Rules of the Game: Another Five Techniques from Particularly Crafty Designers

I guess we're starting hi thanks for everybody for coming two rules of the game for 2017 here I guess I wanted to say thanks to anybody who came from outside the US I know this is a time you might be worried about that sort of thing most my friends fortunately made it in okay I'm glad to see everyone here and you're certainly welcome at my session to talk game design regardless of your country of origin so in this session if you're not familiar with the format we take five lustrous speakers who you see listed here on the screen and we give them each ten minutes to talk about one of their personal rules about game design so we've done this a few times before we did this in 2015 when we got these five cool rules and then we did it again last year with these five speakers if you want to check these talks out they're both up on the vault and the first one is free if you search for five rules on GDC fault these come right up so why are we talking about rules you know why do we get game designers care about rules well obviously as game designers our job is creating rules basically to make a game work you know many of us like rules because you know we like games in the first place games are built out of rules they make a very knowable world they make a world that's consistent that seems fair when you're playing bridge you know you know you know the order of how the players go you know you know how you bid for for a contract you know you win a contract and it's always clear-cut who win or loses a game because of the rules even a more advanced game like say diplomacy you know the rules can be simply more complex and open to interpretation but you know you might have some House Rules or something like that but you discuss this ahead of time you agree on it and if anyone who is in the middle of playing a game with diplomacy starts changing the rules you might get upset about that so we as game designers like rules and I think we appreciate them in other places too like say in forms of governments you know we may appreciate systems that are put in place for good reason that even when someone may go off the rails in one branch you know the system hopefully keeps them from destroying everything and we as designers recognize that these rules are important even when the guy we like is in charge anyway so moving back to game development this reality is that in the creative endeavor of game development or or anything there are no hard and fast rules right it's much more open to interpretation and personal taste rules are a personal taste when it comes to creating games so these are some of the designers who have been you know we're highly inspirational to me growing up in over the years I think if you ask these people like what their rules about game design where you would get some very different answers they would each have their own thing that they did so as you hear the rules from our listeria speakers here today think about that these are their personal rules you know they may or may not apply to you right now in this moment or not right now anyway if we think about the the cycle of game development as we're all familiar with it you may be aware of the dark doldrums in the middle of a project when things are not going so well when you think maybe I should have been a mailman you know when you're stuck on that problem you can look back to this session and look at these rules and say maybe one of these rules will help me now I didn't see the use of it they're GDC but now I can use this and this actually happened to me recently working on my game the church in the darkness I was building a level for a long time for a new demo for GDC and it was actually due to some life issues and other things became like a really dark place for me creatively and building this and a lot of it because the the level looked like this for a long time it lacked any shall we say pizzazz later as I was getting towards the end of making the demo it started looking like this I started adding in all these things and this is taking a scene where I just stubbed in here's some cages for this cult group you know it doesn't it doesn't really look very cool at all but now you know I've put in a guy and he's shooting get a pig's head on this side and you can interact with him and different versions of this scene play out this was all very cool and I did it in about an hour right at the end and suddenly the level was fun to play down I no longer dreaded working on this thing and I think why didn't I do this earlier if only someone had told me I should think about pizzazz well last year at this very session Lee Perry did a talk called pizzazz first polished later where he talked about that dark trough of game development where everything is bad and he talked about particularly on solo projects you can lose your lose your momentum lose your focus but if you add some pizzazz earlier you get you get motivated again you get feeling good so think about it that way you know this is you know I should be aware of this talk because it was in this that I ran last year too but I'd forgotten about it so when you're in those moments of darkness and despair look back to this session see if one of these things can inspire you to keep going on your project even in those dark days so the other thing to think about with these rules as you hear them it's the theme that emerged I know I don't usually give the speakers a theme for these I just let them come up with their own rules but some sort of theme emerge this year and that theme is everything you know is wrong which seems kind of timely to 2017 but you know our speakers today are gonna challenge some common assumptions you may have about how to make games and how to design them I mean it kind of makes sense to that I think as game designers we got into this medium we got into doing this instead of going for some safe career some more profitable career right we decided no I want to do this thing I love even if our family thought it was crazy we decided hey we're gonna go make video games and as you're in this industry for a long time you'll hear a lot of you know commonly held wisdom about what you should do and what you shouldn't do if you're here you've been longer you'll see all those things disproven over time so for example you may have heard the old chestnut you should never make a game that requires a peripheral until someone makes one that breaks that rule you should certainly never make a Western game because those never sell till one does and adventure games are dead or it goes even farther into sort of game design rules like everyone online is an that's why we should only make shooters until someone figures that you can subvert that or that you know players only want to win they want everything explained to them they don't want to have to work hard to do anything or the most dreaded of all well that doesn't sound like very much fun so it's in breaking these rules that I think we can you know go go off and make some of these new things so as you hear these things realize again they're not absolute they apply in different times but they can also help you and I think these are the type of rules in saying that everything you know is wrong you know go with that that a good rule doesn't close down possibilities it really opens them ups and helps you think of things in a different framing so with that our theme everything you know is wrong we're gonna have five speakers get help here talk for ten minutes each as I said coming up a little later we're gonna have Damion Schubert is going to remind us who our true player base really is Christina Norman is going to show you how your assumptions about what you need out of a future may be entirely wrong he'll Barwood is going to suggest that maybe the way we do rules is wrong and finally Luke Muscat is going to question the very existence of well you'll just have to wait for his but first she'll see how is going to tell you maybe you've been doing things to the wrong sort of scale she as a designer has worked on everything from Family Guy to FarmVille to indie projects and it's now the