An exploration of methodologies for innovative game design. A presentation at Casual Connect USA/2015

1. Natural Game Design
Creating Games
Without Cloning
Greg Costikyan
gcostikyan@bossfightentertainment.
com
Casual Connect 2015

2. As Markets Mature, They Become
More Conservative
Financial
Risk….
Design
Risk….

3. But Cloning is a Mug's Game
• Market Leader Has Great Data
• They've Tuned Their Game Carefully
• They Have a High LTV
• You are Competing for the Same Players
• Your Customer Acquisition Costs: Sky-High

4. Genre
•“Genre is the name we give to one hit game
and its imitators.”
•– Dan Scherlis

5. New Play Patterns Create Hits

6. Innovative Design
High (Potential)
Reward
High
Risk….

7. Our Usual Methods Don't Innovate
•As designers we:
• Tweak numbers in spreadsheets
• Document stuff
• Iteratively Refine.
•...none of this will get us there.

8. Methodologies...
•...for blue-ocean innovation.

9. 1. Agile Design
•We pretend to be agile, but…
• Set budgets.
• Set time frame.
• Develop to spec.
•Actually, it's waterfall, with a bit of agile
frosting.

10. Stage 1: Find a Novel Core
Mechanic
Dream up a
Core Mechanic
Prototype and
test
Is it fun yet?On to Stage 2!
Does it have
potential?Yes N
o
Yes
N
o

11. Stage 2: Is the Possibility Space
Big Enough?
Build more stuff
Test
(with users!)
Are we
convinced?
On to Stage 3!
Does it have
potential?Yes N
o
Yes
N
o
Start Over

12. Stage 3: Scale Up
Staff Up
Planning &
Preproduction
Build this
Game!

13. Basic Rules
• Tiny team at start.
• Stages 1 & 2 take as long as they take.
• Don't be afraid to throw away work.
• Gear up only when you've found the fun.

14. This Seems to be How These Guys
Work:

15. Pros & Cons
• Likely to work best for mechanically simple
games.
• Casual, ahem.
• No guarantee of success.
• But then… nothing guarantees success

16. 2. Recombinant Game Design
Patterns
•“...patterns are simply conventions for
describing and documenting recurring design
decisions within a given context, be it game
design or software engineering.”
•– Bernd Kreimeier

17. Game Design Patterns?
• Essentially, mechanics or
collections of
mechanics/UI/
visual expression.
• Staffan Björk & Jussi
• Holopainen
Jussi was my boss at
Nokia.

18. Games in a Genre
• Vary in theme and detail, of course, but
• ALL adopt the same game play patterns.
• With almost never any deviation.

19. Real-Time Strategy Patterns
• Fog of war
• Resource gathering
• Building & unit construction
• Two or more races/civs/whatever with
asymmetric capabilities and differing dominant
strategies
• Early game build up/end game battle
• Speed & interface mastery key to victory

20. Innovate by….
• Taking play patterns that haven't been used
together before and…
• Figuring out how to put them together in a way
that feels fun.

21. Spelunky
• Platformer
• Levels always fixed.
• Rogue-like
•Levels always
algorithmically
• generated
• Platformer with algorithmically
• generated levels
• Infinite replayability!
Mario Bros. + Rogue =

22. Portal
Quake + weird physics + puzzles
=
• It's an FPS
• Where you don't kill things.
• Instead it's all nav puzzles...
• With bizarro-word physics
• FPS, physics, puzzles:
• All well-understood play
• patterns.
• Never seen together before.

23. Minecraft
• Sandbox world-construction
• Typically single player
• Survival horror elements
• Crafting
• A new genre: survival crafting.
Second Life + Legos
=

24. Pros & Cons
• You're starting with proven mechanics.
• We know they work in some context
• But not everything works with everything else.
• Less whole-cloth innovation than agile design
• … but maybe better suited to more complex
• games (ahem, midcore).
My current game is a mid-core build & battle game that
replaces

25. 3. Trope Inversion
• Take one aspect of a genre that everyone
knows is core and essential to the form.
• Do exactly the opposite.
• Defy the common wisdom.

26. “Player cooperation is essential in
tabletop roleplaying.”
Paranoia: A light-hearted game of terror,
death, bureaucracies, mad scientists,
mutants, dangerous weapons, and
insane
robots, which encourages players to lie
to, chat, and backstab each other at
every turn.
– 2
nd
edition backcover copy
Maybe not.

27. “Permadeath in an MMO is Always
Bad.”
• Die? Start over from level 1,
• buster.
• The game ends. MMOs
• never do that! And then –
• it resets.
Guess not.

28. Pros & Cons
• It's so simple!
• And you're leaving everything else
unchanged, pretty much, and you know this
play pattern works.
• But…. Conventional wisdom exists for a
reason.
• You may utterly fail.

29. Get Out of Your Rut
• Yes, making games is hard (even without
innovation)
• Yes, being innovative is hard.
• But it's not THAT hard
• And there are proven ways to do it.
• No more excuses, please. Just do it.

30. That's Three Ways to Innovate
•I'm sure there are more.
•“There are four and twenty ways
• Of writing tribal lays
• And every single one of them is right.”
• – Rudyard Kipling

31. Sadly, you may never get the
chance..
Financial
Risk….
Design
Risk….
Game designers and suits are class enemies, I fear.