Letting Go

During the creative process of designing a game, you come up with thousands of great ideas and notso-great ideas. Sometimes you come up with ideas that seem like amazing groundbreaking concepts. Occasionally, these ideas just dont work. Whether for technical reasons, world continuity and design considerations, or simply because theyre just not fun to play, these ideas need to be changedor set

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aside. Sometimes, this can be a simple matter when you try something out and realize that it isnt fun or simply doesnt look right. Other times, this can be an extremely difcult decision because you can see how it might work and are willing to try and nd ways to keep the idea alive. For example, we had a major shift in the look and the associated design elements of WarCraft III after a year or so of development, when we moved away from the over-the-shoulder angle associated with Hero units. The interesting aspect of this decision was that although it probably caused some concern and confusion to our players, the development team actually found that they could now make the game they envisioned; the rest of our design concepts related to melding role-playing elements into a strategy game were basically unaffected. Dumping an idea that you have conceived, fostered, and perhaps even implemented is a painful but necessary process. Not everything works out as planned, and its difcult to admit when that gameplay mechanic you thought would revolutionize the industry turns out to be an adventure into tedium. When youre faced with the need to pull the plug on something in the gameno matter what the causeyou have to do so as quickly and painlessly as possible. Dont be afraid to scrap ideas because many times youll replace them with something far better or simply nd that [you dont need] anything there at all.
Bill Roper says that WarCraft III is one of our greatest accomplishments to date. We started out hoping to create a tting sequel to WarCraft II, and we ended up crafting a world of epic proportions. WarCraft III offers players an incredibly fun and dynamic experience.

(Used with permission by Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.)

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Taking Time for Tools
The design and implementation of the World Editor for WarCraft III was key to the successful realization of the role-playing game aspects found in the single-player campaign. The level designers worked handin-hand with the editor programmer to create a tool that was not only powerful but also easy enough for them to use day in and day out. While its not uncommon to see tools created without much thought given to the end user, the growth of the World Editor was a cooperative venture between the people making it and the people using it. This was essential, not just because we intended to ship it as a part of the game, but also because we knew that we wanted to free up our game programmers as much as possible from having to do special-case programming for the campaign. By putting a heavy focus on designing a robust tool that the level designers could use to modify their work and then immediately review it in the game, we streamlined our development process [and gained] many more chances to iterate on those designs while reducing our required quality assurance testing time [see Chapter 17, Proper Game Testing]. Its said that a craftsman is only as good as his tools, so giving your craftsmen the best possible tools will help them create the best product they can.
Is there anything that Roper wouldve done differently? We should have spent more time in designing the game before we put as many programmers and artists on the project as we did, he admits. Roper explains:
By nature, game design is a very organic and iterative process, but in our excitement to start making the game, we honestly put too many people on the project at too early a stage. Its difcult to gauge the proper numbers to assign to a project in the rst weeks and months, but the biggest lesson we learned was to put as many designers into the mix as possible. Also, keeping multiple high-end designers in addition to the level designers on the project until the end was something we didnt address until later in the development process. Fortunately, we caught this issue before it was critical, but it certainly set back our balance and campaign designs to some extent.
In addition to the Legendary Heroes and the role-playing game avor, what else makes WarCraft III stand out from other real-time strategy games? While there are many elements that go into any successful game, I honestly feel the character and emotional bond gamers get while playing WarCraft III makes it far different from any strategy game we have ever created.

