Game Design Curriculum
riotgames.comGame design (whether computer or even board games) is a valuable topic to learn even if you never make a real game. If you make any kind of thing that people use, learning a little about how to think like a game designer can help you make things that are more rewarding and pleasant to use.
One way to think of videogames is that they are useless software. Imagine a word processor that couldn't save or print files. Or a compiler that didn't generate executables that ran on any machine but your own. Why would anyone ever use such a pointless thing?
Well, games are in many ways exactly that. They don't really touch any part of the outside world or produce anything materially useful. They're self contained. So why do people sink time into them even though they can't get anything tangible in return? It's because the process of using the software itself—playing the game—is so intrinsically enjoyable.
If you can learn a little bit of that and apply it to software that does do something useful, you can end up with the kind of programs that build devoted fanbases.
Incredible how many posters are missing your point!
As a gamedev I 100% agree with your assertion that games are useless. An expression I use in game design is "fictional friction". Nothing in my game is real. None of the struggle is essential. Every mouse click or decision was a fiction I designed for players.
Nothing prevents me from giving players infitnite money, in fact there is a dev cheat menu which does just that. Instead all my effort revolves around crafting fake value for otherwise meaningless bits.
Thus games are the peak of software design: people put up with other software to pay for chances to play mine.
While we have the gamedevs here, and we're talking about game design, I would very much love and appreciate if you could upload a picture of your bookshelf and share it here.
I'm almost done with the Coursera CalArts game design specialisation, and they have cited a few resources, but I want to know what the industry recommend amongst themselves.
(That said, I've found the peer assessments on Coursera utterly lacking, some of the videos hard to understand and badly captioned, and will be starting a master's in game design in September...)
That's a fun question. Personally we do not have more than a couple dozen books in total at our house. This is more the product of my generation plus living in Japan where no one can afford the dead space for a book shelf.
For the subject matter I would say your best set of resources is GDC presentations. Our industry's great minds never write books, or even web articles for that matter. Best they give are the occasional GDC presentation. Even then Miyamoto has maybe given a couple hours of publicly accessible teaching material in his entire career.
If you are interested in Rendering that fields has a good number of useful books written. Design itself is more about "theories of games". Everyone has their own theories, mine might be more influenced by Sid Meier than anything.
My experience has been with a couple western designers, but more so stalwart japanese designers. On the Japanese side you'd be surprise how "personal" the design philosophies are. Westerners tend to be more rule driven, and thus if you want a systems driven understanding of design that needs to come from the west.
The training system in Japan is more apprenticeship driven. What the west would call designers first start as planners. Planner being a rather low level job with lots of manual grunt work. Then within a company the senior designers will couch the juniors on the subject of game design.
Thus there indeed does exist tomes on Nintendo's game design: but no one outside Nintendo has ever seen it and no one Ex-Nintendo can talk about it. Just look at how Ojiro (https://twitter.com/moppin_) designer of Downwell went silent after joining Nintendo, then after leaving has remained silent.
Off the top of my head I know for sure Nintendo & Bandai use this "in-company learning" structure. Square Enix being a collection of fiefdoms tends more towards hiring a designer they like then putting them in charge of a team. Hence how you got Tokyo RPG Factory.
Note I'm approaching this with the understanding that a good game only has 1 lead designer. In Japan this is the game's director. It might be that in the west game's have a more group driven approach.
Thank you for highlighting the West's rules/systems-driven approach vs the mentoring approach in Japan.
I an indeed infinitely curious about the personal design philosophies of all the secretive greats. I guess there's something special inside all of us (game designers), and we just need to find it and nurture it. Books are good for starters, and up to a point.
PS good luck with Railgrade!
Am I missing these wieldings of "useless"? Aren't there intangible experiences like morality, logic, therapy, etc.?
I take serious issue with the description of games as useless. They don’t do anything in the same way as reading a book doesn’t do anything. Or playing chess doesn’t do anything. You absolutely get something tangible in return. Whether it’s a new perspective, new friends or utter humiliation.
The idea we should capture the way games build tangible experiences and apply them to “useful software” is to misunderstand both what makes games useful and software that achieves a task. Gamification is swimming in the shallow end of game design. Swimming in the deeper end is beyond what most productive software should be doing design wise. The goals are different, the results are different and more importantly building software that fuses games and learning is different than either.
> I take serious issue with the description of games as useless.
I figured some might. Try to charitably understand why I chose to emphasize with that word. Yes, obviously, playing games provides all sorts of meaningful things to the player. As I said, playing games is intrinsically rewarding.
But what most games don't do is provide extrinsic utility. Playing a videogame does not pay your mortgage, fix your leaky sink, cure your halitosis, or get you an A in class. (Ignoring professional game playing for money, of course.)
Your electricity company's website can be a slow, bug-ridden heap of PHP 1.0 garbage and you will still use it because it lets you pay their bill and keep your lights on. A videogame has no such luxury. If using the game itself is not enjoyable, you have no users. That means good game designers are very well trained in making things people want to use. That's a great skill for anyone who wants to design beloved things.
> The idea we should capture the way games build tangible experiences and apply them to “useful software” is to misunderstand both what makes games useful and software that achieves a task.
There is definitely an important aspect of games that cannot be harnessed by useful software. A key, perhaps the fundamental thing that makes play play is safety. There is a lower bound to how much harm playing a game poorly can do. That keeps the stakes low, which allows you to get into a freer, more exploratory mindset.
Obviously, the app you use to pay your mortgage cannot offer that freeing sense of delight. While that safety is what makes games games, that is not all that makes games enjoyable.
> Gamification is swimming in the shallow end of game design.
Oh dear, I certainly didn't have "gamification" and all the sleazy things that has been used for in mind, though I can see how what I said was ambiguous regarding that.
Maybe a more direct way of stating what I was getting at is that game designers have a greater appreciation of usability than many others. Every tool has some mixture of utility (what it can do) and usability (what it makes easy/enjoyable to do). If a tool has important utility, users will suffer using regardless of its usability. If a university's slow automated phone system is the only way to register classes, well, I guess you're gonna sit on hold for three hours. But you won't like it.
Since games have no utility, they must have usability. Usability ("fun") is foundational in a way that it isn't in other fields. And I think there's a lot to be learned from game designers about how they approach that.
