Category: News

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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This past year has been great in reaching out beyond just the audience here to people in my local community about videogames and game design. However, the study of game design continues to be a mystifying art for some, and it hasn’t gotten any better since I started Game-Wisdom 7 years ago. With the growth of the industry and being accepted worldwide, there really needs to be more than just a handful of discussions about game design.

The Low Bar:

The last time we had this discussion, I drew my line in the sand about how I feel about the state of Game Journalism. I find that the majority of “coverage” out there—from youtubers and streamers to major sites to be irrelevant.

For someone wanting to learn about game design, the majority of information out there is useless. Youtubers making rant videos about companies “killing games” or “being against gamers” is just tabloid trash. While the “professional pieces” on major sites tend to fall between someone just reporting what someone else said, and fluff pieces that don’t really educate anyone on design or the game in question. To continue getting myself into trouble, I do question many people who write and talk about the game industry on their knowledge of game design.

If you want to learn about game development and what it means to work in this industry, the majority of sites, youtubers, and streamers out there will not help you. One of the reasons why I can talk about game design these days is the very fact that I’ve interviewed over 400 developers about design; not PR, but actual game development.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOHO_iZa_3M]

Some days I feel that I’m five to ten years ahead of everyone else when it comes to these discussions. Frequently, when I want to write a piece on a concept or design theory, I’m still either the top or near the top link when searching for it on Google. Several concepts I’ve talked about when it comes to game design, consumers don’t think about, let alone people who make games for a living.

I can’t wait to see the reception of my second book covering a genre that is over 30 years old that no one else has ever taken the time or thought to explore from a design and educational perceptive.

Game development is very hard to put into words, and why most people don’t cover it; however, that difficulty also brings me to another problem.

Bringing it Down to Earth:

Game development is a topic I feel that hasn’t gotten enough credit as a field of study. If we’re talking about the time that videogames became accepted in pop culture (around the early 00’s), then the industry from that point of view is not even 20 years old.

Too many people, from inside and out of the industry, treat design as this mythical creature that can’t be understood or tamed. When something goes wrong, they’ll chalk it up to hindsight, when people who understand development can see the writing on the wall. We’ve said this many times over: What you don’t know about how games work can hurt your chances of succeeding.

When I examine titles, it’s easy for me to see how a game compares to other titles in the genre from a playability point of view. Too often for my tastes, I see games from indie developers that play like they have either never touched a game from the genre, or willingly chose to ignore all design sensibilities from it.

The problem with trying to learn game design is that just saying the phrase “game design” and trying to teach it is akin to saying “craftsman” or “engineer” — it is a multifaceted topic across multiple disciplines.

Just because you built a game of one genre doesn’t automatically make you an expert in another; similar to the differences in metalworking vs. woodworking. More importantly, even if you made an amazing strategy game or FPS, that doesn’t mean you’re going to be good at making an RPG or platformer.

The number of topics that go into game design is staggering, and I should know; besides writing about game design, I have three years’ worth of videos examining single topics, and I’m nowhere close to covering it all.

This makes it very difficult to explain even the basics about game design to people, because there’s never just one thing. Good UI design may be universal, but there’s a difference between the UI for a puzzle game, a strategy game, platformers, and so on. Someone who wants to learn about FPS design may not care about RPG development.

When trying to make videos or posts related to game design, the field in of itself is very niche, but then we drill down into the individual topic makes it even harder for people to find out about it. Outside of common phrases like “How do I build a videogame?” “what is game design?” most people aren’t typing in specific questions.

Is it Getting Better?

The real positive I’ve seen about the growth of game design has not come from game designers or members of the industry, but from the schools and libraries. We are seeing a push to bring videogames to education and the study of game design.

At the end of the day, game design is both an art and science (and why it’s in the tagline for game-wisdom). There are many people who only focus on the art and chose to downplay or ignore the science part. If you can’t learn the fundamentals of what it means to design a videogame, then chances are you are going to end up with a bad game no matter how much work you put into it.

