Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Designing a game is easy, right?
TheLizardbones
Member CommonPosts: 10,910
Not so much, if you look at what it actually takes to just design a game. Liz Englund, a Game Designer at Insomniac Games gives us some insight into what it actually takes to just design a game with The Door Problem.
The premise is that you are making a game. In the game, there are doors. For this one object, there are a lot of questions to ask.
- Are there doors in your game?
- Can players open them?
- Can the player open every door in the game?
- Or are some doors for decoration?
- How does the player know the difference?
And so on. That's just the start. Then there's the other door problem(s) that start up once other people get involved in the design like the network engineers, marketing people, etc.
Game designs show up pretty regularly on these forums, but I've never seen one that has the level of detail shown here just for doors, much less for an entire game. It's kind of insane.
The website may be very slow to load, it's gotten Slashdotted, but hasn't actually crashed.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Comments
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
Yes and no...
I would say that the design phase has to be broken up into multiple steps and what you see there would be part of step 7 or 8... Most of what you see here would fall under step 1 or 2... Basic concept, and wish list. The questions posed above are part of implementation. Before you can start talking about implementing "it" you have to determine what "it" is.
I've worked with devs before(granted not on games) and starting off we had to clearly state our concept or purpose so we all knew what we were trying to accomplish. We then need to put down everything we might want it to do(we are talking broad strokes here, as we are not implementing yet). We then sort that list into 3 categories: Must have, Nice to have, Not going to happen(or at least not before initial release). etc...
Difficulty is relative.
I believe that once you're actually at the point where you're deciding what sort of cues the door will have to show that the player can or can't interact with it (Obvious tip: If you put in a door, it better fucking open. Else don't put in a door. Anything a player sees, they should be able to get to or interact with). That the hard part of the design process - The Game Idea. Is already done.
Whether a game will be a success or failure is first decided once the Game Idea is hammered out. What is the story about? Is a good story? Does it resonate? What is the soul of the game?
Once the realization of what the game is has been realized the rest falls down into execution.
I'm not saying that physically creating the Vision or Idea is easy. But from a pure creative perspective, creating an Idea that doesn't suck, is the most difficult part of creating a game. The rest is just fiddly bits.
"The rest is just fiddly bits."
No. Like others here, I work in IT, and actually develop applications. Like others here, they aren't games. All those little details, making them work? That's the hard part. If having a game idea was the hard part, game developers wouldn't have boxes and boxes of ideas just laying around. They would be taking good ideas off of game forums like these and using them. No, coming up with the idea is the easy part. Taking the idea and turning it into reality with all the details in place and without having to use the budget of a small country is the hard part.
**
Existing game developers already have lots of "Ideas", and have no need of new ones is a common theme. "Ideas" are easy, and common. "Ideas" make up a very small part of game development time. Making games is actually hard. All those little fiddly bits are hard.
http://www.theastronauts.com/2013/05/you-have-an-idea-for-a-game-heres-why-nobody-cares/
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20120214/91082/So_You_Want_to_Be_an_Indie_Game_Developer.php
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/issues/issue_221/6582-Why-Your-Game-Idea-Sucks.3
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Design is pretty hard, especially since every choice you make can affect other choices. On the other hand, IT in general uses templates to avoid re-inventing the wheel every time, and game designers have access to many, many examples of how other games have handeled various issues.
So the 'door problem' is misleading somewhat misleading.
Designing a great game is easy.
Designing a great game with monetary and time restrictions is difficult.
<p align=center><a target=_blank href=http://www.nodiatis.com/personality.htm><img border=0 src=http://www.nodiatis.com/pub/9.jpg></a></p>;
... .what?
How many games actually let you do that?
There's so many things in every game that are basically just window dressing. Most games with trees don't let you climb them, or chop them down, or tap them for maple syrup.
How many games let you open al lthe windows and crawl through them?
There's so many objects in your average room that unless the game is 'You're stuck in a room', that the programmers are never going to bother programming you interacting with in any way whatsoever other than looking at it and going 'Oh, that's nice'.
They can't possible let you interact with EVERYTHING, unless it's a very, very limited setting.
Says the person who can't get the correct programming for his signature.