While I really, really like studying game design, there just don''t seem to be enough resources around to do any more than low-level researching of previous designs; i.e. get an emulator and a couple hundred games, and then load them up and play them and analyze them one by one. There are articles around, and a few books, but I don''t think anyone could really claim to be satisfied by them. They usually end up trying to offer help on high-level issues of story and player psychology, without ever getting a solid grounding in the core subjects of what games and gameplay are and how they might be categorized. The result is that each of these works feels disconnected with each other; they can''t draw from a common source, and neither can they properly discuss different viewpoints in a written form. I do like these forums and keep coming back to them, even though they tend to attract kiddie-fan types who go on about how their FF clone will be the best ever, if they only got help. (that''s attributable to the high traffic more than anything else) But I want something more...permanent than a forum. What gets posted here gets lost in the shuffle, and ultimately helps only a few people. But sites that offer only articles, on the other hand, have too few people contributing to form a proper discussion. I have also heard of pay-only places like the ASP, but they seem poorly oriented for what I''m interested in. Not only that, but I''ve realized, as I''ve slowly plodded through games from 1980, 1981, 1982.....1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, etc., that I''m keeping all this info I''ve learned to myself, and I have no good place to share it. Well, there''s Mobygames, I suppose. But it just doesn''t seem oriented very well to the things I want to say. "What was good" and "what was bad" are very player-oriented topics, and you''re completely forced into them. It also to some extent encourages statements like "the graphics were okay" when you''re talking about something from 20 years ago. Nobody really cares that the graphics were okay on a 20-year-old game; they might care about graphics, but only if they were exceptional or ground-breaking. If you''re reviewing something that old, it should say something insightful, not read like copy from the latest issue of EGM. I am the only one with concerns like these, or is there a good reason for a new site for designers to exist, one that might help to address these needs?

I would pray falling on something like that and I agree with you . I had done this myself sometimes ,after failing to find the kinds of resources I wanted.But I also didn''t have where to share it,so I just did it to increase my perception as a designer.
Sometimes it''s nice to find people that share common thoughts.

For quite some time I''ve pondered creating a game design site that attempts to be fairly scientific in its approach to games, attempting to categorise and describe things accurately and usefully. I''d want to speak about game mechanics as compared to other games, for example. But I am always too short on time to do such a thing.

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I would like to see a site devoted to low-level game development as well. I''m wondering if anyone could "teach" low-level design tho. For example, anyone go to college and learn how to write, but very few college graduates could acutally complete a novel. Some would give up when it became boring or hard. Still others would complete their novel, only to find it dry and uninteresting, and finally, there would be a few who succeed. People in all three groups started with great ideas, but only a few people ended up with a truly interesting story.

The reason group 1 (the quitters) failed is obvious - they weren''t serious about their novel

Group 2 is a different story - why is their novel dry and uninterested? They may have used too many stock characters, or perhapse they did not create a believable diction for their characters. There is not much you can do for this group, they lack talent or experience, and must gain them on their own.

I still think its a good idea, you''d need some good mods to keep flames, and off-topic rants to a minimum.

As someone who studied English Language I have some experience of this. It''s easy to identify certain tricks and methods employed by authors. Some techniques are applicable in writing speeches (eg. alliteration, repetition - especially in threes), others in wording advertisements (eg. using a challenge or comparison), and yet more when writing to entertain (eg. the opposing concepts of mystery, where something happens and you don''t know why, and suspense, where you''re expecting something to happen but don''t know when).

You can teach the basic idea behind the process, and then the writer injects their own creativity while applying that process. The same can surely go for game design, where a logical analysis can provide the craft and the individual can provide the art. It would also provide some groundwork upon which future designers can elaborate upon.

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RTF, I haven''t found any source in the net that has given me more than 5 things to learn about game design. I mean, I have found many ideas here on gamedev, but never an article or post that by itself gave me any ideas.

Some things that helped me in my path of game design learning.

-Things talking about AI are the best sources for Game Design I have found. Things like if an enemy wants to escape from the player, where should he go? The obvious answer is to run exactly to the opposite direction of the player, but what if hiding behind a wall can hide him? Now you just got a Game Design element here

-Snes and old games are good to look for design ideas, because back at that time game developers were more creative with the gameplay that today. Just play a game and when something that was cool, strange or anything happens in it, think deeply about the details of it.