How about logic/puzzle games? They train our brains in finding patterns and that built ‘muscle’ can be applied in non gaming areas. They also serve as a springboard into software development for many. I think the danger is overindulging and the gamification of everything, but in small to moderate amounts games could provide some value. Leavig aside computer games, I think playing in general has a very good value in learning.
> But what most games don't do is provide extrinsic utility. Playing a videogame does not pay your mortgage, fix your leaky sink, cure your halitosis, or get you an A in class. (Ignoring professional game playing for money, of course.)
Games can help you practice interpersonal communication skills, teamwork and coordination, problem solving, and fine motor skills. These may very well help you with your work or leaky sink in the future. Games can also help inure you to failure, and provide some perhaps necessary escapeism to improve your mental health (perhaps more important to work on than your halitosis!). Or help provide that social connection that turns into a job offer.
Playing cow clicker all day - sure, that's probably not all that extrinsicly useful. But you're painting with an overly large brush IMO. And there's perhaps a reason you'll have a damn difficult time finding anyone playing cow clicker all day ;).
> Your electricity company's website can be a slow, bug-ridden heap of PHP 1.0 garbage and you will still use it because it lets you pay their bill and keep your lights on.
Or I might pay by mail or phone instead. Or use my bank's auto-pay setup. It's less a matter of utility, and more a matter of competition.
Games have a huge entertainment industry they're competing with - lots of choice. It wasn't always this competitive - people enjoyed playing Pong on the Atari back in the day. There's plenty of "extrinsicly useful" software I avoid - yes, even when I'm earning $$$ to pay that mortgage - in favor of better alternatives. Your electricity company's website probably has few alternatives, but even then there might be some.
Oh yes absolutely UX design can learn a lot from games.
VR applications are riddled with games folks both because the tech requirements are the same. And also because the interaction design really benefits from the way games use space and deal with limited control input.
I still fundamentally disagree that games don’t provide people with external utility. It’s a popular assumption because they don’t necessarily do anything obvious or provide you with something tangible to others. There are plenty of emotional journeys you can take, creativity to engage in and skills you can learn. My younger brother for example was really helped in learning to read by playing Monkey Island.
An ephemeral word processor actually sounds like something that could provide cathartic release. It might not be as useless as you think.
Can you give a few examples of some products that get this right? Not just in terms of what's commonly referred to as "gamification", and not talking about badges and things that dance around, but a deeper, less obvious, more subtle and refined connection with to that analogy?
I remember I liked a game and I started writing code to play it for me so I could do other things while still having the feeling that an extension of myself was playing.
As a side note, the company had one of the coolest recruiting tactics. I had to examine HTTP responses to be able to send in requests that triggered actions, and they included a call to application in the HTTP response headers "If you're reading this, please apply".
My company was asked to make some health and safety induction software. Visitors to the client company would have to self complete the induction process in the reception area whilst waiting for their host to collect them. Client wanted us to present 38 slides worth of information and have them ‘acknowledge’ each point. Instead of doing this we turned it into a game whereby the user has to explore a simplified 3D version of the building and identify the health and safety risks themselves. Graphics were well designed, it had elements of humour and it worked. Our analytics showed that 94% of people who started interacting with the software completed the entire induction process.
Could you write more about this? What have you used to develop that game? Was it the core competency of your team? I'm wondering because the client did not expect to receive a game, so didn't come to you for the game-dev ability. Am I wrong? I'd love to know more.
> Can you give a few examples of some products that get this right?
The latest one for me is Ableton Live. It is just a beautiful piece of software. Everything feels smooth, immediate, expressive. It gets out of my way whenever it can but is right there at my fingertips when I want it to be. It's just a lovely, lovely program.
Nice! You probably know of this link "Get started making music"[0] and I found it pretty cool.
What do you think of "The Sims Game Design Documents"[1]? Could you recommend other similar resources?
I guess what really strikes a chord with me is the arc, not only "in" the game, but of the journey to make the game. One book I enjoyed on an emotional level was "The Making of Prince of Persia"[2] by Jordan Mechner. I also enjoyed "Masters of Doom"[3] by David Kushner, but more on the merit of good research, which I really respect. I don't want a montage, I want the story with the suffering and tribulations.
Do you know of similar content?
[0]: https://learningmusic.ableton.com/
[1]: https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments/
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Journals-1985-19...
[3]: https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cult...
I'm asking because you seem to speak with experience...
Why do we make video games? I've been programming for 10 years, I love games; wanted to make them. But I went into infosec because it felt...justified? Like it's more noble? But that doesn't seem to make sense saying it out loud.
But your points on understanding game design because of that human-software-machine connection, that just feels like it makes sense.
I'm sorry, this question has just been bugging me for over a year now.
There might not be a deep philosophical answer. Making games is fun, playing games is fun, that's all there is to it. If you can make money doing something you enjoy - why wouldn't you?
To try to go for a philosophical answer - why do we do anything? Cooking, writing, building shelter, sending spaceships to mars. I think generally, the purpose is to make human brains feel good. Ultimately, we all are going to die and nothing we do will have a lasting impact, but as long as we're here - we spend our time making ourselves and each other feel good. Games are one of the ways to make people feel good.
A more cynical answer - we make games for no good reason. Games feel good in the moment, but feel like a waste of time and energy afterwards, making a net negative impact on people's lives, like junk food or addiction. People play them against their best interests, because it feels good in the moment, and because people aren't rational creatures. People make games because making games is fun and makes them money.
One more answer - making games is art. Art is cool. Making games is an art that can be beautiful, interactive, engaging. It's a combination of multiple art forms (painting, sculpting, storytelling, music, etc). It's also way more fun than most kinds of art, people don't get addicted to paintings or books the way they get addicted to video games. I doubt that people got as much joy out of looking at Mona Lisa as they did out of playing Minecraft.
One more related thought - the real world is overrated. We have the power to make imaginary worlds that are far more engaging and satisfying than the one where we live. Better ones. So we make them.
These are different possible perspectives, pick yours. There can be a bunch more I'm not considering.
Thank you for this.
What I left out of my question is my desire and admiration for automotive sports. It's so strange to me that I have no problem admiring to one day build a track car, and waste tires, fuel, and endless hours of amateur manufacturing effort all in the name of "fun". Sure, I'll learn many skills, but it's primarily for fun.