creative product her own and owl overseer at alchemy labs I give you Chelsea how all right sweet so my rule is designed by fractal why fractals our human brains are hard-wired to find patterns they help us cluster and predict the constant flow of information streaming into our brains which lets us survive and act and optimize our performance in an otherwise overwhelming world now some patterns are really easy to see songs have courses versus bridges novels have 3x structures here as journeys politics Evan flow conservative to liberal and back again but games aren't simple nor linear entities they're these really vast and complex systems multifaceted and multi-layered even games with the simplest underpinnings can have these vast and unpredictable results and that's the beauty of fractals - fractals are these patterns that exist across scale that describe infinite systems the defining property of a fractal is it it is self-similar which means you can see the same basic shapes and patterns no matter how far you zoom in and out in or out and often when you translate your view as well and all of that infinite complexity comes from one tiny little set of variables all fractals have at their heart some sort of equation or algorithm that defines that repeating pattern this one is for the Mandelbrot set that single algorithm feeds back in on itself multiplying outward downward upward with just one underlying and foundational set of variables an infinite and beautifully resonant pattern emerges and ultimately that's exactly what we want with our games we want coherent design across massive interrelated systems this means that your vision as a designer needs to be like that algorithm we use a bunch of different words for this whether it's your vision statement X statement one-liner but at its heart it's the aggregate of values from which the rest of your game can be derived now as designers we'd usually tend to go a little bit deeper we have these pillars usually we call them and those are the variables now the clearer those pillars are the better we empower our teams to bring the game to life at whatever scale they're working at if your team can really grok this basic algorithm they can generate code content and be creative without designers always looping over them so that's the general gist and I want to show you a few examples of how I've put that into practice the first is in terms of thinking about teaching mechanics to players they really help in conveying information a dominant learning paradigm is called scaffolding where you teach a small concept practice it until mastery and then build off of that at higher and higher levels these are essentially learning fractals we did this a lot in Family Guy where we started by teaching about items then we talked about characters who need multiple items then we introduced them to districts which have multiple characters and finally the overarching storyline which contains several districts we started at that most basic level of our fractal and zoomed out over time fractals are also really good at creating player motion there's something really magical that happens when you feel that order of magnitude change your possibility space suddenly opens up and cracks open it's this wonderful sublime feeling and we can use that scale shift to evoke more complex feelings and our players won game jam we made this incredibly simple game where you fly up into hovering water in the sky as you go up that water the clouds kind of fade out and you wind up on the very beach that you started on though this was an incredibly simple game and most of the let's players weren't super intrigued initially when they got to this point we saw this deep emotional response we realized that or we saw them realize that this was a repeating pattern that the whole world was this Mobius loop this fractal and you can also do it crude to create stakeholder emotions when you're pitching something to someone you want them to have those mind-blowing moments again here's a simplified version of a little prototype that we worked on this was called city stream so essentially in city stream every person twitch chat is retina represented on the world it's a city builder you're building up this one little tower and then you're building up the towers around it and then you learn each of those towers is specialized and then you learn that all of those towers are at risk by these massive influxes of enemies and then you realize that your city is just one of many and every streamer on Twitch actually has access to their own little world which again can battle and destroy other cities so we worked on this fractal of building and maintaining and we tried to see how far we could scale it up when you want pitch you want to blow people's minds and designing with fractals means asking what your game would look like if you zoomed out even further if you've ramped it up another order of magnitude or if you translated your design into some space where it hasn't been done before fractals are so you are also really useful for understanding player engagement I use fractals for virtually any element that can hold a player's attention whether that's narrative difficulty curve level unlocks marketing a narrative fractal might be a start with a single line of dialogue or flavor text zoom out to conversations quest story arcs and eventually that entire hero's journey so when you're working on a different area of your game and you want to test your concept for completed nough said and look at those different scales fractals are also really useful for communicating design and a lot of us are really familiar with this already you have the one-liner the elevator pitch the concept deck all the way up to the system's dock or that often lamented design bible thinking of them all is the same basic entity just the different scales helps me keep the ideas consistent throughout and realizing that different people on my team work at different scales helps me give them the documentation that's going to be most beneficial a global except team obviously doesn't need your design bible a technical artist isn't going to do much use with a one-liner I've also noticed that when some people design they tend to have a default scale I tend to revert to a concept dock for instance I think it's important to figure out what that default scale you're comfortable that is and then practice scaling up or down fractals are useful for understanding other IP as well not just communicating your own if you're aware of patterns across scale you can identify the Keystone's of other franchises I've designed for a bunch of different licensers and a bunch of different IPs and unlike a lot of folks I love that work there's something really special about seeing a pattern across a brand and being able to vocalize it and with a clarity that most people can't once you've seen the consistent themes in a celebrity's Twitter feed or Instagram interviews concerts filmography you start to understand how you could bring that over into a game how to translate it and there's something really magical that happens when you go to a licensor and you're able to articulate their core values in a meaningful way core values are what makes us human they're what we're most passionate about that's why we get so enraged about things like politics when you can tell someone when you can echo back their core values to them it creates the trust and bonding and faith it's really useful for external partnerships fractals are also really useful for understanding our future once we can see the pattern we can look back at where it's gone and start predicting where it's where it's going my UX designer and I work on cepting one of our unannounced games we found this really interesting trend we saw that despite mobile gamers always complaining about lack of real gameplay they would almost always use an automated to them we also saw the rise of idle games becoming increasingly popular and we kind of put these things together and realize that games for the most part are switching away from immediate moment to moment at least in the free-to-play category where that we cared about - more of this meta game