Designing for yourself

Sorry for the lack of warning on my hiatus. I took off to visit some family in Alabama and didn't think to mention it until I was already there and occupied.


INTRO
A week before I left, I went on another trip... to my sister's psychiatrist. I have a sister with bipolar disorder. That and all sorts of other stuff (including schizophrenia) runs in the family. This time, I went for me. I've had a number of rather severe difficulties throughout my life. I finally decided that, since I've only gotten better to an extent on my own, I'd go to a shrink and see if a professional could offer any help I didn't already have access to (I already know a good bit of psychology, so there's not a lot I'm not already familiar with in some way).

Sure enough, the psychiatrist confirmed my self-diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome (AS), among other things (mostly related). AS is a high-functioning form of autism. The doctor's confirmation prompted me to buy a book on the disorder, which I've been reading up on over the past week. Mostly, AS means I experience emotions in a qualitatively different way than most people and that the social aspects of language have to be intellectually studied and maintained, rather than intuitively learned and accessed. There are many other components -- some peculiar, like a hypersensitivity in one or more of my senses (touch, for certain, but possibly others) -- but the gist is that I experience the world very differently than most people and will always be more of an observer, rather than participant, in society.

Like I said, I had already figured most of this out on my own. Because of my awareness of being extraordinarily unique, I've often worried about the challenges this creates for me as a game designer (if only an armchair designer). Are my aesthetic and practical preferences too unique to assume that there is much cross-over with popular preferences? How do my desires relate to those of others?


YOUR OWN VISION
Brad McQuaid recently caught a lot of grief over his management of the Sigil team and production of Vanguard. A common criticism was that he stubbornly enforced his own "Vision" of the game without regard for the opinions of others.

While I certainly agree that a good designer must be open to the opinions of others and be critical of his own ideas, it's a mistake to always approach game design as a democratic process.

Most of the great musical and literary masterpieces of history were created by lone composers and writers. Many of those master works were accomplished without any peer input whatsoever. Others were fully created, then only honed into a more refined work through peer review. Artists can perform great deeds on their own, and regularly do. Even in the modern industry of popular music, the hit songs of many bands are written by a lone songwriter.

Please note that this isn't to say collaboration doesn't often have tremendous value. As a songwriter who has participated in bands before, I know how collaborating with another inventor can change one's own style for the better and often result in a wonderful mix of strengths.

The point is that game design is not different in this way. If Beethoven could write parts for dozens of instruments to be combined into a single symphony, a game designer can single-handedly design the many mechanics which combine to form a video game. Like the writer's editor, help in honing the original work can be invaluable. But that part of the process is analytical more than creative. It's alright, and even the most successful route, for one man or woman to be alone in creative control (note that control is different than input).

Is it more than possible than a single person's creative vision can appeal to a massive audience? Of course. We see it all the time.

In my own personal experience, I've noticed that the works of mine (music, fiction, poetry, etc.) that are most popular are works I created for myself -- I am the audience. I created something meant to please myself, and it ended up pleasing lots of people.

And if I'm the freak that psychiatrist and everybody else thinks I am, then odds are you can design for yourself, too. ;)

Forget about demographics. Design for yourself.

Copy or move on?

Kendricke wisely reminds us not to shy away from old ideas. If some other developer came up with a great idea, don't be afraid to implement it into your own design, even if you come close to duplication. Give the original designer credit if it's a new idea, and that designer should be proud to have contributed to the community's progress. I've advocated designing for yourself before, but that was not to imply that any goal should be completely self-centered. The surest path to helping yourself is to help others.

Still, I think Kendricke's advice should be qualified a bit. A good designer (of anything, not just games) doesn't just come up with new ideas but doesn't just duplicate good ideas either.

Perfect the good
First, no idea is ever honed to absolute perfection. Ludwig van Beethoven put it well:

"The true artist is not proud. He senses dimly how far he is from the goal, and though others may admire him, he feels sad not to have reached the point where his better genius lights the way like a distant sun."