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responsive and iterative rhythm section. They listen to what the soloist is doing and then play with it and off of it. In turn, the soloist responds with his own intuitive iterations or departures. When a second soloist joins the fray, his performance is augmented by what he has just heard only if he can build on and learn from that experience. As game developers, we shouldnt be afraid to play other companies games and learn from what they did. We also need to play our games and learn from our own mistakes and failures. The rest of the equation is to listen to the people who buy our games and see what they want out of a play experience. All these things can inspire new chains of thought and can lead to new ideas in the design of game mechanics, world concept, and story.
In Chapter 21, Breaking into the Industry, Bill Roper offers some advice on breaking into the industry.
Brian Reynolds, Big Huge Games
Throughout his illustrious career as a programmer and game designer, Brian Reynolds, now president of Big Huge Games, worked alongside Sid Meier at Microprose and Firaxis on such remarkable strategy games as Colonization, Civilization II, and Alpha Centauri. His latest project is Rise of Nations. Read more about this game, published by Microsoft Game Studios, at www.bighugegames.com. It seemed a simple task for Reynolds to list his best advice for strategy game designers and support these words with an example from past or current projects:
1. Get something running in the rst month that you can actually play. (It doesnt matter if graphics arent so great.) With Civilization II, we had the game to where you could play it all the way through over a year before it shipped (even though it was all-new code from the original Civilization). We knew that we needed to play and try out all the new things we wanted to add and that wed need that much time to get the balance and AI tuned. For our current game at Big Huge, we had something playable by our rst milestone, even though all we were actually required to deliver was a design document. Strategy games are extremely complex to designalthough the individual components look deceptively simple, having a lot of simple moving parts makes for a very complex overall balancing task. Its easy to look at a strategy game and say, I could make this better; Id add this and this and this, but very hard to actually integrate lots of new parts into a game system without breaking the things that were already fun. To balance all the moving parts correctly, theres no substitute for actually playing your own gamethe combinatorial explosion from all the moving parts makes it impossible to truly anticipate or tune results on paper in a design document. The sooner you get your game running, the sooner you can actually get to work on making the game fun and making it balanced. Both fun and balance tend to be taken for granted by novice designers. They think, If I make a game about topic X and it has features A, B, and C and technology J, then it will be fun, but as it turns out, fun and balance both take a lot of hard work.

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2. Each strategy should have both a unique strength to make it cool and a unique weakness to keep it from being too powerful. Rock, paper, scissors is the best model for game balance. Our current real-time game is based around a rock, paper, scissors model for game balance. That is, unit A is really strong against unit B, but weak against unit C; whereas B is weak against A and strong against C, etc. That way, no unit is so powerful that its unbalanced. Also, all units are strong against something, so theyre cool to build in the correct context. 3. Play your game regularly. If you have multiplayer [capability], get that running early so that you can balance it. By the time our new game ships, well have had our multiplayer running for at least 18 months. Weve built a special multiplayer lab with eight workstations side by side (its modeled on the lab we saw at Ensemble Studios), and we run at least one multiplayer game a day thereoften several. We have novice days, pro days, intermediate days, freefor-all days, and so fortheveryone in the company signs up and plays. Everybody in the company gets to see their own work interacting with the rest of the game, gets to see the big picture, and has a chance to contribute to the design and balance. The progress on design and game balance was dramatic once we got the lab in, and we have plenty of time left.
Most of Brian Reynolds advice in this book is found in the chapters on programming (see Chapter 11, Programming Theory) and articial intelligence (Chapter 12, Articial Intelligence [AI]), as well as on how best to break into the industry (Chapter 21).
Bruce C. Shelley, Ensemble Studios
Bruce Shelley is a lead game designer and spokesman for Ensemble Studios, the development studio that has created award-winning and critically acclaimed real-time strategy games for Microsoft. In the past, Shelley has worked on computer games such as Civilization (Microprose), Railroad Tycoon (Microprose), and others. His latest project was the million-unitseller, Age of Mythology. Shelley offers some key tips for those starting out in the industry:
Be familiar with lots of games, but especially those most like the game you most want to design. Consider which parts of a game are working and which are not. Providing a player with interesting decisions is the rocket science of game design. If you agree, then consider whether a game youre playing or designing is providing interesting decisions. When you attempt to add a new piece to a game, ask yourself whether it will add interesting decisions for the player to deal with. When considering a new game, look at the competition rst and make lists of features they do well, poorly, or not at all. The features they do well are the minimum requirements for your game. The features they do poorly or not at all are a list of opportunities where you can differentiate your game and offer innovation. Always seek to differentiate and innovatedont clone around.

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On providing direct examples, Shelley says this:
When we set out to make the original Age of Empires (AOE), we made our lists of features that were done well, poorly, or not at all in games like Civilization, WarCraft, and Command & Conquer. From these, we built our list of must-have features for AOE, such as hidden maps, economic buildup phase, empire building, town conquest, great multiplayer, scenario editor, and differentiated civilizations. Then we built the list of features that would differentiate Age of Empires because other games were not doing them well, such as historical theme, random maps, non-cheating AI, levels of difculty, realistic graphics (not cartoonish), and multiple victory conditions. By meeting the competition where they were strong and providing clear differentiation and innovation in AOE, we created a game that was able to be quite successful in a very competitive genre (50+ RTS games in development in 1997). Competing games that fell by the side came up short mainly because they didnt sufciently differentiate and innovate from the best games in the genre already available.
Check out this screen grab from Shelleys latest, Age of Mythology, published by Microsoft Game Studios in 2002. Talk about gorgeous graphics!
(Used with permission by Microsoft Corp. and Ensemble Studios, Inc.)
Shelley says its critical for a game designer to keep these three pointers in mind when starting out:
1. Design for a broad global audience, not a narrowly focused, especially hardcore audience. The majority of game buyers are casual gamers, and too many games are beyond their skill or tastes.

