What Games Are

Strategy Taxes and Making Games

Strategy tax is a great term to describe a kind of cruft that creeps into many games. Strategy taxes are self-imposed constraints which limit, or even harm, a game for a loftier goal. Game makers accept them as trade-offs in service of a bigger play like capturing a market, being available across all platforms, or promising to investors that the game will be in profit on day one. 

Strategy taxes can be incidental or they can wreck projects. One example is getting caught up by brand values, where an overriding idea like 'no violence' or 'must be educational' or 'must have a story' hampers the game to the point that it breaks. Another example is the choice of technology and platform. Adopting a cross-platform solution (like HTML5, Unity or Flash) for fear of being left behind seems smart, but not if the overhead that the solution imposes makes the game run too slowly.

What's the point of building a bad game just to fulfil some imaginary strategic criteria?

Is a Post-Programming Age Possible? [Questions]

A discontinuity (for me) as computing continues to evolve is how the tools for developing software still seem remarkably basic. While software has fundamentally changed how we make content, programming itself is still a byzantine world of text instructions, compilers, debuggers and arcane syntax. And so it remains the preserve of the technical rather than the creative.

There are tools that have attempted to bridge this gap such as GameMaker, but have always involved massive trade-offs in performance and flexibility. There have also been changes in programming itself, such as object oriented programming and new languages, to make many operations easier than they used to be.

And yet development is still a complex and cold process where one day of design requires 90 days of development to see if it works. Is that the way it has to be, or is it an area ripe for disruption? Are we ever likely to see tools that allow users to design proper applications or games based on logical rules, and yet use a much more intuitive interface to do so?

Getting the Jumps Right [Testing]

In games, like any art, nothing is as it appears, not even something as straightforward as Mario’s jump. What initially seems to be the simplest action in all of gaming is actually fiendishly hard to bring to a finished state. Taking the time to get the basics right marks out a polished game from a typical one.

So the question for your game is, irrespective of budget, time or platform, have you got the jumps right?

You Need $100,000 [Game Development]

Probably the single biggest thing that stands between the idea of making a great game and the reality of actually doing it is the cost.

Even with agile practices in place, games need a certain level of development before they start to show their potential. The game actions need to extend, the loops need to be in place, the dynamic needs to be coming together and the wins need to build toward something. It needs to develop an aesthetic voice and style, work on the user experience and finally have some level of testing. These things take time and money.

How much? It varies massively depending on what it is, but the bare minimum is $100,000. If you find yourself pitching well below that, it usually portends trouble.

Visual vs Action Oriented Design [Game Design]

(with thanks to Ian Carroll)

Generally speaking, there are two ways to start designing a game. The first is to start with visuals. You create a world, a series of possible dynamics that might come out of that world, and you have a sense of back story. You tend to describe the world in terms of place, character or storysense, and paint a picture of an experience to inspire your team.

The second is to start with actions. You start with what the player will do, how he will do it, how the game will control and what the camera will do. You tend to think in terms of rules, efficiency and flow and treat the aesthetic components as something that will come along later.

The games industry often uses visually oriented design to sell its ideas, but action oriented design is usually superior for making great games. So why does the visual persist?

Simulacra or Simulation [What Games Are Not]

Because they create a world into which a player can project, video games often incorporate some level of simulation. Constraints such as gravity or real time regularly play a part in games, as do attempts to use procedural algorithms for a variety of things from rag doll physics and enemy behaviour to terrain generation.

However simulation is not actually the point of games. The reason that we use simulation in games is not to create a real world, but instead a deliberately simplified impression of one. In games it is generally better to fake it rather than make it.

You Need Four Coders [Game Development]

Games are changing. Lower costs, liberated distribution and single-franchise business models all mark quite a shift from the old days of console development and one shot economics. It’s encouraging more investors, startups and other outsiders to get involved in making games. All of these are positive things.

At the same time, I think outsiders believe too much in the hype of lean and agile development. Spreadsheets which describe getting-to-market plans with only one coder are pretty common. They’re lowballing to appear more attractive to investment, which is understandable but terribly naive. Their game will likely never get to market, or if it does it will be terrible and die on the vine.

So consider this a golden rule if you plan to make games: You Need Four Coders.