We will always fall short of the ideal, but that's no excuse to quit reaching for it. In game design, reaching the ideal refers as much to finding which features fit best together as it does finding the best possible iteration of that feature. No feature can reach its full potential if placed into a poor context. A poor context might include many other great features... but the wrong combination of features.

Multiple goods
Second, there's rarely only one form that can capture an ideal excellently. Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" and "Pretty Good Year" by Tori Amos (or insert whatever song and artist you prefer) both succeed admirably on many levels, particularly to communicate sadness, but they accomplish the same goal in different ways. In game design also, a design may have worked excellently before but there remain other ways to accomplish the goal.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But we shouldn't automatically steal any idea that works. Consider using that old idea, but also consider if there are other ways which better fit your overall design or which you, as an individual and unique designer, might be better able to realize.

Dinosaurs

As usual, I've rambled at length, so just skip to the last section ("Future Games") for the gist of it all.


UNIVERSAL INTEREST
My first obsession in life was dinosaurs. When I was five, I was already spouting off names like diplodocus, ramphorincus, compsagnathus and deinonychus. My parents bought me books and posters, watched TV specials with me, took me to museums and explained what they could (my dad was a geologist, so he wasn't completely in the dark).

And they bought me dinosaur toys. Not every kid my age had dinosaur toys, but we were all fascinated to some degree by tales and pictures of these "real monsters".

The difference between an animal and a monster, incidentally, is only mystery. Countless creatures we call animals today were commonly referred to as monsters until TV and other media took away their mysteriousness (giant squid and whales, for example). This may seem like fruitless philosophizing, but it's a psychological truth that developers should consider when creating beasts and NPCs for their games.


PAST GAMES
Dinowarz (http://www.vgmuseum.com/end/nes/a/dinowarz.htm), on the NES, is the first game I remember playing involving dinosaurs. It may have been the first "mech" game, placing the player in the role of a man controlling a robotic T-rex. Your dinosaur-mech fought with bullets, lasers and grenades. Really, it wasn't heavy on dinosaurs (and that was only half the gameplay, as you can see from those screenshots), but the player did have to face other mechs fashioned after Cretaceous dinosaurs. I liked the game.

Primal Rage (http://www.consoleclassix.com/gameinfo_primalrage_smc.html) of the SNES is the next one I remember; "Street Fighter with monsters". Honestly, I can't remember whether I liked it or not, which means probably the latter. The label "dinosaur" applies here even less than in the last game.

Turok 64 is probably the only dinosaur game most gamers are at least passingly familiar with. Once again, dinosaurs are mixed into a sci-fi setting. This time, though, we've got real dinosaurs (though not the main enemies). As I recall, this game came out shortly after the first Jurassic Park film, thereby taking advantage of a spike in dinosaurs' popular interest (particularly in velociraptors). The game was so popular that Acclaim made it into a trilogy; each focusing on humanoid enemies and sci-fi weapons, but also acknowledging the raptors as a favorite being in the gameworld.

These are the only 3 other games with dinosaurs (loosely labelled) that I can recall playing extensively. Xbox has a game called Dinosaur Hunting (http://screenshots.teamxbox.com/gallery/782/Dinosaur-Hunting/p1/), which I've never played, and Xbox 360 has King Kong (
http://screenshots.teamxbox.com/gallery/1285/Peter-Jacksons-King-Kong/p1/) ...I played the PC demo (beautiful graphics, if nothing else). I never owned a Playstation or PS2, so maybe there's something I missed there. There have been a few games involving dinosaurs for the PC over the years, but I don't recall any attracting much attention in the industry.


FUTURE GAMES
So anyway, what's the point?

Well, the topic of dinosaur games rose to mind when I was playing this free casual PC game by (http://www.crazygames.com/game/flow). One of the creatures reminded me of trilobites (http://www.trilobites.com/site/index.cfm), the most commonly recognizable animal of the fascinating time from the Cambrian through the Devonian in which sea-life was still the big show.

