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GDC 2003: Designing Original Games Based On Licensed Properties How to evaluate a licenseYou may be in the lucky position to take a licensed game or see if something better comes along. Or you may just be wondering how the development is likely to go with a license you know you're going to take. The first thing you need to do is talk to the publisher, and if possible, the license holder, about what they want to maximize about the property, and about your leeway in designing a fun game around that. This is really the most important step. So, here are the questions, basically, you want to ask:
A question you don't need to ask the publisher, but you need to ask yourself, is whether or not the license is intrinsically a good license? Is this going to bring 200,000 additional people to your game, or is it going to send 200,000 boxes to the bargain bin? In some ways, this is easy. Speaking as someone who once said in an email "I just don't know if Lord of the Rings is really going to be a hit," believe me when I say it can also be tricky. In general though, if you're in the target demographic for the license, you and your peers should be able to have a pretty good idea of the license quality (don't ask me what I was thinking with the Lord of the Rings comment). If you're not in the target demographic, it's tougher. On one hand, well-established brands (Barbie, Matchbox, etc) are no-brainers. For less established brands, you just have to trust your judgment. Unfortunately there's no magic answer to this. Designing Original Games Based On Licensed Properties Here come all of the secrets. First off, I can't tell you how to make a fun game. (Or rather, I could, but that's a different lecture. ) But if you're attending the GDC, chances are you already have fairly good ideas in that direction. There are rules to creating which will help you really maximize the chances of successfully doing a licensed game. I think you can measure success in about five ways: sales, how fun the game is for players, how satisfied you and the team are with it, critical acclaim, and how satisfied the publisher/license holder is with the game. Of those, four are important: what the critics think is probably not super important, except to have something to show your mom. Some people think it all comes down to creating a great game that could stand on its own, but doing it inside the constraints of the license, and the license holder. There may be some truth there, but I disagree: if you slapped the "Rug Rats" license on Halo, it wouldn't be a very good "Rug Rats" game, it would dis-satisfy players, and probably the license holder and publisher. You have a responsibility, both to the license holder, and to the fans of the license, to maximize the license at every opportunity. That's why kart racers are so frequently awful: they have the characters, but they don't maximize the license, even if it was a great racer, no one would be satisfied with Return of the King Kart Racing. The first rule, therefore, is to remember that with licensed development, you are making a game for a specific audience, and you may not be in that audience. So, the notion that "we make games we like to play," may not fully apply here. At the same time, you want to have fun, and you should have fun, when you're making a game. If you're crafty, you can do both. Sometimes it's easy: if you're doing a NASCAR game, or you have the Tony Hawk license, the gameplay can just magically suggest itself. Other times, it's less easy. You want a gameplay style that will appeal to the same demographic as the audience, and that enables you to render the look of the license appropriately. The things to look for, we've found at Digital Eclipse, when we're trying to come up with an original game idea for a licensed property are both tried and true - what's fun, what works on the platform, what does the demographic like, what do we have an engine for - and the more abstract: what can we do that would be super fun, but that no one expects? An example: Digital Eclipse has a team that's huge Metal Slug fans. When we got the opportunity to do Lilo & Stitch GBA, we were able to say "Let's make it like Metal Slug!" Now, the target audience for Lilo & Stitch might not like Metal Slug. But we thought about what your eyes and fingers are doing when you play Metal Slug, and abstracting that out, we decided that that in itself was fun, and if we could bring it to Disney fans, we would have succeeded in doing something original, and fun, on the platform, that kept the target audience, and license, in mind. So we did it. At the same time, a shooter didn't work for Lilo, so we split her levels into a screen-to-screen scrolling adventure, a la Abe's Oddyssey. The result was a game that was well accepted by critics, by Disney, by fans, and that we were pleased with. It had the best elements of Metal Slug - tons of shooting and over-the-top cell animation - and yet it was totally Disney through and through, from music to character design principles to story.