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2. Within a specic genre, make your game different in terms of topic, look, and feel. At the gameplay level, innovate new features and gameplay. Dont imitate successful games only to the point of being at least as good as they are on their strong points. Create a new experience with your game. Nobody buys imitations. 3. After you have a basic design document, prototype the game quickly and thereafter design by playing. Play every day, make adjustments, get opinions, recode for tomorrow, and play again. If you have enough good gamers giving comments and your instincts as a designer are good, youll design a fun game.

Shelley supports this advice in light of his latest project, Age of Mythology:
1. Included within Age of Mythology are multiplayer games, a single-player campaign, random map Solitaire games, and a variety of game types such as death match. We believe that gamers of all skill levels and from all global PC markets will nd a satisfying way to enjoy our game. We think this is reaching out to a broad global market, as all of our past games have done. 2. Adding the mythological elements and moving to 3D technology will make our game different from other RTS games, including the Age of Empires games. At the gameplay level, we think weve innovated with myth creatures, god powers, and more subtle changes. Overall, weve made Age of Mythology both different and innovative to provide a new experience. No one will consider it a clone of something else. 3. Age of Mythology has been playable since early 2001. Since then, we continued to design the game by playing every day, making changes, and recoding through thousands of iterations.
Shelley is also known for this piece of advice: A game has to have a great rst 15 minutes!
The concept of a great rst 15 minutes was Sid Meiers. He mentioned to me that one of the reasons he thought AOE did well was because it had a great rst 15 minutes. The point is that a game has to engage a new player within 15 minutes of that person sitting down to play. If not, the player is likely to give up and never try the game again. So the start of the game has to be engagingget the player absorbed by presenting a lot of interesting decisions that pile on top of one another. Another one of Sids phrases was the inverted pyramid of decision-making. You want the player to deal with only a few decisions at rst, which multiply quickly, fully absorbing the player. Games that do this pull the new player in. In the original AOE game, for example, the map is almost entirely hidden at the start. The new player has a few villagers to put to work and use to explore. Once he or she has built more villagers and begun exploring, there are more decisions to be made: what tasks to assign to newcomers, where to place gathering buildings, which new directions to explore, what strategic choke points to watch, etc.

Its been said that a game designer need not reinvent the wheelthat its perfectly acceptable to improve on an existing formula. Does Shelley agree or disagree?

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The most valuable resource any game designer has is all the games that already exist from which we can get ideas. The risk is that we may do too much copying and not enough creating. Gamers want a new experience. It can be familiar or similar to other games theyve played, but it must also be different and innovative to be successful. Age of Mythology is a big RTS similar to many others, including our own Age of Empires games. Weve played and considered everything in the games that have been published. But weve also tried to create something thats different and innovative.
On creating an innovative yet accessible game, Shelley adds the following:
Basically, cloning a successful game is a recipe for disaster. We believe a new game must be clearly different from existing products or people will ignore it. For the Age of Empires games, the big differentiation was choosing historic themes when the competition was doing mostly sci- and fantasy. As a bonus, it turned out that there was a huge interest in the casual market for a historical RTS, which no one else was trying to ll. Innovation is important also, perhaps mainly with the hardcore gamers. They want a new experience. If a new game doesnt add much thats new and fun, they wont bother to put in the time to learn it. Graphic look and feel can be an important differentiation. Tony Goodman, our CEO and early art director, championed a fairly realistic graphic look and bright colors. The competition at the time was going with a more cartoonish look and often very dark and gloomy colors. We think now that our look was an important differentiator and another important key to attracting casual gamers. We think too many developers largely ignore the casual market, to their loss. Most game sales reside in the casual market, yet developers often try to outdo themselves focusing on what only the hardcores seem to want. Make commercial art, not ne art. When someone says theyre making the game theyve always wanted to make, the question is, how many of them does that person intend to buy? It makes much more business sense to say that youre going to make the game that you think millions of average casual gamers are going to want to own. Thats the kind of thinking that publishers want to hear.

