Keep it simple, stupid
While at Flash on the Beach last year, one thing that was gotten across quite a lot was the “KISS” principle, or “Keep it simple, stupid”. The basic idea behind this is that when designing something (this principle applies to a great deal, not just games), simplicity is one of the most (if not the most) important things to consider.
While reading a forum thread about Valve’s latest game Left 4 Dead, I noticed a lot of people were being armchair designers and suggesting “cool things” to add to the game that they thought would improve the overall experience. I’ll list a few of them here and why they wouldn’t work:
- Having other groups of survivors holed up in various locations. You could barter with them and trade ammo for medkits or vice versa! Or you could just kill them and take their stuff! One of Left 4 Dead’s main strengths is its fast paced gameplay and the high level of tension it maintains throughout, giving you the feeling that you are never safe. Stopping to barter either means you break the pacing and tension while you shop around (by stopping zombie attacks while you interact with the survivors) or you are constantly being attacked while shopping, making the exchange annoying as hell. Either method wouldn’t work.
- Have a huge open world city with a start area and a target area. You could take any route you want to get to the goal! Valve originally had something like this in mind but they found that players would often get lost as there was no clear way forward. As they explored the city, they would often end up at places they had already been or run into dead ends, getting frustrated. These problems go away as players learn the layout of the city, of course, but once players know the layout of the city they also know the best routes. Once players find a “best” route, even if it only shaves seconds of the overall travel time or is only marginally easier than other routes, they will always use this roure, to the total exclusion of others, turning it into the linear game it is now, except with huge amounts of wasted time and effort given to the areas that players will forget about. Valve applied the KISS principle and resigned the levels to be simpler and more linear.
I mentioned above that players find a “best” way to do things and stick to this no matter what. This is true in most situations (well, why would you do things worse?) and can especially be seen in online games like World of Warcraft. In WoW, you can compare two damage-dealing classes and if one does, say, 1100 damage per second and another does, say 1045 damage per second (5% less), everyone will consider the latter class to be vastly inferior than the former, despite the fact that a 5% damage difference is largely irrelevent in all but the most cutting edge of content (which only a small proportion of players will ever experience). This is foolish behaviour but it exhibits itself whenever some level of competitiveness is present in online games. However, it’s a matter of psychology rather than pure game design. I’m also digressing a lot.
So yeah, keeping it simple. When designing a game, you will inevitably think of cool things to add to the game that you (and your friends) think will make the game that much better. But will it? Be careful with every feature you add to the core gameplay and really ask yourself “is this worth it?” as good gameplay is a volatile mistress who can be upset by the slightest thing.
An example of this in one of my games, Helix Defense, I thought about adding boss character waves in, where instead of 10 ships attacking there would be a single really strong ship. I tried it briefly but something about it bugged me. I took it out in the end, mostly for reasons of turret balancing (the game is balanced around all turrets being roughly equal; having waves with a single strong enemy skews this by indirectly making turrets that attack a single target better and turrets that attack multiple targets weaker).
When I released the game there was only a single enemy type whose health and speed increased for every wave. All the turrets were roughly equal at killing these enemies, which I liked. The game was simple and easy to pick up while still maintaining a good level of variety, which I also liked. However, I now think there really should have been more variety with the enemies. One of the main things I noticed from people who played the game was that people almost always ended up using the chain turret exclusively (along with the slowing turret, which was always essential), even though it was only a little bit better than the other turrets. This goes back to the player behaviour thing I mentioned above.
The game was too simple, in the end. There was very little to differentiate the turrets (aside from the slowing turret, again) as their only job was to do damage to enemies. There should have been some other incentive to use every turret to encourage the use of all turrets. Perhaps having different kinds of enemies that are susceptible to different kinds of turrets would have solved this? It would take experimentation to see if this is the case or not.
These are the things I have to consider when designing Helix Defense 2 (hoping to come up with a better name for it).
(You may have noticed that it hasn’t been released yet, despite I said it might be done in january! Well, between work and family i’ve been quite busy. I’m still working on it, I promise!)
That’s enough rambling out of me for now. Tata.
Twitter
http://www.twitter.com/kylerodgers
