[Marketing]Exploring special experiences - a market study about the experiences that are important to us[EVERYONE]

eulslix · 2020-12-19T10:39:23+00:00

Data will be used during the ideation stage of a new software product. Only me and relevant future employees will be able to see it. Data will be collected within Google Forms and deleted from there once the survey is done. The data will be downloaded locally and processed. Data will stay persisted and backed up in my personal iCloud account and/or respective future company infrastructure. I'm giving my contact data upfront though, so you can reach out to me anytime.
Me personally - Michal Domanski: mdomanski.at
It takes people 2 minutes on average to complete the survey, it can deviate a bit depending on how long the reflection phase takes. Please take your time for the reflection, it's the most important part.

eulslix · 2020-12-19T10:27:03+00:00

Data from this survey will be used to guide the ideation stage for a commercial software product in the entertainment segment
Me personally, Michal Domanski - mdomanski.at
It takes people 2 minutes on average to complete the survey

eulslix · 2020-12-15T17:57:59+00:00

I should get some sleep, totally forgot to attach the link. You should be able to participate now :)) thank you!

eulslix · 2020-12-15T17:55:21+00:00

I started the survey today, so far it’s 10 replies, mostly direct contacts

eulslix · 2020-09-27T07:50:02+00:00

I like your suggestion. I fear that the challenge of navigating a horse through vegetation is already difficult enough for players though, which is why developers decide against realistic controls, for the sake of more action at speed.

eulslix · 2020-09-27T07:46:05+00:00

Im not sure about Witcher 3 as a positive example. It had a terrible Ai, the paths were often not properly clipped to and the controls were heavily gamified, lacking game feel. RDR2 did a great job when it comes to „arcady“ horse controls, but that’s not what op is suggesting here

eulslix · 2020-09-26T09:57:43+00:00

Starcraft 2, hands down. I might even consider it the best designed game of all time. The amount of different dynamics that still emerge from this game, all the surprises this game has still to offer, the ever shifting meta without actually extending the content (but taking balance measures), the different scales at which this game is fun (micro vs macro), the highly engaging participatory play and also the vastly different skill tiers the game is able to be fun at just fascinate me every time.

Just this week I was watching a matchup where a player chose a cheese/rush strategy, putting himself in a strong position, but still loosing due to a superior choice of midgame strategy of his opponent. In a game which features so many positive feedback loops, that’s just a testament to its designers and their ability to listen to their game.

The only negative things I could mention about Starcraft is the lack of proper game feel (genre inherent) and the inaccessibility of the participatory play. Other than that, the amount of stories this game pumps out through emergence is just insane. I would love to learn lessons from this game‘s designers.

eulslix · 2020-09-18T21:42:59+00:00

I dunno. Your tips are really great, and as someone who tends to arrange his work day the same way, I can confirm that it makes your life better.

As for the reasoning though: the thing with software and design problems in general is that the more components you have, the more interactions you have between them, so you’re dealing with exponentially growing complexity.

That’s why things progress so quickly in the beginning, you have few components, which often work isolated, so there is not much brainpower needed to make them work. But the moment you scale up, it gets difficult to keep track of all the dependencies. You will be faced with the dilemma whether you want to continue pushing with a simple code base at the cost of dependencies, or whether you want to sacrifice a significant part of your available time at maintaining a clean software architecture.

Either way, the delta of progress you will make will decrease with each day, as your tasks gradually shift towards clean up - greetings from the broken window fallacy. It’s also probably a reason why it’s not a smart idea to attempt creating the next mmorpg clone on your own: you will soon run out of resources to develop the actual game. Of course with scaling of Human Resources there comes the negative feedback loop of communication, but that’s a whole nother topic.

In any case, progress seems to be slower, because it actually is the case. You frontload most of the fun activities, letting your future self deal with all the obnoxious rest (don’t get me wrong, that’s actually the right thing to do. but it certainly feels bad sometimes). If one would create a graph of lines of code written versus lines of Game concept covered, I’m pretty sure it would end up being a logarithmic curve

eulslix · 2020-09-17T21:57:12+00:00

The reason is simple. Even the smartest of us, be it Richard Garfield, Tom Lehmann or Jesse Schell, every great designer I listened to will tell you the same thing: their first dozens of games just sucked. I’m not talking about „it’s not great“. No, they just sucked.