So I'm left with--how do I resolve the cognitive dissonance that "cars" are okay, but "games" need to be justified? I think there's something deeper going on for myself.
Thank you for taking the time to walk through this.
Why do we paint? Sculpt? Write? Film? Play or compose music?
Both art and entertainment are important.
No game is David's Michelangelo in talent or effect.
When people say we need entertainment they are thinking in a sense of dessert like of course you deserve a dessert sometimes. But that is not how we got 67% obesity rates.
And now with companies aggressively stealing attention and average person spending 5 hours a day on entertainment while reading one book a year you do feel little guilty for creating one more app to steal you attention and sell you microtransactions.
but this pressure is a positive thing as now when we make games in free time or talk about games we focus on more artsy indie stuff. it is weird how quickly most of my friends dropping Call of Duty or Halo after decade of obsessing. this pressure will create more artistic games.
> No game is David's Michelangelo in talent or effect.
Yet. How long has sculpting been an art form and how long has it taken for Michelangelo to surface?
How long have video games been an art form?
Also games think on more dimensions. I get sculpting, painting, performance, literature... and just enough magic to make it fresh. Only certain vectors can be described by other mediums and often not combinatorialy.
I think you just haven't played the right games. There are some incredible games which, to me, have the same appeal as Michelangelo's David is to some (personally, to me, its just a sculpture, nothing too interesting -- my point is, the art that some people find meaningful and interesting is completely subjective and depends on the person).
Why do we write books, make movies, music or art?
This sounds very similar to my perspective, which is that most applications try to provide a nice user experience in order to assist in doing something: creating a document, communicating with friends, reading the news, etc. With a game, though, the user experience is what it is trying to do. There's nothing other than UX. That makes game development good practice for focusing on UX in general.
Weren't there multiple studies showing that games gained experience is useful for the real world?
* Social - How many people have learned to trade and avoid scams IRL by playing RuneScape? No RuneScape player would have falled for the recent "double your BTC" Twitter scam. * Strategy- From all kinds of games (chess, strategy, fighting games, shooters, etc.) * Working in teams - MOBAs, Rocket League, Shooters. You start flaming your team, you lose. * Health - I know people that hate doing exercise, yet they played hundreds of hours of Table Tennis in VR and losing weight. * Self-esteem - Games allow people to clearly know when they are really good at something. They also make it easy to see progress. So, you might feel like you suck at everything IRL, but you find that one game that you are good at and then people even respect you for that and look up to you. * Mental health - Might be for escapism but also could help you express your anger or other feelings in a game instead of the real world This list could go on forever.
> They're self contained This is so, so wrong. I don't know if you are a gamer or not, but gaming communities are huge. Once you start playing a game, you will want to discuss it with others, learn from others, share your experience with others. Not only that, but through a game, the game developers communicate to you in a sense that no other experience can (books, movies). Yes, the "bits" that make up a game are self-contained as any other physical object, but the story behind them and what they express spreads way further than themselves. I think "real" software is a lot more self-contained, plus most of it is created to hinder value creation, not to actually create value.
> Social - How many people have learned to trade and avoid scams IRL by playing RuneScape?
This may be true, but RuneScape players do not seek out the game to improve that skill. They don't think, "well, I'm pretty crappy at trading and dealing with scammers. I guess I'll go play RuneScape, even though it's not fun at all, to improve that skill."
The other examples in your paragraph are in the same vein. I am not saying that playing games does not have positive benefits. I'm saying that most players do not choose to play games primarily for those benefits.
> I know people that hate doing exercise, yet they played hundreds of hours of Table Tennis in VR and losing weight.
My point exactly. If all they cared about was losing weight, they would exercise and play Table Tennis at the same rate. The reason they play VR tennis is because it's more usable.
> I don't know if you are a gamer or not, but gaming communities are huge.
Not much of a gamer these days, but I worked at EA for eight years.
You're taking umbrage at what I said because games are clearly close to your heart, but read a little closer. I'm not attacking games. I'm doing the opposite. I'm pointing out that games must be fantastically designed because people will choose to sink hours into them regardless of whether they provide practical benefit or not.
Let's say a study came out that showed that RuneScape actually did not improve your real-life trading skills. Do you think that would significantly affect how much people played it?
Hmm, so your point is that the main reason play games is for entertainment and not to improve a specific skill. But, does it matter? If it was not for games, they wouldn't have improved those skills at all, as they were not actively looking to improve them, or are doing deliberate practices is too boring or intense for some.
> If all they cared about was losing weight, they would exercise and play Table Tennis at the same rate.
They did care about losing weight, but going to the gym or exercising was not something that they did before or were ever planning to do, simply because they didn't consider it to be an enjoyable activity. My point is, if it was not for VR Table Tennis, they wouldn't have lost that weight. Same with other skills, if it was not for the games that were facilitating the development of certain skills, most likely most would never aquire those skills, which, for the most part have clear real-life applicability and benefits.
I think it's the same like saying tracking steps taken using mobile's device gamification feature has no real-world benefit. Yet, my dad actively started walking more just to reach the daily steps goal. If it was not for that goal, he wouldn't have started walking more.
> Let's say a study came out that showed that RuneScape actually did not improve your real-life trading skills. Do you think that would significantly affect how much people played it?
There are certainly games and gamification features that make it really easy to learn a specific skill. That being said, most people play games because they like it, not to actively improve a skill. In this RuneScape example, no, I wouldn't care about the studies, but while playing the game I would definitely be happy to see me getting better are trading (eg. selling fish next to the fishing spot at a cheap price, or travelling a long way to the bank and sell it at a higher price, or even creating huge stocks of fish and then waiting for a price increase before selling). I think games are really good at making people find new skills and things they are good at, without them actively looking to improve in any way. Once you find a skill that you enjoy (eg. trading), you can go further, outside the gaming world, and actively look to improve that skill or use it in the real world.
> I'm pointing out that games must be fantastically designed because people will choose to sink hours into them regardless of whether they provide practical benefit or not.
