Defining Awesome

“Ultimately, sidetracking kills you”

 Donald J. Trump

The goal of the Game Designer should not be to stage the game.

That is a goal of a theater/movie director, a choreographer or even a writer.

Game Designers should design what the player can experience and come up with game mechanics that will allow him to do that.

Let me give an example. read more »

There is a well established trend in creating computer games these days. This trend is to make a game NOT fun at all. This happened a while ago and we haven’t noticed it because it didn’t happen suddenly. It was a  slow degradation.

How did it happen? I think because game developers forgot what games are meant for. Modern video games have in the essence become movies with rendered graphics. You only control how fast the movie progresses.

How many times have you bought a game thinking it delivered what it promised, only to experience the same repetitive gameplay over and over? These games are developed with a trailer in mind. Game companies try to blind you with flashy effects and trick you into buying the game – NOT fun.

The good news is that this trend is starting to reverse. The successes of indie games like Minecraft in the last year, tell us that millions of gamers are tired of mainstream games and are beginning to see what games should be like and what they themselves enjoy most. This is the beginning of a revolution. A revolution that will show you what video games were always meant to be…

This is where King Arthur’s Gold comes in. read more »

“If you please–draw me a sheep . . .”

When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey. Absurd as it might seem to me, a thousand miles from any human habitation and in danger of death, I took out of my pocket a sheet of paper and my fountain-pen. But then I remembered how my studies had been concentrated on geography, history, arithmetic and grammar, and I told the little chap (a little crossly, too) that I did not know how to draw. He answered me:

“That doesn’t matter. Draw me a sheep . . .”

But I had never drawn a sheep. So I drew for him one of the two pictures I had drawn so often. It was that of the boa constrictor from the outside. And I was astounded to hear the little fellow greet it with,

“No, no, no! I do not want an elephant inside a boa constrictor. A boa constrictor is a very dangerous creature, and an elephant is very cumbersome. Where I live, everything is very small. What I need is a sheep. Draw me a sheep.”

So then I made a drawing.

He looked at it carefully, then he said:

“No. This sheep is already very sickly. Make me another.”

So I made another drawing.

My friend smiled gently and indulgently.

“You see yourself,” he said, “that this is not a sheep. This is a ram. It has horns.”

So then I did my drawing over once more.

But it was rejected too, just like the others.

“This one is too old. I want a sheep that will live a long time.”

By this time my patience was exhausted, because I was in a hurry to start taking my engine apart. So I tossed off this drawing.

And I threw out an explanation with it.

“This is only his box. The sheep you asked for is inside.”

I was very surprised to see a light break over the face of my young judge:

“That is exactly the way I wanted it! Do you think that this sheep will have to have a great deal of grass?”

Most comments below my last post are amazing. Thank you for them. I decided to post one little gem here from Snow:

“I mentioned Mare and Raigan. I was chatting with them once and we all came to a simple conclusion. If you are creating a game and you want to focus on fun. Sometimes it’s best to set a bunch of restrictions first. You already did this with Warmonger. You take out the pen and paper and limit yourself to just simple shapes and say you pretend like you’re designing the game for an old 8 bit console like the Atari 2600 or the NES. So you have memory constraints, graphical limitations and even audio limitations. This forces you to only focus on what is important in the game to convey what the game is about. Say it’s a game set in space. Given your extreme limitations, what would be the key elements required in the game to first make it look like a Space themed game? Second, what’s going to make it fun? Well you have your given elements: Stars, a spaceship, astronaut. Then what? A moon, aliens, weapons, etc?”

About 2 months ago I came to an important realization. Actually I don’t feel I thought of it, it sort of found me. These are game design principles. Universal and guaranteed to just work. The holy grail of game design.

This isn’t anything new and I feel no ownership over the ideas. I did though, come to my own understanding of these principles and it changed how I perceive game making.

It started because of my random interest in random stuff… read more »

Brilliant design lessons; Mechner’s 1 3 2 method & why less talk is always better.

Minecraft should be a huge inspiration for indie game developers. Look how simple it is to make a fun game and good cash from it. Just go to the website and see how shitty it looks like. The site has seamless textures as a background! When was the last time you saw that 1998? Look at the download page or the buying page (just a Paypal link). Everywhere is just random stuff written in a hurry. It reminds me of the first Soldat web pages. Then go play the game. It’s the simplest idea in the world. Building stuff out of cubes (Lego?). Then go again on the website and read on top: 602 servers, 380083 registered, 68753 purchases. Then tell me that you need a big website, money, promotion, nice company name, advanced payment processing, great graphics and other bullshit that you’re using – as an EXCUSE TO NOT JUST make a good game, like Minecraft.

A speech I gave at TEDxWulkan about why it is absolutely necessary to use our emotions to propel our work.

It was a spontaneous event made by the team behind TEDxWarsaw, which is a local license of TED Talks. The theme of the event was “It’s impossible. But doable.” 2 weeks after the Iceland volcano eruption TEDxWulkan was an opportunity to look at Explosive Ideas, Impossible Dreams and Crazy Propositions and how those might actually be accomplished.

The video was made thanks to streamonline.pl and the rest of the speakers can be viewed here http://www.streamonline.pl/tedxwulkan/.

Thanks for watching, for me it was certainly fun to do this.

Ferdinand Porsche: “In the beginning I looked around and, not finding the automobile of my
dreams, decided to build it myself.”