I see this from a lot of indie developers who put their heart and soul into a project and wonder why no one is buying it or it’s getting bad reviews, to only find major UI and design issues that should have been caught within 10 minutes of play. I know there are indie developers who don’t like the word “bad”, but guess what? If you actively ignore negative reviews and comments about your game, then you are never going to improve.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ItwsmTPGC4]It’s very easy to look at the structure of a game or genre and write it off as someone telling you what to do, but that kind of thinking is akin to someone designing a car without brakes because you wanted to think outside the box. While game design isn’t rocket science, it still requires research and work to get right. Messing up on UI design and playability are no longer valid excuses when there are dozens of games being released daily.

There should be a greater respect for game design across all areas of the game industry, because it doesn’t matter how pretty or thought provoking your game is if no one wants to play it.

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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[An excerpt from the forthcoming Virtual Cities atlas of video game cities by game urbanist Konstantinos Dimopoulos, and artist Maria Kallikaki.]

You haven’t died until you’ve visited Rubacava. The liveliest, most vibrant place throughout the Mesoamerican Hades. The town that never died. An extravagant, cheerful yet forlorn city where heartbroken lovers await their soulmates, and the ancient dead dance wildly through countless nights. Rubacava: a city of long shadows, papier-mâché skeletons, bright lights and unexpected fogs, where the biggest of the bone bands play the finest bebop tunes, and where jazz and mariachi get married to andean melodies. This is the great post mortem melting pot. The town where lost souls are bound to be found, and hardened criminals can watch the occasional saint embark the Nada Mañana cruises towards a restful afterlife.

This high-life port town of the Land of the Dead is located on the coast of the Sea of Lament, and thus serves as a crucial waystation on the four year journey to the Ninth Underworld and eternal rest. Reaching it means braving the Petrified Forest, and then, upon arrival, buying passage across the ocean as quickly as possible; yet somehow this almost transient place keeps on growing. Souls tend to linger here in waiting, after losing hope in a better hereafter, or by being swept away by this breathtaking urbanistic embodiment of Mayan, Aztec, Toltec and Mexican metaphysical beliefs.

Rubacava, not being a theologically detailed location, didn’t always exist, but is far older than anyone remembers. Its turbulent history has a palpable weight to it as the dead refusing to leave the afterlife behind are always the more intriguing ones, and their city, teetering between a full on mob-town and a revolutionary hub, could never be anything but fascinating. The moon of Rubacava has definitely seen much as the tiny transit town by the sea grew to become today’s metropolis, and geographers have long argued whether nostalgia or allure is the main centrifugal force boosting its population.

Sense of loss aside though, this is an undeniably stunning, intoxicating city. The sea laps mesmerizingly against lofty bridges, sublime bas-relief decorations can be discovered in the most unexpected of places, the shadows of emphatic buildings hold countless secrets and drinking holes, and sudden explosions of scale and spectacle regularly impress. Add in the blimps’ sky-traffic, the gargantuan cat racing track, an unrivaled nightlife, eye catching sky-signs, the lively masses of the dead and a thousand promises, and the city’s gravitational pull makes absolute sense. The sights are countless, the colours dizzying, the music perfect, the scope awe inspiring, and the aesthetic experience of getting lost worth dying for. One path might lead to an abandoned lighthouse, another to a forgotten pier, and a third to a cliff-carved elevator towards a new section of town complete with massive casino.

Rubacavan life isn’t confined to savouring spatial delights, holding a job, or playing the kitties. Things often get exciting, dangerous, and even hopeless in this city of the poor masquerading as the cosmopolitan town of the rich. Demonic bouncers abound, skeletal birds mock, and betrayal, passion, and passionate betrayal are as common as tensions and stark divisions. Shattered illusions, shady schemes, the occasional miracle, an unashamedly corrupt police force, and the popular desire for post mortem justice make for an explosive mix that only temporarily abates during the Day of the Dead. The single day of the year when shows, clubs, and slot machines stand abandoned, and when the overworked masses are allowed a moment of respite.

Walking the streets on any other day reveals a staggering menagerie of characters. Posh lawyers, hip club owners, exhausted or defiant workers, gangsters, agents of the Department of Death, artists, sailors and gamblers roam the shadows of emblematic skyscrapers, and gather around stepped pyramids and vast plazas. Rarely, the occasional former florists researching the forensic side of botany can also be glimpsed. Second death by sprouting is a notoriously flowery and complex affair apparently; one only florists can analyze, and only mob bosses can turn into macabre gardens.

