10
The year was 1993: My first ever video game was Super Mario All-Starts, a SNES bundle of the original Super Mario Bros., the Japan-only hardcore sequel, the American sequel, and the greatest platformer of all time: Super Mario Bros. 3. Somewhere along the way I picked up the player's guide, back when you'd actually buy a book with the answers instead of just going to GameFaqs like a pleb. What fascinated me the most was looking at how all the levels were laid out on the page. You could read the level from left to right, start to finish, just like you'd read text. And when I realized I could draw that, my own levels on my own paper, that's when I started creating games.
Okay, they weren't actually games you could play. But I "designed" plenty of levels for Super Mario All-Stars. No record of them survives, which is good, because I guarantee that 6-year-old me made the worst levels. As I grew up I found ways to make my game designs closer and closer to reality. I made paper board games. I built Lego and K'nex worlds and roleplayed with friends. It was hardly a unique journey. Plenty of game designers started out as fans, just as I'm sure plenty of authors started out writing horrible slash-fics. (This is not an invitation for you to share links to your slash-fic.)
In late high-school I picked up a program on my laptop called "Lunar Magic." If you're unfamiliar, this program allows you to open up a Super Mario World ROM and edit the game. It was easy to use for someone like me who had yet to learn the slightest bit about programming, so I started making my own levels. They were bad. I remember one in particular, a Ghost House. For the unfamiliar, Ghost Houses were not like regular levels. Instead of a fast-paced platforming adventure, you'd usually have a slower puzzle to solve, surrounded by invincible enemies, with secrets around every corner. So I thought "hey, I could make a hard, puzzley, secret level!" I came up with this ridiculous maze: there were multiple rooms that all looked identical, but you had to guess which door out of many took you to the next room. You wouldn't know you had progressed until you got to the final room. That was totally hard! I was proud of myself.
Note to future game designers: mazes aren't bad on their own, but don't do what I did. Looking back on it now, I'm not even sure my maze idea was a bad one. But it was a bad idea in Super Mario World. Certain games lend themselves better to certain playstyles. You'd probably have a fit if you were playing some thoughtful strategy game like Europa Universalis IV, and then you have to complete 17 quicktime events in rapid succession. Or in a totally hypothetical example, imagine you were playing a horror game set in some hilly area which is really silent, and then in the middle of it you had to solve an obscure puzzle based on your knowledge of Shakespeare plays. It's the same as my SMW romhack. Why, in this fast-paced, light, friendly platformer, did I build a brooding, slow, soul-crushing, random maze? What was I trying to accomplish? Who was I trying to impress? My mom? Your mom?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
I think about that game sometimes when I'm building in Minecraft. While most builders prefer to just make amazing static images, some aspire to create their own games within the game: Adventure Maps. It's a great goal and Minecraft is perfect for just this kind of thing. (Full disclosure: I'm building my own adventure map that I think is at the very least better than having a scalpel shoved under your fingernails. So I'm biased.) But building a cathedral in Minecraft and building a Zelda-inspired dungeon are two very different things.
So why not give a little tutorial on how to do game design? Yes, that's right! The whole long, winding intro was leading to an announcement that I'll occasionally blog about how to make good games. Thanks for sticking around.
The first question to ask (or at least among the first of many) when starting a new adventure map is "What is the goal of the player?" It's vital to ask yourself this and have a satisfactory answer, because like it or not your map has a goal. Everything created by everyone has some sort of goal. All design is goal-oriented in some way. Anyone who says "it's not about the destination, it's about the journey" is a filthy liar. As soon as it's about the journey, the journey itself becomes a destination! There is some purpose to all art, and any art in which that purpose is not immediately perceived is passed over as noise. Most people don't understand twelve-tone music and so dismiss it as noise, despite it being art. (Whether it's good art is up for debate.)
Let me say right away that the "goal" I'm talking about is not necessarily the endpoint of the adventure. We shouldn't say that the goal in Super Mario Bros. is to rescue the princess. You do that, but it's not the goal of the game. It's Mario's goal, not yours. In the game, you guide Mario around traps and obstacles to the end of each level. As the game progresses, the challenge increases. In order to find the princess, you as the player must hone your reflexes and your memory. You use your reflexes to adapt to what the game throws at you, and you use your memory to build a mental map of the game so that you can traverse it successfully. That's your goal: reflexes and memory.
It's hardly a rare occasion to confuse player goals with game story. But one is broad, vague, and useful, while the other is overly specific to one game. "My goal is to reach the top of the Citadel and defeat Dr. Breen" works only for Half-Life 2. No other game has that goal, so it's safe to say that's actually Gordon Freeman's goal, not yours. A better statement might be "my goal is to test my reflexes and participate in this narrative." Half-Life 2 fits the bill, but so do a lot of other games. In this case, broad strokes are better.