level of strategy we essentially looked over and saw trends somewhere and put it into our into our different genre a bunch of other teams had also been working on getting their concepts greenlight some for over a year our design was greenlit in less than two months and finally fractals helped us understand the world a team is a small small microcosm of society every team has its own quirks and its own dynamics but it will always in some way reflect bigger issues when small things happen in your team don't let them slide don't accept them as part of a bigger pattern because change at any scale affects the others one simple correction can make all the difference when we think in fractals were no longer helpless individuals were simply at a different scale and we can create vast change thank you Thank You Chelsea you know a great great way to start thinking of reframing your problems which we will which we will come back to a little bit later in the session but up next you may know Damian from his many years of working in the MMO space culminating as being lead designer OnStar was the older public he now works on the mobile RPG dungeon boss and some years ago back some years back Damian gave a somewhat famous design talk on how you were doing your design documents wrong and now he's gonna tell you how you're thinking about your playerbase wrong Damion Schubert free is the default I now make free-to-play games I've made freedoms that have made hundreds of millions of dollars I haven't actually gotten much for that but the thing that I have actually done that has been most important is to never lose sight of the fact that most of the players playing them aren't giving me any money this is really really important now when we talk about free planes it's really natural to think about how to make money I mean it's why our bosses give us paychecks and we would really like to pay the rent and we would really like to have nice cars and things like that and that's completely reasonable but there's a whole other track at this conference I believe on how to make money from games I want to talk about the other half of that which is the fact that we really need to spend more time thinking about the free players now I look long and hard for publicly available data and the most commonly cited number is this number which is back in the heyday of Zynga they would say that a 2% conversion rate for any game that they made was a blockbuster success that means that of everybody who downloaded Mafia Wars or one of those games if they got a 2% conversion rate great success and that means that 98% of those players never spend to die now that that number is slightly weighted really the numbers look more like this when you look at the day to day today because if you spend you're more likely to come back so any given day 10% ish of your population has spent money that still means that 90% of your players are freeloaders right that's a big deal most of your players are playing for free that is the normal gameplay mode of your game that is the default for your game for most people free means exactly that they download your game they play the game and they do it all intending to never spend a dime for many of them that's the point even if they love the game now today's kids have so many options that they no longer have to worry about getting mom's credit card in order to play something there's so many free-to-play games as well as free music free movies any entertainment medium you can think of they can get a whole bunch of it for free that's your competition and some people see playing for free as a badge of honor how many people in this room played candy crush as far as they could for free just to prove that they friggin could right so what does that mean for us designers was it mean for those of us who are like me I make free to play games because I am a massive hippie and I like the idea of giving the gift of gameplay away to as many people as possible to me that is exactly a beautiful notion Pig Socialist notion and he half a handful of heavy spenders have to pay for that I'll live with that but what does this mean for those of us who are battling evil project managers intent on picking up our customers and shaking it for loose change well it really means keeping in mind that most of your players will never spin remember that 2% number we talked about before let's imagine you're an amazing monetization designer let's imagine that you manage to double that that's what that looks like right now four percent of your population is paying you money and 96 percent of your population is still playing for free that's normal keep that in mind keep that in focus and really think about how that frames not only how you design your game but how you develop your game and how you support that game in life so free players are not just free loading so they do all sorts of good things for the game in general and for the game that your spinners are playing for one thing the free players are the source of the virality of the game they're free players are going to be the reason you go to the top of the charts they're going to be the reason you become a cultural phenomenon free players provide rival ways they provide people for free or spenders to beat up on as well as for each other to beat up on free players can create content for other players to play like in second life you could actually create content and upload them for other people to play with they they actually do your job for you in Star Wars The Old Republic the free players provided we had a real problem before he went for you to play when our game stalled we didn't have enough people to run dungeons to launch battlegrounds in the fire raids free players provided a population of people so that those things could actually happen free players provide a whole lot of cannon fodder for your spenders to beat up on and lastly free players are very often the bedrock of the community like the the the there's not necessarily cross section between people who like to spin and people who like to run message awards manage your reddit threads and do all of us other invaluable services that actually make your game an event a thing a place to be so take away 3 please for the love of God if free-to-play is normal in your game and it probably is if you're making a game that's called for you to play treat it like it's normal now it's really easy and it's really seductive to give all of your employees free money and you might want to do that from time to time but every now and then you have to force them to play like a free player you have to force them to actually play with the crappy heroes you have to force them to actually hit all the pop-ups that free players hit would they actually log into the game and you have to force them to wipe their accounts and do it again every now and then because we have this tendency to layer on more stuff in our games and it always hits the free players the worst you guys need to really focus on being sure that your designers and your QA departments in general realize that free play is the default way to play this game and watch the paywalls a paywall is when designers put in a big cliff in the game design that's designed to make people either spend money or seek some kind of free alternative usually way to day or grind some levels or do something that in order to props of spending the most common problem I have seen in most of the mobile games that I have downloaded is that they put too harsh pay walls too early they go up before players have a chance to fall in love with the game when this happens your brain actually extrapolates that pattern if you ask me for money at 5 minutes and 10 minutes I'm going to assume it's gonna do it at 15 20 25 30 so on and so forth and I want to realize that your game is not free at all by contrast one of the design battles I won when we converted Star Wars Old Republic to free-to-play was to not have any pay walls or pretty much any spend opportunities at all on the first planet of the game that's three to four hours of gameplay I had a really good reason for that when we were a premium game we tested the bejesus out of that first