How to Increase the Odds of a Successful Game

Writen By _rydin on August 19-20, 2004

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Be nice. This is my first article. Please tell me if you found it at all usefull.

In this article I will give you some pointers and tips to increase the odds of creating a game that will become successful. To do this, I will cover five different areas; target audience, control, choice, variety, and effects.

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Part 1:
Target Audience

The first thing you should do, even before designing a game on paper, is to decide who your target audience will be. Who is going to play your game? This can be a number of people; friends, family, gamers, the klik community, even if its just for yourself. By choosing these groups of people, you unlock further potential to increase the amount of people who enjoy your game. If you are going to make it for your friends, you can spend less time on graphics and such because your friends will understand if you aren't the best artist in the world. Instead, you should spend you time making stuff your friends will enjoy, using humor they would understand, ect. If you are going to make it for just a gamer, you should focus you production into good gameplay and try to enhace the experience as much as you can (more on this later). If you are going to make a game to try to impress the klik community (which is the case for most games ), sure you can show off, but you better hope its pretty professional.

Of course, you don't need to stick to one audience, and you also don't need to stick to certain features to satisfy them; if you want to do good graphics, go ahead, but it probably won't make much of a difference to you friends and family. And lots of games still become popular if they aren't professional here in the community.

Okay, now that you have decided your target players, you need to choose how to please them. The most important tip I can give here, is to learn how to suck up. Remeber in grade school, when there was this one kid who could get good grades, who never studied, and was constantly giving the teacher gifts and praise? This is what you need to do with your players. If you know they want something, let them have it. Tell them what they want to hear. Teach them things they already know to make them feel superior. Of course, don't just GIVE it to them, they have to do SOME work. And the more spectacular the gift, the more they should have to work for it. You want to make them feel in control, and that brings us to our next point: control.

Part 2:
Control

First off, let's take a small trip back in time. Imagine yourself playing pacman. Now, think of all the things that pacman is capable of, and then, think of all the things you can make him do. Almost the same right? You can move him up and down, left and right. You can't make choose if he eats the pellets, or how, he does that part on his own, but the player, you, must guide him. This is about the perfect balance of things that you should be able to do. The player wants to feel in control. He doesn't want to watch pac man move around, dodge ghosts, get bonuses, and then only get to choose if he eats the pellets. The player doesn't mind if he doesn't get to do the small stuff like eating or walking (imagine if you had to tap a button every time you went walking on an rpg), but players will be really jealous if they can't do that ultra special move the character does only on the cutscenes. Don't get me wrong though, cutscenes aren't bad. Just don't have the characters doing stuff you can't do in the game.

You must decide what the player should be able to do. Of course if you're making a RTS, you don't want to help the people cutting the wood, you want to be on a larger scale of control, leaving the smaller stuff to the game.

Another important point is that players don't like to feel that the game is controlling how good they are. Well yeah, you have to control them to a certain extent, but the player would rather feel that mistakes are his fault, so that he will be determined to beat it, instead of the player feeling like the mistakes are based on glitches, and get frustrated and never play it again. This can also be tied to the actual controls of the game. A player doesn't want to feel that he died because he forgot where the shoot key was. A great way to illiminate this is to let the player choose the controls that he feels confortable with. Choice is our next section.

Part 3:
Choice

Choice is a vital role in any game. It what sets video games apart any everything else in existance besides real life itself. Players like to choose. Why do you think mmorpgs are so popular? Why do you think the grand theft auto series is so popular? You can choose alot. The more free players are to do what they want, the better they will like the game. This can be hard, because the more options you let the player choose, the more difficult and longer it will take to code. Try not give the players to much reign over where they can go though, because they might wonder off and run into tough enemies. A game has to be linear to a certain extent too, or else it becomes a pointless "stress-reliever".

There are many things you can let your target audience choose from.
You could let them choose there weapons or skills. This way they choose their style of play. But make sure to try not to make a super weapon, or uber skill, because players will only want to use that weapon or skill when they find it. Try to balance the weapons out. The pistol is weaker than the rocket launcher, but you can shoot more shots with the pistol than the rocket launcher, and you can get head shots that instant kill much like the rocket launcher.
You could let them choose they're appearance or character. This way they identify with the character more, and feel more like they are actually experiencing what's happening in the game. This can also add to the atmosphere that the player wants, increasing his odds of liking the game.
You could let a player choose his friends and enemies. This hasn't been used much. The only example I can think of is online games. You can be a terrorist, and choose to hate the Counter-terrorists. You can be an orc and choose to hate the humans. It also goes deeper, as you can choose the people who help you based on they're personallity, not by the game's set friends and enemies. Imagine how fun it would be to be able to choose if you want to save the princess, or choose to join the evil dark mage on his quest to rule the world.
You could let your players choose their gameplay style. This almost never fails. Let them choose if they want to bust down the doors and shoot everything in sight, or it they want to silently snipe only the nessisary guys to get the gem in the complex, then get out as fast as possible.
You could let the players choose their difficulty level. This is a feature in almost every comercial game these days, and it's very effective. Beginers can put it on easy, and the veterans looking for a challange can put it on hard. This can be difficult to pull off on online games because you never know who you'll be playing with.

