Hey everyone! I’m kinda new to Unity and the forums and so far I’ve been generally enjoying a lot of the positive feedback on a lot of the threads
I’ve worked on a few other engines before and have even released a few web games here and there, so I’m no stranger to Game design. With my recent project (which I hope to showcase soon) I’ve been wanting to ask this question for awhile… And with all the veterans I see on the forums, why not make use of the potential valuable information I can get…
My Question: What are some of the common mistakes you see beginner or seasoned game designers tend to make?
It could be inappropriate ideas and approaches people tend to use or even the flawed mindsets behind them…What are your thoughts?
Poor usage of monetization features is a big common mistake- there seems to be a prevailing idea that ads are always the thing to do when it comes to free to play. What I’ve learned is that when implemented poorly, they can really damage a games experience. Monetization is a huge deal and deserves extra research to figure out the best way to handle it.
Related to the above, I often see a failure to design with marketing in mind- sure you can share a high score to Facebook, but a number alone doesn’t make people want to share, nor is it clear to potential customers why they might love you game.
Art design is another related note- the market isn’t forgiving because a developer is an indie- lots of people will tell you that graphics aren’t everything, and you don’t need to have great art quality. While you don’t need to have access to expensive tools, and an art degree is not a must, games are still a mostly visual medium- customers will be evaluating your game on its attractiveness and level of polish. This means a working knowledge of color theory, composition, at least some animating skill and a grasp of things like lighting and cinematography. If you want to compete, you have to look competitive.
Neglecting to make your camera and controls as polished as possible. Players will forgive graphics (heck, Thomas Was Alone just uses solid-colored squares), but they’ll absolutely hate on a game with unresponsive or unintuitive controls or an awkward camera.
Also, for indies in particular: Scoping the game too big, or too small. If it’s too big, you’ll never finish, or you’ll cut too many corners. On the other hand, if you try to make it smaller than it should be, you may cut out the spark that makes your game idea unique.
I wanted to add something because I feel like it touches on something I said that might not have been clear- I don’t think it’s forgiveness really- TWA is a stunning game, graphically. The use of lighting, color theory to pick the palettes, using camera angle to invoke a feel all while clearly communicating information to the player is a fantastic take on graphical minimalism- I guess what I wanted to get across is that you don’t need graphical complexity to be competitive, but you do need to have a high level of polish and good skill with whatever graphics you do use in order to stay competitive with other games that might be able to have more graphical complexity. TWA is a great example for how to stand out while still being simplistic.
I also think people underestimate the importance of movement. TWA looks like ass in still screenshots, but when you see all the motion, it’s an entirely different, vibrant thing. There is always so much motion on screen.
Yeah, I kind of regretted mentioning TWA after I posted because, while the graphics are simple, they’re still beautiful. But my point was that not all games need graphical complexity, but all games need polished controls.
lack of marketing, or knowing your target audience. I think this applies heavily for sequels. but just in general everyone has a different opportunity cost. what might seem like a good effort>reward balance to you might not be the same for your player base.
Till today, I think one of the games with the most tightest controls I have ever played is: Megaman X
(Supermeatboy, Castlevania 4 & Dustforce are on that list too :p)
@BingoBob
How do you suppose we find out our target audience? For a game franchise with multiple entries it’s a lot easier to do this, thanks to the analytics and information you can gain through the older games in the franchise not to mention you can observe through Social media, the kinds of people who are the most excited for your game…
With a brand new game or project you don’t have all that… Let’s say you have just an idea and you and your team are working extremely hard to materialize that idea into a game. What options do you have then to find your target audience?
One way is to implement the minimum product that gets the gameplay idea across. Playtest it with as many people as possible. Local, in-person tests, such as local gaming meetups, are good because you don’t have to expose an in-progress project to the Internet.
Keep in mind that most people can’t see past graphics. Experienced developers can play a graybox level and understand that they’re evaluating gameplay, not looks. Others won’t be so forgiving, so you may need to add polished graphics in a few places to give them an idea of what it’ll eventually look like. There are other ways to get around this, too. If you’re working on a collectible card game, you could build it as a physical, tabletop card game first. Print out the cards on card stock with a color printer, and take it to a gaming meetup to playtest. This way you can make sure the concept, cards, and rules are fun before spending time implementing it in Unity.
Keep doing this until it’s good enough to get people addicted to the gameplay. Once you’re sure it’s at that stage, materialize the prototype into a game.
So to bring this around to the original question, a common mistake is not playtesting soon enough, and not continuing to playtest throughout the whole development lifecycle.
ESRB Rating system. If you put Mature content into your came, chances are fewer kids will be buying the game or be allowed to play it their home. so lets say you have yourself a Mature game would it make sense to make lame Pun jokes designed for a child audience? I see this all over the place. the “options” you have is called good sense.
