Game Design Debts Part 2

Better sooner than later

In the last part of this little series I discussed the topic of game design debts and provided some examples. If you haven’t read it you better check it out so you have a clear understanding of what I mean when talk I about game design debts. In this article I will present some more examples where you may face possible design debts.

Providing no good tools for your designers

As soon as your game benefits from content you better invest time to provide your designers tools that are good enough to produce that content. The better the tools the better your content will be. Make it as easy as possible for your designers to build levels, scripts, new spells, or whatever kind of content your game will feature. Content design is also some kind of design and I think that every form of design benefits from iteration. When content creation is easy and fast it is much more likely that your content designers will produce better content as they can iterate thorugh the different versions more quickly. Your tools should provide the possibilities to design and prototype something as quick as possible. Tuning your game until you hit the bulls eye of the different attributs ain't easy. If you have long waiting time between the design of your content and playable prototypes, your content and level designers have a lot less tries to produce high quality content. If your team is able to you should keep this in mind and talk to your programmers about this problem from the very beginning so they can plan their tasks and software architecture the way that content creation in your project is as quick and easy as possible so your designers can iterate as effective as possible.

Programming these tools costs time but it will quickly pay off as soon as your content designers can create content independently from programmers in a quick and meaningful way.

Not planning the tutorial

If your game will feature a tutorial you should keep its unique code and special implementation in mind. Tell your programmers as soon as possible what kind of features your tutorial will probably need. I have already faced it two times that the programmers heard too late about the specific requirements from the tutorial and huge workarounds were needed to implement it the way that we wanted it. We could have saved a lot of time if our programmers would have known about these demands for the tutorial from the very beginning and plan the resulting requirements before the most features were already implemented. The requirements were often so unique that our code wasn’t able to provide these features without huge workarounds. If our programmers would have known about these requirements from the very beginning it would have been a lot easier. From now on we will try to talk about the needed features we for the tutorial as soons as we plan our production code. We didn’t have the possibility yet to see if this approach will work but we hope to save a lot of time in the future this way.

Doing playtests too late

Playtests cost time but they will give you valuable information if done right. When you strive for high quality you better start doing playtests soon enough. That means that your have enough time to react to the information that you gain through your playtests. Doing no playtests can cause a loss of so many possibilities. So plan your playtests as soon enough. Try to know what you want to find out and keep your eyes open for surprises. When you do your playtests too late you may miss the chance to react to the rising information which is already bad enough, if you don’t do them at all you will miss a lot more. Playtests don’t need to be as time consuming as you may think. In the very beginning you can do internal playtests with co-workers. These are fast and easy to perform but sooner or later you should invite players that are part of your target group and let them play your game. There are a lot of information about good playtests on the internet. I will link this article that contains a video and hope that you may find it insightful: How to make your game better with playtests the uncharted way

Doing too little research

Research is important. Research is not about stealing ideas from other games it’s about deleting unknowns as soon as possible. When we made our first f2p game we had no idea about f2p. We had no idea what a good f2p title needs to have a chance for success. We just made what we thought would be fun and when we were done we tried to find a good way to sell ingame items to our players. As you can imagine we failed. Do your research in the very beginning. The more you know about the market and  a lot of different games that you could learn from the better. Don’t do mistakes that can be avoided because you think research is a waste of time or you may already know everything. When it’s done right it can save you a lot of time and money. You even raise the chance that your game stands out as you may see possibilities that you may have missed without doing your research. I already wrote about research for game designers so you may take a look at this article: We don’t know what we don’t know: The power of research.

I hope that you enjoyed this article. I don't know if I'll continue this series but I hope that the already mentioned examples are helpful and protect you from some mistakes.