planet to the degree that the people running the test said that our first planet was the single best testing MMO starting experience they had ever seen why that up right instead let them fall in love with the game give them a whole planet so that they want to spin so that they want to help your developers out so that they want to take the developers side remember how I said free-to-play players our good cannon fodder for big spenders you have to be real careful with that I mean it's not fun to get stomped now I'm not saying that free players should always be paired with other free players but it's really important that if you have a PvP experience that you're giving them people that are just out of reach that you're giving them something where maybe if they spent a little or if they invested a little more time or got a little more free gems that they would be able to beat that stuff you don't want people to run into a wall and say that the only way it could possibly compete is to drop a thousand dollars or you will drive them out of those game systems if you don't drive them out of the game all together in Dungeon boss the characters in our gem portal are much more powerful than the free players and people who have spent them have a much easier time actually winning in PvP this was a harsh lesson for us that we really had to spend a lot of time massaging our matchmaking in order to bring that in line yeah David beat Goliath but this is a great story largely because of how improbable it actually was most of the time Goliath stomps David and David throws his iPad across the room and then the last point is this if you take all this together and you say yeah we really do need to get our free players to spend be sure if they have a fun time be sure that's not too obnoxious and then try to hint at them that spending just a little is going to have a big impact don't try to make them whales from day one try to get them to spend $1 make that first dollar really really an amazing value for them give them glimpses of what spending that first dollar is gonna be like and then once you do try to stair-step them up gradually now it's always going to be the case and so sighted free-to-play that the heavy spinners are going to do the heavy lifting in terms of supporting the gameplay that is either a fortunate or unfortunate way of life for the free-to-play market right now depending on your point of view but at the same time we have to keep in mind that most people aren't that most of our player base are free players and they still add enormous value to the game that's fine and get used to it in conclusion free players are the normal ones design your game is such thank you very much Thank You Damian I think those of us not working on free-to-play games can think of this to is a way of addressing your player base you know thinking are we spending too much time on the people who've been playing for 30 hours and not enough on most of the players who aren't going to get that far I think you can easily easily extrapolate this to other types of games next up we have Christina Norman she was a programmer and then a designer at Bioware on the mass effect series and now works on that little other free-to-play game League of Legends and she's here to say the problem you think you have well maybe it's not actually a problem at all I give you a christina norman hello hello so today i want to convince you guys to willingly embrace radical constraints now designers generally hate constraints we look at constraints as restrictions on what we can do and who wants to be restricted we want to do whatever we want to do but constraints can also really help us focus our creativity I think we all have stories of situations where you've been working under the absolutely harshest restrictions and we've done incredible things constraints can really inspire us to solve hard problems and innovate as designers when we accept them so I'm going to take you through three constraint scenarios and I'm going to introduce a constraints framework to you and show you how I solve two impossible problems solving it oops and Wow why is Shepard a panda wait a second okay we got this there we go and I will be using industry industry standard 3 panda notation which I believe originated at NYU to indicate how the team felt through all of this because changing constraints can be really stressful so throughout this when you see a happy panda that's a developer who is working contentedly within constraints when you see a sad panda that's a developer who is feeling frustrated and restricted by constraints and when you see a sneaky panda that's a developer who is ignoring constraints to solve problems and the size of the Panda indicates the level of impact so let's start off by going through the story of Mass Effect one now Mass Effect one started like all possible games with a blank slate it really could have done any it really could have been anything for example we could have made it a pure dating sim and there's probably an alternate universe out there where we did that and it's probably a pretty cool universe but we wanted to focus on other aspects as well so we wanted it to be a epic space opera RPG in which you could explore the galaxy say the universe command an elite squad of superheroes you know pretty basic stuff and we have scheduled in a budget so as we went through that initial concept in phase we realized we had to get specific so we split if we fleshed out the plot we figured out who the characters were going to be we identified the RPG rules we figured out key systems for conversations and gameplay that would make the game really great and we made some tough calls then we prototyped key systems verifying that they were both possible and valuable it was becoming more and more clitoris as a team what Mass Effect would be and what it wouldn't be then III happened and we had to show Mass Effect to the world so we developed this vertical slice that would capture all the key experiences that players would have in Mass Effect like explorations cinematic conversations and in tent squad combat this was really hard but the team gave it their all and overall we were really happy with the results and players were excited but then as we set out to realize this vision across the entire game we encountered huge problems executing at scale like most developers our e3 demo was visionary but it wasn't real and as we tried to create real experiences at a galactic scale we ran into horrendous technical problems with our engine with our workflow they kept slowing us down and now for the first time as a team we call Dibley felt we were being constrained in a way that was taking all of us away from the game we wanted it to be and then it got worse as we got closer and closer to our ship date we realized that we were not trending well so we started cutting features we started cutting entire planets from the game we had to not just make new content but we had to rebuild our existing content and systems to make them more efficient all of this was slowing us down and we felt like Mass Effect was slipping away so we crunched because that solves all problems right guys through force of will talent focus and Red Bull we dragged Mass Effect back closer to where we wanted it to be but the cost on the team was really really high but in the end despite all this adversity we shipped Mass Effect and it was awesome and players loved it it wasn't exactly what we'd wanted it to be it's you know getting outside of that original space we wanted it to be in but it was definitely a great game and reflecting on that journey from blank slate to Mass Effect I started to see how constraints were a road map for our progress and I started wondering if we could use them to help get the team pointed towards better games with fewer sad pandas and we all wanted Mass Effect 2 to be a better game we wanted to fix all the problems with the first one we wanted it to be refined we wanted to be polished and we wanted the team to not be miserable sad pandas so when we started with that blank slate of Mass Effect 2 we knew that the first thing we had to do is figure out how we were going to address those