I’d like to start this article by pointing out that it is merely a documenting of my own personal experience and thoughts that led from it, and in no way is a treatise on what I think everyone should do. Please take it with a grain of salt.

Introduction

Emergent behaviour is something that has really surprised and fascinated me in the past with gaming communities. A particularly clean-cut example is Minecraft. Despite being designed as a sandbox game, the game’s community has grown to accomplish some incredible feats including a working computer as well as people making games within the game, which – to my mind – is just incredible. Given enough momentum, and given the right design choices in a game project, people will start to play a game in ways that it was not designed for – sometimes to very interesting effect.

So naturally, when this sort of thing started happening – albeit in a less grandiose fashion – within my own game’s community, I really found it astounding, and it led to some interesting revelations and thoughts for expansion, which I will go into later.

My own experience with emergent player behaviour

First, let me explain what happened within my own community to lead to these revelations, and to the eventual typing of this article. Some of you may know me for my main project, Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox. Among those who know and play the game, it has become infamous for its difficulty – which it was designed for – and the sheer effort required just to stay alive in the game when everything in it tries to kill you in the most creative way possible. This factor alone has led to its small, but dedicated fan-base to have a somewhat gleefully masochistic view towards playing, and many community requests for expansion to the game have revolved around this mentality, including making dungeons darker and more difficult to traverse, making traps deadlier, combat less forgiving and primarily the addition of a perma-death option to greatly multiply the sense of risk.

The emergent player behaviour that led from this started out fairly simply. People wanted to know how long they could survive in the game’s hostile environment, which only gets more difficult the longer you stay alive, and so, competitions arose to see who could live the longest. To my mind, this was inevitable and very much tied into the base competitive nature of the modern gamer.

However, it soon escalated from there with the addition of functionality to be able to “claim” locations as being the first to discover it. The game world in Malevolence is infinite, and everyone is in an exact copy of the same world, so people can travel as far as they like to discover new locations which are procedurally generated by the game, but still exist in everyone else’s copy.

The procedural nature of Malevolence means there’s
always something new to find. This makes players feel
a sense of ownership if they’re the first to find something.

This has led to certain players making it their entire goal to just wander the game world claiming as many places as they can get their digital hands on. One player has already found and claimed over 1100 unique locations, and the community as a whole has claimed over 10,000. It quickly became a mark of status on the forums to have claimed the most locations, and certain players would become minor celebrities for their efforts. I marvel to think what people will manage to accomplish once the quick-travel system is implemented later this month.

But this sort of digital achievement was not enough for the community, and – just recently – a forum member posted a challenge request for four others to join. He had found a particularly difficult level and wanted to challenge a handful of other players – on perma-death – to reach the end of the level alive (no small feat, given the difficulty). A section of the forum was dedicated to the exercise, and many hundreds of members watched along eagerly as the characters battled it out to survive (they documented their progress with screenshots and narrated videos). The entire ordeal became somewhat of a grand spectacle amongst fans of the game – a bit like reality TV in RPG form – and people even went so far as to place bets on how long people would last. Play strategies and tactics were discussed at length and equipment was debated over across many posts.

The popularity of this exercise, of course, led to more tournaments – of varying types – being organised and participated in, eventually leading to a thriving sub-culture within the community. This, in turn, led to the most recent piece of emergent player psychology which really caught my attention: Legendary Items.

Many games have legendary items in them – weapons or armour which have phenomenal properties which players actively seek out for their own – however, these items are only legendary because they have been written by a game designer to be legendary. What has been happening in my own community is that certain players are managing, through quite impressive play skill, to survive exceptional levels of in-game adversity, and when they have finished their challenges (to much community fanfare) they have been distributing their (procedurally generated – and thus, unique) equipment to the community through the game’s internal item sharing system. These armour items and weapons have become highly sought-after legendary items not because they have been written to be valuable, but because actual people have made them famous through very public shows of in-game heroism and skill. To the best of my knowledge, this is unique in video games (though I could be wrong – I don’t profess to know every game and its contents). Regardless, it is fascinating to see these purely digital items gain a real sense of perceived value not due to rarity in the game, or clever writing, but by actual achievement by real people.

I am sure that other bits of emergent player behaviour will appear over time, but thus far, the above is what I have experienced. This alone has led to some very interesting thoughts, which I felt that I should share.

Players congregate around well-known discovered places,
such as The View of Inca, because of its abundance of
resources. But the heavy visitor traffic simply begets more
visitor traffic as word spreads.

Designing a game to behave in ways for which it was not designed

It’s no new revelation that a strong community is a valuable asset to an indie game project, but how can one work to strengthen that community?

From my own experience, a community is often strengthened by a sense of ownership over the title. This – at least for me – was achieved by leaving the gameplay style quite open and not pigeon-holing people’s playing angle. An open world with procedurally generated content affords people the feeling that there is always something that only they could have found before – be it an item or location. This makes people feel that it is “theirs”. Naturally, this leads to a desire to show off their “acquisition” to help aid their social standing within the community.

This factor, and the emergent tournaments, has led me to begin serious planning to start implementing in-game functionality which will allow people to set up their own challenges for people to take on and handle for them, as well as showing off their character and gear that they’ve found, but it’s interesting how this could be applied to other projects as well.

If a game project is a solitary experience, then it will remain so in the player’s mind, however, if you add in a sense of unique accomplishment – separate to normal game goals which everyone is doing – and make something an experience for which they can know that no-one else has done, then that makes them want to share it and talk about it. This communication builds community bonding, and the community talks about it, leading to more people hearing about the project. People start discussing their achievements as though it was an actual thing that they, themselves, personally did on the weekend.

Conclusion

In an industry that has an ever-increasing indie push, the importance of marketing and publicity is becoming more and more relevant, and that onus is usually placed on the developer at the early stage, as marketing departments and publicists are expensive for independent developers. As such, anything that can help word spread about a project is a good thing. Talk is cheap, and with a little bit of clever design and forethought regarding emergent player behaviour, this can be turned into a very valuable part of your game’s functionality.

Thank you for taking the time to read about my personal experiences. I hope they’ve helped!

Addendum

After publishing this I had a developer friend make an interesting point which I thought I’d add to the end of this article.

One interesting observation made about “emergent” behaviour is that players latch onto it due to the very fact that what they’re doing is outside the realms of “what has been designed”.

Case in point:

Look at all the stunt videos for Codename Eagle, Battlefield etc… communities pop up with people breaking the game in marvellous ways.  Now compare that to the videos from a game like Crackdown2, in which the “stunts” have been designed into the game structure, ie “park your car here and work out how to flip it to here”… (tip: There probably are none).

By writing that stuff into the game you’ve transferred ownership away from the players.

If Quake 2 came with a tutorial on corner-jumping, how many people would care?

A good developer needs to act as an amplifier… when people do cool stuff, they should use their power over the codebase to amplify the players’ cool stuff. Provide the Lego bricks for them to build with, but be careful not to try and show them what or how to build it.

