Design: Transcend the Box from the Start!
"I want to make an RPG."
"I'm designing a first-person shooter."
"I've got this cool idea for an RTS..."
"So I'm working on this side-scrolling shooter..."

If you hang out in game development forums, you'll see postings like this. I've been guilty of saying things like this, too.

These are CATEGORIES of games. Neat little boxes invented by fans and marketing guys to put games in to add shorthand descriptors to make purchasing decisions easier. They aren't games. While it's definitely a good thing to borrow conventions from these categories, the danger you run into if you start your design process from inside that box, your thinking will never go far outside of it.

Sid Meier's approach (or at least the approach he used to take) was to make a game about a subject. He said he'd try to pull out all the elements of that subject (he used his original Pirates! game as the example) that sounded like fun, and see how many he could fit together. Getting them to fit together harmoniously could be a trick. In a speech he gave at GDC many summers ago, his talk was entitled (I think), "How I almost destroyed Civilization." I don't remember all the details (I didn't go... I've not been in the industry THAT long - I had to read about it in a magazine), but I remember he considered for a long time making Civilization real-time. That's a pretty defining characteristic to be undecided on.

What would the PC gaming landscape be if he'd only said, "I want to make an adventure game. I'll theme it based on human advancement through the centuries."? A lot less interesting, for one thing.

The popularity of game categories rise and fall pretty regularly. Once-dominant genres fade, new ones rise up, and sometimes old categories reappear and kick butt. In the mid-to-late 90's, the common wisdom was that RPGs didn't sell, and that it was a dead genre. Then we had Diablo and Baldur's Gate and Final Fantasy 7 happen, and pretty much knocked common wisdom on its butt. It wasn't about the categories - it was about the games! The categories grew stale because too many games that were all alike, and even the good ones were hard to recognize amongst the pile of derivative junk that were all alike. They all matched the boxes they were put in pretty well.

Twisted Metal was a game I worked on which actually created a (small) category. The "Vehicular shooter," I guess. Several people working on it had different ideas of what it would be. From my background, I immediately put it in the box I was most familiar with, the "sim" game. I was thinking of the Car Wars tabletop game and sci-fi "simulators." Some of the guys working on it were thinking first-person shooters in cars. Sony's producer on the project, Dave Jaffe, was thinking Fighting Games, of all things! Street Fighter in cars. The monstrosity we ended up with turned out to be none of these things, but it also turned out pretty cool, and was a signature series for the Playstation. It also spawned some pretty cool imitators, thus becoming a mini-category of its own.

Battlefront.com was formed by wargame developers who found themselves unable to work in the "mainstream" game industry anymore because the category was no longer a staple of PC games. The created a game called "Combat Mission" which transcended the traditional bounds of wargames on many levels. It still simulated a battle in a turn-based format, but comparing it to the traditional hex-grid-and-counter style wargames was difficult at best. They couldn't really get a publisher, so they sold the game mail-order. While the game didn't exactly take the world by storm, it was a major success. For the sequel, they apparently had no problem getting it onto store shelves. I don't know if they started with the idea of doing a wargame but abandoned all the traditional ideas of what a wargame should be later, or if they started by saying, "We want to fight a battle where you can really see the units duking it out cinematically and in 3D so it looks more like a war movie that you play in stages." However they did it, they created a revolutionary game that redefined the concept of a 'war game,' and they were apparently successful at it.

Don't start with a category and try to dress it up in a theme later. Don't limit your thinking by starting your design from inside an existing, well-established, well-explored category. Explore a theme from the start rather than simply dressing up an old idea in a new theme. You can always impose category restrictions on it later if and where you need to.

Transcend the box from the start!
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:31 AM (Permalink)