Finally, Shelley was asked to be frank about what its like working with a powerful publisher such as Microsoftsomething many game designers are likely curious about! Shelley says the pros are that big publishers get shelf space; have marketing muscle; have PR departments; and are usually well organized for testing, localization, and manual creation. They do virtually everything better than the alternatives (small publisher, self-publishing). But he discusses some of the cons as well: They usually control the purse strings and can dictate schedule dates and budgets. Your game is just one in their portfolio. They may use it for strategic purposes good for their company, but not necessarily for yours (loss leader, bundling deals). Bruce Shelley offers advice on many other topics in this book, including writing design documents (Chapter 6, Creating Characters, Storyboarding, and Design Documents), coding realistic AI (Chapter 12), creating a good user interface (Chapter 14, The All-Important User Interface [UI] and Game Control), and breaking into the industry (Chapter 21).

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Peter Molyneux, Lionhead Studios
One of the computer game industrys most revered game designers is Peter Molyneux, the brilliant (and soft-spoken) managing director at Lionhead Studios. And talk about a track record! Molyneux is responsible for some of the most beloved PC games, including Populous, Magic Carpet, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper, and the Black & White series. Molyneux is currently overseeing a number of new projects, including Project Ego, Black & White 2, Black and White: Next Generation, and The Movies. Molyneux shares some advice he wishes he was told before he got involved in this industry:
1. Come up with a concept thats easy to explain in a sentence or so. This was highlighted to me by Bing Gordon at Electronic Arts back in 1993. I was heading up to a meeting to try to sell the concept of Magic Carpet. [As we rode up together in the elevator] I said that I was looking forward to making the presentation, and Bing replied that if I couldnt explain the concept on the way up then it probably wasnt a good concept. We were on the rst oor, and the meeting was on the second oor. Games that are easy to explain and that deal with subjects people can easily understand are always going to be more successful than more abstract ideas. 2. The most brilliant concept is useless unless you can think of the way that people will play the game. In the end, game design comes down to interface designthe key to making games playable is how youll get people to interact with your concept and how simple the interface is. 3. Dont be frightened to be original and innovative. Remember that the greatest game concepts and interfaces are yet to be designed; just because everyone else has done things a certain way previously doesnt necessarily make it the right and only way to do something.
Put to the testto support his advice with real-world examplesMolyneux passes brilliantly:

The idea of designing and building your own theme park was very accessible and clearin one sentence, you know all about the game and what you need to do to play it. Although this is the most perfect example, I can think of others. You play God in Populous, you play the bad guy in Dungeon Keeper, and you nd out who you are in Black & Whiteall are examples of games that explain themselves. In Black & White, we wanted people to be able to do anything they wanted in the game world, so using the hand meant we didnt have to use a lot of explanations in the interface (although for this reason I think the tutorial should have been longer).
Molyneux once said in an interview that he would prefer to make games with a shorter development period. He claries this point:

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The length of time a project takes is becoming a real issue. More power means bigger teams, having to take care of more than just graphics and programmingAI, physics, interfaces, gameplayand all of these elements need coding to be built from scratch. It makes the task of developing a game quite overwhelming. For a game to have the best graphics, sounds, and animation means that developing a game is becoming a Herculean effort. I hope that with better internal organization of our team, it will be possible to compress 34 years into 23 years.
Molyneux talks briey about programming in Chapter 11 and breaking into the industry in Chapter 21.
Peter Molyneux says, The greatest game concepts and interfaces are yet to be designed. Pictured here are a couple of sneak peeks at the upcoming Black & White 2.
(Used with permission by Lionhead Studios.)
Alex Garden, Relic Entertainment
Alex Gardens most recent venture, Relic Entertainment, is one of North Americas premiere game-development studios. Relics rst title, Homeworld, has won more than 50 awards, including the prestigious Game of the Year award from CNN.com, MSNBC, and the worlds largest computer game magazine, PC Gamer. Gardens latest game is Impossible Creatures, released in early 2003. This game allows players to make war-hungry creatures by combining animal traits. Garden was cornered to surrender some of his best-kept game design theories. Interestingly, his answers are similar to Sid Meiers advice:
1. Design around themes that youre passionate about. Life is short, and making games is supposed to be fun. Make sure youre having fun making games, and chances are that people will have fun playing them.