This is, precisely, what I aim to do, given recent developments on my project, and what I will aim to do for future projects as well :)

Keep in mind this whole lecture purely relates to my own experience with crowdfunding and not to that of others, but I hope that any prospective crowdfunding applicants can get something useful out of it!

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Hi, my name is Alex Norton, and in mid 2012 I ran a successful crowd-funding campaign for my procedural RPG, Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox, earning over 500% of my requested total. How did I do it? Well, I’ll tell you – but it’s not an exact science. The best I can do is to give you what advice I can.
First of all, why did I even look into crowd-funding? Many campaigns you see on places such as Kickstarter are looking to fund an entire project – sometimes asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this. To me, that seems a bit much, particularly given that all that is offered up on these campaigns are some design drawings and an empassioned speech by a director of some sort. My tact was different. I already had a product, but a rough one. It worked, but wasn’t as pretty as it could be. To make your project pretty is often the part that takes up most of your money, so that’s what I looked to crowd-funding for. Polish is often what makes or breaks a product. No matter how impressive something is technically, without the right shine it just becomes hard to “sell” to an audience.
In addition to polish, crowd-funding my game gave me an insight into its market viability. Would it sell? Is the idea sound? How will the public  react to it? All of these questions and more were answered purely based on the social response that my project got on the network, and on blog sites that talked about it. So that’s another angle for you to look at.
The first time I attempted crowd-funding, however, didn’t go so well. I made up a video for my product, slapped together a few screen- shots and gameplay videos and left it there for a month on IndieGoGo, expecting to find the account full of money at the end of it.
Needless to say, the excersise was fruitless. Not only did it get to barely an eighth of what I needed financially, it copped a fair amount of negative publicity, which put me to thinking.
Now please, don’t get me wrong, the fault for this lay with me entirely. IndieGoGo is a fantastic site (and available for use by people in Australia) but my strategy for running my campaign was entirely wrong. So I took the lessons I learned from it and made the move to Kickstarter via one of the American members of my team.
After doing significant research on other, more successful, crowd-funded projects, I came to the following conclusions:

- Communication is key! Talk to your pledgers and potential customers. Answer their questions when they have them and keep them engaged.

- It all comes down to how you sell your product, and how you sell yourself and your team as people.

- Be aware of your target audience and gear every little thing you do towards them and only them.

- Market your campaign. Send links to blogs, reviewers, journals, magazines and spread it across social networks. Get traffic to it.

- Be willing to put in the hours that it takes to make regular updates, answer all questions and keep the customer engaged at all times.

On top of this, I decided to change my tactics to include the following:

- Show the customer that the project is being made by people. Good quality, friendly, nice people. If they like you, they’ll be more
inclined to like what you’re selling.

- Don’t just show them why your product is special. Show them why it’s special to YOU, and why it should be special to THEM.

- When you’re selling your product, you should also be selling the people making it. It makes the customer feel a part of something,
rather than a simple ‘browse and buy’ scenario.

- Write lots of updates. At LEAST 3 per week. Show them you’re working at it. Show them how dedicated you are. Try and use video where
possible. People respond to video. Get your best speaker onto it.

- Talk to the pledgers, not just as someone who answers questions, but really engage them in conversation. Show them you’re real.

So after doing all that, I had an interesting campaign. It took work, to do all that, I won’t lie, and that’s something you have to be prepared to do. It’ll be more work than you think it will be, too. So, for the month that your campaign is running, prepare to turn away friends and family, to decline invitations and to tell everyone to leave you alone. If this project really means that much to you, then you need to be willing to dedicate your life to it for a month.
I did this myself, and the response was massive. My project was fully funded within the first week, and after that it just kept climbing and climbing. I had to move on to add stretch goals quite quickly, which was something I’ll admit I had not planned for, but when it comes to crowd-funding, you never know what might happen, so you have to be prepared for not only the worst, but the best, too!
Once it was all over and done with, I had the aftermath to deal with, which was another thing I wasn’t expecting. It’s not as simple as all that. To suddenly go from being a penniless developer to having all that cash sitting there… It’s a hard thing to be responsible and look after it properly, but you must. Don’t go nuts with it as some people have done in the past. Be responsible, be well-managed and you’ll reap the benefits of it.
Another thing you’ll have to deal with is the public hatred. Yes, it’s strange, but some people don’t like to see other people succeed, and if you happen to have a particularly successful campaign, some people will hate you for it. They will make you feel terrible, but trust me when I say that it’s best to just ignore them. If you’ve handled your campaign as I stated above then you’ll have a vast and loyal following behind not only your product, but you as well, and they’ll always make you feel welcome!

Not all campaigns work though, and it’s not always your own fault, or because your product is a bad one. Sometimes the planets just don’t want to align for you, and that’s alright, too. If that happens, it is definitely worth your time to analyze the wreckage and find out what could have been done better, so that you don’t make repeat mistakes next time. That information is PRICELESS, I cannot stress enough. A failure is only a failure if you fail to learn from it. Remember that. You can always try again.

So, what would some last-minute advice be to a potential crowd-funder? The following is the best I can offer:

- Just because you CAN crowd-fund, doesn’t necessarily mean you SHOULD. Make sure your product has GOTTEN somewhere first, otherwise jumping
into a crowd-funding situation can bring some pretty nasty PR down on your project.

- Don’t do it unless you’re prepared to deal with it. I cannot stress to you just how much work it is if you do it right, and that is
something that you really have to be ready for. PROPERLY ready for.

- Be sure to market your campaign EVERYWHERE. Don’t rely on people to just happen across it one day. Spread the word EVERYWHERE. Don’t be
shy about it!

So that’s all for now! This is a cut-down version of this topic, but for the full version, feel free to watch the video at the link below. I wish you all the best in your campaign and your projects! Good luck!

(In case the embedded video doesn’t show up, click here for the link to YouTube)

But before we go into that, the first thing that an indie developer really needs to do is to have their product displayed in as many places as possible. When starting work on Malevolence I started out with just a simple BlogSpot account and did all of my updates on there. Guess how many people cared? None. And why should they? How could they even FIND the blog unless they were told about it?

Take a search engine like Google. It has a “crawler” that goes around the web, finding pages, and finding all of the links on those pages. It analyzes where the links link to, and finds which pages have lots of links heading to them. If a page has hundreds of other pages linking to it, and lots of visitors, then it must be important, right? Well, to make your game more visible, you need to have lots of people visiting your page – a bit of a catch 22 – but you can help it by having a presence in many different places. Oh, and good news everyone… The Internet has many, many viable, justifiable places where you can put your game on show.