A blog on Koster's site (http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/09/25/flow/) convinced me that I'm not the only one who can be absorbed by such simple gameplay, well-presented.

The combination of those two realizations makes me wonder how easily kids and adults alike could be captured by a dinosaur game that places the player in the role of a realistic dinosaur.

Player actions in Flow consist only of chasing prey and evading predators. That's it. The only goals are to make your creature grow, to unlock new creatures and to explore (discover new creatures). The presentation contributes greatly to this game's appeal, but I'm mainly interested in learning from its structure. The heart of the game is suspense (will I escape? will I catch it? what's that lurking just out of sight? etc).


Now, picture yourself controlling a dinosaur in 3rd-person (or 1st-person?) view, chasing and fleeing from other dinosaurs. Imagine your dinosaur growing with each meal...gaining strenth, endurance and speed. Finally, as an adult dinosaur, you can save that particular beast to your character-select screen and attempt survival as a new species; or continue exploring the wild landscapes to see how well your creature matches up with other species.

It could be a top-down world, ala Flow (for simplicity), or an extravagant (but developmentally expensive) 3-D world, like an MMO. Either way, there is considerable appeal to a wide market, and any number of the following features could be applied to the basic concept:

• Educational. A 3-D world with realistic (according to current paleontological theory) animal models, behaviors (diet, animation, vocalization, etc), habitats, etc. All you have to do is label the creatures, add a brief description (that the player can easily skip past) at its selection screen, and parents and teachers will love you. You might even be able to market the game to entire school districts.
• Difficulty Selection. For the young child or most casual gamer, the gameplay never has to move beyond simple movement commands, and the movement of all creatures other than the player's avatar can be slowed or their A.I. diminished. As A.I. is concerned, not only are there opportunities like that of raptors as pack hunters, but there are behaviors of many other kinds, like triceratops presumably circling around their young to protect them (like elephants and bison have been known to do). The latter features can be scaled for two or more further difficulty settings. Growing creatures can gain access to special abilities (like a tail swing for an anklyosaur, a leap for a velociraptor, or headbutt for a pachycephalosaurus). A greater difficulty setting might also add hunger and starvation; a medium difficulty might cause the player's creature to lose strength or speed after a long period without food; a high difficulty might make that loss constant, similar to Dead Rising's diminishing health mode.
• Land or Sea or Sky. The game can focus on as few or as many environments as desired, and the developer can choose to make them zones or seamless.
• Any Time. The game might be limited to only dinosaurs, only Cretaceous dinosaurs, or it might span all of prehistory (from simple aquatic creatures to mammals of the last great ice age).
• Character Customization. Paleontologists usually have only vague knowledge, if any, of these creatures' aesthetic appearances. That could be reflected through customization options of color, skin type (fur, bare, feathers, scales, etc) and patterns/camouflage.
• Multi-player. There might be ways to create a system similar to the trading card system Spore is said to currently have. Cooperative gameplay is a possibility. The game might even be made into an MMO, with players hunting and fleeing each other, with a chat window (toggleable) in one corner. If there were not uniform limits to adult creatures, players might even compete by trying to become the most powerful, most elusive or otherwise "best" creature.
• Fantasy. And the alternative to realism, of course, is fantasy. All of this could be used as merely a foundation for a much more expansive game. Personally, I'd be interested in creating both realistic and fantastic versions, but the realistic version could achieve much more impressive marketing appeal (for being educational).
• Player-created Content. At least a small bit of fantasy opens the door to allowing players to create and share their own virtual worlds, designing habitats and populating them preferentially. The trading card idea also ties into this.

Oh, and one last thought. If someone began such a game this year, they could release it alongside the release of the Jurassic Park 4 film (I think the script is finished, or almost, and they're looking for a director now). That's free and significant publicity. Considering Spielberg has demonstrated interest in our industry, you might even be able to work out a cooperative marketing deal (he'll advertise the game, perhaps even on the next DVD and/or DVD-set, and the game will advertise the movies).