problems from Mass Effect and inventory was one of those top-of-mind problems for those of you who didn't play Mass Effect's inventory was slow it was clunky and you had to interact with it constantly it was universally disliked so it was a clear must fix thus one of the constraints we established early on was that we were going to have a good inventory system and we designed a great inventory system but then what we found was as we were rebuilding our UI pipeline and finding that we had some programmers who quit and we couldn't hire some other programmers things were not trending well it became clear that the inventory we wanted to build for Mass Effect 2 was not possible so we designed a lower scope inventory right but the problem was that wasn't possible either our UI problems were that bad so we changed our approach we designed a possible inventory system but the problem now was it wasn't really very good and to make it possible we knew we'd have to cut some big things from the game and those game things were gonna have to cut we're pretty awesome this felt really bad and no one was happy with the situation so then I had an idea why don't we just cut the inventory itself it seemed like it was the source of all the problems and I proposed this idea to the team and they were confused everyone knows Mass Effect was a Bioware RPG and Bioware RPGs have inventories and it wasn't the whole point to make sure that we had a good inventory wasn't that what we were setting out to do in the first place so I reframe the problem and I said I don't think we really need a good inventory system the problem was we had a bad one so if we don't have a bad inventory haven't we really solved that original problem I didn't convince the team at this point but I opened their minds up a bit to see that you know maybe there'd be another way but people were skeptical what would Mass Effect even look like without an inventory would it even be an RPG would it be fun these were important questions to answer so the design team dug in really deep deconstructing why we needed an inventory in the first place and identifying the problems we'd have to solve if we removed it one by one we proposed solutions to those problems and built confidence in the new direction until we had buy-in from the team and in the end Mass Effect 2 didn't have an inventory and it was a much better game by going out of our comfort zone we'd solve an impossible problem and a new way of thinking about things that help lead us to other changes that made mass effect more focused and polished and reflecting on that experience I wanted to generalize this like was this just a fluke had we got lucky with a random idea so I thought about the whole process and what had happened and tried to generalize it so first the thing I saw is that we had to identify that we had an impossible problem teams don't like to admit that things are impossible they don't like to acknowledge being blocked they want to work harder and realize their original vision but when repeated attempts to solve problems creatively and analytically fail it's important to acknowledge that you are not trending towards success this helps open up the team's mind so they're willing to look at a different approach then you need to id8 clearly at this creative ideation stage you must ignore constraints and you must not allow analysis to shoot down ideas there are no buzzkill pandas at this zone dangerous ideas must be allowed and even encouraged but then as you go into the reframing stage you find a way to reframe those original constraints in a way that allows your solution to be possible and you identify all the issues that are going to come about because there will be issues you probably had good reasons why those constraints were there in the first place then you have to solve those issues one by one you work through them you prioritize and you solve quickly your goal at this point is to determine if this is a viable direction to build buy-in from the team you are not building production code or content because you don't know if this is going to work out then lastly you reintegrate this process must end with a cohesive whole vision for where the product is going and clear constraints that the team can accept and work happily in that's how you end up with happy pandas working within new constraints so this looked great on paper but to figure out if this actually worked I needed to solve another impossible problem but luckily gamedev those happen every week so when we went moved into the Mass Effect 3 we knew we wanted to do something big Mass Effect 2 had been a really big success so we wanted to do something big to make it more than Mass Effect 2 and multiplayer was big we'd actually always wanted to have multiplayer in Mass Effect but we hadn't had the time or resources to do it it was pretty scary to add this on in the third game and the team was nervous but they were also excited by this ambitious goal so then we did some research and that research proved very troubling all of our data and survey said that multiplayer was a winner-take-all market that was dominated by big PvP games even worse when we surveyed Bioware players we found out they had low engagement in multiplayer and they really weren't that excited by the idea of a multiplayer Mass Effect seriously like the most common responses can you just make more single-player levels please so to make successful high quality multiplayer we knew we had to build a different kind of multiplayer Bioware multiplayer and that meant a co-op game that had everything that Bioware players loved like an exclusive multiplayer Story co-op level mechanics and levels that you couldn't choose solo we needed new enemies powers and weapons content you could only access in multiplayer plus we needed social network integration so recruiting your friends to play would be really easy and this was basically the scope of an entirely new game and it was a pretty cool concept for a game but it wasn't feasible Mass Effect 3 multiplayer we were back with an impossible problem and a great chance to test the framework so we first of all we just had to acknowledge that the plan we had for multiplayer was not going to work the scope was too high to ship even though we had planned on dedicating a pretty sizable dedicated multiplayer team then we ideated to find an alternate approach and what we kind of landed on was our base assumption that players would not want to play Mass Effect multiplayer what-if co-op + mass effects gameplay was super fun how would that change the situation then we reframed our original constraints we would make a game with co-op Mass Effect gameplay that was really fun and that we'd identify the problems we'd still need to solve to make it a great multiplayer for Bioware players then we solved those problems first we validated our original assumption by doing a horde mode prototype of Mass Effect multiplayer to verify it was fun we improved it by adding on objectives limited powers and a high difficulty then we identified that we needed additional stickiness to keep players coming in and to entice them to come and in the first place so we fleshed out some pretty intense progression systems and in the end with a strong co-op horde mode demo that was really fun and that updated vision we got buy-in from the team and moved forward with mass effects multiplayer now about this time I actually left Bioware but the multiplayer team took that prototype and they built it out to be Mass Effect trees multiplayer and they did an amazing job that same team has now gone on and to build Andromeda and I cannot wait to check it out and just to be clear we we did what we set out to do we made multiplayer that Bioware players wanted to play in fact they wanted to play it so much they spent more time and multiplayer than they did in single-player for the third game in a primarily single-player RPG franchise that was success beyond what we'd ever imagined so to kind of sum up I really want to encourage you guys when your teams get blocked take a step back consider adjusting your approach and embrace radical constraints thank you [Applause] thank you Christina so moving on