People sink hours in anything regardless they provide a practical benefit or not: games, books, netflix, hobbies in general. There are many different type of games, from those that directly play with your dopamine system and have the dreaded in-app-purchases monetizaton, to those that tell a good story or are highly competitive and make you feel good for defeating others. People have various reasons to play games, and one of them could be the well-designed game loop, but this one is usually the most relevant part in the addictive pay-to-win games mentioned before.
>useless
Well, they are not exactly useless. Even discounting for educational games, pointless games like Borderlands / Grand Theft Auto have great value. That value lies in providing entertainment in an interactive way, something that was never possible for most of human existence.
There is something magical about highly interactive games, like say Far Cry. GTA, etc, where the player knows his game, while being the same product, is unique to him/her. Services like Twitch have created whole new ecosystems of micro-economies, where a section of population is replacing movies with watching others playing games. There is great fun in watching an expert gamer playing a game. Part of the experience is in unexpected humor through mistakes, wrong decisions, distractions, etc. Part of the experience is in knowing that none of it is scripted and everything is happening in real time.
As an evolution of the entertainment industry, it's not useless.
There are many negative aspects of gaming as well. If played in excess, at the cost of childhood related activities, like playing with friends outside, etc, it can be detrimental to social development.
But those sorts of problems are there in many areas of life. Anything done in excess is detrimental.
You missed the point. He said games do not generate anything materially useful. His intend here was to trivialize the true value of games and still giving them the honor of being worthwhile. Read between the lines or just don't at all.
> Read between the lines or just don't at all.
Not OP, but I take umbridge with this last bit.
That aside, I fail to see how exercising grey matter and fine motor control is not materially useful.
It's going to be grating for any gamedev to hear games described as "useless", as if players' enjoyment was somehow not valuable.
But I think you're basically making the argument that games are art. That they exist for the aesthetic experience, and for no utilitarian purpose.
And I'm very much okay with that. :)
I would argue that there's a big class of games that have an educational purpose. E.g. Minecraft, TIS-100, and many more. Even an arbitrary game that's not in your native language is helpful, I learned English mostly from gaming.
I immediately thought of music software as something I find intrinsically rewarding, but of course it produces music. Then again, games produce let's plays :)
(Riot's less than stellar history aside) I see these takes on game design a lot, and they're interesting to see because everyone takes their own stance on how to construct a fun game from distinct smaller concepts. Yahtzee’s Dev Diary [0] talks a lot about loops (And I give it a watch recommendation), while at your average GDC talk you hear about the concept of pillars [1] and their role in shaping games. I'm interested to hear if anyone else has resources on other game design takes.
https://www.twitch.tv/irdc_usa
This is quite old and focused on rogue-likes, but it might meet your request. Somehow.
I've not played duskers (2). But from watching the video, sounds like he was super lucky. A happy accident, rather than an utter disaster.
One of those definite cases of survivorship bias.
I was privy to some of the development process of Duskers, and I would say that Tim worked pretty hard to create opportunities for happy accidents to befall him. There were several other prototypes that he was working on at the same time, but only Duskers crossed the finish line. This is not uncommon among game developers I've known; generally they're bursting with ideas and have many in-progress experiments in various stages at any time. It's a little like an incubator, where there's a diversity of ideas in order to have a better chance of having one be a hit.
There is survivorship bias, but it's kinda all happening within the one designer.
The three books I've read and then gone back to over the years are:
- Brenda Romero (credited on the book as Brenda Braithwaite) and Ian Schreiber's Challenges for Game Designers[1], which uses a series of design exercises to illustrate concepts like balancing and mechanical loops, and at least from a cursory glance at the Riot curriculum is very similar in structure to it. The exercises still help me bootstrap my understanding of mechanics that I don't always employ in designs, and still occasionally inspire new ideas just by going through one almost like a karate kata.
- Raph Koster's Theory of Fun for Game Design[2], which is more introspective about the nature of games rather than a pragmatic how-to guide. Koster's views are often contentious, particularly on defining what a game is or can be, but I usually go back to this book when I want to step back and remind myself what kinds of audiences might be in my blind spot for a mechanic or concept — I might think something is fun because I think it's fun, without interrogating why, and even if I don't agree with Koster on how he goes about defining it the book does a good job of demonstrating how one builds a definition in the first place.
- Jesse Schell's Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses[3], which just got a 3rd edition last year that I haven't had a chance to read yet. It's a framework for interrogating a design — and I say "interrogating" literally, as the lenses are a set of questions to ask of your design — that touches on mechanics but also how viable an idea is to make into a game in the first place. Walking an idea through the lenses serves like a second pair of "eyes" when I don't have another person handy to bounce that idea off of in depth. There's a card deck version[3] of just the lenses that are handier to have on the desk.
It's likely that there are newer books out there covering similar ground;[4] these are the ones that were around when I came up through my first game design experiences around 2010-2012.[5] These are all high level enough to be pretty general works on the nature and purpose of all types of games, even if all of them have digital games at or near front-of-mind, without being so focused on theory and philosophy that they don't give you actionable things to apply in a design.
(Also, I've found that all three of those names are polarizing, often for very different reasons. I find the works valuable regardless; books don't tend to yell at me in a Discord chat or on social media when I read them, which is a nice change of pace.)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Challenges-Game-Designers-Brenda-Brat...
[2] https://www.powells.com/book/theory-of-fun-for-game-design-2...
[3] https://www.schellgames.com/art-of-game-design/ — and of course there's a booster pack available, because game designers are insatiable post-publication tinkerers
[4] Procedural Storytelling in Game Design, co-edited by Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress and Tanya X. Short of a bunch of procedural indie games and formerly Funcom, is exciting in concept, and Darius Kazemi is always fun to read on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Procedural-Storytelling-Design-Tanya-...
Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design, by Geoffrey Engelstein and Issac Shalev, looks like it ports the cookbook concept from software development to tabletop games, which feels right up my alley: https://www.amazon.com/Building-Blocks-Tabletop-Game-Design/...
(It seems notable that both of those are by CRC Press, which I associate more with academic textbooks, but neither really fits the usual bill for them.)
Calling it "newer" might be a misnomer, but I'm desperate to get around to the illustrated The Making Prince of Persia: Journals and wish there were more books with the perspective of a journal during development — watching along as opportunities open and close, instead of as a post-mortem that's colored by the end product and invariably focused on what went wrong/how to avoid it. Also it just looks gorgeous: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Journals-1985-19...
