Make It Big In Games

Tim Aste, Push Button Labs‘ resident genius artist finished the logo for our upcoming Flash game, Grunts Skirmish. He created a nice blog post about the process he used to create this awesome logo in one day.

Grunts Skirmish Logo

BTW, this is the same game that I blogged about in the article The Art Of Backing Off. We did do the Game In A Week push to get it started, and now two plus months later, the game is starting to have some magic moments. At the end of the week, we did prove to ourselves that it was worth moving forward with the game.

Flash and the Push Button Engine (more info soon) are a dream to work with. It is so much fun going back to the simplicity of creating a 2D game. We are really happy with the way the game is turning out, and hope it will be a candidate for a lot of different platforms. Check out Tim’s blog if you would like to see some in-game screen shots and animations.

Making a game like this is kind of like making pizza. Using pizza ingredients will almost always taste good, but sometimes it can taste like heaven. I’m hoping for heaven:)

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
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Marek Bronstring, a game developer that I met on Twitter, writes a blog called gamslol where he recently penned a post entitled “Game Design 101 Rant: Over-Reliance On Documentation“.

Many people have asked me what a design document should be, and while I am not going to write that article today, you can read about what they should NOT be in his post. Here are some quotes:

If you already knew that game design isn’t all about writing design documents, then that’s great. I like you. We should do the secret handshake. As for everyone else, I’m sorry that you have been misled, and hopefully I can help make some amends.

But sadly there’s a myth that writing giant Game Design Documents (GDDs) is what designing a game ultimately boils down to. This myth needs a thorough pummeling.

I totally agree him. What he calls GDD’s, I like to call Big Ass Design Documents, or BADD for short. I have seen design documents that look like the old ancient bibles that sit on top of family pianos. While the developers think they are really solving a problem, in actuality they are causing bigger problems.

Nobody reads those tombs, and they are so large that, like a government legislative proposal, entire developers are sucked up just keeping the document up to date. Worse, designers get pissed at the programmers because they still ask questions about the design even though the designer thinks the answer is in the document. “Didn’t you read the f***in’ document?”, is the common phrase.

Just like “Agile Development” is kind of the new phrase for doing what you want just about any time you want, I think Agile Design is a much better way to go. Of course, you need a certain amount of design documents, but having a designer that can communicate his vision and a producer that can carry it out is much more important than the bureaucratic process of creating and maintaining a BADD.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games

After several months of being undercover we are finally opening our new start up to the world. Push Button Labs has put up an initial site. While we are not exactly announcing our products yet, there are some hints as to where we are going.

Our mission statement is:

Make great products with people that we want to work with, and have fun doing it!

On the “people we like to work with” side of the equation we are formally announcing our team, and I am proud to say that Rick Overman (systems engineering), Ben Garney (programming), Tim Aste (graphic design, art), and Sean Sullivan (web) are all on board. We have also worked out an arrangement with Adam Larson (programming) to work from Washington. All of these guys worked with me at GarageGames (or, in Rick’s case, at Dynamix, too), and are the absolute best at what they do.

Our first products should be released before the end of the year. I look forward to telling you about them.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games

What got me started on this article was a conversation with Ben Garney last week about how he was going through all of the old Nintendo games with an emulator. He noticed that playing with the tools to not have to go back to the start of the level after dieing actually made the games much more fun.

McMorbid - Game Frustration by *Rimfrost on deviantART
Last night my kids were at the house for dinner, and I asked Jon to bring Rock Band 2 so we could have a little social gaming interaction. After setting up the game, the first thing we had to do was go to the Internet to find and enter a cheat code to unlock all of the songs. It didn’t work at first, and for a while we thought we would have to play the game’s entry level songs. That kind of pissed us all off, and was the tipping point to make me write this article.

Why, after all of these years of game design evolution do we, as an industry, still rely on cheap design tricks like “unlocking” songs, starting over levels, only allowing saves at certain points in the game, etc.? Especially in a social game like Rock Band, what is the point of not allowing the owner to play all of the songs? Jon just paid $170 for the game. Isn’t that enough “earning”?

When a player gets killed in a platformer or FPS, why does he have to go back three levels or to the beginning of the level/chapter? Why can’t players save anywhere in a game? I know the answer that will be given, i.e. to give the player a feeling of anxiety and tension. I call bullshit on that answer. That kind of tension is not the kind of tension that a designer should want to create. External tension that the player simply does not want to waste more time traversing a part of the game already explored has nothing to do with the real design/game tension that should come from the game’s internals.

Playing LucasArts adventure games was more fun to me than Sierra adventure games because I knew I could not die. Even in the adventure games I designed and directed, I succumbed to the “player character must die” design mechanic. I remember distinctly caving in to pressure from Sierra, but mostly I remember it being easier from a design standpoint.

It seems to me that this pseudo role play, leveling up mechanic is industry design dogma, i.e. it has been done for so long that people in the industry don’t even question it. I know most people in the industry will be against my opinion here, but I have to speak up (again). The first time I raised this point was in 1989 when we were finally releasing our first Affiliated Label games, A-10 Tankkiller and David Wolf: Secret Agent. We put in a feature called the VCR Interface, that allowed players to move to the next level or fast forward past the part they could not conquer.

This post could be incredibly long, and I will continue to address this point as I start writing posts for my Games for the Non-Hardcore series. I look forward to seeing how all of you feel about this subject.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games

As I am settling into my new house (which is why I have not posted for so long), the lack of Internet and cable television has caused me to spend evenings watching Netflix movies, and I have seen some great ones. I finally got around to watching No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and Micheal Clayton. All of those movies were awesome works of art, and extremely inspirational to me. As I was watching the end of Micheal Clayton, where George Clooney’s character is just riding around the city in the back of a taxi with the wonderful, smug look on his face after taking down the bad guys, I just felt inspired to delv even harder into making games.

Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t make me want to make movies, or tell stories, or try to make games into movies like so many game designers seem bent on doing. No, it simply made me feel warm inside and inspired to work harder on OUR art form, i.e. making games as fun as I can possibly imagine them. Movies are good at looking into the human condition and telling stories. Games are good at interaction and providing people with a fun experience. Excuse me while I go work on that.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games