For Malevolence, the first big step after BlogSpot was to create a profile on IndieDB/ModDB (creating a profile on one creates one on other other, too). They get quite a lot of traffic on there, and it will actually rank your game against others (a library of about 6000 games) in terms of how much traffic you get. It also rewards your dedication to the public by putting you on the front page whenever you write up a new update post. Given the way it works, and the attention that it gets, it’s very much worth taking the time to make your profile page attractive and thorough. That’s where a bit of the psychology comes in. I have noticed that gamers who browse ModDB for new indie games are a little bit like channel surfers. They flick through profiles quickly – bam bam bam – until they find one that appeals to them very quickly, and then they’ll stop and take a deeper look. So having lots of nice, bright screenshots, thorough videos and lots of clear, solid information about your game readily accessible for them will entice them to stay and take a proper look at your game.

Once you notice that you’re getting more traffic, you can make a move towards putting links on your IndieDB/ModDB profile to other networks that you’re operating on. Some examples of which include YouTube channels, Facebook Fan-pages, Twitter accounts, etc. Any and all are good. Just be sure to make the links subtle. Some nice clean icons, perhaps. Gamers, I have found, dislike feeling like they are being bombarded. Do some research, take some time, look at successful pages and the way they’ve done things. It pays off.

The social media avenue was the next step for me with Malevolence. It started with a YouTube channel where I would make a point to do screen-captures fairly regularly showing the progress of the game’s development. Many people either don’t enjoy or don’t have the time to sit down and read lengthy blog posts (he says in a lengthy blog post) and a nice, quick video can get the whole point across much faster and with more of a sense of interaction. Even taking the time to narrate the video can easily double or triple the amount of information translated in the same time frame. Things to think about there.

After that came the Facebook and Twitter. I actually expected these to be the most active of the network avenues for promoting the game, but in the end they fell into roles of keeping CURRENT fans up to date, and didn’t really do much to draw new fans. Though it seems obvious now, it took me a while to work out why this is. Most people on Facebook and Twitter these days use them on their smartphones, rather than their computer. While it IS possible to go browsing for new content via the smartphone interfaces, they are much more designed to just keep up with what their already follow. That’s not to say that you can’t still make use of these avenues though, as they offer quick and easy mini-update portals for you to address your current fan-base en-masse, and quickly spread links to any major blog updates you do elsewhere.

For the longest time, Steam was one of the holy grails of indie games “making it” and their new Greenlight process has taken that from some dark, incomprehensible process to something more tangible. As soon as it went live I create a profile for Malevolence on there thinking “wow, I might be in for a chance”, and things went fairly well for a time, but then started petering off quick quickly. Valve kept altering and adjusting the vote process for getting games approved and it was quite drastically affecting my game’s ability to get noticed on there. It’s been quite frustrating until it got me thinking… How WOULD you make an unbiased system for gauging a game’s popularity in the middle of a firmly established community of over 50 million users? The more I think about it, the more complex it becomes in my head. Sure, I have lots of problems with the way the Greenlight process works, however, since I can’t come up with a better one myself, I’m happy to leave it up to them to sort out. I’ve had many heated discussions with fellow developers about how the system should work… Mainly about the apparent pointlessness of having a “no vote” button (which I’m sure will create some lovely ‘discussions’ in the comments) however, as I said, I’m happy to leave the process up to Valve, as they would certainly know best. Of all the networks I’ve gotten Malevolence onto, that’s the only one that hasn’t really gone anywhere yet. As the owner of it I can watch the percentage of votes go up and down, and I can’t really make sense out of it, so I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing and hope for the best. The only advice I could give to other indies attempting it would be to make sure that all of your avenues (Facebook, IndieDB, dev blogs, etc) point to your Greenlight so that you can funnel as much of your traffic into it as possible.

HOWEVER, all of that only depends on how badly you want to get onto Steam. I’m aware that some people don’t. Some because they just don’t like how Steam operates, others because they’re making mobile games and it’s kind of useless to them. I, personally, am trying to get on there, but that doesn’t mean that everyone SHOULD.

But I digress. What about the psychology mentioned earlier? Well, that is where your marketing plan comes from. Just sticking your product on some blogs and social network sites isn’t really a marketing plan. It’s just a means to give your game a ‘presence’ on the Internet. A solid presence is a powerful thing, but it takes constant maintenance. It’s not something you can set and forget until you have a large, strong, dedicated community to do it for you. As an indie, that’s just not something that’s likely to happen straight up, so it’s something you’re going to have to do yourself. KEEP your blogs updated. RELEASE lots of screenshots. RECORD lots of videos. ANSWER lots of questions, and above all, MAKE SURE that your community is reminded regularly that you are still working on your game, lest they lose interest.

But what about expanding your community? That’s where your marketing plan comes into play. You’ve got your presence sorted out, you’re maintaining it well, but how do you bring new people in? That, in itself, depends on many different things:

TARGET AUDIENCE: What is the target audience for your game? You can’t just say “gamers” because not all gamers like tower defence games. Not all gamers like FPS games. Not all gamers like RPGs. And then, even within the types there are sub-types. In the RPG player genre there are gamers who like first person RPGs, but don’t necessarily like isometric RPGs or turn-based RPGs. So it’s a matter of specificity. Take the time to work out precisely what your target audience is with your game and market mainly towards them. There’s not much use in wasting energy trying to talk to people who aren’t interested in listening!

ANALYZE: Take the time to analyze the way your target audience acts. Do they talk amongst themselves? Do they operate vocal communities? Is theirs a community of sharing, or of bragging? As an overly abrupt stereotype, FPS gamers tend to have communities that are much more vocal and aggressive than communities of RPG games. I realise that’s a massive generalization, and it is most certainly not ALWAYS the case, but if you look into how the communities of your target audience operate, you can use it to your advantage when creating your marketing plan.

ACT AND REACT: As an indie, much of what you learn, you will learn on the fly. If you make a marketing faux pas, you will learn about it pretty quickly. Try not to be too stubbourn about things. While it can be trying at times, an indie game without fans/players, is nothing. It’s like owning a coffee shop that has no customers. Don’t be too hard-headed to change the way you operate if it’s something small and it keeps people happy. You need to be adaptive, you need to listen and you need to communicate.

So, with these things, you can create your marketing plan. As an example, my marketing plan for Malevolence was to make use of the RPG communities idiosyncrasies. I did my research, joining forums and following blogs, doing the whole Jane Goodall thing and “living with the apes” so to speak (not calling RPG players apes, by the way. Just using a metaphor) and I found that a common trait among them is that they are excited about indie RPG development and will quite often share links to interesting indie RPG projects that they find. BUT, at the same time, while there is a lot of link sharing going on, there isn’t much response to it. Many RPG forums will have an entire section just for sharing indie RPGs that people have found. These sections are often filled with lots of posts with links, but the posts won’t often have many responses. That doesn’t mean that people don’t follow the links, but it means that there is more excitement about sharing the links than there is about the games themselves. RPG fans seemed excited about the IDEA of new RPGs, which is cool.

