Issues in Game Design

Understanding The Audience

•The first step in designing a hit game is to understand the target audience. •These are the people that you (or your client) want to play the game.

•As a game designer, it is your mission to create a game that is not only enjoyable to that group but also easily playable by that group. Overly

complicated controls or intricate storylines will be likely to confuse and discourage a younger audience.

• Likewise, games with intense graphics that require high-end machines most likely will not be playable by the less savvy

Understanding The Audience• Even the coolest game ever created can turn into a miserable

experience for a user if he or she can't figure out how to play or even start the game

• Essentially, in order for a game to be fun, it has to be easy to get into and play. – Be careful not to design above the audience. – Make your game very easy to understand and control and make the

objectives obvious.• It is important to realize that the majority of people who will be

playing your game may not be as technically aware or as game savvy as you are.

• Most people playing your game for the first time will not give it more than a couple of seconds if it is difficult to figure out.

So, Who is This Audience?

• If you are developing a custom game for a client or sponsor, they will most likely have done the research and can tell you exactly which group's they are targeting.

– For instance, a client may request a game specifically targeted to girls age 6-12.

– Right away, we know that we aren't going to be proposing some thing akin to a first person shooter game. We would be more likely to propose a very cute, cartoon-style game such as Mystery Date.

– If you are developing a game to be placed on a game web site, you can ask your contact at that site for a breakdown of the site's user demo graphics.

– Most sites will make this information available to you if you are going to be providing content for them.

Who is the Audience

• These are very important questions to ask BEFORE getting started.

• To really push the envelope and develop a hit game that people will come back to play again, you need to understand who is going to be playing and with what equipment.

Demographics

• Demographics is a science to advertisers. • Basically, it is the statistical study of the

attributes of a section of the population.• Most demographic studies delve deep

into very specific aspects of a group, such as house hold income, number of children, eating habits, and so on. – We are going to be most interested in the

biggies, age group and gender.

Age Group

• The age group of your audience is probably the most important demographic factor to consider.

• A child will approach your game with a very different mindset than an adult.

• Advertisers have been segregating the population into age brackets since before anyone thought of creating a computer game.

Age Groups

• The breakdowns can get very specific and overlap in many cases

, but here are a few broad groups to consider.

• It is always best to aim a bit low in your range.

• Adults can more easily relate to younger material than kids can relate to more sophisticated material.

Kids 6-12 18-34

Tweens 9-14 25-34

Teens 12-17 35-44

12-24 45-55

18-24 55+

Gender

• Coupled with the age of your audience is their gender.• Boys, girls, men, and women all have different views

and may consider different games to be fun. • The browser-based game market pretty much seems to

be split evenly with women slightly higher in numbers.• That is not to say that no market exists for blood and

guts games of destruction and mayhem, but because the majority of Internet game players are female and might appreciate a less violent storyline

• Don't neglect to consider the lighter side of things when trying to target a broader range of people.

Gender

• To get a good idea of what kind of content the different groups might be interested in, look at television.

• Networks have a lot more time and resources to invest in targeting an audience than you do. Find some shows that your target might watch and then take note of the style of the program and the commercials that play on it. – You should be able to get a pretty good idea of what

that group would find interesting.

Playback Specs

• What kind of machine is the intended audience likely to have? What operating system and browser version will they be playing your games with?

• Make sure your game will work on a broad range of systems. – Not everyone updates his or her computer every time

some new technology is released.– Flash helps with consistent performance across

platforms– Keep an old machine around for testing

Computer Speed

• If your game is a word game, puzzle, or a memory match-style game, this is less of a concern

• Action games call for fast-moving graphics, sounds, and intense calculations to run smoothly, so you have to make sure the play back machines are up to it.

• Do frequent testing on your ideas to make sure you are not taxing the machine too much.

• You can use many tricks to optimize your game. These tricks come from two schools of thinking-more efficient code and more efficient graphics

Flash Version• Each new version of Flash offers

more and more cool features and power to help you create more and more cool games. Flash MX 2004 offers the most powerful feature set to date.– Be aware of the lag in what is available

to you as a developer and what the majority of people will have.

Screen Size

• Another important factor that is often overlooked is the size of the display screen.

• Most of developers have giant display screens when developing, and it is easy to forget that the players that will be playing your game will often be viewing on a smaller display screen.– A common screen size of 800x600 running the IE 6 browser will

have an approximately 780x436 available screen space for all the site content.

– If the site has a navigation frame or banner space, the space for your game will be even smaller.

– Keep your game small enough so that the user does not have to mess with browser scrolling or settings to play.

– People tend to get very aggravated if any Internet content requires them to change their desktop settings.

CONCEPT AND FLOW• it is important to begin with a solid, well thought out concept.

• No matter how small or simple the game might seem in your mind's eye, planning out the game play and supporting interactivity such as loading, setup, and help screens, improves the overall game experience for the user

• It can spare you a lot of head aches during development. • It is very easy to overlook some vital game elements when developing

without a plan, which could prove to be ten times more difficult to add later in the developmental process.

The Initial Concept

• Start with the game concept. – This includes the genre of game you'd like to

create,– the game's target audience

• Take what you learned about your target audience and tailor the game plan to fit.

– Overall feeling of what you want the game to be like.