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5. If I had been present at creation, I would have given some useful hints. Goodman advises knowing your limits. Recognize your strengths and passions, and take advantage of them. For example, Goodman knew his knowledge of board games was very strong when he approached Age of Empires. 6. By the mile its a trial, by the inch its a cinch. Creating a game usually follows a topdown methodology, with game vision on top of the pyramid, game ideas and features in the middle, and low-level game mechanics on the bottom. Goodman explains, There is a method to this process. The top is where the vision is generated (How about a game where youre on a desert island?); the middle is the games features (And this is what well do on this island); and the bottom, the most crucial of the three, is how to implement these ideas in the game. According to Goodman, many game designers concentrate too much on the top two levels and not enough on how the play mechanics will work in the game. The bottom level is the hardest; the implementation of the details is key, says Goodman. He also says most design docs seem to rely on the rst two levels, when the emphasis should be on the implementation of the ideas into the computer and not just the ideas themselves. 7. Take note of the future; youre going to spend the rest of your life there. For the RTS genre to move forward, Goodman says, there has to be more to the game, and not just more of the same. He cites 3D action shooters as a genre that has evolved graphically, but not in gameplay (barring a few recent exceptions). With RTS games, try to foresee what will come down the pike and work toward bettering the genre. 8. Trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit. Time is your friend, says Goodman. Use your project schedule well. Age of Empires was a 1,000-day project; 500 of those were spent internally at Ensemble Studios, the other half play-testing by Microsoft. Bewarethe only thing that can kill a good game is a great game. Be realistic at the beginning of your project and keep in mind that many of the great RTS games, such as StarCraft and Age of Empires, took longer than average to complete, but look at the outcome! 9. Communicate your vision. One of the most important considerations while developing a game is communication. This is not only between a designer and his team, but between designer and publisher, the public, marketing, game critics, and testers. 10. Never put a glazed donut on a mouse pad. And other lessons learned the hard way, says Goodman. Some of his other lessons: Schedules are not more important than quality.

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Lets not tell them and maybe they wont nd out always backres; its no
different than when you were a kid.
For more information on Empire Earth and the design team at Stainless Steel Studios, visit www.stainlesssteelstudios.com.

Del Castillo gives some examples of his past or present work that reinforce what hes suggesting here on innovation and on adding an emotional layer to a game:
Innovation. When we conceived this game, it came from our ideas. We all came together and designed an RTS with no restrictions, no legacy, no need to be in the same universe as a predecessor. We were unbound by the past, and that allowed us to more fully reach for an ideal. Its the way it should be done. Too many people are held back by what theyve already created and the desire to get more money out of it in the form of an incrementally improved sequel. Battle Realms (BR) endeavored to innovate in two major ways. The rst is combat. First-generation RTSs did a great job of showing the potential of this genre, but inadvertently they were very production-oriented. Building was more important than ghting. In BR, terrain matters. Height makes a difference to combat effectiveness. Real line of sight makes reconnaissance, sneaking, and ambushing a real element in the game. The unit dynamics focus on the combat dynamic and incentivize spending more of your attention commanding the battles rather than landlording the village. The second major thing is to create more of a living world. There are a number of prongs to this, but it basically revolves around distilling more elements of reality and turning them into fun elements for the game. We incorporated a Living Resource System, which allows the player much more freedom. Horses are gathered and harnessed as pack animals or war steeds; water is used to put out res, grow rice, and quench the thirst of peasants. Weve tried to connect everything in some way, like the real world. Inspiration. Its about what I love, not what makes money this week. The inspiration comes from my childhood. Way too much D&D and the like mixed with way too many Kung Fu movies. Ive been a game master for paper RPGs since I was 14, so the world-creation part is denitely something I love.

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Living world and the Living Resource System. This affects things in three ways: It makes things easier to understand. It feels right when the men run at each other, when the re burns down a building or catches another building on re or is put out by your peasants. Players of RTSs have learned a vocabulary of what they can and cant do and what things mean. Were allowing them to do more, and that means changing how things work a bit. It connects everything. Water, as an example, can be used for many thingsput out res, domesticate horses, quench the thirst of peasants toiling to build a building or soldiers training, even make the rice grow faster. Connecting things in this way not only feels more natural or right, but also allows the player to easily shift his strategy and adapt to the enemy. It brings the world to life. We have units with more animations than ever before. Combats look alive as the units do different types of attacks. Birds y from the trees when men move through the forest. Vultures gather on the battleeld. Soldiers juggle or clean their weapons when left alone too long, and it affects their abilities! Removal of articial genre boundaries with the introduction of what other people would call RPG elements, but what I call character-investment elements. Genres are a thing of the past. Bringing in some of the growth and motivations from RPGs is very natural and allows for new cool possibilities in the game, to feel natural, and leave you asking, Why couldnt I do this before? Its all part of bringing the battleeld more to life. Allowing you to customize the characters is the rst step to giving them individual characters and allowing you to fall in love with them. If you fall in love with them, you wont want them to diethus creating the battleeld drama.

Ed Del Castillo offers some helpful advice on breaking into the industry in Chapter 21.