[5] Steve Swink's Game Feel has been on my list of to-reads on the subject forever, but I've never gotten around to it: https://www.powells.com/book/game-feel-9780123743282
I bounced off Katie Salen/Eric Zimmerman's Rules of Play, but it's lauded enough that it's hard to omit it. If you like Koster's ideas around orthography in game design and want to see a predecessor that takes it further and issues prescriptive rules, or if you have more of an interest in design criticism than creation and want an intro to a critical vocabulary, it might appeal more: https://www.powells.com/book/rules-of-play-game-design-funda...
Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop is a great read, and even more well suited to a classroom environment than Challenges for Game Designers, but it's _too_ classroom-y for my tastes, focused more on getting from point A to a very specific and more directed point B, instead of laying out a more open-ended task where the boundaries can be a creative aid. I've never felt compelled to return to it as a result, but there are folks who swear by it, so it's still worth mentioning: https://www.amazon.com/Game-Design-Workshop-Playcentric-Inno...
Tried and true.
Despite thinking Riot has excellent insight into competitive game development, I'm pretty cynical about their recent wave of sharing since it wreaks of image repair. It doesn't matter what there is to learn from Riot if the culture is poisonous, and I don't believe it's changed much since the last wave of allegations. It's a shame, since this looks pretty substantive, but I'd rather learn this elsewhere.
It's extremely difficult in Riot's case to separate the content they make from the culture of their company, and I agree with you that it's not really possible to do. I think that this resource is still an interesting collection of material and it's worth the time evaluating on its merits while keeping the perspective of the company's values in mind.
They have held an extremely interesting tech blog for years, but it makes sense that they would talk more about design only after they had more than one game on the market.
They put a PowerPoint into a PDF into a scrollable window too small to display a full slide. Ouch.
The course itself is interesting, in that it's not a programming course at all. It's about what makes a game fun. Download the PDF and look at page 6, which has the useful info.
There's a download link above the PDF view that allows you to view/download the PDF directly
Game designers in most companies do not program.
Disclaimer: I am a DotA fan/nerd and am a huge fan of its design vs LoL's.
I applaud Riot for this, but I think they're specialty and reason for their huge growth is more to do with outreach, as jimbob45 noted. For a company with such a focus on competitive PvP games, I would argue they are not very good at balance at all. I would even go so far to say that their monetization scheme is detrimental to the balance of the game because of the incentive mismatch with creating a balanced game vs a profitable one. With that said, I think they have gotten a lot better over the years, and no one can take away from their success.
I agree with you, but I also wonder if balance is somewhat of an anti-pattern. By changing the balance of the game, they're influencing the meta builds and play styles, which keeps things interesting. So in a way, creating imbalances is a feature to keep the game fresh. All of this within reason of course.
I would agree with you IF you take traditional view of 'balance' in the way that LoL and other simpler games do. I would call that ideal a 'symmetric' balance, where they want each element in its category to be compared to all other elements in the same category. LoL definitely strives for this, as do many other games. Each champion is balanced against other champions of the same role. Items are relatively inflexible and augment the already present abilities of the champion. Each champion is essentially a complete package and each uses items to enhance what they already have. But when you have such rigid categories, power creep and best-in-slot champions will naturally appear, as whatever is best able to maximize their item's stats will be meta. My first competitive game was LoL back in its beta, and I was hooked, but what opened my eyes to what balance could be was DotA's approach.
DotA takes a systemic approach to balance. Each hero is a tool in the team's toolbox. Most heroes have very specific strengths and weaknesses, and their powerspikes are very pronounced. When you draft a team, you are specifically drafting a set of capabilities that you want to exploit against the enemy. This also leads to heroes having very hard counters. But I think the real beauty in DotA is it's item system, which allows you to patch holes in your team's composition and allow a huge amount of flexibility for each hero. I can keep going forever, as I really love its game design. But the most important thing that DotA does in terms of balance is its holistic approach that allows heroes to be individual components to a team, and have items to augment strengths or patch holes that the draft was not prepared for. (DotA's design and metagame sparked my interest in Complex Adaptive Systems, so I just nerd out about it any chance I get).
So to your point, I think the whole need to create imbalance is caused because of the way Riot balances their characters in the first place. I think it is fundamentally flawed from a design perspective, but it obviously makes them a ton of money. They really mastered monetization of multiplayer games. They also made their game very approachable for noobs, and that I have to commend them for.
agree on mobas (I was one of the devs on dotabuff for a year and think LoL ... has many opportunities for improvement) but ... try Valorant, it's imho much, much more interesting than cs:go or overwatch. It's a brilliant game.
The thing that I take away from this is that this could be indicative of a shift away from the modern concept of university and towards a strengthening of the old master-apprentice models of learning.
I was genuinely interested in this, however, after clicking around I couldn't find anything more than PDFs with empty areas for taking notes and vague curriculum module descriptions. Am I missing something? Perhaps there's missing content when viewing the page via mobile. Will revisit from my PC later.
The content here is a guide on how to teach the concepts outlined in the curriculum, and is not necessarily a self instruction course. See module one: https://www.riotgames.com/en/urf-academy/fun-and-feeling
Sure, but how do you teach these concepts without a source of truth? I can't find any reference material.
Edit: Just discovered the lesson plan download link under the headings, separate from the buttons at the bottom of the page. It helps, though am still confused about how anyone would use this material.
The “8 kinds of fun” have been a huge help to me as a D&D DM. It’s a great framework for running adventures that players will respond to and give everyone a chance to find their fun.
It also helps answer micro, nuts and bolts like what kinds of rewards your players will respond to. For example, a player really into challenge might only care about the stats on a magic sword they find, but a player more into narrative or exploration will dig a sword with a mysterious engraving on the hilt even if it isn’t necessarily an upgrade. Real life people usually respond to multiple categories, but if you pay attention during the game you will see this at work.
I got onto this via a post at theangrygm.com, who I really recommend. He’s super opinionated, and the “angry GM” schtick gets old, but he knows what he’s talking about.
IMHO the biggest innovation Riot brought to the industry was player outreach. They were the first to heavily (30+ posts per day across multiple devs) interact with their player base. Even better, their patch notes were the first to have paragraphs explaining each change. Even better, they stuck to a bi-weekly patch cycle religiously, unlike Blizzard, who had to be begged to put out a patch every six months.