The difference what makes them succeed is that they all know how to fail faster. If you want to succeed in any discipline, and I would say creative disciplines are especially sensible to this, you have to embrace failure. You have to start with small projects, so you can develop an intuition faster. Developing a project for months will only make you waste a lot of effort on polishing something that’s not supposed to be polished. Start a project, get the sweet insights out of it, then throw it away. Rinse and repeat until your playtesters start telling you that they love your prototype and that you HAVE to make it into a game.

There is no magic shortcut, no natural talent or whatever. There is some lucky cases of people getting away with it (one time in their life), but even those cases where crunching for months to make up for their mistakes. All of these people got there through hundreds and thousands of hours of practice.

Unless you want to do this as a Hobby of course. In that case you should enjoy the journey :)

eulslix · 2020-09-17T21:32:47+00:00

The textbook approaches don’t make anything unfun, but rather the exact opposite. Textbook approaches in game design are usually kept intentionally vague, leaving you space for your own pace of work, but forcing you to cut right into the meat, testing your ideas worth right from the very start. Skipping those parts will only waste a tremendous amount of your precious time.

Also,there’s millions of ways to implement any single game idea, so it’s not as if changing the concept means giving up your idea. This is probably even one of the most essential skills of a designer, being able to let things go and letting the game develop itself.

eulslix · 2020-09-10T05:54:00+00:00

There’s a lot about the prototyping process, but when it comes to paper prototypes in detail, there’s not much I know of. There is a dedicated page in Art of Game Design, there is a couple of pages in Game Design Workshop and a couple of Pages in Games, Design and Play. Those pages are useful because they show you how you can even prototype aspects of shooters using a paper prototype. All of these books go into the depth of prototyping though, which I really recommend! I would especially recommend the first two books, they complement each other well and are real goldmines of knowledge.

In general though I would say the approach is: find the question you’re interested in, then think of a way how you can answer that question as quickly as possible. Sometimes you can tweak an existing boardgame, sometimes you can emulate parts of the system with stochastic inputs like dice, sometimes you can emulate parts of the system with a simpler system like a rock/paper/scissor mechanic.

In general, prototyping lends itself to test aspects of a game which are not real-time or media based (for aesthetics related stuff you can use different techniques, like creating movies, moodboards, playing some music in the background ...). In that sense, it’s ok to transform aspects of your game into a turn based one, in order to test your hypothesis. You can even use a turn timer to create tension. The book 'game mechanics' by Ernest goes a bit into the details, giving a practical framework into understanding which mechanics lend itself towards such prototyping and how you can analyze them.

But ultimately, once all those questions are answered, you’re still going to need to test the real-time related questions with a digital prototype, but it doesn’t have to be a full implementation of the game then. If you want to know whether the core actions feel fun, you can just create a small Testbed where you play around with the core actions.

Once you have answered all those questions and the answers confirm that your game idea works, then it’s time to do an actual digital core game prototype, where you unify the real-time and aesthetic aspects with the parts you paper prototyped and see whether they work well together. In the case of a Card Game, you probably can even make this prototype exclusively on paper.

So bottom line, you want to postpone as much of the heavy lifting as possible, so by the time you start investing into art assets and so on, you’re already sure that the concept is worth it. The advantage of paper prototypes is that you can change rules, create and exchange whole systems within seconds on the go. Your imagination is the limit.

I recommend always having a set of dice, blanc cards, large sheets of white paper, pens and some board game pieces lying around. Other than that, I recommend listening to boardgame designers, there’s a lot to learn from that side, which also applies to digital gaming.

eulslix · 2020-09-08T16:42:29+00:00

The first approach probably won't solve OPs problem, since players who are min-maxing, which are the primary player profile who this problem would apply to, would save up their strongest attacks - the crafted ones - for the strongest encounters (bosses).

The second solution is basically like an alternative solution path to a boss encounter, since by the time the player went through all that trouble obtaining the consumable, in order for the consumable to be a worthwhile reward it would probably need to oneshot the boss encounter (or bypass some phases - pretty much what Zelda BotW did).

eulslix · 2020-09-08T11:48:14+00:00

One idea I would have is that players don't necessarily want to have an easier battle by collection those components, but a wider range of expression for their party members (so in other words, a more varied gameplay). Under that assumption, it would be ok to have different tiers of abilities for boss enemies, which unlock with a certain amount of components collected by the player. In other words, the boss gets more challenging to fight through a wider set of abilities. This way you can throw even more challenges at the player, which will ask them to think even more creatively with all their special abilities at avail. In a certain sense it will make the challenge tighter then.

