Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!

1. Bad Game Designer,No Twinkie! Ernest W. Adams ewadams@designersnotebook.com http://www.designersnotebook.com +44-1483-237599 a member of the design group http://www.ihobo.co.uk

2. Twinkie Denial Conditions • Bad Conceptual Design • Bad Game Mechanics • Bad User Interface Design • Bad Programming • Bad Level Design • Bad Content Note: These are design errors, but they don’t always make a game bad! Many good games contain errors.

3. Bad Conceptual Design

4. Adolescent Armageddon • “Conquer the world!”“Save the galaxy!” • Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can we have some games that aren’t teenage power fantasies? • Better:

5. Kill Monster/Take Sword/Sell SwordBuy New Sword/Kill New Monster • I’m supposed to be a hero, so why am I spending all my time bargaining with shopkeepers?! • I’m not a hero, I’m an itinerant second-hand arms dealer! • Robbing corpses doesn’t feel all that noble, either... • RPG’s need to break the “Monty Haul” cycle.

6. Conceptual Non Sequiturs • Anything that a normal human being (not a gamer) would say makes no sense. • Medical kits hidden inside oil tanks in FPSs. • Half-naked women who, when killed in RPGs, drop suits of plate armor. • Ordinary people moving 20-ton stones in action games.

7. Bad Game Mechanics

8. Deadlocks • A situation in which a process cannot continue without the resource that it produces, or two processes are each waiting for the other. • All games need a mechanism for breaking deadlocks – an additional source of the resource.

9. Too Much Randomness • Random bad luck that makes a long game unwinnable. • Poker is highly random but each hand is short. • Over time the better players win. • Constant, irritating random encounters that add nothing to the plot.

10. Bad User Interface Design

11. No Save or Pause Game Feature • Often used to make games more difficult without any work by the designer. • “Saving is cheating” attitude is a sign of a weak design. Saving isn’t cheating in Monopoly or baseball. • It’s the player’s machine, not ours. It’s not fair to punish her just because it’s her little brother’s turn to play.

12. Games Without Maps • Games don’t offer the same visual cues that the real world does. • Getting the player lost is a cheap way to lengthen the game. • Better:

13. Bad Programming

14. Games That Run Too Fast • If an old game runs too fast to play on new machines, it’s sloppy programming. • All game events and animations should be based on timers. • If you have spare cycles, use them intelligently, on AI!

15. Stupid Monsters • Hear player. Lumber mindlessly towards player. Get shot. Die. • It’s time for some smarter monsters! • Better:

16. Bad Pathfinding • Nothing makes an otherwise smart game seem stupid than a unit who can’t find his way past his own comrades! • Groups should stick together walking around large obstacles (hills) but split up among small ones (trees).

17. Bad Level Design

18. Difficulty Moving in 3D Spaces • Locations in 3D games should either be clearly accessible (floors) or inaccessible (walls). • People can climb very steep slopes if they try, so let them! • Give players a little slack about where they can stand and jump from.

19. Any maze that has to be solved by brute force is a boring and stupid maze. Mazes need to be fun and clever, organized according to a principle that the player can deduce (with effort) and then follow easily. YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE. – a maze in Adventure Boring and Stupid Mazes

20. A Switch Opens a Door Miles Away • Another time-waster, designed to slow the player down without challenging his mind. • In the real world, doorknobs are usually in the door (!). • If you want a door to be locked, then lock it, and store the key somewhere reasonable.

21. Many Combinations, No Clues • A puzzle in which the solution is one of a large number of combinations (with no clues about which one) is a trial-and-error time-waster. • Infidel ended with one of 24 possible choices and each time you died and had to reload!

22. Extreme Lateral Thinking Required • Use the lampshade with the bulldozer? • This is OK as a joke. Maybe. Once. • Other than that it’s just a designer playing rather mean tricks on her audience.

23. No Lateral Thinking Allowed • I can kill stone trolls with my axe, but I can’t break down a wooden door? • With today’s deformable environments, we should allow more lateral thinking. • Better:

24. Unless it is a trivia game, all the information needed to win a game should be contained within it. When localizing, beware cultural differences! Q: WHAT IS THE AIRSPEED VELOCITY OF AN UNLADEN SWALLOW? A:AFRICAN OR EUROPEAN? – a Monty Python joke in Haunt Obscure Knowledge Required

25. You Have 30 Sec. Before You Die • Puzzles that kill the player with an extremely short time limit are just another sign of designer laziness. • If the player will have to reload the whole game, one-third of the possible solutions should lead to safety.

26. Bad Content

27. Not Enough Voiceover Clips • Players get bored and turn the sound off. • This was often the case with cartridge games, but there’s no excuse any longer. • My rule of thumb: no fewer than 5 audio clips for any given situation, even the rarest.

28. Fantasy-Killing Elements • I just saw my father murdered and now I’m supposed to solve other people’s problems?! • Anachronisms, bad writing, inside humor, and irrelevant mini-games all help to destroy a fantasy. • Harmony is a key quality of the best computer games.

29. Pointless Surrealism • Surrealism is not just weirdness for the fun of it! • True surrealism has an underlying point, to cause the viewer to think. • Better:

30. Poor Acting (and Writing) • Bad acting destroys suspension of disbelief. • It ruins emotional tension. • Good writing is cheap, so there’s no excuse. • Better:

31. Neat, Tidy Explosions • If the game industry has anything to learn from September 11, it is that explosions are not good clean fun. • Bombs ruin things: buildings and lives. Let’s tell the truth about them. • Any explosion should leave some wreckage.

32. Low-Poly Trees (and other things) • A good-looking sprite is better than a bad 3D model any day of the week. • If you can’t do something well, don’t do it at all. Don’t ask me to pretend that some weird blocky green umbrella thing is really a tree.

33. Huge Breasts & Other Juvenilia • Yes, it makes money. • But it also gives normal people the impression that games are only for drooling adolescent morons. • Juvenile content hurts the entire industry because it discourages non-gamers from starting to play.

34. Twinkie Denial Conditions Redux • Challenges solvable only by trial and error. (Not to be confused with exploration or practice.) • Non sequiturs and pointless illogicality. (Not to be confused with necessary simplification.) • Designer egotism, vanity, or showing off. • Confusion between “hard” and “enjoyable.” • Laziness: making the player work so you don’t. • Sloppiness and inattention to quality. • Deliberate, needless offensiveness.

35. Bad Game Designer,No Twinkie! Ernest W. Adams ewadams@designersnotebook.com http://www.designersnotebook.com +44-1483-237599 a member of the design group http://www.ihobo.co.uk