After all, life itself is made up of very broad strokes coming together to form specific instances. Let's say that I go for a walk down to the local sandwich shop and buy myself lunch. My goal is not to reach the sandwich shop. My goal isn't even to buy myself lunch. Really, I'm just hungry! My goal is to fill myself up with some kind of food so that I'm not hungry anymore. It's the least specific action but it's what I'm most in pursuit of. Everyone eats food to survive. Not everyone buys lunch to do it, and most people don't go to the sandwich shop in my local area. So, the specific actions of buying of lunch and going to the sandwich shop itself must be steps on the way to my vague goal of satiating my hunger. They are sub-goals, milestones to mark my progress. I know that I will no longer be hungry once I have done all those things, but all those things by themselves don't mean anything until I eat the sandwich.
In the same way, rescuing the princess is not the goal of Super Mario Bros., but it tells us that we have achieved our goal. Our real goal is to improve our reflexes and memory, and we know we've done that once we've finished world 8-4. Our real goal in Half-Life is to participate in a story, and we know that goal is not finished until Gordon Freeman is put in stasis by the G-Man yet again. Our real goal in chess is to prove ourselves the superior tactician and understand things like territory control and battle strategies, and we know we've achieved that goal when we say "checkmate." This is also why some games' endings feel flat to us. If the game is too easy, we dislike it because we didn't achieve our goal. Maybe Mario reached the princess, but we used three warp whistles to bypass all the challenges. We learned nothing. No goal was achieved, so we feel the game somehow is incomplete.
This is why you absolutely must identify this goal before you design anything. My SMW romhack Ghost House sucked because I hadn't pinpointed the goal of the game. HA, YOU THOUGHT THE BLOG INTRO WAS JUST RAMBLING BUT I PLANNED THIS CALLBACK THE WHOLE TIME. Anyway, one of the goals of games such as Super Mario World is - like all platformers - to test our mastery of the game's physics and control schemes. What part of trying random doors and hoping you guessed right tests that? Another goal is to test reflexes. What part of a long, boring slog with few input commands tests this? Yet a third goal is to test our memory of level layouts. If I built a level with multiple identical rooms and made the winning scenario random guesswork, how is that in the slightest bit a test of actual human memory? From the get-go I was building a bad game. I didn't have a good idea that fell flat - I had a bad idea, and no hope of making it a good game!
You don't need to know everything about your game. In fact, you can invent the goal before you even know the story or genre. I'd recommend doing just that. If you know the goal of the game, that knowledge can tell you what story or genre will be most appropriate. And you don't have to be overly specific with your goal, at least not at first. Come up with one, two, maybe three broad, vague ideas and build from there. It shouldn't take too long. After all, there aren't that many broad ideas out there. Just because I'm so nice I decided to include a few ideas for you:
Exploration: The goal here is just to see what's around. These maps need to be very open, without too much of a linear story, in order to allow players to explore at their own pace. Also, maps need to be large enough that a person can't feasibly explore all of it, at least not without a serious time commitment. Any puzzle, battle, or obstacle must be there in order to encourage the player to reach a new area for exploration.
Control/Destruction: Destruction doesn't necessarily mean killing. This map asks the player to gain control of all assets and reshape it as they see fit. Minecraft Survival mode does this perfectly! Your goal there isn't just to build - it's to completely change the world around you by breaking it down and re-building it.
Concept Mastery: Wargames and puzzles use this. Conceptual maps ask players to first understand an idea before finishing a challenge. Said challenges must not be so easy that they can be solved before learning the concept, nor so difficult that learning the concept becomes impossible. These maps must also set up strict rules which the designer does not break, as players rely on these rules to gain mastery.
Narrative Participation: The purpose here is not to challenge the player, but to guide them along and get them invested in the narrative. If you make a map with few obstacles but lots of dialogue sequences, chances are you're going for this one. If players routinely fail to reach the end of the story, it's the sign of a bad map.
Testing Reflexes: Minecraft doesn't usually do this. Still, parkour maps are probably the best examples you'll see. Good reflex maps provide challenges such that they cannot be solved by thinking about them, but only by performing them over and over until players stop making mistakes. At the same time, players must be provided time to react to obstacles. Otherwise you're no longer testing reflexes, but something else.
This should give you a starting place, as I'm sure there are more. There's also nothing saying you can't have more than one goal for your map. (I'd avoid using too many ideas, but combining two or three isn't unheard of.) When you first envision an adventure map, ask yourself what goal you are hoping the player achieves. Figure out what you want the player to do, and then design all the pieces of the game around that. It's just a start, but it's the right start.