The Initial Concept

• You should be able to condense your concept into a single sentence. – "Western style, comedic point-and-click shooter game where

kids challenge each other for bragging rights and high scores.“– This is just a starting point for us to build on,

• When beginning to develop the game concept, it is important to keep in mind the limitation of your skills as well as the limitations of the playback environment of your target audience. – Designing outside of these Limits can result in a game that is

either simply not playable by the intended audience or a game that never actually gets finished because some elements were too difficult for you to accomplish.

Develop the Theme

• Most memorable games have at least some hint of a theme or storyline to grab and hold the user's attention.

• A good title for the game goes along with the theme and also gives you a much more memorable game.

• The difference between a cool game and a cool game that people talk about is a good theme.

• Your storyline does not have to be complicated or even visually represented.

Storyline and Characters

• Expanding on the theme by developing a storyline and characters to support your game is a very effective way to add appeal and value to your game.– Sometimes you might want to develop the theme

even further and really set up a story that brings the user into the game.

– When you have your ideas together, you create a simple storyboard illustrating the sequence.

– A storyboard is really just a few drawings that describe the action.

• This will start to bring your ideas to life and will help others visualize the story.

Flow

• Now that you have your ideas down, make sure your game flows from setup through the game to whatever screens you have in there after play.

• Plan all this out ahead of time so that your end product has continuity

Flow• Make sure you account for the following:

• Loading Screen -This displays the loading status of your media. This can also contain some graphics to help set up the theme.

• Welcome Screen-The game should hold on this screen after load ing. This is where the user is presented with the story or mission and is prompted to play the game.

• How to Play/Help -Include a screen containing the instructions and controls for the game. This may be incorporated into the Welcome Screen or into a separate, always-available pop-up screen.

• The Game -This is the playable game.

• Game Over-This is the conclusion to the game. Player will see the outcome here. This screen should also contain a prompt for the user to play again.

Flow

• If your game is going to have multiple levels, modes, or special features during play, plan these out too.

• Nothing is more frustrating than trying to add a forgotten feature or screen after the fact, only to find that your code doesn't accommodate the change easily.

• This can lead to a very clunky and unprofessional game experience.

Scoring

• Point systems in games should serve as some kind of measurement of how the users are doing, something to compare to or compete with their friends.

• Reward people for doing well and for taking chances during play.

• t is important to explain how the scoring system works during the game set-up screens. This gives players the information they need to make split decisions during play, provides some anticipation, and overall makes for a more fun game

Scoring• The scoring matrix should be adjustable during development and

final ized during the testing process.• It is very difficult to tell when you are developing just how quickly

you can accumulate points.• As a general rule, set up the scoring matrix to give the player a

steady stream of easy, small point awards just for playing and then have larger point values for accomplishing difficult tasks or taking chances. – As difficulty increases, these bonus points should get more attractive.

• Scoring is your tool as a game developer to tempt the player to take chances, try new paths or moves, and keep things interesting.

Difficulty Levels

• Games are more fun to play if the difficulty ramps up as you go.

• Many players are likely to have never played the game before. First levels should be fairly easy to complete with no prior experience. – If a first-time player dies right away, he or she is likely to give up

and go play something else.

• The first level should introduce the player to all the controls and features of the game and demonstrate the basic skills that will be needed in later levels.

• Each level from there should be more and more difficult to complete.

Health/Lives

• The game can't last forever. Lives help you regulate the play time, and they give the player multiple chances to improve.– This could be anything from a health meter in

a fighting game to misses in a shooting game or lives in an arcade-style game. Let people fail a few times before you call the game over.

Bonuses and Power-Ups

• Another effective way to increase the fun of a game is to add in a few bonuses or power-ups throughout each level.

• A power-up is a term generally used to refer to an extra goody found in a game, such as health, an extra life, or just about anything special.

Easter Eggs

• Easter eggs are fun little surprises within the game.

• These can be any thing from extra levels to bonuses, extra lives, and so on. Easter eggs are generally secret and meant to be discovered by the player by accident.

Length of play

• How much time do you expect your game players to invest in one play? – It is also important to design your game to last

an appropriate amount of time for your audience. You'll want players to have enough time to get through a game without investing their entire afternoon and without getting frustrated that they didn't have time to get into the game.

HUMAN COMPETITION

– Competition can be the driving force behind hit games.

– People do love to waste time and fool around with cool games and gadgets on the Internet, it's true, but what people really love is to compete with themselves and others.

Real-Time Multiplayer

– Real-time multiplayer games offer competition with another player (or multiple other players) in real time.

– This means you are playing directly against another player.

–These types of games require an active Internet connection and a server side component to function.

High Score Lists

– High score lists are a very effective, passive way to enable competition between users.

– The simple act of providing a list of the top 10 players for a particular game can add the ever-effective competition factor to a simple, single-player game.

SAVING GAME DATA

•nabling users to save their games gives them a good reason to come back and play again.

• This is especially important for games that require a long investment in time to play or games that take a while to accumulate some kind of in-game status

Saving Game Data Option 1: Flash's Local Shared Object

• The SharedObject class in Flash works much the same way that a browser cookie works. – The data is saved locally on the user's

machine. – When you close the swf file, the data remains

and can be retrieved at a later date.

Saving Game Data Option 2: Server-Side Database

• Using a server-side database to save game data gives you more options.

• You can still save all the same user-specific data, but you can also accumulate data about groups of players, game activity and so on.

Saving Game Data Option 3: Local Files

• Some Flash add ons allow you to save local files. • You can use these methods to save all sorts of data that pertains to your

game, players, and so on, such as game setup deci sions, game state, high scores, and so on.