-After mastering deeply a complex game you begin to learn the intrincate details of the strategy you should play, and the elements asociated to it. That has helped me a lot to know how a player that is worse than you can beat you in a fighting game, and the relationship between the style of playing and the enviroment. If you don''t get me think about this:

-The character I pick is slow but strong. The character my rival chooses is the fastest dodger and runner in the game but he''s weak. It doesn''t matters if I''m strong if I can''t hit my enemy so even if he is weak he wins.
-However besides punching him I can throw mines in the ground but whoever touches those mines explodes, no matter if it''s my enemy or me. If my rival it''s faster than me and runs more than me he is bound to hit mine''s more often than me, so here the balance isn''t the classic the speed vs streght, because speed wins over streght. The mines are what balance the gameplay here. And the designers knew about all this.

Coz: That''s exactly the kind of advice I''m talking about. It''s good advice, but it''s forgettable and almost worthless if you didn''t already figure it out on your own. Since I did already figure it out, and I come to the same conclusions, that means that there''s something more basic going on, something that can be built up in a logical fashion to produce your statement.

The problem here is that it is far, far easier to say, "well you do a little of this and that and wa-lah, you''ve learned something" than to break apart and then reassemble everything you play, recording each step of the process, noting differences in even the smallest things like timing and pauses, number of buttons pressed, etc. So everyone does the former and not the latter, and the end result is that research, real research using scientific methods, doesn''t exist in our field. The best that can be found is either alchemy - recipes - or stolen from other fields(ex: the usage of literary elements).

To some extent, yes, we can say, "oh, but the games themselves will show you good design" but this won''t help if you''re trying to infer a pattern from a large body of information - several generations of games. Say you wanted to know when the first life bar was used, the first instance of parallax scrolling, the first game with a walkable first-person 3d world. Or if you wanted to compare competing games and developers during a certain period of time, to find which ones succeeded and which failed. These things can''t be looked up by a Google search(and if they are "common knowledge" often people get them wrong). No, you have to go out and search endlessly, and only after much effort will you get a possible answer. This is a problem that will only get worse over time, as the total body of games released increases year by year.

I wasn''t trying to come down hard or anything; I just wanted to point out that we can do much better than just scrounging about and building up our skills seperately and at random.

Now that I''ve thought some more about the idea of a site that could provide this kind of information, I''m getting interested in carrying it out myself. The site could be a combination of discussion, Wikis, and articles; each would complement the other. For example, the site could "cover" a specific game in three different ways:

-Discussion of the game in question. Probably a single thread per game would do; if more complexity were required I''d lean toward a Slashdot-style discussion with moderation and points that would make it easier to bring good ideas to light. It''d need a rebalancing since it''s not a "news" site though(ha ha).
-A wiki page about the game, which would link to elements used in its design and useful facts or related games. Wikis are great things since they can grow quite a bit with only a relatively small amount of work per person - I know I often turn to Wikipedia myself for facts these days
-A full article, "published" to the site. These would be complete reviews, that either include the game in question or focus on it. Ideally these articles would simply be raised out of discussion-land into the spotlight by a moderator; the alternative would be to wade through submissions(ugh). To some extent, though, moderated submissions seem obsolete when you can just have people post their articles directly into a forum now.

It could work for all developers, too; you could provide all kinds of information about games under this system, and discuss things like pixel art or early 3d engines or SID tunes. If a significant community proved to exist, the site would become content-rich as a matter of course.

I''ve no experience with site administration, but if I had help on that end, it might become possible. As it is though, it''s just a wonderful dream

There are a few sites out there that cover some low level game design. Sirlin.net is good, and the 400 project is interesting, although there''s not much there right now.

I suggest that you read rules of play if you get a chance to, it covers high level and low level game design issues and is basically the only game design textbook out there. Most other books are based largely on the personal preferences and experiences of the author, although there is good stuff out there. The Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams book has some lower level stuff (I think) and Game Design and Architecture has a little.

At some point you need to go ahead and play some actual games, look at how they apply these theories, and implement them yourself. So eventually you will have to go back and play old games similar to what you want to accomplish, but it''s often a lot easier to identify the elements you like if you have theory to back you up.

quote: Original post by Coz
-Snes and old games are good to look for design ideas, because back at that time game developers were more creative with the gameplay that today.

Bull. Games were just as varied as they are now - the only difference being that you just don''t remember all the crappy games from that era.

Having a kind of a section for each game is good, for stuff like post-mortems, what is good and what is bad about a game from a designer''s point of view. Don''t forget the forums, and obviously the articles and columns by seasoned veterans (hey you should go to MUD-Dev and grab some of those RPG gurus ). But we need to save those rare gems that occasionally pop up in every forum and I think it''s also important to have a section just for them; otherwise they''ll end up archived along with a lot of garbage that no one ever reads. They could have a tiny description of a really neat idea or one of Iron Chef Carnage''s essays and the most interesting follow-ups in the discussion