Okay, they weren't actually games you could play. But I "designed" plenty of levels for Super Mario All-Stars. No record of them survives, which is good, because I guarantee that 6-year-old me made the worst levels. As I grew up I found ways to make my game designs closer and closer to reality. I made paper board games. I built Lego and K'nex worlds and roleplayed with friends. It was hardly a unique journey. Plenty of game designers started out as fans, just as I'm sure plenty of authors started out writing horrible slash-fics. (This is not an invitation for you to share links to your slash-fic.)
In late high-school I picked up a program on my laptop called "Lunar Magic." If you're unfamiliar, this program allows you to open up a Super Mario World ROM and edit the game. It was easy to use for someone like me who had yet to learn the slightest bit about programming, so I started making my own levels. They were bad. I remember one in particular, a Ghost House. For the unfamiliar, Ghost Houses were not like regular levels. Instead of a fast-paced platforming adventure, you'd usually have a slower puzzle to solve, surrounded by invincible enemies, with secrets around every corner. So I thought "hey, I could make a hard, puzzley, secret level!" I came up with this ridiculous maze: there were multiple rooms that all looked identical, but you had to guess which door out of many took you to the next room. You wouldn't know you had progressed until you got to the final room. That was totally hard! I was proud of myself.
Note to future game designers: mazes aren't bad on their own, but don't do what I did. Looking back on it now, I'm not even sure my maze idea was a bad one. But it was a bad idea in Super Mario World. Certain games lend themselves better to certain playstyles. You'd probably have a fit if you were playing some thoughtful strategy game like Europa Universalis IV, and then you have to complete 17 quicktime events in rapid succession. Or in a totally hypothetical example, imagine you were playing a horror game set in some hilly area which is really silent, and then in the middle of it you had to solve an obscure puzzle based on your knowledge of Shakespeare plays. It's the same as my SMW romhack. Why, in this fast-paced, light, friendly platformer, did I build a brooding, slow, soul-crushing, random maze? What was I trying to accomplish? Who was I trying to impress? My mom? Your mom?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
I think about that game sometimes when I'm building in Minecraft. While most builders prefer to just make amazing static images, some aspire to create their own games within the game: Adventure Maps. It's a great goal and Minecraft is perfect for just this kind of thing. (Full disclosure: I'm building my own adventure map that I think is at the very least better than having a scalpel shoved under your fingernails. So I'm biased.) But building a cathedral in Minecraft and building a Zelda-inspired dungeon are two very different things.
So why not give a little tutorial on how to do game design? Yes, that's right! The whole long, winding intro was leading to an announcement that I'll occasionally blog about how to make good games. Thanks for sticking around.
The first question to ask (or at least among the first of many) when starting a new adventure map is "What is the goal of the player?" It's vital to ask yourself this and have a satisfactory answer, because like it or not your map has a goal. Everything created by everyone has some sort of goal. All design is goal-oriented in some way. Anyone who says "it's not about the destination, it's about the journey" is a filthy liar. As soon as it's about the journey, the journey itself becomes a destination! There is some purpose to all art, and any art in which that purpose is not immediately perceived is passed over as noise. Most people don't understand twelve-tone music and so dismiss it as noise, despite it being art. (Whether it's good art is up for debate.)
Let me say right away that the "goal" I'm talking about is not necessarily the endpoint of the adventure. We shouldn't say that the goal in Super Mario Bros. is to rescue the princess. You do that, but it's not the goal of the game. It's Mario's goal, not yours. In the game, you guide Mario around traps and obstacles to the end of each level. As the game progresses, the challenge increases. In order to find the princess, you as the player must hone your reflexes and your memory. You use your reflexes to adapt to what the game throws at you, and you use your memory to build a mental map of the game so that you can traverse it successfully. That's your goal: reflexes and memory.
It's hardly a rare occasion to confuse player goals with game story. But one is broad, vague, and useful, while the other is overly specific to one game. "My goal is to reach the top of the Citadel and defeat Dr. Breen" works only for Half-Life 2. No other game has that goal, so it's safe to say that's actually Gordon Freeman's goal, not yours. A better statement might be "my goal is to test my reflexes and participate in this narrative." Half-Life 2 fits the bill, but so do a lot of other games. In this case, broad strokes are better.