here we to our next speaker our next speaker is the NOC Christina Norman is how Barwood he is somewhat special that he's one of the the main inspirations behind this session years ago he worked on probably the most beloved Indiana Jones games of all time and also was an illustrious game design speaker at GDC for many years that inspired me in my first years coming here and actually worked on a first framework of establishing rules for game game design called the 400 project and he's here today to talk about a little bit about that and and what went right and what went wrong with that and also some other stuff I give you Hal Barwood [Applause] hi there let's look at some history I delivered the first talk on game design rules at GDC 16 years ago in 2001 it was called for the 400 I had observed that most arts have a lot of rules and the practitioners need them and use them in order to be able to cope with the difficulties of their work but I also noticed that game designers did not seem to participate and I wondered why not well we're games just too new back then to have developed any rules or we guided by formal principles instead as some have advocated or is it just the libertarian streak in game designers that says we don't need no stinkin rules well I thought that rules must exist but I thought they were mostly unstated they were intuitive implicit foggy vague and therefore very unreliable and I wanted to change that and when I look back I think I was on the right track because here we are 16 years later still identifying rules and advocating for their use Noah falstein and I did a couple of follow up talks at GDC and we started the 400 project inviting developers to come to us with rules which we would then publish up we compile Alvin collected more than a hundred of these before we moved on to other things let's look at some representatives of these rules that are typical what the player turned the game off bad save game systems caused players to repeatedly trudge through vast tracks of a game they can't figure out they'd learn to hate the developer and they quit a good save game system unless you stop and start wherever you want if you add a small amount of randomness to AI calex the stupid npcs that are running around may give you the illusion of intelligence and things that look alike should behave alike the items that an avatar can pick up and use should have a graphic emphasis over and above mere decor well these are good rules these the ones I've just discussed they're very much like the rest of them but they're small rules they're minor it's hard to believe that game designers would be guided by rules like this and there are thought processes and I was wondering why and all the hundred rules we got we didn't uncover anything more important or deeper and I think there are a couple of reasons deep rules are very hard to articulate and I think that there's a faction of game designers that feel that resorting to rules is to make use of shallow tricks well I think that rules are the summation of prior experience and carry with them great wisdom and the important rules are big rules rules that hold sway rules that actually can become part of your guidebook for how you go about your work I want to discuss one such rule today it's one of mine just personify your problems and what it means is to use characters to solve design difficulties when you have a problem in front of you that might be solved mechanically instead see if you can get an NPC take on that job well this is fundamental to the sort of games that I like to play that involve lots of character interaction a certain amount of righteous combat and traversal and exploration well character interaction combat exploration this is the domain of narrative games they don't cover the waterfront of game design but they cut a broad swath through it and I confess the rule originates in my career as a screenwriter let's see how the rule applies to an old movie that I worked on Close Encounters of the Third Kind Steve Spielberg wanted his ending to be an awesome spectacle the problem in a movie is that awesomeness only goes so far it's very dry bearing that in mind when Matthew Robbins and I revised Steve's script we invented little Barry we got him abducted by aliens in the first act and we delivered him to his mother's arms in the finale in order to give that awesomeness some emotional heft and when Matthews in my movie Dragon Slayer is all about a Rompin stompin very scary dragon but the dragon is an animal a force of nature and not a dramatic villain so we invented creepy King cassiodorus and his hateful sacrificial watery that he uses to appease the dragon to give the movie's dramatic structure so does that mean that what I'm talking about is just storytelling not at all show don't tell and movies which is a perfectly fine principle becomes play don't show when you come to games so when my rule moves to the world of games it's all about design how to weld the story and the gameplay together let's look at some examples here's one how to keep danger alive before it arrives in my old adventure game fate of Atlantis the player is going to spend hours running around before you ever arrive at the mysterious lost city so we invented a companion for indie Sophia Hapgood and we outfitted her with a necklace that comes from that city that carries with it a supernatural unhealthy aura Indies a little doubtful that she's turned into a psychic but we learned right away that her claims are not entirely imaginary and a series of spooky puzzles involving her stand-in for the mystery of the city until we actually arrived there well here's a different kind of problem yeah Star Wars items and the poverty thereof well while ago I made a little replayable action-adventure game called Yoda stories there are 15 scenarios there are hundreds of ways to put them together you can go through it each time in less than an hour when we made it we didn't have know how to categorize this but we now just call these things casual games and it's just a little applet on your desk but the problem is that progress through a game like this is gated by a of puzzle chains now we scoured the Star Wars Bible and we found very few useful keys and tools you're looking at a lot of them right here what would you do with a low mite crystal well we invented a new puzzle type to go along with keys and tools we invented valuables items that only have human meaning so if you're a super deformed Boba Fett and you demand alumnae crystal you super deformed Luke Skywalker better go and get one if you want to advance the action this idea allowed us to create dozens of transactional puzzles involving lots of dialogue and characters to warm this little game up now how do you know slightly larger question is how do you take a story which originated in film and translate that into the world of games don't stories always take place in an exaggerated version of the here and now and so does my game infernal machine and these games always demand and in the stories always demand adventure and it's in the supernatural of course the supernatural could be accomplished with visual effects but you can also do with characters here we are in Shambhala in an abandoned monastery inhabited by a lonely old woman if you run around and find a plant bulb nurse it into growth and hand that thing to the old woman when it blooms she's magically transformed into a beautiful young princess well as beautifully as you can be with a hundred polygons and anyway she now requires the supernatural strength to crack open a gate and send you onto even stranger things the adventure side you need a pal and a guide we brought back Sophia Hapgood this time as an untrustworthy CIA agent but we didn't just want her to hang around so in the palawan volcano level she's kidnapped by Russian Spetsnaz soldiers meanwhile Indy discovers a gate that blocks his path and there's a switch when pressed the gate goes up when released it comes right back down forcing him to rescue Sophia who then becomes his assistant she stands by the switch as he readies himself to whip across a gap she presses the switch and holds it down long enough for the gate to