I made a note of this and built my strategy around it. I planned to start my marketing push at the same time that Skyrim came out. Sounds crazy, right? Well, there was reason behind my madness. I started pushing the links to my various blogs, etc, on forums and other hubs while people were busy getting fussy over Skyrim. The community saw my links and shared them around, but, as expected, not much action happened other than the spreading of the links. Because of this, there ended up being many, many sites with references to this infinite indie RPG. As it spread, more people heard about it, but they didn’t focus on it because… Hey… Skyrim… But that was precisely my plan.

The excitement over every game, no matter how groundbreaking the game was, eventually wears off, and once the attention for Skyrim had started to dim, I was in the position where links to my game were ALL OVER the Internet, and a vast portion of the RPG community had heard something about it. Even if they couldn’t recognise it by name, when someone mentioned “Have you heard about Malevolence, that infinite indie RPG being made” more often than not they would be met with a reaction of “I think I heard something about that, yeah… Can’t remember where though.”

This is where the psychology of my marketing plan came in. Having another person bring it up makes them remember seeing it somewhere which inspires them to look for it again. They hit the search engines and start typing in the word “Malevolence” since they have no idea how to spell “Ahkranox” and, since I have made an effort to have a VERY strong web presence, they see this:

They barely have started typing the word Malevolence, and it shows up. Marketing plan complete. That being said, they may go to the site, look at it and hate it. I unfortunately can’t help you with that. Marketing is one thing, but your product still needs to stand on its own. I was lucky enough to have this strategy work quite well for my game, but sometimes even the most well thought out strategy will fail. Not having a strategy at all, however, will pretty much guarantee that you’ll fall short, so start early!

But that’s where I’ll leave off, I think. In conclusion, when marketing your game, you need to take the time to establish a web presence, develop a marketing plan based on research and analysis of your target audience and attention to detail when looking into the psychology of the way they act as a community. Stick with it. If you believe in your game strongly enough, you won’t have too much difficulty in translating that to your viewership!

STAGE 1 – DELUSIONS
—————————
Going through university I had the same delusions as most people that I would get my qualifications, build a folio and get a job at a AAA game company. Shortly thereafter, fame and riches would ensue and I would live happily ever after, making games that I love, and having everything right with the world.
I finished university to find that all of my hard work would get me on a “consideration” list for a baseline, entry level QA job which would mostly consist of me being locked in a cubicle for 70+ hours a week doing some of the most repetitve, soul destroying work known to man.

A good example of what it is to be a tester, provided by Penny Arcade.

Sure, that would give me a foot in the door to have my true skills recognised later on, however, most game companies go through and trash their QA teams at the end of every project after smothering them in NDAs which make their soul now below to the company. So that’s a minefield in itself.
If, and I really mean IF, I was to be plucked from QA and given a position within the company, one of two scenarios would have happened:

EDIT: Since this seems to be causing some controversy, let me clarify that my thoughts listed below are not my opinion of ALL games companies. I am simply listing things that tend to commonly happen based on the experiences of the many developers I have spoken to, and these thoughts in no way represent what the industry is like as a whole.

Programmer Position – I would be sat down and made to do scripting work for 70+ hours a week on someone else’s proprietary engine, since using third party products “speeds development” and I would learn that there is such a thing as an “acceptible sacrifice of quality for speed” which would slowly destroy my integrity as a programmer. My passion for creating new features would slowly be vampirically sucked away, and anything I made in my spare time would be contractually owned by my employer which would sap my enthusiasm for innovation even further.

Artist Position – I might be lucky enough to get assigned work that interests me. I might be having a great time designing and modelling sci-fi assets for an amazing new shoot-em-up and enjoy watching them come to life within the engine. But one day the producer (who is computer illiterate and whose only gaming experience is with Bejewelled) would pop by and say “You know, my 10 year old niece is really into ponies right now. Change the game to be about ponies”. Because he is the money behind the masterpiece, I would now be forced to abandon all of my work and create ponies and handbags all day every day. Also, everything I make outside of work would be contractually owned by my employer, limiting my folio and preventing me from moving to another company.

STAGE 2 – DETERMINATION
———————————
So, having this realisation, I then turned my attention to the indie game dev scene, which was far more attractive as I was beholden to no-one, I could work on what I wanted and do it in any way that I pleased (so I thought) but there were certain demons there which no-one told me about, either.
I got myself a day job to take care of living expenses and turned my spare time towards my magnum opus… Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox – the game of my dreams that was everything that I wanted to see in a game. I was out to show the world what a game COULD be. New technologies, new gameplay mechanics and a dash of old-school to reel in the retro crowd. It was going to be amazing and the world would be changed forever.

I was young. I was naive. And no-one had warned me what was coming.

First off, I had been playing around with a new method of procedural generation to create infinite worlds, and my favourite gaming genre was always RPGs, so I figured “why not make an infinite procedural RPG?” it seemed a good idea at the time, so I started work on it and found that it worked. I started a blog about it, more for myself than anything. Things were going fairly well.

STAGE 3 – REVELATIONS
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It was at this point that I started meeting a couple of other game devs. Before this point I didn’t really know any, and one with quite a long resume happened to start work at my day job. We got to talking and he introduced me to more people. They all seemed quite interested in my project and thought it was great that I was trying new things. This reaction gave me the motivation to make my development process a bit more public, so I started promoting Malevolence a bit more and getting more of a team together to work on the game’s shine.

Much to my amazement, it got quite a lot of attention (for an indie game being made by a nobody in the industry) and that made me happy, so I kept at the PR. But with positive attention comes negative attention, and it was then that I learned two important things:

• People, when given the anonymity and audience of the internet, can be truly horrible.
• You can read 1000 praising comments, but if just one of them is bad, it will ruin your whole day.

The fact that I was trying to do something new with my game was evidently a horrible crime to many people and I would get utterly horrible comments ranging from put-downs to persanal abuse that would get them arrested if said in person… Even one or two death threats. It’s a sad fact of life that people who are too scared to follow their own dreams will often try to talk you out of following yours. It’s easy for people to say “just ignore those comments” but that’s simply not possible.
Some people who disagreed with the game’s concept gave thorough and well-written justifications for their feelings, which was good to see, but they were few and far between.
I had decided early on to keep an open-doors development policy and be extremely communicative with the public. I even developed somewhat of a reputation for answering every question asked of me. Many people loved this, others took it as justification to send more abuse, because they knew someone was listening.

At first, I thought it was because of my new ideas and concepts that I was touting, but after meeting with other game developers I found out that it’s just what the gamer community is like. Full of angry, hateful, rude, abnoxious people who feel entitled to say anything they want to the developers who are making games for them. That’s not to say that they’re all like that. Far from it! Many, many people have been very supportive, communicative and encouraging throughout the entire process, and you have to really cling to people like that because, as a developer friend of mine once said “Those people hating on your game will always complain loudly. That’s just what they do. The fact is, though, that they’ll probably still buy your game.” and that’s what you need to focus on. It doesn’t matter if other people like your game. What matters is whether YOU like your game. If you love it, other people are bound to as well. Just look at how much hate has been poured upon Minecraft over the years, but Mojang have sold millions and millions of copies regardless, and you can tell that they’re super proud of their creation!

