Unofficial Systems

The most important thing one learns in college isn't about your studies. It isn't about alcohol and drugs. And despite what the movies tell you, it isn't about love. It's that in any given bureaucracy, there is an official way of doing something, and an unofficial way. The official way is always long, tedious, and scripted. The unofficial way, however, is the way you Get Things Done (Tm).

For example, at my Alma Mater, students who wanted to take more than 18 units had to apply with the dean to do so. The dean was swamped with work, and hardly gave any weight to this particular duty, making acceptance rates low and available meeting times far in the future.

Hence, if you needed to take more classes, you just spoke to one of the nice people behind the desk at the registrar's office. It was quick, it freed up the dean to do more important things, and it never said no. Now, if you failed out of any classes during that time period, you would be put on academic probation, but that was just their way of telling you not to screw up again.

And this is how college, and life, goes. If you wait for the official set of circumstances, things will never happen. You've got to take the risk to get anywhere.

Video games are particularly bad about unofficial systems. Because of the intense scripting requirements (and the uniquely human nature of unofficial systems) games frequently fail to see beyond the bureaucratic way of doing something.

More examples of official vs unofficial systems:

Official system: Earn enough money, pay for a hotel room.

Unofficial system: Make friends in the target city, then look for a couch to crash on. If you can't do that, sleep in the van.

Official system: majors in the school of the sciences are forbidden from taking classes in the arts.

Unofficial system: walk in, ask the art professors directly if they mind you taking their class, then join.

It is ironic that games are so poor at these natural shortcuts, as players are thorough in looking for them. If you give them objects with attached physics, they will stack everything in the world together and attempt to climb over every wall. If you give them an ocean, they'll swim to the ends of it. But if you have a character that you need to buy a map from, you can't just ask to look at it.

Sorry if I've lead you to believe otherwise, but I have no idea what to do to better integrate unofficial systems into main gameplay, nor am I sure about the circumstances which these would be desirable. Deus Ex got close to exploring such mechanics, but remained tied to the special case scripting monster. It seems like this area is a section of gaming that is both in need of exploring and potentially likely to bear fruit.

How to make a game

There are two dirty little secrets to making games. The first one is: Don't make a game. Seriously. You're making a series of steps. You're building up a group of subsystems. But making "a game" is too big a task for anyone to handle.

The second secret, is especially important: take crappy, easy steps. Go for the low hanging fruit. Monkey steals the easiest peach. Frequently, you can make 3 or 4 cheap 'n easy steps and discard one or two of them in the time that it would take you to make 1 step well. Don't make great stuff for an experiment when bad stuff would either prove or disprove your theory. And don't build up a "perfect" system when the player would never notice the difference.

The first step down the road of making your first game is to find a unique seed of an idea. A story is not a unique game idea. "Let's make a warcraft game" is not a unique game idea. "Let's make a game where you try to keep store shelves stocked with stuff" is a unique game idea, and should be pondered.Gather groups of people together... friends, associates, random strangers off the street... and brainstorm. Brainstorm a lot. People may not have the same ideas or same vision, but thinking through all of this will help your game cohese in your mind.

To visualize your idea, create a cheap and crappy paper game. Yes, I'm serious. Draw some stick figures, then cut them out and place them on the board. These are your high-resolution normal mapped models, with ultra-realistic fiberous texturing. Careful, they cut. Now, work out how it actually plays. Part of this is a humility step, but part of it is to make you as a designer sit down and figure out all of the mechanics each step of the way, and ways to make it work in reality. How does the player restock the beans'n'cheese aisle if they're in groceries? How does stopping to mop the floor effect checkout times? Put this in front of your friends, family, and associates for feedback.

While you're doing this, get a coder on board... preferably you. If you don't know how to code anything, start studying now.

Now that you have a team, you want to knock out 3 - 5 super cheap-'n-fast internal demos. At this step, there should be no animation, no music (unless integral) only white stick figures on a black background. Again, show these off to people that you know for feedback.

While you're doing that, get an artist on board. Now do the above again. 3 - 5 more super cheap-'n-fast internal demos. By the end of this process, you should have more or less proven the gameplay that you want to make. Or gotten sick of making games. Let's hope it is the former. Now you need something to demo to the public, and possible investors / artists / musicians. Pick the one crappy internal demo that worked best, and polish it up to be a not-quite crappy external demo. Add some art, stand-in music, and gameplay.

Demo this a few times to people who you don't care about.

Polish up the crappy external demo to an awesome and shiny (but super short) external demo, based upon the feedback from the people you didn't really want to impress anyway. This should only be 1 - 5 minutes maximum... the shorter the better. Only show the ready stuff, imply the rest. This might consist of one screen full of playable game while an unlicensed but appropriate MP3 plays in the background. Finish with some images sliding by to give a feel for the scope.

Hopefully you've been flexing your contacts all this time. Chances are, you won't get buy-in from a major company, simply by the nature of game development politics. That's OK... Do it yourself. Small teams frequently make great shareware titles on shoestring budgets. There are whole infrastructres out there to support shareware authors, from payment processing to distribution. You should be able to find a few programmers, artists, and musicians that are willing to work for the experience and a percent of the final game.

From here, the development process is pretty straightforward, if painful, so I leave the rest in your capable hands.

Good luck and Rock On!

Design Utopia

Design Utopia

In my design utopia, there are no buttons in the shell. In fact, there is no shell. The game itself knows what you want to play... Think the first generation of Tetris here, or possibly Tomb Raider if it was 20% more aware. If the shell isn't the interesting part, there should be as little of it as possible.

In my utopia, All controls are painfully clear and intuitive. Need to move forward? Press forward. Need to open a door? Grab the doorknob and twist. Need to do a back flip triple Lutz to a sitting position? In my utopia it's painfully obvious to everyone sitting around how to do that. The interface is complex and powerful but completely intuitive, asking the player to focus on motions they don't usually make. The player can more or less do anything they can think about, within the confines of a game.

In my little utopia, players are always juggling as much as they can really think about at once... roughly 5 or 6 things. All cinematics are both highly relevant and intensely emotional. Players never find themselves wandering around bored looking for the proper door to stick a key in. And they're never one-hit-killed in the back while trying to defend against twenty other random, different characters in the front.

In my utopia, the world is surprisingly uncluttered. You never need to rummage through piles of trash to find the secret hidden key. If you need to get through a door in my utopia, you need a "door opening thing," not some random collection of items gathered by opening every drawer in the game. Everything may require thought, but it will never require walking up to every object in the world and pressing "talk."

In my utopia, things wrap up satisfactorily after a time that real people can reach. After 20 hours the story is completely wrapped up in a deliciously satiating fashion. Maybe the player can enjoy 40 more hours of super-duper bonus levels, but they already know what happened. You're full. You're done. You can walk away and deal with your bills after just one weekend.