Every week I try to learn something new from people who have done what I want to do already. I read articles, watch videos, or listen to podcasts about games, game design, programming and self improvement. Every month I will try to create a summary of the articles and such which didn’t get individual posts.

Game Design

GDC 2010: Sid Meier Keynote – “Everything You Know is Wrong”

Sid Meier’s keynote at GDC 2010 does an excellent job of going into some odd and unexpected psychological behavior of players and how it is important to the design of the game. It is about listening to a player and using their psychological tendencies to make their overall experience better.

Sirlin – Solvability

I think I will be mining David Sirlin’s articles for a while. He has quite a few good articles on game design and his article on game solvability is no exception. He discusses the importance of hidden information or surprise to keep a game from being completely solvable so that it will remain interesting and maintain replayability. A game where you just have to memorize a certain pattern and do that to win will not remain fun.

Rob Pardo Blizzard Game Design Lecture MIT 2014

Rob Pardo gives a talk about some of Blizzard’s game design values and process. The main part of the talk is sort of a summary of how Blizzard’s values affect the process of game design and what is good about that. He also talks about expanding a game audience and avoiding certain game design mistakes like not play testing early enough. A lot of good game design advice here.

Self Improvement

Jim Rohn – Your Best Year Ever

This is a really long talk (about 4.5 hours) but it is a gold mine of personal development advice. The major theme is if you want things to change, you have to change. Jim Rohn fill this talk with different small things you can do to improve your life that will significantly change the destination you are headed in 5 to 10 years. Topics include health, psychology, finance and suggestions for your personal library. You may need to break it up over a few days, but I definitely recommend watching it and taking notes.

More Next Month

I think this will become a regular monthly posting and hope to be able to provide a nice little aggregate of useful information for anybody trying to learn about game design, programming and self improvement. In the future, I may also add drawing and writing articles since these are also important in game design.

Now, go read about making games so you can make your games better.

If you continue with the habits you have now, will they get you where you want to go?

Our habits, or daily rituals, will slowly guide our lives toward one end or another. Most people don’t stop to think about this, but it is an important part of guiding your life and being productive.

Good Habits

You are as productive over a long period of time as you are in the habit of being. I am only going to talk about good habits today because, frankly there has been a lot written about bad habits. Here are some habits you might want to develop.

Write Things Down

The mind only has so much space. In order to stay creative, we need to take stuff out of memory and make a hard copy of it so we can think more and better thoughts.

This also prevents the loss of a good thought. Often we get going throughout the day and the demands of life cause us to forget things. Writing down an idea allows us to find it and remember it later much easier. Carry a little notebook with you or keep a note taking app on your smartphone and get in the habit of writing things down.

Do Things Now

Often we put off things unnecessarily. If you have time to do something, get in the habit of doing them right away. Don’t say “It can wait until tomorrow.” Tomorrow will have interruptions and delays and you might not find time for it. Now would be a good time.

Put the Most Important Thing First

If you have something that you really need to or want to get done in a day, get in the habit of doing it first. If this is writing, do it first. If it is working on your game, do it first. If it is calling your mom, do it first (unless it is like 5 AM and she wouldn’t be up yet).

This is often said as “Pay yourself first.” And most people use this phrase when talking about money, but it applies just as well to time. Take the first part of your day for yourself.

Have a Plan

Don’t just start things, take a little bit of time and plan them out. Come up with some clear, actionable steps to get you to the goal first. Once you have these, start immediately.

Make it a habit to plan your day.

Get Moving

It is hard to have the energy to make important decisions, do good work, or change bad habits if you are inactive all the time. Starting the day with a 15 min to 1 hour walk can give you a great boost in energy and helps slowly build fitness over time so that you have a larger reserve of energy to call on.

Keeping your body healthy through working out and eating right will help you have the energy to be productive and successful. Make it a habit to move more every day.

Shape Your Life With Habits

Use some (or all) of these good habits to get you on the course to your life goal.

Now go start good habits and make games.

As I learn about games and game design, one of my goals is to eventually create a game that people play against each other at a competitive level. One of the important aspects of a game like this, whether it is turn based or real-time, whether 1 vs 1 or team vs team, is balance.

Originally I was going to read several articles on this and summarize what I learned here, but this article will mostly cover what I learned from an excellent series written by David Sirlin on his blog at sirlin.net. I highly recommend heading over there and reading the original series once you are done here.