Being proud of what you’ve made is very important. Whenever something happens around your game that makes you feel proud, then you’ve gotta grab a hold of it and not let it go. I’ve had John Passfield sit me down and tell me that he believes that Malevolence has the makings of an epic game, I’ve been called a “visionary” by members of the Guild Wars 2 team, I’ve been recommended by RockPaperShotgun as a project to watch… These things make me glow with pride, whether I believe them or not, and whenever I’m getting slammed by ignorant haters, I remember these things to help get me through it, and that’s something you’ve just got to do to survive psychologically.

STAGE 4 – HINDSIGHT
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So, looking back, I’ve realised there are a lot of things that people just don’t tell you about being an independant game developer:

• A large, loud portion of the public will openly hate you regardless of what you do. Learn to live with it.
• No-one will ever take your project as seriously as you, or fully realise what you’re going through.
• Everyone will think they know better than you about your own project.
• Getting noticed at all is incredibly difficult .
• The odds of you making money out of it are slim.
• If you want to succeed, you’ll likely have to sell out. Just how MUCH you sell out is up to you.
• You have to develop a VERY thick skin.
• Being open with the public isn’t neccesarily smiled upon 100% of the time.
• You will meet many “game developers” but very few people who are actually developing games.
• You need to have the ability to listen to all advice given to you. Remember that listening to advice doesn’t mean you have to take it. But listening can’t hurt and you never know what you might learn.

I’ve also learned lots of things to never do again which may help upcoming developers:

• Don’t make an RPG as your first released game, nor any other kind of large-scale project. Start simple. Learn the lessons. Once you’re experienced, THEN you can work on something big.
• Never announce your release date until you are 150% sure of it.
• Never let yourself get so enveloped in your project that other parts of your life suffer.
• Never engage the haters.
• Get a test team and follow strict testing practices.
• Have a thorough plan before you start working too hard on it, and then stick to that plan come hell or high water.
• Think carefully about having a public development process. Depending on the target audience and the project itself, it may be better to develop it silently and only open things up to the public when you’re nearing completion.
• Never let anyone cause you to stop being proud of your work. The moment you aren’t proud of it anymore, the moment people will stop respecting you for it. If you make the game, and no money comes of it, at least you’ll have work that you’re proud of.

Some of them are hard lessons to learn, but learn them well before you venture into the murky waters of independant game development. Consider yourself forewarned! Obviously, other people will have other bits of advice, or revelations of their own, so I’d love to hear them, too! Share them in the comments!

Making games is hard.

Now, that in itself is a statement that many people would casually read and then scoff at, but it’s very true and very serious. Making video games is one of the more difficult things that you can do as a profession. Especially as an indie developer, because you don’t always have the people to have your back when you need it.
Even now, still reading this, many people will still be under the impression that it is easy to make games, and the sad fact is that their minds won’t be changed. But – in the off chance you keep reading – maybe I can help you understand just what we have to go through.

A game developer must be able to write software. That – in itself – is a feat. I often say that there are people who can program and then there are programmers. Anyone, given the right resources, can learn to write software. They can then go on to get a job writing software and make good money and reap the fruits of their hard work… But that doesn’t make them a programmer. True programmers write software because they can’t help it. It’s in their blood. They see things and wonder about the algorithms that make them work. They don’t stop at wondering how something works, but feel a compulsive need to know why it works, too. They will often dream in code, or search for that elusive “perfect combination” of sleep deprivation and caffeine that allows them to find their “coding zen” where they do their best work. When they’re coding, they are 150% there, in the moment, focused. When they’re not coding, they’re planning out what they’re going to write when they get back to their IDE. It’s this sort of unnatural focus and necessity of expression that makes someone a programmer. They are a programmer because they have to be.

Just being a programmer is one thing, but being a games programmer is another thing entirely. Games programming is arguably one of the hardest forms of programming. It can be made considerably easier by the use of proprietary engines and pre-made modules which can be used so much as to reduce game programming to basic scripting. But for those of us who write our own engines, our own modules, it gets phenominally difficult, and it’s mainly due to the fact that we have to become detailed experts in a variety of fields.

We must be physicists. Every little bit of movement you see in the game has been hand-crafted. When a box is knocked from a shelf and falls to the floor, most people take it for granted. In fact, many people will complain if it’s not there. But someone has had to learn and follow precisely how nature affects objects with gravity and collision and friction to perfectly simulate that box falling off of the shelf. So much study, practice, research and code must go into doing something so very simple that it staggers the mind.

We must be psychologists. When the bad guy sees you, throws a grenade and ducks behind cover to lay down fire, that hasn’t happened by magic. A game developer has studied anthropology and psychology to make the characters in the game behave in that specific way. And as games get more advanced, so does the AI. Even simple AI methods like the Dijkstra algorithm can become very complex to write out and be handled efficiently, let alone larger, more advanced and complex algorithms.

We must be artists. A game world must be visually appealing. It must conform to the desires of our senses, but this – once again – doesn’t happen by magic. People have worked long and hard to smooth down all of the sharp edges of the world that you’re running through, making sure that every object, every leaf, every light, every particle system is placed with utter perfection to bring the game world to life.

We must be lighting engineers. Do you see the way the light is shining on that pipe? That small effect is the result of long hours of study and coding to generate rays to simulate photons of light whizzing through the map and hitting surfaces, referencing their normals, comparing them to the viewing angle and illuminating the texture map accordingly, applying bloom if too bright, increasing contrast if too dark. Just trying to begin thinking of the process that is behind this happening at 60fps is utterly bewildering, but game developers do this in their sleep.

We must be pyrotechnicians. We must understand fire, explosions, destruction of objects, projection arcs and the light and heat associated with it. We must make it feel dangerous. Read that sentence again. We must make it feel dangerous. A thing that is not real, can – in no way – harm you. Not even a little. But it must scare you. It must make you reel in shock and make you feel like you are there. That you could get burned, or hurt. We must, as game developers, and purely through fancy code, make the virtual real or you won’t play.

We must be tacticians. It isn’t good enough for the enemies in the game to be able to move through the maps, or even “think” dynamically with relation to the players actions. They must employ tactics against you that will be effective or the game will be too easy. A good game developer must be able to think like a well-honed military unit – something that often takes years of training in harsh conditions – or people will be able to outsmart the game and will find it too easy.

We must be designers. The game must feel immersive. It must draw you in and make you forget the outside world. It’s the key to success in a game. But to do this the game developer needs to understand layouts, composition, landscaping, interior design, use of colour, light, shadow. They need to study things like the golden ratio and apply it with precision or people won’t become immersed in the game.