To players who actually played SC2 and LoL circa 2011, it wasn’t a surprise when LoL became the premiere e-sport and SC2 withered away.
I never picked up lol early, but I do vividly recall all the screeching wars between Hon (heroes of newerth) , Dota and lol people
The agreement was that lol won because it was free, tho it looked and played worse than either Dota or Hon, but the free aspect won riot the entire emerging markets sector
Me as a SC2 player through and through I just looked down on them overall, so feel free to correct me if I am wrong
Of all the non-FAANG gaming companies Riot is the one that most closely operates like a tech giant to me (with the exception of maybe Epic Games)
They have an incredibly robust M&A division, have mastered land + expand with their esports, are putting down roots in pretty much every major gaming category, and have modern monetization practices down to a tee.
Excluding the clearly egregious cultural issues, I would be fairly confident in betting on Riot in the long term
>I would be fairly confident in betting on Riot in the long term
Tencent already did that more than 10 years ago. I wonder how they pick who to invest into, because it seems that in the gaming space they have their hand in almost everything successful. And how come others aren't doing the same?
>Of all the non-FAANG gaming companies
So, out of all of them?
I must say that they're probably the most competent studio on the market
LoL is probably the only game that I play (maybe once a year I decide to spend up to 50h over some peroid on one title like GTA V or something) for years and it almost always feels "fresh" and very competitive.
I think there's lots of studios just as competent or more competent than Riot. They've made so few games, it's hard to compare them to other studios in that way.
I agree. I do not like Riot's "startup" approach to game design, where gameplay elements are plucked from the most popular titles on the market. The games have never felt innovative to me, they just seem like they took from everyone else and then focused on iteration so much that it gives the features and gameplay a level of polish that a lot of games don't get (especially from a esports vantage point). The art style also feels so accessible to me that it lacks a certain soul that defines a good game.
That's very fair
The way they do esport is huge part of their success
LoL is also an amazing spectator sport, the format is so fun to watch. OverWatch/CS-GO/Valorant/Fortnite etc... the FPS aspect is a harder to follow especially for people with slower eye movement.
Lol on the other hand, its like watching Soccer/Golf/Football except the players also have magic/hi-tech abilities. The "depth" of the strategy is also sooo much more than an FPS. flex picks, lane swaps, lane freezing , meta shifts, (also mechanics but that spans across all esports).
Then theres also the music division, that collaborates with mega pop stars in korea/us/south america
You only think that because you know more about LoL. As someone very into Overwatch, it's an absurdly complicated game where you only know about the complexity once you learn about it. After having learned a lot more about the game, I can look at high-level play and "see" a lot more of the things they're doing due to the level of complexity of the game, just like you can see that same stuff watching LoL.The "depth" of the strategy is also sooo much more than an FPSAt a high level, Overwatch is complicated because it effectively combines MOBA elements with FPS elements. It's not really a straight FPS, and the higher skill you get the more you have to pay attention to the MOBA elements in order to do well. As an example: Zarya is a tank whose entire ability kit (sans ultimate) is built around using an ability on herself and a teammate (on different cooldowns) to protect them from damage/negative effects for 2 seconds at a time. This ability can be destroyed if 200 damage is done to the player it's affecting, and Zarya gains increased damage if damage is done to this ability up to a cap. It sounds simple, but players who have mastered Zarya are ones who know _when_ to use these two abilities, which order, etc. which has a lot to do with the current state of the game. Bad Zarya players use both abilities instantly and simultaneously the second they see the opponent. It's all about timing abilities... which sounds a lot like playing a MOBA. But you also have to be good at aim and master the two firing modes she has, among the many, many other things to pay attention to during gameplay.
I don't whether LoL or Overwatch has more "depth", but they both have a lot of it.
Let me start a flamewar by informing you both that Dota 2 exists, and has much more complicated spells. And hence more depth. At least that's what people who have played both LoL and Dota 2 say.
Everything the GP has described is essentially only the mechanics part of a Dota 2 game. The strategic part of the game has way more depth than "use your abilities at the right time in the right order".
I agree to a large extent, but the last 2-3 years have not been kind to the Dota 2 strategic landscape. In the strategic rock-paper-scissors of teamfighting beats ganking beats splitpushing beats teamfighting, teamfighting has been overpowered by Valve.
It's not really possible to consistently win in pro Dota by ganking or splitpushing strategies. Only occasionally, can you do it, when you have a clear draft advantage the opponents don't see, and a clear plan that you can execute flawlessly. While, if both teams go for the teamfight strategy, then there is much more room for mistakes.
this is cs / this is overwatch: https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/ildfi9/xqc_...
I don't agree. While I played LoL for a while (never competitive level though), it's still not fun to watch any competitive game.
Comparing these games to soccer is impossible. Every champion has unique abilities uncomparable to other champion's. If you have no knowledge about what they are doing (or need to be doing) you are just out of depth.
The games are just too fast and way too specific for casual watchers. This is ok but this kind of gaming will never get even near of soccer in spectator interest.
Edit: typo
hmm i compare it in the sense of how you visually look at it. top down, from usually a birds eye view.
I do agree it might be hard for an extra casual person to watch. Maybe i'll say its soccer for 'cerebrals' who want the best of chess + soccer + rts. They want a juicy 'programming style' logic problem injected into the veins of their esport (i'm thinking 150 champs x (4 abilities + 1 passive), incl % reduction math and item build meta strategies)
yeah i guess some people don't like watching competitive league, but after 10 years or so, its still pulling in massive crowds and is _huge_ in china (ofc tencent owns it though)
Meanwhile, League of Legends has been the most watched game on Twitch consistently for years, only rivaled by the some-odd temporary new release and Fortnite.
It's not that complicated. The champions walk around and shoot spells at each other.
I've actually never seen this opinion before. The amount of background knowledge you need to understand a match LoL is so much higher than something like CS, which I think is definitely the easiest major esport to consume
I think that it's dependent on how depth you want to understand
If you're just curious about who's winning and who's doing "cool stuff" and killing enemies then you don't need years of experience
but if you want to understand all that decision making stuff then yea
I suppose "competent" encompasses a limitless variety of accomplishments, including both reliable upkeep of a massively popular real-time multiplayer game and creating+maintaining a massively popular competitive game's balance and freshness. I reflexively associate it with technical performance, like John Carmack at iD and Naughty Dog now.