What is Balance

What most people think of when they think of the word balanced is usually fairness. That everybody at the beginning of the game has a roughly equal chance to win (not counting personal skill). And in most player vs player games this is an important aspect of balance. But as game designers, when we say a game is balanced we also mean that there is an large number of viable options available at high level play by expert players. And in the talk given by Ernest W. Adams that I summarized previously, he would say that a single player game is balanced if it is appropriately difficult or challenging.

Your game can have tons of options, but for balance, we only care about meaningful options. We want to avoid a game where only 1 or 2 dominant strategies emerge or where only a few characters, decks or builds (or whatever your game uses) are ultimately playable at a tournament level.

Symmetry vs Asymmetry

Games where opponents start pretty much identical lean toward the symmetrical side of the scale and are typically easier to balance. This is the simplest way to balance a player vs player type game. Examples of games that are on the symmetrical side of the scale include most FPS games and Chess.

The more diversity in starting conditions, the more asymmetrical a game becomes. Adams mentions that this makes games much harder to balance but at the same time makes them more interesting. Examples of this type of game include League of Legends, Magic the Gathering, and any other type of game where multiple classes, decks or characters are available as the starting option. In asymmetrical games, fairness is important to design. You want every option to have a reasonable chance to win in the hands of the right player.

Enough Viable Options

One of the harder questions when balancing a game is how to know when you have enough viable options. The first step in this is ensuring that moves and strategies have counters. If a move cannot be countered then it becomes 1 of those dominant strategies we talked about earlier and the game will quickly degenerate into people just using that move to win (not very fun). After a couple layers of countering you probably want to loop back to the original move so that the third or fourth layer of counter is just the original move, sort of like rock-paper-scissors.

One of the things to watch out for and avoid is chaff. Needless mechanics, characters and choices that do not add to the game and are ultimately useless. Don’t just add an option to add it, make sure it is useful. Explore the design space and see what works.

Checkmate and Lame Duck

When one player is doing better than another and they have reached a point in the game where it is impossible (barring a major mistake from the winning player) for the player that is losing to make a comeback, we call that a Checkmate scenario. And this is fine usually.

However, we want to avoid allowing the time from the beginning of a checkmate until the end of the game to be drawn out. This is a Lame Duck situation where one player or team know they can’t win but are forced to play out the game for a long period of time in the losing situation.

Playtesting Is Important But Hard

One of the best ways to find out if a game is balanced or not is to play it and test it. This can be hard. Especially if you have a large number of options. But play testing discovers things you never could have predicted.

When play testing you want to evaluate your playable characters, decks, etc. One trick to balancing games is to not rank your playable units linearly. Sirlin recommends using a tiered list with 3 actual tiers and 2 tiers that you want to keep empty. You want to keep things out of the “God” tier that must absolutely be played if you want to win and conversely you want to keep things out of the “Garbage” tier that must never be played if you want to win. The remaining 3 tiers should all be pretty close.

Getting language type feedback from play testers can also be hard because a lot of good players make decisions subconsciously. In order to balance your game you sometimes need to rely on the intuition of yourself and others. Be careful to get enough feedback that your decisions are not driven by just one loud incompetent person.

Most Important Design Tip

Probably the most important design tip that I got from this article was to try to start the design with mechanics and failsafes that self-balance. Sirlin used a fighting game called Guilty Gear as his example. It built in certain things like progressive gravity and combo breaking type abilities to keep characters from being able to completely immobilize and beat an opponent with no response.

They eliminate potential problems from individual characters with global design features. This is difficult but if you can figure out a way to do it, do it.

Various Tips and Tricks

My notes from the article have a few things that I though were important that won’t get whole paragraphs here. For more on these I recommend reading the original 4 article series on Sirlin’s Blog.

• Don’t balance the fun out of things.
• Counter matches (characters that counter other specific characters) are not good for 1 v 1 style fighting games.
• Avoid special cases and actually balance the game.
• Don’t set yourself up for failure by including too many characters or too much customization.
• If you add a new move, make it too powerful then scale it down as necessary (otherwise play testers won’t use it)

Conclusion

Balancing games is important and complicated. Perfect balance is hard to achieve because to keep the game interesting we don’t want it to be completely solvable. The more play testing you can do the better because it helps you figure out where the game is unbalanced. One of the best ways to balance a game is to have some global design elements that help ensure balance. While this is difficult, it will help tremendously if you can do it.

Sirlin offers a handy pdf summary of his article available here. This subject will be revisited in the future.

Go balance games.