We must be directors. The game, after all, is almost like a cinematic experience. We must feel the adventure. The people must say the right things, the events must play out in the right way. This is made even more difficult in games with procedural content as the developer has no reference to make the game play out well. Therefore they have to make the game know how to play itself out well. They have to teach the game how to be fun and then trust it to do its thing. Think about that for a second.

Lastly, game developers have to be emotionally strong. It is an incredibly personal thing for a person or team of people to invest so much of their time, money, energy and love into a project for a year to five years, lovingly honing it into their idea of a masterpiece. For them to finally build up the courage to display it publicly and let the world in to see this personal world that they’ve created – to see their vulnerabilities, hopes and fears made manifest takes real courage. What takes even more courage is to read and cope with the armies of inconsiderate punks on the internet who hide themselves behind a veil of anonymity as they methodically try to destroy this much-loved thing that someone has put so much of themselves into. But you build up a tolerance. You become immune to it after a while. The noise that those people make will never be louder than the call to play this wonderful thing that they’ve made. Neil Gaiman said it quite well – if you do work that you’re proud of and the money doesn’t come, at least you still have the work. A game developer must work to cope with having their soul destroyed a little bit more each time someone says something ignorant and hurtful about this thing that they’ve created, but they get built right back up again by the praise that they receive. People enter their little worlds and are truly amazed, and there is no greater feeling than that.

But one thing that always hurts is when someone says “Oh, you make games? Isn’t that really easy?”

No. It’s not easy. John Carmack, one of the greatest game developers of all time took a break from making games to do rocket science. Actual rocket science. For a break.

So basically this little rant was mostly to have something to point people towards who don’t appreciate what it takes to make a game. For the people who are happy to whinge about the way a box falls off a shelf rather than just smile and enjoy the game.

For those who want further insight into just what it takes to be a game developer, I highly, highly reccommend reading this book and watching this movie.

I’m aware that this is an opinion piece and that you may not agree with me, but frankly I don’t care. The dedication, skill and emotional investment that game development requires needs to be better recognised.

Procedural Generation is definitely in vogue, and I personally have believed that it is the way forward in video gaming for many years now. Using procedural generation in games is nothing new of course, as fans of games such as Elite or The Sentinel will know that we’ve been seeing it in games for a good 25 years.

Older titles made good use of it due to the memory constraints of the hardware of the time. It was simply more efficient to have generated levels rather than hand crafted ones, but that is no excuse for games not to make better use of it now that we have better specced hardware.

Fans of the RPG genre will no doubt remember The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, which had one of the largest in-game worlds ever seen, and still to this day tramples almost every RPG made in terms of world size. I recall reading somewhere that the in-game world of Daggerfall was equal to twice the landmass of the British Isles.

That is a heck of a lot of world to explore, and – from a game design perspective – a nightmare to recreate by hand. Through clever use of procedural generation, however, it is easily possible, which is what Bethesda Softworks did with Daggerfall. The settlements and towns were hand-crafted, with the wilderness in between being generated by the game.

But why stop there? Why have world borders at all? Procedural generation code hasn’t changed much in the last 25 years. People are still stuck using fractals and diamonds and blobs to do everything, which becomes repetitive and quite simply looks like procedurally generated content. To any programmer looking at it, it virtually smells of procedural generation. On top of all this, if you get it wrong, it will end up VERY wrong. The indie crowd seems to do it best, with titles like Dwarf Fortress generating MASSIVE worlds with lush histories and more world than you could ever hope to explore. But still, they aren’t pushing the envelope. My aim was to fix that by making it work. An infinite game world should be possible, and indeed it is.

The Idea

Just over two years ago I began assembling a team to make the first truly infinite, fully 3D fantasy RPG, entitled Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox. It was to be played in a style similar to the classic grid-based, first person RPGs of the late 80s and early 90s such as Might & Magic, Eye of the Beholder and Dungeon Master, but set in a literally infinite world. We had originally thought to make it a planet-sized world, but in the end decided on the story being that the game’s world was being created within the imagination of a sentient sword, which would act as a way to “explain” the infinity of it.

After much experimentation and very complex math, we got it working, but all in raw data. Nothing really playable. But we had in front of us an infinite world filled with infinite dungeons and infinite cities filled with infinite NPCs. We then worked to get a game working in such a world (some of the efforts of which, you may have read about in my last post)

Now, just to confirm, this world wasn’t being randomly generated. It was both infinite AND persistent. Without going into too much detail, this is achieved by making the world dynamically affected by the passing of time. Every part of the world is identified as either affected by time or timeless. The lay of the land with its hills and caverns… That’s all timeless, and never changes. Because those parts never change and cannot be affected by the player, they only need to be loaded into memory when the player can see them (or if they are needed to generate quest information, etc). However, if an object is affected by time (for example, the contents of a chest), then they have a time coefficient applied to the procedural algorithm that generates them. This means that a chest in a dungeon, for example, will have different items in it depending on WHEN the player opens the chest. If the player was the clear out that chest, that act is stored in a database of player changes, but then re-set when a certain amount of time has passed. This ensures that the database of player changes to the world never exceeds a certain size (which is estimated to be around 250mb at the very most, but more realistically around 50mb)

This generation accounts for almost everything in the game. Spell creation, item creation, weapon creation, potion creation, NPC dialogue system, even the spell effects that happen on the screen. Due to this, the world that the player explores will be ever-changing and infinite. They won’t keep finding the same old weapons or items, there will be no end to the number of spells they can find or use, they won’t even keep having the same conversations with NPCs. This is necessary to keep a player interested for long enough in an infinite world.

Public Acceptance

Back when the game Elite was first being worked on, it was planned to have around 282 trillion galaxies with around 256 star systems in each one, but their publisher, Firebird, were worried that such a large in-game universe would be intimidating to players and put them off. I have to say I had wondered at that, and was interested to see how the public would react to an even bigger in-game world.

I was surprised at the results.

We’ve been quite public with our development process for the game so far and generated a small cult following on communities such as IndieDB, but very few people seem to quite grasp the scale of an infinite world, despite our thorough descriptions of it. We had put up renders of the world generation data, showing just a tiny fraction of the world:

And then, we showed them this:

That inland sea is around the size of the entire in-game world of Skyrim. Funnily enough, the largest response we got from this information was disbelief. Many called us liars and that it simply wasn’t possible. Others began to believe that the world size of Malevolence was the entire above image, rather than infinite. Only about 20% of people really understood.

So, from a marketing perspective, it’s been a bit of a nightmare to have an infinite world. We’ve even had many suggest that Malevolence is just a rip-off of Legend of Grimrock, despite the fact that Malevolence was started about a year before. But that’s always going to happen, no matter what the game. What happens upon release will happen, and that’s just how the cookie crumbles with game development. Funnily enough, that hasn’t been the hardest bit. The hardest bit has been the math involved in making a world like this one.