rise and ending equip his way across and sneak sigh just in time it's a co-op puzzle that anchors Sofia into the gameplay one of many the finale is a boss fight we needed to pull the player through a long slog and we needed to give everything a supernatural twist so the we had God Marduk imagining that Sophia might be a like-minded menace captures her and melds with her so when you fight and win you don't just earn a victory badge you resolve a relationship and rescue a friend now here's a completely different kind of problem where you have a very mechanical game and you need to introduce the NPC's and make them function so not long ago I made a game involving Queen titania and King Oberon late of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream they're quarreling again and you need to reunite them it's an adventure RPG but it takes the form of slider puzzles the player maneuvers icons around the game board in order to reveal and assemble the game elements well some of those icons turn into characters and they speak and that gives the game some human warmth and other characters need to be assembled in order to be able to deal with them at all you even have to assemble the final boss in order to do battle well if you think what I'm talking about is old-fashioned or adventure II and static antique not so here's a perfectly modern game The Last of Us Joel the hero has to deliver a sermon assirram across the country where it might become a cure for a fungus that's destroyed civilization and that serum might have been liquid in a little glass vial in his pocket but if that were the case the entire experience would be as dismal as this scene so instead the serum resides in the immune system of a young woman Ellie his protege and the Naughty Dog designers didn't just want her to hang around either so there are lots of co-op puzzles boosting her over walls letting her crawl through tiny ducts to reach the far side of a gate that Joel can't open from this side and because she can't swim in at least three instances Joel has to find a raft to convey her across a body of water where she can do her stuff she even has a level of her own well what's the takeaway from this sort of thing there are two one humanize er design it's never a mistake to add characters especially if you can do so in unusual and functional ways but more generally try to state the rules that do actually guide you as explicitly as possible because that gives them power and try to run through them like a text a checklist deliberately as you work you'll find that if you do your design vocabulary will be greatly enlarged this is my website fine arts comm here you can take a look at that rule collection see my old rule talks play thorne or play Yoda thank you so weird that I just introduced Hal after having seen him talk 15 years ago so wow you know and the interesting thing about that rule said I think is is you know it's his rule there is you know this these are principles has been using in games for ages why can't everybody get on board with this at last anyway finally we're coming up to - Luke Muscat here who you know is most known perhaps as the designer of games like fruit ninja jetpack joyride is now the creative director at pretty gate where they worked on land sliders and other titles you know and every year I do a talk like this someone says yeah really like a rule like why are we doing rules and this year that person is Luke here he is [Applause] okay hi yeah my name is Luke musket I've made some stuff we're gonna bid overtime so I'm gonna go a little bit faster so I'm basically here to say forget your rules make goals your king it's all about just having strong goals or if you want the shorter snappier more twitter Obul title for this talk rules here's the problem I have with rules every time that I am thinking about rules or you know trying to kind of process all of the the knowledge of wisdom I've gotten from other designers and through making lots of games over the years it lets me take something a feature that I'm making and go from like crap feature to something really good and then all of a sudden I realize I've actually been making the wrong thing all along so this is why I love goals it's always for me about keeping goals just to make sure I'm making the right thing and I'm gonna give you an example so let's say this could be like a design document or whatever this will for this will be like a user story and a sprint backlog we're gonna make it health bar okay and you know we have a list of tasks there to make that health bar and then a kind of estimate of how long we think it might take to make it so here we go here's our health bar and like that health bar sucks right that's one shitty health bar so what do I do well I think about like the first thing that I learnt as a designer which is this all about player feedback you got to make it juicy and exciting and then that's going to make this health bar really good so let's iterate this health bar real quick we can like add a little bit of art so you know at least it doesn't look so placeholder and then whoops we can add a bit of animation there as well so now you can see really clearly exactly how much health you've lost and then we add particles yeah particles everyone loves particles right and then like we can step it up and add some screen shake as well and like now we have a health bar that's like kind of cool and of course we can just keep on going and going and going and make this better and better and what we've done is we've taken an idea and then we've implemented it and then we've iterated on that implementation to make it as good as possible and then we're done and even kind of like the dangerous part of this is I love that health bar right like I just sunk a whole bunch of time into that health bar but I mean why was I making a health bar again like clearly I thought it was a good idea at some point but at this point I've completely forgotten what the purpose of this health bar was and even if I remember why it's on there in the design document or whatever you can bet my program as an artist I know so this is the thing this is you know we always have like you know the vision which is like a really big goal for the game and then we have the design pillars which like the ones in the middle and then like the user stories or like you know the feature kind of goals and then all of a sudden we're implementing it and for me like I just completely forget all that other stuff and you know implementation is hard and I think that's why it kind of goes over the top of all of that I mean a lot of a talks at GDC are about the best way to implement something how do you make something more efficient how do you make it even better have a better emotional response and so what I try and do is actually make it really explicit that I need to hit my goals and you can do that with a few really simple little tweaks so instead of a user story I can set a goal here and go okay the player can take multiple hits and knows when they will die I mean that's basically like the goal of a health bar right and now instead of having a list of tasks we have a list of possible solutions there is definitely more than one way to skin this cat tricky part is is now effort we don't know exactly what we're making right so how do we calculate the effort well I think that's fine we can do even better let's set a budget instead how important is it that we hit this goal and really nail it and let's scale the amount of work based on not how much there is to do but how important it is and this way it really explicitly allows us to like iterate on an idea first before we iterate on the implementation and really like I put this goal everywhere just so that I invoke my inner three-year-old which is just to keep asking why why why are we doing this to make it more fun yeah but like why does it need to be fun and just keep on drilling back further and further and you know we can make this go way better as well we can iterate on the goal and go okay let's try and create exciting with a play of barely scrapes through an area that's really what this health bar was about in the first place right and there's so