It is in the harbour district though, in the oldest part of town, where the vibrancy of unlife truly explodes. The gigantic Feline Meadows race track effortlessly dominates the area and sets the tone, even if locals know that the old town can offer more than bets and transit. Hidden in an old Scrimshaw tank, for example, lies the infamous Toto’s tattoo parlour where liquid nitrogen and drills are used to create stunning tattoos on bare bone, whereas up on the magnificent bridge connecting the two harbour clifftops, under the statue of Justice, hides a morgue. A steep climb down to sea level reveals the beautiful, golden and blue, Art Nouveau Blue Casket club owned by Olivia Ofrenda; the very heart of beatnik Rubacava, and the spot to discuss revolution, drink coffin shooters, and recite poetry in a building nurturing defiance, and standing out in an Art Deco modernist city of gleaming towers.

It’s not just architecture that alludes to 20th century modernism. As the city grew past its initial waterfront core it was almost certainly influenced by functionalist ideals, possibly even by Le Corbusier’s Radiant City plans, and adapted a predominantly gridiron structure with regularly spaced diagonal avenues to its needs. Wide boulevards now allow unreasonably powerful demon-driven cars to achieve ludicrous speeds, and connect pastoral suburbs with a bustling downtown that’s developed both vertically and horizontally. Activities have been modestly organized, though, admittedly, the sheer fluidity of death’s reality had to lead to haphazard implementations, unfinished avenues, labyrinthine alleys and clashing functions. Adding to the confusion, Rubacava’s recent civic explosion has been driven more by speculation and money laundering than planning forethought, allowing for odd configurations and even unnaturally big crocodiles in badly maintained sewers.

With the exception of the few newer industrial areas, the labyrinthine harbour and its surrounding leisure district remain the city’s core economic hub. Gambling and entertainment are soaking up the cash produced by the hardy Sea Bees working on ships suspended in thin air, while gazing at the well kept docks where opulent ocean liners await their lucky passengers.

Just as the harbour is divided between extravagant pleasures and hard toil, so is the rest of the city. Death wasn’t the great leveler after all, class lines are being drawn, and tensions rise as the rich keep on exploiting the poor. Even the pious seem capable of suffering in this cynical economy when the Chief of Police is a notorious, bribable gambler, and upstanding crime lords like Hector LeMans can seemingly do as they please. The police are only interested in running protection schemes and arresting striking union members, inadvertently fuelling the flames of the fledgling resistance. And as the Sea Bees, the workers’ vanguard, come closer to the incendiary ideas of the beatniks, and the name of almost mythical revolutionary leader Salvador Limones keeps on inspiring defiance, it is evident that a revolution is brewing; just as the mob moves on to take over the town.

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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Following the research done for “Videogame Dialogues: Writing Tools And Design Ideas” (a quite popular Gamasutra post on game dialogue’s user interfaces written by Daniele Giardini and myself) when I had the chance to get back to developing the narrative part of Football Drama I decided to create further layout tools for the writer, building upon the research done then.

One of the observations of the linked post was how mature and feature rich are dialogues in contemporary comics with respect to today’s games, as in the examples below.

Our dialogues in Football Drama were more or less in this format:

From that Pino Panzarella and I started designing possible evolutions, like in this draft:

An obvious fact that makes evolving the design of dialogues in games not that easy is that dialogues are generally at least partially generative (and so is the case for our Football Drama game), so its normal that the dialogues are generated by structures like these:

This is our internal dialogue editor, Outspoken (developed in Unity by Daniele Giardini). What would be great would be to have the possibility to (1) configure single nodes’ balloon appearance and (2) configure alternative layouts of sequences of nodes.\

(1) For single speech balloons, we opted for having four classic layouts: thought, scream, speech, whisper.

(2) For the alternative layouts, we have three cases,

• A full-screen layer that sends some message before or between dialogue exchanges

• A node with a question and then choices (as the first column in the draft illustration below).

• A couple of dialogue nodes where in the second node we want to zoom in the character (second and third columns in the draft)

You can see our solution in action for both cases (1) and (2) in the following video:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUwDxyILWBw]

So I hope this gives you some inspiration in designing tools for your game dialogue’s layouts.

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