After all, life itself is made up of very broad strokes coming together to form specific instances. Let's say that I go for a walk down to the local sandwich shop and buy myself lunch. My goal is not to reach the sandwich shop. My goal isn't even to buy myself lunch. Really, I'm just hungry! My goal is to fill myself up with some kind of food so that I'm not hungry anymore. It's the least specific action but it's what I'm most in pursuit of. Everyone eats food to survive. Not everyone buys lunch to do it, and most people don't go to the sandwich shop in my local area. So, the specific actions of buying of lunch and going to the sandwich shop itself must be steps on the way to my vague goal of satiating my hunger. They are sub-goals, milestones to mark my progress. I know that I will no longer be hungry once I have done all those things, but all those things by themselves don't mean anything until I eat the sandwich.
In the same way, rescuing the princess is not the goal of Super Mario Bros., but it tells us that we have achieved our goal. Our real goal is to improve our reflexes and memory, and we know we've done that once we've finished world 8-4. Our real goal in Half-Life is to participate in a story, and we know that goal is not finished until Gordon Freeman is put in stasis by the G-Man yet again. Our real goal in chess is to prove ourselves the superior tactician and understand things like territory control and battle strategies, and we know we've achieved that goal when we say "checkmate." This is also why some games' endings feel flat to us. If the game is too easy, we dislike it because we didn't achieve our goal. Maybe Mario reached the princess, but we used three warp whistles to bypass all the challenges. We learned nothing. No goal was achieved, so we feel the game somehow is incomplete.
This is why you absolutely must identify this goal before you design anything. My SMW romhack Ghost House sucked because I hadn't pinpointed the goal of the game. HA, YOU THOUGHT THE BLOG INTRO WAS JUST RAMBLING BUT I PLANNED THIS CALLBACK THE WHOLE TIME. Anyway, one of the goals of games such as Super Mario World is - like all platformers - to test our mastery of the game's physics and control schemes. What part of trying random doors and hoping you guessed right tests that? Another goal is to test reflexes. What part of a long, boring slog with few input commands tests this? Yet a third goal is to test our memory of level layouts. If I built a level with multiple identical rooms and made the winning scenario random guesswork, how is that in the slightest bit a test of actual human memory? From the get-go I was building a bad game. I didn't have a good idea that fell flat - I had a bad idea, and no hope of making it a good game!
You don't need to know everything about your game. In fact, you can invent the goal before you even know the story or genre. I'd recommend doing just that. If you know the goal of the game, that knowledge can tell you what story or genre will be most appropriate. And you don't have to be overly specific with your goal, at least not at first. Come up with one, two, maybe three broad, vague ideas and build from there. It shouldn't take too long. After all, there aren't that many broad ideas out there. Just because I'm so nice I decided to include a few ideas for you:
Exploration: The goal here is just to see what's around. These maps need to be very open, without too much of a linear story, in order to allow players to explore at their own pace. Also, maps need to be large enough that a person can't feasibly explore all of it, at least not without a serious time commitment. Any puzzle, battle, or obstacle must be there in order to encourage the player to reach a new area for exploration.
Control/Destruction: Destruction doesn't necessarily mean killing. This map asks the player to gain control of all assets and reshape it as they see fit. Minecraft Survival mode does this perfectly! Your goal there isn't just to build - it's to completely change the world around you by breaking it down and re-building it.
Concept Mastery: Wargames and puzzles use this. Conceptual maps ask players to first understand an idea before finishing a challenge. Said challenges must not be so easy that they can be solved before learning the concept, nor so difficult that learning the concept becomes impossible. These maps must also set up strict rules which the designer does not break, as players rely on these rules to gain mastery.
Narrative Participation: The purpose here is not to challenge the player, but to guide them along and get them invested in the narrative. If you make a map with few obstacles but lots of dialogue sequences, chances are you're going for this one. If players routinely fail to reach the end of the story, it's the sign of a bad map.
Testing Reflexes: Minecraft doesn't usually do this. Still, parkour maps are probably the best examples you'll see. Good reflex maps provide challenges such that they cannot be solved by thinking about them, but only by performing them over and over until players stop making mistakes. At the same time, players must be provided time to react to obstacles. Otherwise you're no longer testing reflexes, but something else.
This should give you a starting place, as I'm sure there are more. There's also nothing saying you can't have more than one goal for your map. (I'd avoid using too many ideas, but combining two or three isn't unheard of.) When you first envision an adventure map, ask yourself what goal you are hoping the player achieves. Figure out what you want the player to do, and then design all the pieces of the game around that. It's just a start, but it's the right start.
| Tags |
4084887
6
ReifytheJester
Night Cheetah
MMGplays
Koefdam
ScotsMiser
SculkwolfContent
lacuna
GoggleD0GG
The Amazing Digital Circus!
Create an account or sign in to comment.