Breaking Open the Black Box

The Secrets and Stories of Game Design

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Archives for June 2012

The Simplest Thing First

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My first major lesson on the importance of simple things occurred shortly after I was reassigned to work on the outdoor world with Mike Heiberg, the legend that inspired the High Bergg Helm and my first official Blizzard mentor.

I was sitting in a cheap, plastic chair, leaning in to a 14″ monitor one day when Mike turned to me and asked, “What’s the simplest thing in WoW?”

It seemed like a trick question, but I said the first thing that came to mind: “Well, a wolf, I suppose. It runs up and does its thing, but it’s not very interesting.”

Mike grinned and said, “that’s right, wolves are incredibly boring, yet they still do their job – why?”

“I dunno, you kill enough of ’em, you complete a quest and you get some stuff. That’s most of the game, right?”

Mike frowned for a split second, shook his head and said, “that’s not quite it – you’re missing the whole step before it. How’d you kill those wolves?”

“Well, I threw a Fireball at it.”

“Aaaaahhhhhh,” spoke Mike with a sagely tone, “tell me a little more about that.”

“I stood back, cast it, cast it a few more times, then it died.”

“So what was engaging about it?”

“Er… well, what? I dunno, using my abilities on it was kinda fun, if simple.”

“Yup, that’s it. Using your abilities is fun. That’s true. A lot of games can miss that – and spend too much time making interesting monsters. If your own abilities are fun, even the most boring of monsters can be interesting. People spent hundreds of hours right clicking in Diablo 2, but it was those moments when they leaped in and pushed whirlwind that they remembers.”

“Sure, Mike, but that’s all so basic.”

“Tell, you what, let’s stop here for the day. Tomorrow, I want you to come back and tell me why a Fireball is fun.”

“What?”

“Do you already have an answer?”

“Well… no, not really.”

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The Importance of Thinking Basics Through

I honestly didn’t have an answer for him. A fireball? God, those are so overdone. Every game has them, even Mario 1 had them. Plus, what distinguished them in WoW, anyways? Fireball was about as simple as you get. 
You didn’t get to avoid it, you couldn’t even roll out of the way. It’s just a fiery load in your face. Fine. Maybe that’s it, I told myself.  So I did what any well-equipped and professional person would do – I cheated.  
I rang up my friend and mentor, Tom and asked, “Tom, what the hell makes a Fireball interesting?”  Tom pretty much laughed me off the phone. “Mike’s training you, isn’t he?” 
Caught!
“Yep… and I have no clue what the hell he’s looking for.” 
“Well, he can explain the answer better than I can – he’s so old he was there when the first ones were made. But here’s a tip to get you started: What are the limits of a Fireball?” 

Limitations

Games are about rules, rule bending and sometimes rule breaking.  Rules define the limits of what you can do – and those limits often point to the power hidden behind a given ability.  In fact, the ability to read between the lines of an ability’s limits is so powerful, that players frequently read too far into them and mistake a minor bug cleanup with a deeper grand purpose. 
After a certain point, you play so many games, you forget the steps you took to learn the original rules and how you used that ability. In a way, the ability to forget what you know is the most powerful skill a designer can have. 
What did you see when you first saw a Fireball? Here was my list:
  • I can attack without getting close
  • Monsters will attack me after they get hit
  • The cast time for Fireball wasn’t very long so…
  • If I throw one from far enough away, I can hit them with another one before they hit me
This seemed like enough. 

Dream On

I recited my list to Mike, who politely listened as we worked, then thought for a moment and replied: “That’s a good list. All of those things are true. However, there’s more to a Fireball than its mechanics. What else?”
“I’m doing the impossible, hurling a giant ball of burning death, and then BAM”, slamming my hand onto the desk for emphasis, “the target dies in a fiery explosion!” 
 “Yep,” Mike said matter-of-factly, “there’s a lot of wish fulfillment in there too – and the sound of the Fireball reinforces that a lot. Since we could spend a month – and we did – trying to come up with everything that makes a Fireball feel right, I’m going to skip ahead a bit.”

The Simplest Thing

“There’s far more happening on screen than just what you’ve described. Look at the way the game visibly lets you know the fireball is coming: the sound is different than when the fireball is unleashed, the character stops moving, its hands light up, the animations change, a bar begins filling up.
“Each detail is woven together to create a tapestry of telegraphing – to let you know what’s about to happen… and most importantly… how much time you have before it occurs.”
I frowned slightly, “You really know how to make basic things seem very ornate. You know, when I saw a monster cast a Fireball, that was the first time I thought they were ever doing something interesting. ”  
“Basic things are ornate, we just rarely take the time to see them. For example, the time a Fireball takes to complete is very important. It changes what decisions you make, and opens up opportunities for the ability to be countered with a kick.”
I agreed. “Sometimes I think too many times abilities get made without thinking about the other side of things – what it’s like to be the victim. Like Strike for example – absolutely no telegraphing its coming, just bonus damage and no gameplay.”
“Then let’s try to minimize that where we can. We’ve got to think about the kids, you know!”
He meant the players, but Mike’s wife had just become pregnant, so I replied, “You’re either going to be an amazing or a horribly annoying father someday.”
Mike replied with a toothy grin, “don’t be silly – I’m a scrawny, Asian gamer. I’m going definitely be both.”

Lessons

There’s more to a Fireball than just the things I’ve described here. I leave it to the reader to ponder the rest. Taking the time to think through what you take for granted is incredibly difficult. I attribute most of the failures of the past few years of MMOs to this flaw. 
If you ask any player what they want out of an attack: instant, powerful and unstoppable are words that quickly come to mind. However, they all miss out on the deeper lessons of a Fireball – that sometimes what makes a game fun is actually the same thing that’s holding you back. 
Next time, I’ll start to move onto a juicier topic… the first of my five steps to improve any design.

