Breaking Open the Black Box

The Secrets and Stories of Game Design

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It’s been a while…

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For anyone still following this Blog, I’m now employed as the Game Systems Designer for Riot Games, currently working on the Summoner’s Rift updates.

This has eaten away most of my educational time. What topic would you like to hear about if I can buy the time to do it?

What was the point?

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If you’ve been following my blog for any amount of time, you may be wondering why on earth I decided to share these stories.

The answer is that there’s a method within my words.  A series of tools that when repeatedly applied dramatically increase quality of a game design with each iteration. The terrible truth is that these lessons are so simple, so basic, that they are easily forgotten.

  1. Design for clarity
  2. Evoke player care
  3. Give your player a response
  4. Make the player’s response satisfying
  5. Fit it all within the context of your game
These 5 tools are the self-feedback tools you can apply to anything you are personally working on. Don’t move on to the next step until the previous has been satisfied. 
Then do it – again and again – until you’ve achieved the quality level necessary to create your game. If you can deeply ingrain into your psyche these five concepts, you can consistently nail basic game design, which opens up a world of opportunities. 

Next Year

In 2013, I intend to turn this lens back upon myself and review every major piece of design work I’ve done. Think of it as a post-mortem if you will, full of the lessons I learned in my own life. 
Stay tuned for adventure!
-Alex

Fit Your Game – Internal Consistency & Identity

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During the development of Wrath of the Lich King, I was brought on early to help develop the vehicle system when our lead designer became embroiled in a lot of bigger issues. The opportunity to work on such an important system made me ecstatic.

The initial plan was to develop a system for making tanks and airplanes in the new outdoor battlefield known as Wintergrasp. 
In Wintergrasp, vehicles were a limited resource, meaning only a few players could use them while other fought on the ground. 
Being a PvP zone, with vehicle-only objectives, this mixture of players and vehicles worked naturally. Despite the relatively limited amount of time I put into the vehicle mechanics (mostly flavors of cone ram damage and catapult style delayed explosions) – it worked and modeled other PvP games such as Battlefield and Halo. 
Being a conscientious, passionate and utterly reckless game designer, I pushed the programmers really hard to make sure that the vehicle technology was very modular, extremely flexible and could be reused for anything. 

Too Much Rope

As the Wintergrasp technology proved fruitful, curiosity rose among the other designers on the team about the technology. Eager to learn the new systems and give new legs to the game, they began adapting it for other purposes – something I completely encouraged.
If Jeff Kaplan were here, he’d probably say something like, “we took vehicle tech too far, without enough constraints and consistency.”  While there’s a lot of truth in that, I feel like the problem was even more basic: 
Often we made vehicles without carefully taking into consideration the audiences involved.  
After Lich King shipped, I personally modified almost every vehicle quest in the game, tuning numbers, changing mechanics and adding consistency such as global cooldowns to vehicle abilities. 

Inconsistency

Due to this massive variation in not only quality, but difficulty, frequency and complexity, that it meant that each vehicle quest requires a significant learning curve and triggered anxiety from players who didn’t know what to expect. This established a baseline negative response which manifested itself in player feedback many times over the course of Lich King.
I don’t want to single out any designer on the WoW team by picking on a particular vehicle quest. In fact, if anything, much of this is my own fault for not establishing examples and guidelines for quest designers to start from easily. So I’ll pick a specific example that I worked on personally.  
Yes, that’s right. I’m the madman behind the source of much hatred and anguish known as the Flame Leviathan. 
Not to take credit from any of the very talented designers who contributed to the planning and execution of the encounter – but many of the issues players had with the experience stemmed from decisions I accepted as immutable early on.  
Riding on the success of Wintergrasp, there was a surge of excitement to see vehicles make their debut in a raid setting.  

Identity

Wintergrasp vehicles worked well, as players could destroy and protect them, choose to pilot or not pilot them. Thus a player could easily slot themselves into the role of “vehicle pilot” or “hero”.  Likewise, while no single player could destroy a vehicle, no vehicle could kill *all* of the players.  
Role switches at work.
In Ulduar, players faced with handling the Flame Leviathan had no such choice. You’re a healer? No. You’re a gunner now.  You were a tank? Well, now you’re a lowly ammunition loader.  
Sometimes, when you switch things up, they turn out awesome. Other times… awkward. 
When players actively choose to buy-in on that decision, they have a great time – modern encounters such as Amber Shaper Un’sok and Alysrazor show that exotic changes in gameplay can be super fun – for the players that opt into that challenge.

Flame Leviathan had a lot of time, love and complex vehicle design built into it. It was a fun encounter  – but it didn’t do enough to reinforce your core identity apart from the vehicle. In fact, I probably worked a little too hard to avoid your class mechanics entirely.

Reinforcing Your Place in the World

Late in the game, to help relieve some of the complaints, I added the “toss you onto the tank” mechanic where players needed to defeat an NPC using their player abilities under time pressure. This helped a bit, but left tanks and healers somewhat out in the cold.
An alternative might have been for one of the vehicle types to have been an SC2 style meditruck, accompanying a smaller fleet of vehicles through the gauntlet – protected by a small squad of normal players on the ground.  
Ultimately, a lot of the complaints stemmed from one real issue: I was trying to put a game that was not World of Warcraft inside of the World of Warcraft.  
If there’s a lesson here let it be this: It’s perfectly fine to add things like that. It’s not perfectly fine to expect everyone in the game to do it and enjoy it. 
Know your audience. Know yourself.