Bottom line, let you're players choose. The more the better.


Part 4:
Variety

Like most of the other sections convered, variety can be on a number of levels. From gameplay itself, to the all other games like it.

When working with gameplay, it is important to add in some variety. Imagine this game. It starts out, instantly fastpaced and hard. There are no save features, no passwords, and if you don't finish the game, you don't get to post your highscore online. It stays fastpaced and hard the whole time. And subliminally sends you messages that you are getting tired, and you have to go to the bathroom. The point? Give breaks. Not too much though, make sure to make your players work for them. Give some out of the ordinary gameplay sometimes (no, not aliens from space, unless that what you game's about). For example. Let's say your player controls a party of 3 that goes out and does a mission, and once they get back, something else always comes up and they have to go out and do a mission again. What are some ways to give some breaks of the usual? How about letting them not have to do a mission right away for one. That's the most obvious answer, but let's dig deeper. What about making one of the members of the party get sick, or has a family emergancy? Then the player must fight the same bad guys, only with 2 people. But still, we can get deeper. What about something that doesn't even resemble normal gameplay? A minigame. Now, this isn't an article about minigames and there many uses and times, but they are a way to add some variety, which is what this section is all about.

What if there was a game that never got harder? It just stayed the same. Never learned any new moves. Only fought 1 type of enemy. Not fun. Your players will probably agree. You want to have it gradually get harder, using what the player has done previously, and building up, right? Well what if you go to fast and the player gets stuck on level 4 of 100? What if you go to slow, and the player gets bored after level 90 because its exactly the same as level 4? Finding the right learning curve can be hard. One option can be to let the player choose the difficulty, but we are in the variety section, so how else can we do it? Maybe adding in a tutorial level, or maybe have the game tell the player how to do the stuff as he needs to do it. Players can be hard to please .

Okay, some players will download your game because it looks and sounds like fun. Others will download it because they were told to. But some players will only get it if it has something new and untried. Game makers have had this problem since the beginning of games. But most ideas are already taken, so it gets tougher as video games get older. I think the best way to get new ideas and untried features, is to not think about games first, and then their features, but features first, and then look to see if other games have something like it.

Part 5:
Effects

Essentally, you can make a game without sound or graphics, and it can still be okay. Think of the old text adventures. You can add in some decent graphics and leave the sound out, and still not much people will care. Get to the point you're thinking I bet. Effects are OPTIONAL but are usually the selling point of each game. This section will breifly cover effects.

First off, music. The thing people say the most about music is that you can use it to set the mood. This is true. But you can do so much more. Think back to your target audience. What kind of music do they like? Use it in your game and it will raise the odds of a success. Now, don't go off making all of your games with a metal soundtrack, because you will become imfamous for only having metal in your games. And besides, tetris with industrial metal (unless there's some other reason to use it) probably won't appeal much to the puzzle game players. I'm not trying to profile from the types of games players like, but think of every puzzle game. None of them I can think of feature a Goth theme. This can be argued with the variety though. A goth-tetris could be a successfull game because its something new. This arguement will keep me from going further on the subject of music.

Graphics. Graphics are very much like music. They can set the mood just as much as music can. You could use bright colors and go for a cartoony feel, or choose more saturated or natural colors if you wanted to be more serious. But when you are chosing colors, you also have to think of performance and resolution and such. You can use resolution to your advantage. Use a small resolution, like 320x200 and get an instant retro feel. But when the game is running choppy on more than half the people who downloads it's computers because the hightech scrolling at 1024x768 with 3d renders at full color, you are going to lose a bunch of potential.

Special effects. Another touchy subject. If you want a psychadellic feel, or want you game to be flashy, or want to show off your elite skills, you probably want to add complex special effects. But beware, the can hog up performance, and after a while, the player won't even notice that he can see the air stream he leaves behind him in real time tiedie, or the ultra realistic explosions. Feel free to add special effects in, but don't spend your entire time on them, because they will eventually become unseen, unless of course the point of the game is to have groundbreaking effects.

Originallity. This could almost be part 5. The whole point you are making games is to be original. Use all orginal graphics and music, and most audiences will love you. Most won't mind if you borrow some music from an unheard of game that fits the mood, but ff7 boss fight music on every level, unless its a ff7 fangame, is probably not good. That goes the same for graphics. Ripped graphics and libs. I see this most often for fangames. If you are making a fangame, and your target players want it to be as much as the real thing as possible, go ahead and use the ripped gfx (although it would be better if you ripped them yourself). But megaman sprites in you realistic mouse aimed shooter probably isn't a good idea.

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Thank you for taking time to read this. I hope it helps somebody. If you follow my words exactly, and you don't piss people off with your personallity, you should end up with a decently popular game. Thanks again for reading.

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