Video Game Startup Guide: Step 3

Monday, December 11, 2006

The names are picked, staff are hired and computers are humming. It's time to get to work on your game design. Let me see that piece of paper with your ideas on it. ... No, no, these are all terrible. I feel I can say that even given the massive distance in time and space between when I'm writing this guide and when you're reading it. Crumple up that piece of paper and let's try again.

So, the game itself. Your first step is to pick your genre. In gaming this is, unfortunately, far more complicated than it needs to be. It's easier in the movies: comedy, drama, romance, action, documentary. Case closed. For interactive entertainment, you're looking at something the size of the Myosin Unrooted Phylogenetic Tree. Don't laugh; given a few hours I could fill out every one of those endpoints, all the way from Ac HMWMI to Rn myr7. Although my names would be a little more catchy (and feature a few more vowels).

Instead, let's just cover a few examples. A popular genre these days is massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG). These are huge online games where thousands of people connect to the same game server to adventure together. If you or one of your employees wants to do this type of game as your first project, please fire that person immediately (even if it's you). MMOs are the height of risk/reward in gaming. Translation: 90% of them fail, and miserably.

The reward, certainly, is outstanding. The leader in this genre, World of Warcraft, boasts over seven million players worldwide. That's seven million people who paid roughly $50 for a copy of the game and continue to pay $15 a month for the privilege of connecting to that game's servers. I'm sure you could find something to do with $105 million dollars a month in revenue. World of Warcraft has been featured on television, the company (Blizzard) hosts it own convention, and the game itself has been responsible for destroying scores of relationships worldwide due to its addictiveness.

Jumping into that particular genre is a suicide mission. You may as well try and take on Wal-Mart. Even the most successful MMORPGs are just begging for scraps outside of Blizzard's headquarters. Given the substantial time investment by players, few are willing to leave a game of this type unless the company in charge makes a significant blunder. Consider how well the XFL has done trying to lure hardcore football fans away from their favorite teams. Such is your fate if you try a MMO.

Happily, the world opens up when you leave that particular ambition behind. Breezing through what you might call the top level of gaming's genres finds these types:

• First & third person shooters
• Racing
• Sports (football, soccer, baseball, etc)
• Real time strategy
• Turn-based strategy
• Fighting (unarmed & weapons)
• Flight simulations
• Space flight simulations
• Tycoon
• City & people simulations
• Role playing
• Party games

And this is just off the top of my head. There are distinctions even within these genres: is your real time strategy game squad based or army based? Does your racing game feature simulation, trick, street level, arcade, or absurd physics? Gamers know and care deeply about these distinctions.

What you need to do is pick your genre and stick with it. Find a game that plays similar to the one you expect to create and isolate your design to match that game's experience. Don't copy verbatim; just use it as a guideline. No gamer picks up a copy of Burnout Revenge expecting to be able to tune the toe-in ratio of their tires. Don't present an arcadey game with too much detail, nor a simulation game too shallow. This should be a long process for you and your staff. If you've hired well you'll get plenty of feedback from them as far as what is and is not realistic for a game design.

What sounds good for an idea at this point? Try taking an existing genre and putting it in a new setting. For example, first person shooters are popular, but World War II, the near future and the distant future (i.e. Halo) have been done to death. Why not venture back into the distant past and cast the player as a native American before the European settlers arrived? Native American mythology has only been dabbled in before; you could expose the gaming world to conflicts and world views that are completely foreign to most players.

Even real world sports can be energized by a new attitude. Electronic Arts has secured the NFL license, but that didn't stop Midway from taking the sport to its logical extremes with their Blitz franchise. Consider doing the same for baseball: imagine a diamond where the batter takes his bat with him, advancing through the bases by taking out the infielders. It may sound gruesome, but no game ever escaped notice by being violent.

By now you've got your mildly original game idea fleshed out (or ready to have its flesh ripped off). Next week we'll discuss something I'm sure your programmers have already badgered you about: what engine will you use for this masterpiece?