbox Live’s point system completely wrong, in a section that’s about how effective that system is in attracting players. One wonders, has this guy even used Xbox Live? Why is he writing about this?)
I won’t spend any more time complaining about specific points (you’ll find plenty of problems yourself). The wider issue that bothers me is: this article is typical of the institutional knowledge of the indie game community. If you go to the indiegamer.com forums, or read the development notes from a random indie game linked from someone’s blog, you’ll find about the same level of insight, which is to say, almost none.
This is a problem. It will be very difficult for indie games to propel the industry forward, to somehow prevent games from becoming the comic books of the 21st century, if we are all riding the short bus. We need to develop an institutional wisdom appropriate to our place at the avant garde.
For example: if writing an article about polish, why don’t we start with some kind of understanding of its basic nature: that it’s not merely eye candy, but also can have a dramatic impact on the usability of the game, and the way the player perceives in-game events? That one important function is to provide audiovisual cues for events that may otherwise exist only as hidden state, or would be vague as to their occurrence in space or time? (If a player can’t tell exactly when or where or why he died, it makes the game much harder to learn, and the player feels less cared-for). That there is a space defined by the axes “provides player comprehension” and “provides sensual stimulation” (and probably a few others); that every piece of polish lies somewhere in that space, with almost nothing at the boundaries? That since it’s very rare for well-executed polish to provide only eye candy without added comprehension, we shouldn’t be so quick to think of eye candy in a cynical, “it’s just there to sell copies” kind of way? What about the fact that audiovisual effects are, by their very nature, smaller works of art within the bigger work, and as such they express things that are inseparable from (and invaluable to) the work as a whole?
That might turn out to be a pretty good article.
May 19th, 2007 at 7:48 am
So, I think there might be two “indie” camps. There’s people who want money, and don’t really care about the artist elements of games (which is what this article feels targeted at). And then there’s people who sort of fit into what you’re doing, trying to progress games as a serious artistic / technical field. But, since people don’t feel there’s much reward in the latter, I don’t think they care much about advancing that area.
May 19th, 2007 at 8:06 am
Right. But even if you just want money, this kind of advice is terrible, or at least heavily amateur.
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Yes, a horrendiously bad article. Very hacky. I think you are right about “indie insight” most of it is just common sense when you start doing it.
It’s almost like people say, hey there’s no articles written about this for indie development so lets just write one, but I’ll put a lot of color into the writing to make it sound like Indie stuff is hip and all that, because I know it is. Yuck.
RohoMech has a good point I think about this type of writing. I’m very much not in the “let’s make indie games to make bucks” camp, which sort of alienated me from the indie group that I used to hang out with because most (all?) of them are about what they call “living the dream”, which is making indie games and living off the sales of them.
In my experience Indies that are in it for the money are usually so focused on the money side that it colors all of their decisions about development. I’d guess that most professional developers aren’t that worried about the money in their day to day decisions. They’ll get a paycheck next week regardless of how the game sells in a year from now. Which is an odd state of affairs indeed.
June 5th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
I could see some problems with this article, but I admit that if you hadn’t pointed out that there were problems with the article I don’t think I would have noticed. Also, I feel that some games (in particular, Bejewled 2) do actually benefit from flashy visuals. However, it seemed like this article was discribing how to create one particular game and stressing that all games need these elements (story, flashy visuals, etc.) to be successful. Not true, though they can help a game. In some instances, though, games will benefit from minimalistic sounds or graphics or lack of story. Knytt is a perfect example.
June 12th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Knytt won’t sell millions of copies for obvious reasons, EVEN if it’s minimalistic style is appealing. There are plenty of games out there that are great, but don’t look good.
Unfortunately, unless you’re dealing with total casual game freaks, graphics DO matter a LOT. Sure, there’s the occasional ‘retro’ game with ‘retro’ graphics that people will like no matter what, but eye candy definitely aids an indie game in becoming popular!!! There’s crap textures, then there’s eye candy and then there’s next-gen ultra über super graphics off course, but the latter most certainly doesn’t apply to the Indie scene anyways since we mostly do not have that kind of technology at our disposal.
Polish is important, but graphical style and gameplay is what sells, come on, we all know this!