(Well, and back in the day – this writeup of Crash Bandicoot by Naughty Dog's first employee is a classic: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/20131031/203788/...)
I hate that they release new champions so often.
My incentive to play is climbing the ranked ladder and, like you, I play in bursts separated by months, but each time I start playing again there are like 5 new champions whose abilities I don't know or understand, which keeps me at a disadvantaged position. I don't have time to study all the new champs abilities.
I think their high champion-release rate drives the casual, but competitive-minded players away.
They release like 5 champions a year, most of them in late summer and late fall. Most months there are no new champions.
Their MMR system has changed over the years to maximize revenue at the expense of player pain. They force the above-average player to play 100s of games climb to rank where they "belong" per season, gradually increasing the amount of time required to be absolutely absurd. Combine that with their lack of care for the toxicity in their player base and you have one hot stinky mess, and I wouldn't put a high schooler anywhere near their core game design values. Direct reflection of their (bad) company culture.
In the micro, fun and well designed gameplay (Valorant too!). In the macro, their games are a terrible slog rooted in addiction science. All to maximize revenue from rolling skin and champion releases. Every single champion is released overpowered to add a temporary boost in play time and revenue. We can do better.
Riot Games, isn't that the game company wholly owned by TenCent?
yeah I guess so, at least purchased most of its stock?
Is there any good game design curriculum you'd recommend? The webpage above is not suitable for self-paced learners...
Bad joke sorry
People are downvoting you, but this is actually a ridiculously common thing in games.
The entire game industry is pretty bad in general compared to tech or otherwise: one huge concept is that you have to "love the game"; you're willing to take low pay, low benefits, deal with overrun unpaid overtime hours, etc. because you "love the game". Most game companies freely tell you about how disposable you are because they have hordes of players, many willing to work for free.
Riot has serious problems with this. The C-level that was repeatedly reported (for years) for grabbing testicles, dryhumping employees or farting on them is still in their role and hasn't been removed - they were just suspended for a month or two and reinstated. The gender-discrimination forced new legal counsel just a few months ago due to possible collusion.
In 2011 I interviewed for a Mobile position at Riot to make an accessory app for players. I was literally hazed like old school college hazings. At the end they asked me when I wanted to start. I told the lead dev to get lost and he begged me to "not be like that" but said if I was going to "be like that" then I wasn't a good fit anyway.
It is still to this day one of the worst experiences I've encountered.
You had to put underwear on your head and drink alcohol until you got sick?
How the hell does this fly? Why haven't employees sued the hell out of the company?
Why don't game engineers demand better? Start a company with decent work hours and comp and refuse to work elsewhere.
The games industry is sickly and broken.
From 2018 case (just google "riot farting" honestly): https://html2-f.scribdassets.com/6454fy6neo6mwj3w/images/5-7...
> Why don't game engineers demand better? Start a company with decent work hours and comp and refuse to work elsewhere.
Some do! I would imagine many indie game companies are not like this. There's kind of a split, where you have "strictly-business" companies - many Asian MMORPG publishers that have a subsidiary in the US are like this. There is no gaming culture, it's just a standard workday. You might get some plushies at the office or a poster or two.
The "cool" companies, like Riot and Blizzard, complete with campus statues of game characters and a culture to match, conference rooms named after game characters or items, are what gamers seem to want to look up to, though.
If you've played any MMORPG long enough, you'll see a lot of recurring themes, kids gleefully willing to "answer support tickets for free" and "I'll be a GM they don't even need to pay me" -- this probably is part of the reason that produces toxic culture, along with the fact that if you strictly hire only gamers, you're already going to almost certainly have a higher toxicity demographic in the first place, depending on the game. If we're talking something like Harvest Moon or similar, of course there's going to be close to no toxic players.
Riot's primary product involves matchmaking you into 4 other random people that you have to cooperate with for anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour or more, where one person can lose the game for everyone by repeatedly dying to the enemy and making the enemy stronger. If you leave, you get banned or penalised for abandoning your team; this includes virtually unwinnable dragged-out hour long matches. You can kind of see how this playerbase would differ from, say, the usual singleplayer or co-op indie or puzzle game.
It's very difficult to boycott a game you've spent tens of thousands of hours on - a game that you're good at, that you have friends on, that you've spent heaps of cash shop currency on lootboxes for. Even if you desperately dislike the developer. This happens for many companies - look at all the loudmouthed people on reddit et al screaming about how no one should support EA or Blizzard, and then a month later go buy the new expansion pack for something and buy lootboxes and forget about it.
> You can kind of see how this playerbase would differ from, say, the usual singleplayer or co-op indie or puzzle game.
Oh yes. I must say, these days I hate playing multiplayer game modes with leaderboards attached.
Relevant to this thread: I used to play Heroes of the Storm (Blizzard's LoL clone) causally with friends. Then one day a colleague dragged me into his team, full of people dozens of levels above me (and otherwise experienced progamers). That was one stressful evening where I could tell everyone hated the noob that was me. My reflexes were OK, but my "meta" wasn't.
I never played a game of HotS with that colleague again.
I mean, seriously, I want to play games where one can excel in out-thinking the opponent. But HotS progaming feels more like an exercise in memorizing obscure game mechanics and a (constantly changing) Excel sheet full of character stats.
Well, the history is a bit different. LoL was created as a clone from Dota (Defense of the Ancients) mod for Warcraft 3. So, DOTA 2 is a continuation of that story and Blizzard basically recreated the mod into a standalone game and called it DOTA 2.
I do agree with the sentiment though. The community is definitively not n00b friendly and I gave up soon as well :S
Blizzard did not do that. Valve (the company behind Steam) did that. Much salt was sown around the Blizzard offices during the lawsuits that followed. Valve won.
Blizzard went on to release a remake of the game that spawned DOTA which was universally reviled, a large part of which was due to them killing incentives to build custom maps with their new IP rules designed to avoid another DOTA incident.
Armchair analysis with no expertise or special access to information, accuracy of statements may vary.
