Game Design reports and market data
3,361 documents·56 writers·968 charts and tables
Documents
Thomas Brush16 min
Will You Ever Finish Your Game?
The primary challenge facing independent game developers is the tendency to prioritize perfectionism over project completion, which often leads to stalled development cycles and a failure to release products.
- Prioritizing project completion over perfectionism is the most critical factor in transitioning from a hobbyist to a commercially successful developer.
- Developers should focus custom creative efforts exclusively on their core strengths, such as storytelling or unique art styles, to maintain a competitive edge.
- Utilizing pre-made assets and outsourcing non-core technical tasks is a standard, professional strategy that increases production efficiency without negatively impacting player experience.
Thomas BrushJul 2020
Game Developers Conference30 min
The Secrets to Creating an Indie Game Franchise
The development of an indie game franchise requires a shift in perspective from traditional commercial models toward a strategy centered on the player’s psychological experience.
- Successful franchises are built by mastering the ability to switch between the creator's perspective and the player's perspective to design and fulfill specific audience expectations.
- A franchise functions as a series of promises—such as personality, nostalgia, spectacle, or novelty—that signal to the player what they will experience across different media formats.
- The 'reliving promise' allows players to experience dependable pleasures, such as recurring audio cues or character motifs, while balancing familiar elements with new content to maintain engagement.
Game Developers ConferenceJul 2020
Extra Credits7 min
Likeness & Lawsuits - Including Real World People & Brands in Your Game - Extra Credits
The inclusion of real-world brands and individuals in video games presents significant legal challenges that require developers to distinguish between trademark law and the right of publicity.
- The right of publicity, which covers an individual's likeness and identity, poses a higher legal risk than trademark law because it lacks a uniform federal standard and varies by state.
- Under the Rogers test, developers have significant latitude to include real-world brands if the use is artistically relevant and does not explicitly mislead consumers regarding endorsement.
- To defend against right of publicity claims, developers must demonstrate 'transformative use' by integrating a likeness into a new, creative context rather than merely replicating a person's public persona.
Extra CreditsJul 2020
Game Developers Conference26 min
It's About Time: System Design for Mobile Free-to-Play
System design in mobile free-to-play games centers on the universal resource of time.
- System design in free-to-play games must be anchored in time as the universal resource, balancing player progression against energy limits, session frequency, and the time required to acquire content.
- Designers should establish a progression model by defining the desired time-to-level, then calculating the necessary daily payouts based on the number of sessions and actions a player performs.
- When tuning upgrade costs, a common formulaic approach is to increase costs by a fixed percentage—such as 250% per level—while rounding to larger increments to ensure the UI remains clean and readable.
Game Developers ConferenceJul 2020
Game Developers Conference25 min
Set this Game in Order: Organizing Hundreds of Levels and Mechanics
Effective level design for complex games requires a structured approach to managing mechanics, difficulty, and spatial organization.
- Prioritize the development of custom tools for tracking game data, as these systems are essential for maintaining quality and polish in projects with hundreds of levels.
- Implement a 'heartbeat' difficulty curve that alternates between gentle learning phases and periodic spikes in challenge to maintain optimal player engagement.
- Isolate new mechanics within dedicated, low-stakes environments to ensure player mastery before integrating them into complex, multi-mechanic scenarios.
Game Developers ConferenceJul 2020
Game Developers Conference30 min
Procedural Islands of 'Dauntless'
The procedural island pipeline developed for the action RPG Dauntless addresses the challenge of creating diverse, high-quality game environments with a small development team.
- The Dauntless island pipeline integrates Houdini Engine with Unreal Engine to automate environment generation while maintaining manual artistic control over topology and foliage.
- The system utilizes a modular 'recipe' architecture that defines biomes by aggregating specific parameters, meshes, and foliage types.
- The generation process follows a multi-stage workflow, beginning with 2D Voronoi-based layout constraints and concluding with 3D landmass and asset instantiation.