If we'd had to stick to the plot of the movie, which only has a few bad guys, and very little action, we'd probably have had to do an adventure game, which would have been totally inappropriate for the platform. Luckily, Disney Interactive really gets games, especially on the console side, and they gave us a great deal of leeway to create new characters, set the story as a sequel, and more. So that's kind of a best case scenario. What about the worst cases? Typically, the biggest pitfall you'll find is the schedule. Licensed games just don't get the time they need. We were approached to do a game design for a licensed property last year. We did an awesome design, specced out all these innovative things we were going to do - it was going to be cool. Then, the publisher said, "well, we're not sure how it'll do, so let's bag it." Eleven months later, they came back to us and said, "Remember that game? We need it in three months." Now, we were able to deliver a pretty fun game, but all the innovative parts went away in about the first twenty minutes of development - the programmer went over the design doc with a Sharpie, saying "no, no, no." So what do you do in that situation? Polish. Doing a game that's based on a tried and true gameplay scheme, but is polished to death, is going to satisfy consumers and license holders much more than an unpolished attempt at doing too much. When we did Tarzan for Game Boy Color, we had a very short schedule. As a result, we went with incredibly simply gameplay: Tarzan simply had to platform around large mazes, collecting bananas while avoid bad guys. In a lot of ways it was like Pac-Man. But the core of the gameplay was done in about a week, leaving the rest of the schedule to test levels, do art, and add tons of finishing graphical touches. The result was a million plus seller from a very, very simple game. In the case of that three month game, we bid a sad farewell to our big ideas, stuck them in the "sequel box", fell back on something we knew how to do, and polished it for half the development cycle. (Having really easily alterable engines also helps immensely with this.) Really, one of the only steadfast rules I've found in game development is that the answer to a short development cycle is to keep the game simple, and polish like crazy. What about other pitfalls - overbearing license holders, or wildly inappropriate licenses? Well, at a certain point, it may help to become a little tricky. If a model is disapproved, sending back the same model rendered from a different angle sometimes works wonders. The reality is, the more overbearing a license holder is, the less likely they are to know the game industry. Smart license-holders understand what it takes to make a successful game and usually want to help. With the less educated licensors, you have three choices: you can try to educate them about why things are or need to be, you can try to brute force your way past them, refusing to make changes, or sending the same model back four times hoping no one will notice, or you can try to accommodate all their requests. Usually a combination approach works, but it's really something you need to judge on a case by case basis. To me, a wildly innapropriate license is one of the coolest things around. On the one hand, I look at it as a challenge - how can I make a Like Water for Chocolate game? It's almost a parlor game at our office, coming up with weird license situations: If you got the Marlboro license, how would you do it as a game? Whether or not I would personally be into the game becomes secondary to my interest in figuring out whether we can make it fun for someone. On the other hand, I think crazy licenses give you a great opportunity to play with a game and really try some new things that you could otherwise never do. We were recently approached with a license for a very social, story-based property that I unfortunately can't mention. It's a really good demographic fit with the target platform, but there is no gameplay suggested by the license at all. So what we did was take a collection of about a dozen mini-games - puzzle games, Apple II style single screen games, etc - any one of which we'd have killed to release as a full game, but which there was just no publisher interest for, and really worked hard to tie them to the license in a way that didn't feel like we were slapping it on. I think the result (it's still in development) is going to be something really cool. There's just a ton of gameplay value there, and I hope it's going to be really symbiotic: the license is going bring people to these games that they'd never look at without a license, and then, hopefully, the game is going to really enhance the feeling of the license for the players. So that kind of thing I think is really one of the hidden attractions of doing a licensed game. If you play a lot of licensed games, you can see it too - you'll see these neat levels in an otherwise kind of bland game, and think "oh yeah, some level designer was testing out something new here." It's kind of a back-door way to really introduce some innovations. We've done games - a few - where there has been no innovation on the gameplay side or the technology side. Without exception, those games have done poorly in the marketplace regardless of the license. The key to doing licensed games well, and creating original designs, is to know the limitations of the license up front, whether that's the schedule, the material you're going to get, the quality of the characters or whatever. You do what you can to mitigate them, do things solid everywhere, but then pick one or two areas, and put all your effort into exploiting them. Players who buy licensed games aren't necessarily looking for the "next big thing;" they're looking for a new way to enjoy a favorite property. But, if you can give them something that hasn't been done before on the platform, or hasn't been done well yet, it dramatically increases their appreciation for the game, and your satisfaction at doing it. Any of the people attending this conference can do a solid, "B+" game. But if you can find one place in a licensed game to slip in something new, something you want to try, something you really believe in, you'll be amazed at how much it can motivate you and your team for the whole project, and turn a B game into an A game. In the end, the quality of the game is really up to you. Whether it's original or derivative, fun or lame, it's up to you. Let me go back to something that was mentioned before, which is that a lot of people look at licensed games as the thing to do before they get their break. I think this is the one of the most stupid attitudes or poses I've seen in the game industry. As I said, any one of us at this conference could crap out a B grade or C grade game on any system in six months. The problem is, so many people when faced with licensed development, do just that. They expect that licensed games aren't cool, and they let it become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Which I think is crazy.
The best example I can think of is Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 for the PlayStation. This could have been a totally lame game and no one would have cared. Tony Hawk was no longer super-well known outside the skating community when the game was made, skateboarding hadn't really been done successfully in 3D, there were really no huge expectations from the market of success, or of anything more than a Top Skater clone. But because of the ambition level of NeverSoft, and the support they got from Activision, the result was one of the best games and biggest franchises of the last five years. You know,
it sounds trite, but the reality is that licenses don't have to be limiting
at all, but it's up to us as the developers to push them forward. The
biggest identifying factor of the sort of "B" licenses - not
your Lords of the Rings, but your Tony-Hawk-circa-1997s - is low
publisher expectations. To me, this is like being given a box full of
toys, and then mom leaves the room. As long as maximizing the license
if your first priority, if you get one of these "B" licenses,
the world is your oyster. You can do whatever you want. And that's a level
of freedom in the game industry that can be really hard to find. Ironically,
it seems to be the freedom that people want when they're looking to do
original titles. ______________________________________________________
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