In case people are wondering, hes talking about Warcraft 3 Reforged, which is a remake of Warcraft 3. A real disaster of a release, I couldnt imagine anyone could have f* up such a beloved game worse than Blizzard could.
I know the beginning of the story, I played the ur-original DotA the UMS map for W3 (and even earlier UMS variants of the concept for vanilla StarCraft/SCBW) :). But I somehow missed the existence of DOTA 2.
The community has probably never been noob friendly. A common meme shared in the Dota 1 days (before LoL and Heroes of Newerth) was "Welcome to DOTA, you suck."
Also, I believe you meant Valve made Dota 2.
> I mean, seriously, I want to play games where one can excel in out-thinking the opponent. But HotS progaming feels more like an exercise in memorizing obscure game mechanics and a (constantly changing) Excel sheet full of character stats
Just for the record:
obscure game mechanics and a (constantly changing) Excel sheet full of character stats
Is exactly out-thinking the opponent, and we are not even talking of a game where execution enters into play as Heroes is no Dota2, let alone SC2 or Broodwar
What you want isn't real outthinking, you want to feel rewarded for feeling like you out-thought your opponent, be it true or not
Fair enough.
I was a quite good SC/SCBW player back in the day though, and I was up to date with obscure game mechanics and unit stats and "current meta" (way before it was ever called that). Yet with all that, the game still felt like it had much bigger possibility space. Something I never felt about MOBA games.
(Come to think of it, maybe I just don't like the "team sports with strangers!" aspect of the currently popular multiplayer games - MOBAs, Battle Royales, whatever the genre it is Overwatch falls into, etc.)
It's not really your fault. Pro gamers have enough experience to be able to know that dragging a noob into an expert-level match is going to be a bad outcome.
>"I'll be a GM they don't even need to pay me"
Is that Tibia reference?
You'll see this in almost every MMORPG (I segment out RPG because it's the most likely to get these - a MMOFPS like Destiny 2 generally just gets by with a few support tickets; people get isolated into clusters or small parties so it doesn't end up as obvious or exposed).
I do miss Tibia though :)
It's a demand problem, there's a huge number of young engineers who desperately want to get into games. They get burnt out after a few years and replaced with new ones.
That being said, things are slowly starting to change, and employees of game studios are starting to demand better. It's still bad in most places, but the discussion is happening.
There is a massive gaming industry in Poland. From discussions with engineers/Devs/designers in that field, they are overworked, management doesn't know what they want, objectives/deliverables/requirements change on the fly (while schedule/cost stays the same). Then fast-tracking happens (no crashing - no extra funds).
For most of the issues they made me believe that it's a halo effect. People that were great designers/devs/other became managers (and bad project managers) and then confusion ensues.
Anyone from Polish game scene can please give better insight?
That sounds about the same as what I've heard from game developers I've talked to in the States as well.
Games are massively difficult to develop, and because of that there's this idea that insane crunch is inevitable for all projects. But every single story I've heard is that project management for just about every game is horrible, even in comparison to badly managed software in general.
I appreciate the snark as much as the next guy but I don't believe Hacker News is the right forum for it.
I agree, sorry.
One could say such snark is...boysenous
Why has it become so popular recently to shit on something because of who made it? Is this not just a poor ad hominem?
In this case because they are positioned to become a form of role model of these students. Who will eventually find out that their favorite company can be horrible to negligible consequence.
You could justify almost any such attack like this. Can you not just appreciate what you’re given here for free, for once? The effort people have put into this? Just imagine pouring months into something like this and getting your post as a thanks.
Because they still benefit. They benefit when people consume their products and they benefit when they're given a forum within the community.
The problem I have with courses like this is it validates careers that lack integrity.
Game design 101 starts with learning to program or do graphics.
The same with software development. Unfortunately, we as an industry validated an entire class of people with jobs where they literally manage software (agile people) without building actual software for years.
It doesn’t sit well with me, but life is not fair.
>Game design 101 starts with learning to program or do graphics.
No it doesn't, any more than architecture 101 starts with bricklaying, or novel writing 101 starts with learning typesetting and printing.
These are mostly false analogies.
I don’t know enough about Architecture to point out the fundamentals that you should be making parallels to.
For novels, typesetting is an incredible false analogy. You need to learn how to communicate via writing on a technical level before you can write creatively (e.g stories).
Back to the shot at agile, I would not expect anyone that never dealt with deadlines or technical scoping to manage timelines for either of those things.
If someone doesn’t even know how to write a game loop, they are going to move on to game design?
If you look at a movie, some of your bad screenplay writing can be fixed via casting. Imagine not having any hands on experience with the process, but alas, you move on to movie director because you took movie directing 101. It’s insane, design is a holistic process that requires a lot of exposure.
>For novels, typesetting is an incredible false analogy. You need to learn how to communicate via writing on a technical level before you can write creatively (e.g stories).
Remember that the purpose of games is to communicate with the player, just as the purpose of a novel is to communicate with the reader. Novels do this through language, games do this through direction, design and assets, not the code. I think the analogy to typesetting is correct - writing the code that runs the game is a far lower level activity than writing the game itself.
>If someone doesn’t even know how to write a game loop, they are going to move on to game design?
If they do, it's only because a company doesn't want to hire outside of house. But one doesn't need to know how to write a game loop to know how to design a game, any more than one needs to know how to design a game in order to write a game loop. They're completely separate disciplines.
>It’s insane, design is a holistic process that requires a lot of exposure.
Not necessarily to programming. It can be useful, and sometimes with small studios or a single developer, it's unavoidable (but good design in those cases is usually the exception rather than the rule.)
If that’s the case, then my friend, you live in a better world than I’ve come close to sniffing.
You can tell stories without writing.
That was how human history and "oral tradition" was passed down for thousands of years, even after the development of writing.
If anything, writing made telling stories harder because you had to start considering things other than just your words, like punctuation and spelling.
If you look at a movie, some of your bad screenplay writing can be fixed via casting. Imagine not having any hands on experience with the process, but alas, you move on to movie director because you took movie directing 101. It’s insane, design is a holistic process that requires a lot of exposure.
Most directors can't write screenplays, or even work the cameras they use to film their movies. And yet Hollywood has been doing just fine...
And for the record: there are plenty of game designers in the video game industry that can't program. They've collectively designed games that have sold tens of billions of dollars.