Plan for Jay Barnson

Steve Taylor (of NinjaBee) and I got into a conversation a couple weeks ago about the "newbie approach to game design." Though it's also the marketer's approach to game design: Take your current favorite, coolest game. Change flavor. Add a ton of features. Viola. Instant game. Gee, that's not hard, ANYBODY can be a game designer.

Certainly, if you have the resources and expertise to pull it off, it sure helps marketing. You can always claim, "It's like last year's hit, only BIGGER!" And Bigger is Better, Right? If a game is already good, then adding additional features only improves it, right?

No way, no how. Witness any number of failed franchises in games or any other media due to an overload of crap that actually detracted from the otherwise outstanding focus of the product. All those extra features literally sucked the fun right out of it. And that's only if they managed to pull off a competent job of it. More often - from well-known game development studios as well as the never-ending horde of indie game development hopefuls - these "kitchen sink" designs collapse under their own weight long before the game even reaches a playable state. (Remember how proud the Ion Storm guys were of their gigantic design documents? They are so fun to pick on. Though I guess I've written games that sold far less, so I should NOT be pointing fingers).

Indies don't have the luxury (unless they are very rich indies) of contemplating 'kitchen sink' designs to compete with modern, top-selling hits. We actually have to take a few steps back, stick fairly close to the basics, and work on presenting a really focused, entertaining experience. This was my principle for design on Void War, though I did allow a bit of "feature creep" to occur to the game as it evolved. I'm trying to do the same now as I'm working on my "next big thing." Well, it's NEXT, and it's definitely some kind of thing, but I'm not sure how big it is.

I'm knee-deep in prototyping, and we just came up with a concept that sounds silly and fun - and most importantly, it's generating TONS of ideas for entertaining gameplay. However, there's no way we can do all of them, and in fact it would probably be a poor idea if we did. With this game, unlike Void War, I'm approaching it with a little bit more market research instead of just feeding my own personal creative demons. So this means nuking a lot of otherwise cool ideas that make the experience too complicated, too confusing, too difficult to control, or otherwise detract from the focus of the gameplay.

But we also want to provide variety to keep the game interesting, so we have to choose things that enhance the 'core' experience, and make different demands of the player's skill. I've been spending a lot of time prototyping, trying out different control schemes, deciding what to keep and what to throw out. I think we've solidly identified the "core focus" of the game, and what will make the game fun and compelling, deep enough to keep playing, but simple enough that my wife would play (she wouldn't TOUCH Void War - though my 10-year old daughter got pretty good at it...)

Ah, but that's the fun and challenge of doing this. Being an indie rocks.