2. Design: Creativity and the Myth of Brainstorming
A
great idea takes a split second to happen, but waiting for that
lightning to strike can be excruciating. There's no such thing as
forcing a great idea to squirt out, but this section should help
cultivate your creative juices.
Formal Brainstorming Has a 0% Success Rate
We
tried hard - boy we really wanted brainstorming to work! We scheduled
“brainstorm meetings”, and “powwows”, we tried different color markers
on whiteboards and oversized post-it notes, we even used motivational
phrases like “blue sky” to help with our “out of the box thinking.” But
in the end, out of all the games we created, not a single one was the
result of sitting down as a group for a brainstorm session.
Why
not? This was all very shocking to us, but after much investigation, it
appears that you just cannot schedule creativity. You cannot say, “Hey
everybody let's meet for a brainstormer at 4:15, and by 5:00 we'll have
4 kick-ass game ideas ready to hit the ground running!”
But
it's not hopeless. There are still (at least) two reasonable things you
can expect from a well-conducted brainstorm session. The first, of
course, is that it gets everybody thinking. And then sometime later,
maybe on the drive home, or in the shower, or while taking Poopy for a
walk, a brilliant idea will erupt in your head. Or maybe not. But as
far as we can tell, your mysterious brain does a lot of thinking when
you least expect it.
The
second way we found brainstorming to be useful was when there was
something concrete to talk about. For example, “How can we improve
this?” as opposed to “Hey let's come up with something arbitrary!”
Given a half-formed game idea, for instance, it was moderately helpful
to run it by the rest of the group to flesh it out. Everyone is a
better critic than a creator, right?
Gather Concept Art and Music to Create an Emotional Target
As
an alternative to brainstorming, we found that gathering art and music
with some personal significance was particularly fruitful. People have
commented that many of the games like “Gravity Head” or “On a Rainy
Day” create a strong mood and have strong emotional appeal. It's no
accident. In these and many other cases, the soundtrack and initial art
created a combined feeling that drove much of the gameplay decisions,
story, and final art.
Mr. Gabler: “The
idea behind “Tower of Goo” came up while I was listening to (for some
reason) the opening to Astor Piazzolla's “Tango Apasionado” after
walking home, and had this drizzly vision of a town at sunset where
everyone was leaving their houses, carrying out chairs, tables, and
anything they could to build a giant tower in the center of their city.
I didn't know why exactly, but they wanted to climb up and up and up -
but they weren't very good civil engineers so you had to help them. The
final prototype ended up a little more cheery, and I replaced the final
music with Piazzolla's more upbeat “Libertango”, but here's a case
where an initial emotional target basically wrote the entire game.”
Simulate in Your Head – Pre-Prototype the Prototype
It's
really easy! All you have to do is imagine your game audience saying,
“Wow!” And then just work backward and fill in the blanks. What's
making them enjoy your game? What emotion are they feeling? What is
happening in the game to make them feel that way?
For
each of our most successful games, it was never a surprise when they
ended up being fun to play – in the best cases, we knew before touching
a line of code that the idea was solid, because we had run a simulation
of the game as a little thought experiment beforehand. The reverse is
also true. There was no game that accidentally or unexpectedly became
successful. We always knew ahead of time. (Unfortunately this didn't
keep us from pursuing half-baked ideas.)
Simulating
in your head also makes the development of the final prototype really
easy. Since you will know exactly what you will be making, you won't
waste time making expensive trial and error “design decisions” by
noodling around in code.
One team member admits: “It
wasn't unusual to blow the first 3 or 4 days of the week just fooling
around watching O-Zone music videos for “inspiration” or propped upside
down in a bean bag listening to music and filling my head with blood
occasionally running some crappy brain simulations. Finally Thursday or
Friday would roll around and I'd panic because I still had no idea what
to turn in for Monday, so I'd take the strongest of the ideas and tweak
it based on whatever the obsession of the week was until it felt like a
fun game, then stay awake for the next few days typing it all into a
computer and drawing beautiful pictures. For me, (and I think all of
us) the days spent in “pre-production” were unquestionably more
valuable that the days spent in actual development.”
3. Development: Nobody Knows How You Made it, and Nobody Cares
Once you come up with a great idea, here are some tricks to whip up a little demo in no time!
Build the Toy First
Start
with the core mechanic. Whether spring systems, swarm behavior,
gravity, etc, it never took more than a few hours to get the basic
theme up and running. This “toy” should be the core mechanic of the
game minus any goals or decisions. There is no win or lose state, just
a fun thing to play with.
