GameDev Weekly Digest 02 | The Power Of Anticipation In Game Design | Using “Kleenex” Testers

Here’s your Game Dev Weekly newsletter made to inspire, improve, and simplify game development.

Weekly Quote

“Nothing is less productive than to make more
efficient what should not be done at all.”

-Peter Drucker

This week’s quote really resonates with me personally. I think it’s a good lesson for game development professionals specifically, because so many times we do too much to polish things before we even know they will be part of the final release.

It’s important to identify not only what needs to be in a game, but also what needs to be removed.

For prototyping, we should be focused on the minimum effort to prove a concept and nothing more.

Free Weekly Game Assets

This week’s quote really resonates with me personally. I think it’s a good lesson for game development professionals specifically, because so many times we do too much to polish things before we even know they will be part of the final release.

It’s important to identify not only what needs to be in a game, but also what needs to be removed.

For prototyping, we should be focused on the minimum effort to prove a concept and nothing more.

The game assets for this week are a collection of items that were created for a game mode that is no longer in development. The style of the game changed and so I am left with a bunch of stylized, hand painted assets that I am in the process of putting on the Asset Store, many of them for free.

There is a tree, bush, and grass pack for free, a build panel with sfx and vfx for free, and will continue to upload similar style assets in the next few weeks.

If you catch yourself frequently watching archived GDC videos on youtube, you may recognize the author of this book. He did a talk called 30 Things I Hate About Your Game Pitch which was an entertaining overview of all the most common mistakes from developers pitching their games.

His book, The Aesthetic of Play, examines the framework of play in games, and provides a set of tools “to help us analyze games and game designs and identify ways in which they succeed or fail.”

One of my favorite chapters is on the power of anticipation within play.

It points out that many turn based strategy games actually have little physical time spent interacting with the games play space. Players can only have a few minutes out of an hour in which they are interacting with the game, like in chess.

Anticipation is a form of play in itself. Thinking about the next move is just as important, and in most cases, more important than the physical interaction with the play space.

What is the key to anticipatory play? The constraints defining the play space need to be easy to internalize, and the players must be given adequate time to learn them.

Render Monster (free)

Render Monster is a great tool for recording video in 4k at whatever frame rate you want. It has saved me time because previously I would do recording on a separate computer through an Elgato HD recorder. You also don’t have to worry about performance at all, because it renders everything one frame at a time.

The downside is audio has to be recorded on a separate run and synced, but for stuff like cutscenes, it still saves a lot of time.

The only issue I have found with the video recording itself is that it doesn’t capture motion blur post processing.

Boing Kit: Dynamic Bouncy Bones, Grass, Water, and More (paid)

Boing Kit is easily my favorite asset in Unity’s asset store. It saves a bunch of time in animation and tweening. As they put it “Juice up your games by adding bouncy VFX!”

And now it works on bone hierarchy structured objects as well.

It’s as easy as adding a script.

What I’m Watching
Will Wright Teaches Game Design and Theory

I have a lot of respect for Will Wright and his design process. He takes an analytical approach to his design in a very professional and repeatable process, while still managing to be very creative.

His Master Class series is a great look about how he researches, designs, playtests, and markets the games he has made. I would recommend it to anyone in game design or development.

One discussion that came up in the monthly Atlanta’s Unity Meetup group reminded me of the way he approaches new mechanics and playtesting.

Will Wright says that it is very important to use new playtesters for each session, calling them “Kleenex” testers because you throw them away after each use.

He also likes to playtest with the tester focusing only on a single design element. The idea is to test a variety of mechanics one at a time and see which ones perform best. If a mechanic is fun by itself he tries to incorporate it more into the main design.

He mentions that the most valuable playtesting is achieved by having two people team up and play the game together. Instead of thinking through the game in their head as a solo tester would, the team talks to each other. This gives you much better data about the players thought process while navigating the game.

This week I leave you with a pair of questions.

Solitaire is basically just sorting a deck of cards.

What elements of design make it fun?

Would it still be fun if the same game was played but with all of the cards showing?

We’ll touch on this next week.

That’s everything for this week. Follow me on twitter for more interesting game development stuff. @BigRookGames

-Jake Jameson