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Benson Russell, who worked on a bunch of famous games, including the upcoming shooter Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare from Infinity Ward, talked about the tasks of game designer. In this interview, he gives some tips on how to make your game fun.
January 29th, 2011 @ 19:11:28
Introduction
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Game Designer’s Tasks
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Building Unique Gameplay
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Quick iteration and trying different ideas as time allows is the other way to find the golden nuggets of gameplay awesomesauce. It’s easy to fall into the trap of analyzing and arguing about something “on paper” or “in theory”, but if it’s easy to test in game and there’s time in the schedule, put it in and give it a try! The only way you’re going to know if something works, or is an improvement is to try it. Also this will usually lead to other ideas, which can lead to creating new mechanics, or evolving existing ones.
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Mechanics Test
In terms of combat, what are the most important things to keep in mind while you are developing an action game?
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For combat encounter design, there’s a really great philosophy that Bruce Straley used when we were working on encounters together at Naughty Dog. What’s the spikey ball that chases the player around? We found that the most engaging and fun combat encounters would encourage the player to have to think about the play space and move around. Hence what was the spikey ball that made the player move? It could be something simple like a grenade to flush them out of cover, or enemies flanking from a different direction, or a specific enemy type like a slow moving tank, or an environmental hazard like an exploding barrel, or a full scripted sequence like a structure collapsing. The goal being to get the player to have to engage their brain and treat the combat encounter a bit like a puzzle.
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Lastly I’d say that variety and pacing are very important to keeping the player engaged and having fun. No matter how much fun a type of combat encounter can be, if the player is constantly doing that same type of encounter over and over and over, it will become stale and boring and un-engaging. Hence find ways to add variety and pacing through the combat encounters. Some great ways to create that variety; focusing on a particular enemy type (like snipers), a unique environment that can offer a different type of challenge (close quarters, wide open, dark and foggy with limited vision, hazards that must be avoided, a really exotic and unique setting visually, etc…), unique set piece combats (on a moving train, or through a moving convoy, but be careful as these can be really costly to develop), a particular weapon that the player has (like a sniper fight, or having to use a rocket launcher at moving targets).
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Incentives and Punishments
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Advice
Benson Russell, Senior Game Designer at Infinity Ward
Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev.
Great to speed up your hand creation or help with your anatomy studies!