many ways we could do that health bar is totally one of those ways this isn't seeing like do two health bars maybe that is the best way and maybe for you know the amount of budget we have maybe that's what works so when I was doing jetpack joyride we had this exact problem right this is basically what it looked like at one point it's a cave flyer one touch dodged stuff if something hits you you die and that's it and you know it was already looking like this it was quite polished and pretty fun but we just I mean I wasn't quite feeling it it just wasn't quite there yet I didn't think it felt a little OneNote and a little repetitive so I go okay my goal is obviously to add some variety how am I going to add variety what power-ups do like that's obviously the way that I'll do it and we spent ages working on power-ups and it just I mean it helped there was more variety there was more things to do but it just wasn't quite there and really the reason is is this goal sucks make the game more interesting like what does that even mean my possible solutions are power-ups and um maybe something else we really go to like give that goal a bit of love and you know make that a better goal and so we realized after a while playing around with it it wasn't just that it needed more variety like the intensity really specifically needed more variety because the game starts slow and then speeds up and you're always one hit away from death and so your intensity just starts low ramps up and then you're just like maxed out the whole time and then that makes it feel really OneNote and I realized like you know the variety problem isn't necessarily about power-ups or having different things to do it's actually a health problem right if I add three hearts for example all of a sudden we get a dramatically different intensity curve if you start off really low you hit something and all of a sudden you're like oh okay I've only got one more hit left and then I'm on my last hit or we could do like a regenerating health thing like you know Call of Duty or whatever and they all give really different intensities and feeling to the game it's really about health not about adding power-ups and we kind of ended up with this system which is the vehicle system every now and then you'll find a vehicle and it'll actually change the controls and everything and you know it stops and slows down the whole game and it's kind of starts you off again really the vehicle is just the most elaborate health pack pickup you've ever seen eventually I'll hit something and blow up and now you're back into those same cadence as before and this gives us this really interesting intensity curve it's just this kind of weird lovechild of a health system and a powerup system and it became like a really iconic part of the game and you know a big factor of its success so some pros to kind of working this way I mean other than the ones I've kind of obviously already laid out my favorite thing is that it really helps the team or pull in the same direction you know like when a programmer comes to you and has some crazy feature that they just worked on on the side they come up with some you know batshit crazy thing that they really like and then sometimes like 50 percent of time it's super cool and ends up in the game and fifty percent of the time you're like well that's cool but like oh why did you do that if your goals are always really explicitly stated everywhere it means there's a really good chance that they will be pulling in the right direction and come up with something cool that you didn't even think of that helps you achieve that goal even better it helps them kind of check me to make sure I'm trying to hit those goals because I might start implementing something and they're like what are you sure that actually achieves what you were trying to do some of the cons well you know if you're in a company of 500 people and you know you're the UI designer maybe you have to make it health bar because maybe it's on a contract that you have with a giant publisher or whatever it's not necessarily you know completely possible go well I don't know what I'm making I just know what I wanted to feel like but even still I feel like as long as you're constantly going back I'm making a health bar like why is the health bar important what's you know what are the important parts of this what do I want to convey you can still use goals to help make that even better goals can be really weird one of the big goals we had when we made fruit ninja was we've wanted players to be able to smell the fruit like it was some weird kind of smell-o-vision thing so this is like obviously a completely outrageous goal but what it helped do is make us really focus on the splatters and the back and it guided us in other ways the fruit is always perfect and always cut perfectly in half because we didn't want to do anything that would invoke the smell of rotten fruit for example and then even better this is what I really really like about goals is goals can be selfish the goals can be about you as a designer or your team I don't need to be about the player at all you can do something just cuz you want to like you use a new bit of kit and try something out you can do things because you want to see what is possible well maybe you know it's a business objective you want to just see what is what you can do you can just come up with goals that to push yourself and push your team and see what's possible and I mean that's what we're doing right now and I can tell you it is pushing us oh my god and so yeah I just use goals for everything including this talk right so I really hate PowerPoint in keynote because I think it is a really limiting way if there's just certain kinds of experiences that you can't create and so I had this like really ridiculous idea in my head that uh you know one thing that I couldn't do in keynote is like step back and shoot my own presentation with a machine gun which is like the dumbest kind of goal ever but I mean that's kind of the reason that I made my entire presentation in unity when I when I showed this to Richard he was like hmm you don't have kids do you and and this is the thing right like with goals and restrictions they you know even when they're sorry with rules and restrictions is sometimes their gently nudging you to do a particular thing right like you know with GDC there's no rule thing don't do this but you know it's telling you download the PowerPoint download the keynote template and those are all really reliable ways to make a really good that kind of presentation but the problem is it's like rules rarely lead to something new it's only through kind of breaking rules that you can really try and do something new and don't get me wrong doing something that's new just for the circuit you know something new isn't the be-all and end-all if you can but I think sometimes we we lose sight of just how powerful kind of surprise and novelty so yeah I'm like way over time so I'm gonna skip my very carefully constructed metaphor and just skip straight to the end because really my actual goal all I was trying to achieve is to do whatever I could to make you guys remember to go for your goals Thanks let's get out of this madness so thanks everyone for coming remember that you know everything you know so far is wrong I hope these speakers help subvert your thoughts about game design remember too that the corollary of everything you know is wrong is that no one knows anything care of William Goldman so the print rules you saw here today may not apply to you now they may not apply to your project right now they may never apply to you but keep them for when you're in the darkness and you're wondering what to do figure out what your own rules are and make and make great games thanks everyone for coming thanks to Amy Hennig sort and Johnson for helping us a lot with this talk and we're not going to do QA obviously but we'll be up here for a while if you want to come chat thank you you

Channel: GDC

Views: 43,457

Rating: 4.721374 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: MVq1-y7ailE

Length: 67min 17sec (4037 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 26 2018