Also what platform you release your game on makes a big difference. nothing will get a PC gamer mad quicker than porting a game over that you originally designed for a console. An exception to this would be like Dark Souls 2. because the PC master race begged them to port it over. And even then it takes a lot of creative key mapping to make it playable on the PC. So in general I would suggest to not make a game multi platform.
Developers have this misconception that they will make a game that everyone will enjoy. there has never ever in the history of all games been a game that everyone enjoys. there will always be someone who hates your game. and maybe defining who your audience is not, will help you find your target.
The other new dev mistake I see is a focus on monetisation. Typically monetisation should be a later design skill. But a lot of people focus on how to use ads or IAP really early in their journey. As a general rule any monetisation makes your game less engaging. You need to have a strong game to counterbalance this effect. No point learning how to monetise before you have learned to make an engaging game.
The biggest royal **** up I see, over and over again (seemingly to no end)… and I have done this and you have done this and friggin’ Jonathan Blow/Your Hero has done this… is they will build something in a vacuum, where they are staring at it for hours upon hours and focus on all of the features they want to see, and their goal will be just to get those technical hurdles out of the way… and once they clear the technical hurdles, they just move on to art assets and music and then to feedback, maybe a short cycle of polish and then comes release. They completely SKIP and I mean COMPLETELY SKIP the part of development after the technical hurdles of cleared called play testing. And I think this is because the word testing is really kind of a jerk of a word. It implies that it is all about technical stuff. Glitches. Bugs. Etc. But in reality, testing should be about “is this fun?” and “why isn’t this fun?” and it really should NOT be done by the developer himself, unless the developer is capable of being completely honest with himself and not prone to being blinded by the glaring flaws in his own work.
There is a point where you have to look at the game from the perspective of someone who has never played the game before. Would you get the rules? Does it make sense? Is it accessible? Does it seem to have a purpose to keep playing? Is this fun? All of these questions are sort of skipped in anywhere from 75%-85% of all games that I see in WIP games and this goes back to online game dev community around '99, which is as long as I have been around.
yes, the average developer seems to have a complete inability to see the flaws in his own work.
Here are some common mistaken assumptions (most devs are not even aware that this is them):
Assuming that the game you have produced is something people want to play, simply because you wanted to produce it.
Assuming that the game you have made is fun because you find it interesting.
Assuming that your “vision” is divine and should not be subject to the opinions of the lowly non-game developer world. (Which is wrong, because an avid gamer knows a lot about games, even if they can’t always articulate it.)
Assuming that your tastes are good.
Assuming that “what you like” amounts to a hill of beans vs. what the intended audience wants.
Assuming that your intended audience exists, and is not just “you and your friends”.
Assuming that negative feedback is the exception rather than the rule.
Assuming that a lack of public response just means you need to “get the word out more”, not considering that maybe there is a problem with the game itself.
Assuming that “it can’t be the game” when things don’t go as intended, blaming marketing or the marketplace, or the way you presented it… cause most likely, it’s the game.
I am sure I can come up with more. But if you can avoid all of the above, you’ll be way ahead of about 90% of all developers. It isn’t easy though, a lot of these things are cognitive biases and pretty tough to avoid.
To actually go into specifics… the most common actual design mistakes all have one effect… the game play’s feedback loop is not satisfying. Once I eat that first piece of candy, the next piece of candy should be just ahead. In too many games, there are no pieces of candy. Just tough pills to swallow.
TL;DR: Oh yeah, the last mistake that lots of developers make is…
not bothering to listen to other people.
Even though you just have an idea of a game you must also have some idea of the target market. Not knowing your target market early could cause issues later on in development e.g. What if you did a graphically stunning, realistic looking game but older gamers said the game was to simple/childish but younger gamers didn’t like the game because it was to gritty/realistic/not cartoony enough? Same for the sound.
How do you do it? Try to find games that have a similar look & feel, ones with similar gameplay. Start mapping it on a Venn diagram & see where it overlaps. Our target market is somewhere in there.
I think tedthebug is being too modest by not mentioning the success he’s had playtesting his tabletop prototype (boardgame) at local events. If you have a few minutes of polished gameplay, and perhaps some concept art to fill in the gaps so people don’t have to try to imagine through grayboxed levels, you can start to get feedback and find out if your concept resonates with an audience.
That said, yes people at the conventions liked our Boardgame but what we found was that most of them, despite being big Boardgame players, aren’t in our target market. It was a weird lesson to learn because we thought that the only people that would like a pass & play Boardgame would be other Boardgame players when actually a very large % of the Boardgame players at the con, in an anonymous survey, said they weren’t interested in an app version & wouldn’t buy it (they’d only buy the physical version). Those that were interested were mainly a) families looking for games the kids can play in the car or on holidays or b) students with no money to buy expensive board games. These were part of our overall target market for the app but what we had considered would be most of that target market are now in fact a very minor segment & what we considered the minor segments are now our major ones.
Because we found all of this out before commissioning art & sound we can change the look & feel to something lighter & maybe more whimsical (we haven’t bedded that down yet). So, definitely consider your target market before going to far into production