The Math

Being infinite, procedural AND persistent, most of the mathematics behind Malevolence is theoretical math – that is, mathematics with few or no fixed/known values acting in a volatile space. But we’ve broken the world creation down into multiple layers.

The first layer is the one you saw above. A large world segment is generated which covers an area of about 400x400km. This is the only layer of the game that uses a standardised procedural generation system (perlin noise)

That is then broken down into chunks that are around 3x3km, calculating the biome information within that area, like so:

In the end, all of these steps need to be completed when each new world segment is generated in order to turn the raw data into this:

That is just for the overworld. Every world segment that is VISIBLE to the player (as in the view above) is given a unique code, generated by the procedural algorithm. If there is a dungeon entrance in that segment, the dungeon is generated using this unique code, ensuring that every time the player returns to that spot, the same dungeon will be there:

This same method is used for town generation, graveyards, ruins or anything else that the player may encounter. And this goes on forever. If a player was to turn off collision and hold down the ‘move forward’ button, it would take them just under three weeks to walk from one end of a world segment to another, and then they would simply move to a new world segment seamlessly, and then another, forever.

The biggest question we have been given is how we have dealt with the data type limitations on player co-ordinates, but unfortunately we can’t give away all our secrets :) But I can tell you that Malevolence doesn’t suffer from the Minecraft world-edge issue, it just keeps going on and on.

Conclusion

Using procedural generation in your game can be a rewarding experience, but definitely don’t rush into it. It takes good planning, clever usage and most of all it needs to feel seamless, otherwise the public simply won’t accept it.

If you’d like to read more about Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox, you can check out these links:

My project team have the distinct honor of listing actor Kevin Bacon in the ‘Special Thanks’ portion of our credits, but I doubt he has any idea that he’s in there. The fact is, he’s had a very large – albeit unknown – influence on the game’s development.

The game is Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox, which I have been project lead on for over two years now, and its engine is quite different to most games due to the fact that the entire game world is procedurally generated, infinite and also persistent.

The Challenge

Being infinite AND persistent, the team’s main challenge was to keep the game interesting so long as the player kept playing (not an easy task). We, of course, took the path of procedural item/weapon creation, even going so far as to make the game procedurally generate the graphics for the weapons, to ensure plenty of new gear to find. That, however, can only last for so long, and procedurally generated countryside, dungeons and towns can only entertain a player for so long before they all start to look the same. So we put our heads together and came up with a solution. We all agreed that we couldn’t keep the players interested infinitely, but we can take steps to ensure they get maximum enjoyment and re-playability out of the game while they do play it.

The Solution

What we came up with in the end was the quest and dialog system, and the way they interacted. Both were to be procedurally generated and intricate enough to ensure long-time interest from the player. But how does Kevin Bacon get involved with this? The answer lies in his namesake header file:

Some readers will be familiar with the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game back in 1994. The basic concept was that you could take the name of anyone involved in the Hollywood film industry, whether they be an A-List actor or an isolated gaffer somewhere on an obscure film, and within no more than 6 steps, be able to link them to Kevin Bacon. For example, one of the voice cast in my game Malevolence, Karen Kahler, was in the short film “The Magician” with actress Jackie Zane, who was in the film “Burning Palms” with actor Nick Stahl who acted in the movie “My One and Only” with Kevin bacon. Thus, her “Bacon Index” is 3 (and through Karen, mine is 4!). Make sense?

Well, it’s that system (or a modification of it) which the NPCs in Malevolence work with.

So How Does it Do it?

Let’s say that the player enters a town and talks to an NPC. The game determines that this NPC will have a quest for them, and so the game spreads its feelers out and works out what is relatively close to the town, and how far away each location is. Since the game world is generated procedurally, it does this process dynamically:

First the game procedurally generates the quest. The engine first selects what type of quest to generate and settles on an item centric quest. It then generates an item, and an incident and comes up with a backpack which was lost. Once this is done, the NPC tells the player that they need help recovering their backpack from a dungeon that they were exploring. Only the catch is, they fled the dungeon so quickly that they don’t remember where it was.

While this is happening, the engine consults the memory map shown above and looks at the area around the town for a few kilometers, then chooses a dungeon that is close enough to not be too far away, and far enough away that the player will have to search for it. However, once it has found a dungeon, it doesn’t let the player know where it is like most games. It is now the player’s mission to search for it.

Finding the Unfindable

Now that you know that there is a dungeon out there somewhere with a backpack in it, you can ask around to get more info. The engine, however, is processing the dungeon’s “Kevin Bacon Index” in the background. The main difference, however, is that not everyone knows everyone else perfectly well, so if one person gives you information, they may not be 100% sure about the information. So when you get a map of people like this:

You can see the percentages between them all. That shows the familiarity of the characters between them. So, if you speak to NPC ‘A’ and ask them about nearby dungeons, they will tell you that they have no idea about that sort of thing, but their friends Steve and Kyle might. If you speak to Steve, he may refer you to Kyle or pass you on to Bob the Blacksmith, who he’s fairly sure knows a mapmaker and a woodsman, who would probably have a better idea about dungeons in the area. When you speak to Bob the Blacksmith, he’ll tell you about Keith the Woodsman, who is familiar with the local wilderness, but will more likely put you on to Kevin the Mapmaker, who knows Keith the Woodsman quite well and may be able to help you himself (with his maps). These NPCs may all be in the same town, or they may be spread between multiple towns. It’s all generated by the procedural engine, but it’s how the player FOLLOWS the path that defines how well the quest will work out.

If a player is clever and good at deduction, they may have an easy time of it – for example, if they followed the path ABDEF, while it may not be the most direct route to Keith, they will get some accurate maps out of it, and maybe even a new weapon to help clear out the dungeon to find the backpack. But if they don’t follow good advice, they may have a far less fortuitous way. And keep in mind that due to the lack of familiarity between certain NPCs, sometimes the player will get false information in their searching, which can slow them down quite a bit.

That’s Very Long Winded

Very true, but not all quests in the game will work like this. The quests are divided into two quest types. There are the multi-tiered quests, as mentioned above, and “b*tch quests” which are your standard “there’s a dungeon, clean it out” or “there are rats in my basement, kill them”. On top of that, even when a player is assigned a multi-tiered quest, sometimes they will have 3 steps to complete, sometimes they will have 20, it all depends on how the cookie crumbles in the procedural generation.

Conclusion

Making a game which is infinite AND persistent has provided countless challenges to us as a dev team, but the solutions to intricate problems are often the most unique. I hope you enjoyed reading about this little section of our game, and if you ever end up playing it and you see Kevin Bacon in the credits, you’ll now know why.

Game Design

Game design is always about looking back before looking forward. Sometimes this is done consciously, other times it is done unconsciously, but it always happens. Every great new idea is built on improving an one or more old ideas, and the best game designers are well aware of this. One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone says to me “don’t reinvent the wheel”, which they often quickly regret saying as I begin to lecture them on how if no-one ever reinvented the wheel we would never have tyres, suspension, alignments, treading, etc. All things which have made the wheel more efficient, smoother and just generally better.

