Make Games

A half hour into Earthworm Jim on SNES, and three things became painfully clear to Andy (Hull) and me: 1. wow, Earthworm Jim is a worse game than we remembered, 2. Earthworm Jim was designed by visual artists with little experience in game design, and 3. modern studios haven’t learned from Earthworm Jim, because some of their games share a lot of its negative traits.

Ultimately, what we enjoyed about EWJ were its quirky characters, humor, and animation, which were unmatched at the time. But it’s because those elements came at such a premium that it pales in comparison to other run n’ guns and platformers of the era, like Contra or Mega Man. Though Jim and his cohorts are remembered fondly (and with good reason), it’s not likely to be a game we’ll come back to very often.

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In the April 2011 issue of Edge magazine, From Software’s Hidetaka Miyazaki outlined the five key criteria by which his team is balancing the difficulty of Dark Souls:

1. Any player can clear any obstacle simply by learning from mistakes and paying close attention.

2. The reasons for failure must always be clear and understandable.

3. Every problem must have multiple solutions, so that the player can tackle it in whichever way they want.

4. The game’s controls can never be a factor from which difficulty is derived.

5. There must be the possibility for miracles to happen - those magical moments that spread stories outside of the confines of the game world.

“So long as an obstacle passes those five criteria, we are happy that we have achieved the maximum level of difficulty, while retaining the necessary element of fairness.”

At this year’s Game Developers Conference, I gave a 30-minute talk with my friend Andy Hull about Spelunky and how it went from being a freeware PC game to the XBLA project that we’re both working on right now. Overall, I think the talk went quite well (whew)! You can find footage of the talk somewhere on GDC Vault, but unfortunately, you have to be a registered member of something or another to view it, so I provided the slides here, with some extra commentary.

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One of the many things I heard this year at GDC that stuck with me goes something like “design your game for hardcore players first, then make it accessible for casual players.”  I’m probably butchering it a little bit - I heard it from my friend Mark Johns, who attributes it to Blizzard.  Who knows?  Maybe the original saying was “Anchovies are the best pizza topping.”

In any case, I like it.  The implication, to me, is that if you start with a shallow game you’ll end up with a shallow game, no matter how many doodads you stick onto it.  Instead, start with something deep, complex, and satisfying, and then polish it up.  Makes sense.

It also answers simply the question that is on every game designer’s mind: “who should I be designing for?”  Other than “myself”, the answer is not “hardcore” or “casual” (or the nebulous “core”), but “hardcore first, then casual”.

Defining hardcore: to me, these are the players who will enjoy your game at its deepest level, who will discover things about your game that you never knew existed, and who will champion your game and give it life for years to come.  They’re also the players who might turn off casual players by calling them “scrubs”, or telling them that they just aren’t good enough… or that they “don’t get it”.  But I think the benefits of having a hardcore fanbase far outweigh the consequences, and for every asshole who wants to shut new players out you’ll have a knight who wants to spread their infectious enthusiasm for your game far and wide.  (See: the Street Fighter and Dwarf Fortress communities)

As a game creator, I like the idea of converting casual players to the cause, rather than conceding things to them, or “dumbing down” my game for them.  I’ll enjoy the game more, they’ll enjoy the game more… everyone will enjoy the game more.  In game design as in anything else, I believe that win-win situations do exist and we should be seeking them out.  This idea - ”design your game for hardcore players first, then make it accessible for casual players” - seems to me like the best way to approach a win-win situation.