Innovate, But Do It Carefully

Often times, game development teams spend an excessive amount of effort in innovating early and often. You may hear some of the following things from your dev team:

* We don't want to make a clone of (insert popular game title here).
* That idea is boring.
* It's been done before.

It's important to remember that so-called "traditional" RPG ideas only become traditional because they work so well, or so conveniently for the development team. That's a GOOD thing. You don't need to reinvent every single cog in the machine to make a great, innovative game system. In fact, it's far better to get comfortable with making something according to established, tried and true methods, i.e. the methods that are proven to work. There will still be plenty of opportunities to make your game ground-breakingly unique and innovative. You don't have to try very hard at all to do that. As long as you're passionate about what you're building the ideas will come out. Don't throw out ideas that are proven to work just for the sake of being different in every possible way. Doing that is the sure path to project failure. Every single "totally new" feature to the game system increases the difficulty to get a stable, working, and above all BALANCED release immensely. A game can have the best artwork, the most creative quests, a great skill system, etc., but if even ONE game balance issue is out of whack, then the whole game will fail. The hard part is putting in the basis and making sure your implementation actually works the way you thought it might. Then add in the innovations and make sure it still works as intended.

Imagine you create the best game in the world in every way, but there's one problem: there's a treasure chest in a low level dungeon that gives 10 gold pieces every 30 seconds to a rogue with lockpicking skill. This can and will be abused to the point where it totally ruins the game for everyone. Game balance is the HARD part. The game system itself is the icing on the cake. That's the FUN part. Most games fail because they can't balance the challenges they've created, and the player gets bored.

We must stay out of that development trap which has doomed so many failed game projects in the past. So the next time you find yourself thinking about adding some sort of innovation into your game design, stop and ask yourself the question: Why? And if there's a really good reason Why, then make sure that you take TWO things out for every ONE thing you add in, since down the road, all idea implementations become more complex.

For more information about my own game project, including video, screen shots, detailed blogs, and much more, please visit our website at www.arcanoria.com.