A great design for a reinvented wheel

But for a wheel to be reinvented, one must start with a wheel to begin with, and that is what we are always doing in the games industry. A good example is the recently successful iOS game, Jetpack Joyride, from HalfBrick studios. An excellent game, and quite obviously modelled off of those Amiga/Commodore-era “don’t touch the sides of the tunnel with your helicopter” games. They took that solid idea, and evolved it with pickups, achievements, special gear you can earn, etc, and made a great game out of it. They reinvented the wheel and it worked.

An example screen from Jetpack Joyride

Does it Always Work?

No, it doesn’t always work. Some past ideas weren’t that great, let’s be honest. But some have not only been ridiculously successful, but have also done the unthinkable and withstood the test of time. Two good examples in relatively different genres are Quake 3: Arena (1999) and Diablo II (2000). There are many more, of course, but these are my case studies for this particular article.

Well over a decade on and these two games are still being played with distinct regularity, are favourites at private LAN parties and have graphics which still stack up fairly well against their more modern competitors. Why is this and what can modern game developers do to make a game that withstands the test of time so well? The answer lies in how the button is pressed.

…The Button?

I mean this metaphorically, of course. But let me explain with a story. In my day job, I am quite involved in the gambling industry, and as such am exposed to many new products before they hit the market. One such product came about which was a “re-launch” (as it were) of the old-style “one-armed bandit” poker machines of yesteryear, which fell out of use in Australia decades ago.

What the pokies used to look like

In an attempt to latch onto the “retro rush” that seems to be going on… Well… Everywhere, people thought that re-releasing a classic-style one-armed bandit machine would inspire people’s nostalgia and that they would be a viable new product. I was quite excited when I heard the news as I remember my grandfather having one under his house back in the 80s and I loved the feel of the flywheel revving up as I pulled down the lever. I loved seeing it kick the spinners into gear and watching all of the colourful fruits lock into place on the wheeled display.

Needless to say, when the first units came into the test room, I was excited to feel that little piece of nostalgia again. The machines certainly looked the same, if not a bit more modern. The digital displays had even been replaced by the classic wheels with the printed artwork on them. It was in test mode and ready to play, so I grabbed the lever and pulled. The wheels started spinning and the lights started flashing, but it was all wrong. It felt so wrong that I thought perhaps the machine was broken… It wasn’t, of course, it worked perfectly well. But the machine was no longer clockwork, obviously, and the lever arm was simply a spring-loaded arm which pressed a small button when it was fully depressed. There was no sense of “winding” the machine up. No sense of having some sort of influence over the device and no sense of being connected to its operation in any way. It was a jarring sensation of being completely disconnected. What was once – for lack of a better term – an intimate interaction experience had now become somewhat cold, clinical and disconnected.

I voiced my concerns at this, and was – of course – laughed off. I even went so far as to suggest they could build a small flywheel mechanism into the arm that has no functional purpose other than generating that “feel” when you pull the lever. They ignored my counsel and released the product anyway. Needless to say, it was very unpopular and never really took off. The official reasoning was that “people don’t like the ‘retro thing’ in gambling”.

How is it Relevant to Video Games?

How does this relate to video games such as Quake 3 Arena and Diablo 2? Well, think of that “button” as being the interaction between the player and the game. It has to feel good, just like the poker machine arm. There are things you can do to the button to make it feel better, and be more intimate, or there are things you can do to the button to make the user feel disconnected from the machine, and they both come down to a deep level of design.

When beginning a game project, try to describe the game in a short, concise sentence. Once you’ve got that sentence, every single thing you add to the game which complies with that sentence will make the game “cleaner” to play, but the more you stray from that sentence, the more disjointed it will seem.

Quake 3 Arena:

Take Quake 3 Arena as the first example. It can easily be described as “Fast-paced, sci-fi, multiplayer deathmatching” and nothing else. The reason that game was so popular for so long, was twofold. Firstly, it was built on a very beautifully made engine made by John Carmack, which was powerful enough to drive MANY other games for the next decade (RTCW, Jedi Academy, Call of Duty, etc) and secondly, it followed a clean design based on a simple concept which could be summed up in that one sentence. Every aspect of the game conformed to it. There was nothing confusing, or particularly intricate about it. When you played it, you were immersed in the game. No part of it “fought” against you or detached you from the experience. You had four movement buttons, a jump button and a shoot button. A control system which could be replicated on a classic GameBoy. The player movement was swift, smooth, consistent. The game never slowed down, or became badly paced at any point, yet still gave the user enough freedom to develop their own style of play and put it into the game.

Conversely, a later id Software game, Doom III, was not quite as smooth. The gameplay was slower and more disjointed. It was still a great game, yes, but things such as having to stop to punch numbers into a keypad or having to put down your weapon to pull out a torch disconnected the player from an otherwise immersive, cathartic experience.

Diablo II:

Diablo II is another fine example of this. Fans of the series will know that it has an incredible complex control system consisting of one button… Oh, yes, you can use the number buttons on the keyboard as well if you like, but there is essentially the left-click button and a couple of others which you use occasionally. The entire game is about as non-confrontational as you can get, and anyone can pick it up. It is also paced beautifully, with the first area being almost impossible to die in, yet still giving you enough of a sense of risk to keep you engaged and on your toes.

A typical scene from Diablo II

It had very simple multiplayer, a beautifully crafted procedural item and level system and enough replayability to ensure people would be able to play it for years, and indeed they did. Blizzard, in true Blizzard form, found all of the features of Diablo I that left the player feeling disconnected and removed or remodelled them, making a game which is clean, simple, elegant and extremely replayable. They followed a simple design sentence of “Explore, kill and loot while progressing character” and every aspect of the game reflects that. Nothing gets in your way, nothing slows the progress. There are no repetitive cut scenes or cloned combat encounters or scripted events, all of which can make a procedural game lag something awful. This “neatness” has ensured the game’s continuing success both in the single player and multiplayer worlds and place on game store shelves over a decade after it first was released.

So What are you Saying?

When designing a game, before doing anything else, describe what you want it to be in one concise sentence. After that, with every decision you make or feature you go to add, check to see if it fits neatly with that short description. If it strays too far out of that, or the description ends up being too long, you will end up with a convoluted game and the player will feel disconnected from it. Remember that games are a form of escapism, and the player should forget that there is even a keyboard or other controller between them and the game. The graphics help, yes. The story helps, yes. But it’s the FEEL of the game that will ensure a captive audience. It’s just like the one-armed bandit. The aim of the poker machine is to pull the lever and get the wheels spinning, but if you just focus on making the lever spin the wheels, people won’t play it. They need to enjoy the act of pulling the lever and pushing the button just as much as the result of that action on the screen.

Anyway, thanks for listening to my little rant :) I hope it helps to inspire all of you other game developers.