Three, four, give me more games, more!
What kind of questions you have to ask yourself before starting a video game development
In my last blog-post ‘One, two, games are coming for you’ I presented fundamentals, without which it makes no sense to start developing any game. Today, continuing the topic, I will describe some important questions you have to ask yourself when you start a game designing process.
QUESTION #1:
What is my game about?
If you want to create a game for people, not for yourself, you must be aware that it will be a product. A product just like a new smartphone or a car. Making games is soooo cool, but generally, it is useful to remember that it really would be good to treat them as regular products. It means they should promise a specific type of a gameplay and a particular experience. Games attract players by offering opportunities to meet different fantasies. You want your players to be a master monster killer with mutant powers, who lost his memory? Just do another The Witcher. You want them to start a career of the most famous basketball player in NBA ever? Start developing NBA 2K18. Or maybe you want them to feel the emotions of a father who has lost his sons? Then you can produce Heavy Rain.
Every single mechanics in your game will depend on this core fantasy, so think carefully before starting coding and try to understand the core fantasy of your game. Be as specific, as you can, because only then you will be sure about the final experience you want to deliver to the players. Having this final experience, you can describe all the factors that affect your planned experience. And then you can start thinking about mechanics that create these factors.
You can find some useful tips on how to work with this topic here:
QUESTION #2:
How do people play my game?
In other words — answer yourself what goal will the player achieve, what challenges will the player have to overcome and what reward will the player get for his struggles. This will lead you to the core gameplay loop — the collective set of actions that the player will be doing over a specific time frame, that defines the nature of the game:
In Call of Duty the core gameplay loop looks like this:
Run -> Aim -> Shoot -> Run.
In The Binding of Isaac:
Enter Room -> Kill Enemies -> Get Rewards -> Enter Next Room.
In Pokémon Go:
Catch Pokemon -> Train Pokemon -> Battle -> Catch Pokemon.
In Clash Royale:
Battle -> Wait -> Open Chest -> Upgrade -> Battle.
Always:
Goal -> Challenges -> Rewards -> Goal.
Challenges may include not only actions but also difficult choices and decisions, such as in The Walking Dead game. In this game, the goal is to survive, and the challenge is not to fight, but to make difficult decisions that determine whether or not our comrades will survive or something bad happens. The reward is an unforgettable emotional moment when the player thinks that what he has just experienced was really hard.
To sum up: describing the core game loop will define your game. The game will be about what the player is doing.
QUESTION #3:
Why is my game fun?
“Is the game fun?” is a bad question. You cannot make a game if you have any doubts about it. A good question is “why the game is cool?” because it is worth doing only cool things. What’s more — you will also need to convince other people that the game is fun, so you need to know perfectly well what’s cool and why. You must be 100% convinced that the game you devote your time and money to is really great. You also need to know how it stands out from other games. This is the moment when you need to think about USP of your game.
A unique selling point (USP, also called ‘key features’) refers to the unique benefit exhibited by a company, service, product or brand that enables it to stand out from competitors. The unique selling proposition must be a feature that highlights product benefits that are meaningful to consumers. Communicating the USP is a key element of branding. A USP isn’t necessarily a game mechanic. It can also be a specific visual style, an original location or story, or even a tremendous amount of content. For example, USPs for Metal Gear Solid 3 are survival and camouflage, for The Witcher — an interactive story and well-designed quests, and for Watch Dogs — hacking in an open world game.
Considering this issue will allow you to focus on designing the game at each level (like mechanics, art, sound etc.) properly.
QUESTION #4:
Who will play my game?
Here we are talking about the issue of your target audience — the group of people for whom you are doing the game. Who you do the game for affects how you do it. Each type of player expects something different. I wrote a short article about different types of players (check ‘Mind your own game’) but I have to remind again: if you are making games for people, not for yourself, you have to understand people. If you are making games for a majority, you have to understand the majority. When you are making games for the masses, be aware that masses do not think like you do! If you want to get acquainted (and you should, if you are reading this post) with some examples of taxonomies of players, see my article from the link above.
BONUS QUESTION:
Why do I want to do this?
Some companies are bad because they ask bad questions (“What do we want to do?”). Others are cooler because they ask “How do we want to do?”. The best companies, which are the rarest, ask: “Why do we want to do it? What do we want to change the life of the customer?”. Then they ask “How?”, and only then at the final part of this process asking “What?”.
People don’t buy what you do, people buy why you do it. Take fifteen minutes and watch Simon Sinek explaining this in his TED speech ‘How great leaders inspire action’:
Now that you asked yourself all the questions mentioned above, you should have most of the answers about the game you are going to create.
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