Making the games you want to play?

I was meaning to write about something else this week, but a recent conversation with a promising starting indie made me think a lot about what motivates me to make games.

 

He asked me if I’m making Cinders, because it’s a game I really would like to play, or just because I think I can do it well with the resources and time available. There’s this stereotype that it’s only fun to work on games you would like to play yourself. But when I look back at my own game-dev career, I find it to be completely untrue.

 

I obviously enjoyed developing Magi a lot. But I also had tons of fun working on Phantasmat, which is a hidden object adventure – a genre I’m hardly a fan of. Then there’s The Witcher – my first serious job. Even though I love hardcore RPGs, I think it’s the one I enjoyed working on the least. It was a wonderful new experience, but I thought it’s just not good enough. For me it lacked in design and quality, compared to games released around the same time, like Mass Effect or Bioshock.

 

Quality. That seems to be what drives me. I just enjoy making something I believe is going to be good. A “game I want to play” equals “a game I think I can make well” for me. Sure, I can tell there are games I’m making for myself, and games I’m making for the others, but it’s secondary. Magi was made “for myself”. I wanted to play something like this, but it didn’t exist on the market. Cinders – on the other hand – is a game I’m making for others to enjoy. It’s a story I want to tell to people. I hardly see any reason to play through my own story once it’s finished for reasons other than testing.

 

There’s some difference between Magi and Cinders, but not in how much fun I’m having developing them or how driven I am. I just like making good games. When I started my game development career, I saw myself in the future as a casual or RPG game designer. These were the kind of games I liked to play the most after all. Now I realize I could work on any type of game, as long as I believe it’s going to be top notch.

 

It started with Phantasmat, I think. A game in a genre I thought I could never work with. Right now, I think this was the most fun and satisfying experience I had as a game developer so far. Taking a genre associated with low-quality clones, and trying to make it “how it should be done”. Spending hours trying to figure out a better way to do things or making sure the art and music production is above the competition. Even though I get no profit from it, I’m so damn proud when I see the game topping various charts.

 

It was also why the concept of making a visual novel was so appealing for me. I found most VNs to be full of potential, but relatively weak design-wise and with a strong “amateur” feel to them. The prospect of making a real high-quality game in this genre makes me really starry-eyed. I think I’m a competitive person. I just like to 1-up what’s already there. Or at least give it an honest try.

 

You know what I also love? Those little challenges that emerge when working on a new game. Those small things that – if done well – go unnoticed by the player, but contribute to superior experience.

 

For example: Phantasmat relies heavily on hidden object gameplay. You search for objects from a list. It looks like this:

 

 

Seems simple. But there’s actually quite a lot going on behind the scenes. Objects to find are chosen randomly from a big list of possible items. Each object has associated difficulty, and the list is made so that it always lists a very easy object in the top-left, and harder ones to the right. It improves the chance that you will quickly find the first item you’re looking for, preventing the “I can’t find anything” rut I noticed in many HO games.

 

There’s also always a certain amount of objects of each difficulty on the scene, and each object has hand-picked collision type and extra space, to prevent the “hey, I clicked that one, but it didn’t work” issue.

 

And when you re-visit the same spot in the future (each hidden object scene is played twice), the system picks a certain amount of objects that weren’t used in the last playthrough, and fills the rest with ones you already found, to give you that quick joy of “hey, I remember where this one was”. Also makes the second playthrough quicker.

 

I love small game design bits like this. Just love them! I’ve found that each game, even seemingly simplest one, features several little design challenges like this. How many colors of tokens works best in a match-3 game with a board that’s not 8×8? How many active elements should be on a single area of an adventure game? How to make it immediately visible which character is talking in a visual novel?

 

Every time I approach a new game, I always come upon those exciting little problems that need solving. In a way, I’m addicted to new design challenges. This is why you probably won’t ever see a straight sequel from me. Even though we want to continue making VN-ish fairytale adaptations, I want to introduce new gameplay elements with each one. I just need a challenge to stay motivated. Just replacing old content with new one won’t do.

 

I don’t know if this is a sign of my game design becoming more mature or just a trait of my personality. But I feel that I’m less and less interested in the archetypical indie motivations, like innovation or “making the games you want to play”. I just want to make good games in general.

 

Instead of trying to discover new gimmicks, I prefer picking things I think should be done better (or at all), and making them to the best of our abilities. I don’t see innovation as a value in itself. In fact, with Cinders we’ve made a conscious decision to try to keep the classic VN gameplay intact and focus on having a better story, art, interface and more choices. We believe that no gimmick is going to replace good writing and pretty art in a story-based genre like this.

 

Sure, if you want to make something better than what’s already there, you’ve frequently got to innovate, but I’m not interested in making things different just for the sake of difference anymore.

 

That’s why our mission statement is simply “We make games, we want them to be good”.