Starting from the Beginning…

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“It is easier to make a complex thing than a simple thing”

This can’t surely be true, right? Sadly, especially in game design, this is true.

A complex thing can have many moving parts, many knobs to tweak and have a thousand miniature rules to handle the edge cases. A simple thing does not have this luxury.  It just works and – if well enough designed – you ignore its elegance.

Simple is not crude

Just because a thing is simple, doesn’t mean it is difficult to use or poorly thought out. Compare these two axes. Thousands of years apart, they both serve similar purposes of chopping up wood. 

Yet for all of these things, the differences are astounding:
Material, Size, Weight, Balance, Shape, Features.  
The ability to design comes from two skills. The ability to see these differences and the ability to conceive new ones. Many people become unfortunately hung up on one or the other aspect of design. Either they steal everything they see – or they make everything new – and lose all of the lessons someone else has learned.

Theft is Flawed

I started out by stealing every idea I ever had from somewhere. The first comic book I drew was mostly a retelling of Super Mario World, but with me as the hero.  The first story I wrote was a thinly veiled fantasy version of the cold war. The first boss I created in WoW was stolen off the white board of my manager, Scott Mercer.  
This last point is important – he handed me the pre-planned design, told me to steal it and simply focus on creating it.  This is the great thing about theft – it allows you to focus on the physical labor required to bring an idea to life. 
If you look back at most of the stories that filled the apprenticeship period in the US and Europe – it was filled with tales of young kids whose masters forced them into rote creation, rather than innovative or creative creation. Generations of iteration had shown that you are a stronger creator if you’ve started out mimicing someone else first. 
However, if you stall out and rely on mimicry forever, you are unable to adapt to the changing needs of your environment.

Innovation is Flawed, too

After working on Attumen, my next boss was a guy known as the Shade of Aran. Stretching my wings a little bit further, I tried to stick to a lot of basic, easy stuff and only mix in a little new stuff.  The result turned out okay – I actually learned so many lessons working on him that I’ll dedicate a full post to him later. 
What is more important right now, is what happened to me after finishing him. I was riding so high on having successfully brought my own personal concept to life, that my brain surged from the recognition of having created something that balanced common with cool. 
Credit to the talented John Polidora
This told me, “Everything you believed was right – you can innovate even further now. No limits!” 
Boy, was that a mistake. I quickly lost sight of the basic things I had done right on Shade and decided to go into crazy land. In fact, I straight up OD’ed on Innovation and the result was… Netherspite.
Netherspite was a boss fight so far removed from the reality of the game that it constantly broke the game’s rules. Tanking was defined by a perfect execution of a positioning dance. Healers had infinite resources, while dps had massively increased damage. 
Sounds amazing, right?  Well, sure! All of those things are great.  The problem is – when you make that many changes at once, your boss encounter ceases to be part of World of Warcraft and instead is part of BDR – Brazie Dance Revolution. 
In fact, the encounter was so far detached from the rest of the game that elabourate diagrams and planning was required for a normal group to execute it properly. 
Please don’t misunderstand – planning is an excellent part of a deep, fulfilling multiplayer gaming experience. However, this encounter required such high levels of execution according to what were ultimately my whims, that many players chose to skip this encounter every week.
Furthermore, this encounter was extreme bug prone and about half of the work I did in Karazhan involved fixing bugs, timing issues and random AI quirks that occurred under the bizzare rules of Netherspite. 
I made that picture of Netherspite my desktop background at work for about a year, to remind me of what happens when you let your personal lust for innovation take over. 

Innovation’s Price

I’ve been really lucky – I have an incredibly forgiving team that has allowed me to extend myself far further than I should have. Coming from an tech-savvy background, I was able to script my way out of the hole I created for myself on Netherspite. 
However, it came at a price. After Netherspite, I was reassigned to work on the most basic content in the game. Basically told that until I mastered the basics, I needed to stay away from content that allowed me to get away with overly complex designs.

“But I MUST Innovate, or else I mean nothing”

The above sentence is a crying voice that still haunts me everyday. In fact, I regularly succumb to this fear and go too far.  That’s okay, you’re totally normal.  There’s one thing to keep in mind, one thing that is incredibly hard to accept and incredibly powerful once you do:
“There will always be another chance”
Maybe not on this boss, maybe not in this situation, maybe even not in this game, but another opportunity will come up again. As long as you don’t give up on yourself, you’ll continue to grow. 

A Balance is Required

Steal until you learn the rules. Innovate less than the maximum you can handle.  
Steal too much and you never develop the mental muscle required to handle the more complex problems you’ll face down the road. Innovate too much and you’ll consume all of your resources fixing bugs and solving newly created problems. 
In my experience, it generally takes 4-8x more time to create a new thing than it does to improve an old thing. So if you’re like me and constantly feel the call to innovate – plan ahead.
Next time, I’ll describe the most fundamental piece of World of Warcraft’s combat system… can you guess what it is?

Why is Game Design a Black Box?

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I frequently hear people refer to Game Design as a “Black Art”, voodoo or just a sixth sense you develop.

While I understand what they mean, I do not believe that game design, or at least the skills related to game design, cannot be taught. However, I do believe that some people are more open to learning the skills required to become a successful designer.

Since starting in this business, a few hundred people have asked me: “So what classes does it take to become a good game designer?”  I always replied, “it’s not what you do in school, but what you do outside of it.”

This rule has been true of just about every game designer I’ve ever met. While the rules and process for making games become increasingly clear, no amount of rote training can overcome the handicap of not being passionately connected to your craft.

In future posts, I hope to share some of the lessons I’ve accrued over the years, but none of them trump this one:

Pursue something you love.