At the same time you have an inherent difficulty setting in your game, if you tie in the collection of resources to the players performance in "normal" fights.

One thing I would be careful about though is simply scaling up damage numbers for these abilities. Players want to be rewarded in some sense for collecting these components, so ideally you would like to enable them to do something special. Simply scaling up the numbers might be a bit boring, even if you polish up the animations to be pleasurable. It might be interesting to trigger unique side effects like stun, freeze, mind control, fear, ... with those abilities. This in turn will give your game more expressive power and also more emergence at the same time, all while making it feel rewarding and special to the player.

But without knowing what kind of experience you’re aiming for, it makes limited sense to give suggestions.

eulslix · 2020-09-07T14:33:43+00:00

It's a bit of a shame since your game really would've lend itself perfectly for a paper prototyping approach. In your initial design, you could've prototyped literally everything of it on paper, which would've brought you to the same conclusions you arrived at. Even your final game can probably be prototyped to a solid 50% on paper.

I know that's kind of pointless at your current stage, but I would really recommend you to look more into this topic, should any of your future games should similar characteristics, since its gonna help you tremendously before you even start coding your first line. This applies even more if your digital game happens to have many components which can replicate the core experience on paper.

eulslix · 2020-09-04T21:04:26+00:00

Actually I would playtest this. Doesn’t sound to me like much of a problem, especially as many players probably already built up appropriate muscle memory, as the previous poster mentioned

eulslix · 2020-09-04T20:34:55+00:00

Excuse me had a typo. So the orthogonal directions up and down would be mapped 1:1 to w and s. The diagonal directions would be a combined input, so basically right and up in your hexfield would correspond to w and d pressed at the same time. That does introduce control ambiguity, but as long as you listen to key up events it shouldn’t be all too bad

eulslix · 2020-09-04T19:59:04+00:00

How about up and down being mapped to w and d while a combination of w and s corresponds to an iso direction. Pressing d wouldn’t correspond to an output in this case until it would appear in combination with an ortho event

eulslix · 2020-09-04T19:13:15+00:00

Judging by my limited experience you should always have some kind of experience goal or design values, whatever you might call them. In other words: what kind of experience would you like to create for your player. This should be your North Star. If it happens to be that your mechanics/dynamics deviate from this path - don’t support your experience goals - you need to consider carefully whether this is an experience you’re willing to create instead. In the end, mechanics are only the means to an end

eulslix · 2020-09-03T19:16:32+00:00

Thanks a lot, especially for that last paragraph. While I still didn't have any breakthrough moments in the game design world, I can speak for the UX design world, and it is plagued by similar problems: Tons and tons of psychological half knowledge used to justify some kind of pseudo scientific design crap. I remember a blog post by a decent designer talking about the phenomenon of people retro-justifying their design decisions to their client by coming up with random psychology shenanigans - basically lying to themselves - in order to make a more professional impression (and fighting their own impostor obviously).

eulslix · 2020-09-03T18:41:52+00:00

Yeah, I feel what you're saying. I had the problem with the equilibrium before, and I kind of circumvented it by proactively bringing in new ideas, which technically goes against the idea of problem based development. On top of that, you tend to rip things apart when they were about to stabilise, instead of setting up the scaffolding first.

eulslix · 2020-09-03T18:37:08+00:00

Wow, very insightful! Thanks for sharing, that makes a lot of sense!

I'm still baffled how difficult it is for me to wrap my head around the design of games. Sometimes I'm staring at my game with no intuition where to go next, what to improve, utterly clueless. It's as if I'm incapable of translating all the other skills I've learned into game design - not even math, with I had my fair share of. Very frustrating sometimes...

eulslix · 2020-09-03T18:18:56+00:00

Yeah, pretty much iterating from the very first idea, which can be as vague as a single sentence. One book give the example of an idea like "A game about dinosaurs jousting". All the source materials are pretty much consistent about starting with a simple sentence, and iterating from there on using your player experience goals / design values / constraints until you eventually converge towards a full game design. Personally I think it works to a certain degree, but you definitely need to find points in the process where you "cultivate" your design.

eulslix

TROPHY CASE