Game Developers ConferenceJul 2020
Game Developers Conference63 min
Emergent Storytelling Techniques in The Sims
The Sims functions as a sophisticated storytelling engine that prioritizes player agency and projection over traditional scripted narratives.
- The Sims utilizes a 'story tree' architecture that tracks thousands of potential narrative nodes in the background to surface context-aware character desires based on personality, history, and temporal decay.
- Player agency is maintained through a 'Yes, and' improvisational framework where autonomous feedback loops and relationship-based behaviors respond to player-directed actions.
- The game employs the 'snowflake con'—the perception that common gameplay outcomes are unique—and uses ambiguous Simlish dialogue to prevent explicit text from contradicting the player's internal narrative.
Game Developers ConferenceJul 2020
Game Developers Conference64 min
Good Design Makes Happy Customers: A Microtransaction Design Primer
Effective microtransaction design hinges on prioritizing player value over immediate revenue extraction.
- Prioritize long-term player trust and perceived value over short-term revenue extraction to prevent the erosion of the player base.
- Integrate microtransactions as a core design system that supports Self-Determination Theory by fostering player autonomy, mastery, and relatedness.
- Avoid manipulative marketing and high-pressure tactics, as players perform rigorous value assessments that quickly identify and reject exploitative practices.
Game Developers ConferenceJul 2020
Game Developers Conference33 min
How to Prioritize Your Dev Efforts in an Era of Rising Costs
Rising development costs necessitate a strategic shift toward sustainable production models that prioritize long-term engagement over high-spend user acquisition.
- Prioritize long-term retention over early metrics like D1 or CPI, as a flat retention curve is the most reliable indicator of a game's long-term viability.
- Build games with 'the right bones' for monetization from the start, as games with highly satisfying core mechanics—like Triple Town—can fail to generate revenue if they lack structural hooks for monetization.
- Maximize the ROI of content by reusing assets for seasonal events; since 97-99.8% of players are often experiencing an event for the first time, repeating content every 3-6 months is an effective way to reduce development costs.
Game Developers ConferenceJun 2020
Game Developers Conference51 min
Beyond Mobile: Integrating Product Management into AAA Development Teams
Product management has evolved from its origins in the free-to-play and social gaming sectors into a critical component of modern AAA development.
- Product management in AAA development serves as the essential bridge between creative design, data science, and live operations to maximize a title's lifetime value.
- Successful integration requires transitioning from a consultant-based model to a deeply embedded, collaborative structure where product managers work directly within core development teams.
- Product managers mitigate team resistance by replacing subjective decision-making with formal business reviews, framework-based strategies, and iterative experimentation.
Game Developers ConferenceJun 2020
Game Developers Conference26 min
Finding Inspiration: Tools for When You're Stuck
Creative block is a common challenge for game developers, particularly when transitioning from structured, well-defined tasks in large studios to the more ambiguous, experimental problem-solving required in smaller, independent teams.
- Treat creativity as a muscle that requires consistent practice and habit rather than viewing it as an innate, static talent.
- Transition from a 'closed mode' of rapid, stressful execution to an 'open mode' that prioritizes playfulness, contemplation, and deliberate problem-solving.
- Use mindfulness meditation to increase comfort with ambiguity, which prevents the tendency to settle for the first, often mediocre, design idea.
Game Developers ConferenceJun 2020
Extra Credits7 min
The Trolley Problem - Designs With No Right Answer - Extra Credits
The trolley problem serves as a foundational ethical thought experiment that challenges individuals to weigh the value of human life when faced with limited, often tragic, choices.
- The trolley problem, formalized by philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967, serves as a foundational ethical framework for evaluating the trade-offs between inaction and active intervention in life-or-death scenarios.
- Game designers utilize the trolley problem to move beyond binary morality systems, forcing players to confront their personal ethical codes through irreversible, high-stakes decisions.
- Titles such as Telltale’s The Walking Dead, Life is Strange, BioShock, and Fallout effectively implement this design to prioritize player self-reflection over objective correctness.
Extra CreditsJun 2020