Making Unique Feeling Games

 I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for accountability on actually releasing a game this year. To that end, I'm going to go through the development process to release a game. Here is the transcript from the fourth episode on making your game feel unique:

Welcome to the Adventure Mechanics Side Quest.  I'm Chandler and today I want to talk about making a game feel unique.  Gamers always want to play something new. Something that isn't what they've played a billion times before. Coming up with completely new designs is almost impossible, though. You have to forget everything that you've played before and everything you've seen as well. For a truly unique game, you will end up spend more time explaining the world than letting the player play in it. The problem is, must gamers don't actually want to play a truly new or unique game. It takes too much time to learn new mechanics and not all truly new or unique mechanics are actually fun. So how do we come up with something that feels unique but isn't so radically off of what players expect as to turn them off of the game entirely? Today we're talking about making a quote unquote unique game.

I've heard that in order to make a game feel unique it had to be only about 15-30% different to feel unique. Why so little? Because the player won't want to go through the hassle of learning something entirely new, but does want to play something that is different enough from what they've played before that it doesn't feel like they're playing the same thing over and over again.Take the first person military shooter, for example. It's almost become a meme at this point that you need a gritty modern military shooter in order to be successful. But, if you look at the sales numbers of these games, especially the copycats and not a mainline game such as modern warfare or battlefield, you'll see that the gamers that want a military shooter don't want to play a slightly crappier version of a AAA game. They just don't have anything that stands out that's compelling enough to have the gamer put down the AAA game for the other gritty military shooter that has the exact same mechanics and feel. How can you make your game stand out in this crowded genre? Do you even want to compete in such a competitive arena? Before you sit down and commit a huge amount of your time and effort on yet another version of that latest hit, you may want to make sure you have something new or compellingly different first.

If you want to compete in a crowded arena, you're going to have to stand out in some way. A compelling narrative, a new twist on an old mechanic, a new mechanic entirely or a new art style for the graphics are all ways to stand out in a crowded field. Even with those, however, it may not be enough to put your game in front of the right eyeballs. You can do everything right and still end up being completely ignored by the gamer you want to attract. That is one of the major hazards of competing in and already established genre.  Geoff Englestein has something he calls the Rule of One to come up with a new game.  In his GameTek Classic, he justifies this by stating that by the time you've taught the player how to use all the new mechanics, you've lost them.  Hence, you only want to teach one new mechanic when you are making your game.  You won't lose the player when you go to introduce it to them.   Although Geoff Englestein works almost entirely in the tabletop space, I think this is a good rule.   You may end up having to come up with a wholly new mechanic to really stand out. In our example of the gritty military shooter, one new mechanic could be implementing a cover based shooting model.  Yeah, yeah, I know, every gritty military shooter now has this, but when you look at military shooters before that was implemented?  It was revolutionary.  Now, it's old hat and is in every shooter now.  What is a mechanic that we could implement that could shake that up?  Open level designs with minimal cover, not having a hide-to-heal mechanic, or only gaining health when you get a kill are all ways to re-imagine the military shooter.

One other design methodology I want to talk about actually comes from Nintendo. They search for new and/or different takes on existing genres and make sure that their implementation is completely different in as many ways as possible. The main idea of the blue ocean strategy is to search for your own genre or player base that isn't getting satisfactorily accommodated. If you can find that player base and cater to their needs, you will be able to find success.  This is what they call the blue ocean strategy. It's equally difficult as standing out in a crowded genre but in a multitude of different ways. How do you make gears of war kid friendly? If you're Nintendo, you make the squid-tacular game, Splatoon. In Splatoon, it's still an area control game, like Counter Strike, but it doesn't emphasize the direct combat between players nearly as much.  It's more about how much area each team has covered in their ink by the end of the round.  Mechanically, it may have a few similarities, but it stands out by shelving the gritty military aesthetic for something more kid friendly: Squid teenagers splashing ink all over an arena.  Sometimes you have to change your artistic vision to really make it stand out from the crowd.

No matter how you approach your designs, keep in mind who you want to cater towards and how you're going to stand out from the crowd. If you are making a commercial game, you will need to differentiate yourself from all the other games that are trying to do the exact same thing. And in coming up with a unique design, make sure that it isn't so radically different that you won't be alienating the player base you are aiming for, either. A unique feeling game doesn't necessarily have to be completely pulled from the void. Lean in where appropriate on existing norms, but don't be afraid to change, or challenge them, to come up with something more compelling. You can accomplish this by taking as much time as practical during the prototyping phase.  You really want to explore the design in a number of ways to arrive at mechanics that you rarely, if ever, see in the type of game you're making.

In the case of The Mapper, I struggled on how to make it work as a cartography game. I haven't seen many video games where you make a map as part of the core gameplay loop. On my first try, I came up with something, but it really wasn't what I wanted. I struggled to see the application of the primary gameplay loop. The secondary and other loops weren't compelling in this first draft. I had to look for outside inspiration.  I took a look at casual games, like Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon and Littlewood and examined what they did for their gameplay loops.  I then came up with the design I have now, which is a lot more interesting, and I dare say, unique.  Although I did examine those games, I ended up coming up with a more thematic interepretation of what a player does in my game.  I wasn't really interested in having the player be a jack-of-all-trades.  I wanted the player to be important, but not all important, so I decided to not include most of the other things that you can do in The Mapper. Remember that game design can be an iterative process and it make take a number of iterations on a given design to come up with an implementation that really shines.

And now for what I've done with The Mapper since the last release.  Over the holidays, I went on somewhat of a hiatus on working on my new build of The Mapper. That being said I now have a new build ready for you to try out. This build is not by any means a vertical slice of the gameplay I expect to see in the completed game, but it does implement the main mapping components.  You can move about the world, recording on your map at your leisure.  I have also put in some rudimentary artwork to give a better feel of what I'm going for.  I'm not going to say final artwork, but they get the idea across. Over the last, how many months since the last update? I put in the questing system, which now includes a number of different types of quests and a fast way to add more types of quests as I think of them.  This means you can also accept quests and, more importantly, get them wrong, especially if you aren't careful on the accuracy of your map.   Building off of this, I improved the map generation for both the map space and the physical space that the player will move around in. I rounded it out with a few quality of life things that make working on the mapper much more pleasant.  I haven't implemented any of the other map details, such as features, animals or improvements, but they won't be as difficult to add now that the terrain is in a better state.  Putting a semblance of a story on it is just a pipe dream at this point, too.

Anyway, that's about all that I had for this episode of the adventure mechanics side quest. For any feedback, leave a comment!  As always, you can find me on Twitter as @jcsirron. I'll talk to you next time.