Mr. Gabler: “With
“Super Tummy Bubble”, the “toy” was just a bunch of bubbles suspended
in a little container. After playing with the toy and flinging bubbles
around for a while, I got it tuned to a point where sticking my fingers
in bubbles felt really satisfying, so it was time to slap on some
gameplay. Gameplay features in this case were bubbles of different
parasite types, a concept of “popping”, a concept of “chains”, score
counters, etc.”
If You Can Get Away With it, Fake it
This is arguably one of the most important lessons of the project. Often the “correct” solution is not the best
solution. Strategically faking it will save you time and money; it will
make your game faster, and your teeth whiter. Fake it liberally and
often! Don't set up complicated lighting and shadowing when a simple
drop shadow and baked textures will be just as effective ("Darwin
Hill"). Don't set up a complicated pattern recognition system for
analyzing a user's drawings when you can fudge it with the same effect
("Suburban Brawl"). Don't draw splines or create your own vector art
library when quickie stretched bitmaps give same effect faster and
easier ("Tower of Goo"). This rule is also a fantastic general lesson
for life, we have found. Slackers, take note.
Cut Your Losses and "Learn When to Shoot Your Baby in the Crib"
At
the beginning of the project there was a desire to salvage everything –
a little more time and effort and surely a crappy game would become a
work of genius! One such doomed prototype began as a beautiful spring
system that squished and stretched and made you want to grab it and
pull it all over the place, but it just wasn't become a compelling
game. The original spring system mechanic took just a few hours to
create, but then it flared and consumed an additional wasted week of
coding and re-coding in a sad attempt to force the mechanic into
becoming a game.
It's
important to quickly recognize dead-end game ideas, cut your losses and
move on. As we found, spontaneity is more valuable than time spent
trying to salvage existing code. You can always come back if lighting
strikes at a later time.
Mr. Kucic: “My
“Potato” ended up being a perfectly simulated soft body system built in
Flash. The only problem was that it was in no way fun. It caused more
headaches than death metal, wasted a week, and it didn't even really
move. You've got to know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.”
Heavy Theming Will Not Salvage Bad Design (or "You Can't Polish a Turd")
We
found that game players are smarter than you think, and they can tell
when you're pulling a fast one on them. If the gameplay is horrible,
there is no recovery - all the art, music, and product tie-ins in the
world won't make it a great game. Like taking a stale gameplay mechanic
and slapping the latest 3D animated movie characters on it, nobody will
be fooled.
Mr. Gray: “With
“Spin to Win”, the ‘gameplay' was to rotate your mouse to spin multiple
circles – literally disc spinning. To hide the fact that it wasn't fun,
I heavily themed the game with a '60s Bewitched art style and
music. But no matter how much I polished the game, it still wouldn't
shine. Despite all the extra love, it quickly became one of the site's
most hated games.”
But Overall Aesthetic Matters! Apply a Healthy Spread of Art, Sound, and Music
This
is actually counter to one of our original hypotheses. We didn't think
art or sound would make any difference at all, but we were wrong!
Playing with a well-polished game actually feels better in your hands
than playing the exact same code but with careless art and poor sound.
It is important to make the following distinction though – polishing
the aesthetic (as in the above section) will still not salvage bad
design, but it does have the power to make a good game even more
playable. This does not mean that you need fancy graphics or surround
sound. It does mean that you can benefit from pulling everything
together into a tight cohesive compositional package. Remember, even
“crappy” can be a tight winning aesthetic if you frame it the right way.
Nobody Cares About Your Great Engineering
Again,
it's worth noting that a great engineer does not necessarily make a
great prototyper. “Correct” or “reusable” solutions are often not what
we look for in quick throwaway code. For every problem, you should be
able to come up with a large handful of solutions and be prepared to
pick the one that gets the job done – fast. The end user will never see
your great engineering, and they don't care.
Mr. Shodhan: “By
over-engineering, it's easy to end up with generic tools or technology
demos that never translate into something playable. This can be likened
to a rock star executing a technically brilliant but entirely
self-indulgent guitar solo that leaves the audience yawning! For the
“evolution” round, I made a program with subdivision surfaces and a
cell shaded look for evolving 3D models by cross breeding ancestry
trees. There was a lot of cool technology, but it had absolutely no
gameplay!”