Reverse Game Design

[toblix]

Okay, stop me if this is too crazy. Let's assume games are made just like a sausage is squeezed into its inside-out-turned pig's anus or whatever it is that holds the ground snout in place. Naturally, as the game progresses and the deadline approaches, just like the sausage-maker grinds the snouts less and spend less times picking worms and boils from the pig's heads he uses as the sausages' main ingredients, the game designer makes more shit game. Thus, we get the Meat Circus, Xen and the last parts of Bioshock.

How about we start with the ending and make sure that's good, and then do the rest? I know it's crazy, and that marketing prefers when all the cool stuff is in the parts most people actually play, but hey, maybe people don't complete games because the ending parts usually suck? Is it particularly hard to make a good ending? Don't they think about the ending until it's almost time to publish? It's not fair that the people who invest the most time in a game and actually finish it are rewarded the least. We should have awesome, funny and crying-making endings!

I know I'm wrong about this, but why?

[Nachimir]

I agree with you to a certain extent, for instance the Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows was a standout level near the end of an otherwise quite ropey game (and the last level was utter shit). I always get pissed off with games that throw all the cool stuff out at the beginning and are then purely derivative for the other 80%. However, that kind of sequencing is only a part of design:

http://lostgarden.com/2006/10/what-are-game-mechanics.html

Making sure the last levels are fun wouldn't ensure the earlier parts are any good at all.

[elmuerte]

I'm not going to Norway, otherwise I would have stopped you.

You need to balance the development. e.g. develop every part equally to balance each other out.

You don't want a MEAT CIRCUS anywhere in your game. You want is spread out over the whole game.

GET READY!

[mercatfat]

dammit, why do people still get stuck on Meat Circus?

it wasn't that freaking hard. really, it wasn't. challenging, yes, but not hard.

[Thrik]

I think it's more a case of a certain facet of Schafer's audience not having that much platformer experience, because I didn't find it that hard either. I've experienced much, much, much more frustrating gameplay than that in 2D and 3D platformers alike, and in fact only spent a few hours on the Meat Circus my first time through.

That or it's down to whether or not the solution to each area clicks or not when you see it, almost in puzzle-like fashion. Because once you know how to actually get through each part, you can belt through every time.

Er, as for this thread, I think developers would do well to take a leaf out of what I'd imagine most people were taught in elementary English lessons, and ensure their games have a superb beginning, middle, and end planned ahead of time. With that in place, slightly mediocre in-between bits are less of a problem.

[DanJW]

The problem is that sometimes the first part of a game to get made turns out the worst. This is most often because it takes a while for the designers to get the hang of the tools and the pacing of the game engine, and to come up with ideas for nice little touches. In addition while the first thing that is made ought to get the most testing, there is rarely enough time to redo it from scratch, so it gets left pretty much as-is.

[lobotomy42]

The beginning part of *anything* is always the best part. It's the part that still holds the promise, vision and intent of the creator, before the harsh limits of reality have set it. The beginning has the benefit of *your anticipation* of the rest of the work covering up for some of its flaws.

Sometimes, this is the way of things. I don't really mind it

[elmuerte]

dammit, why do people still get stuck on Meat Circus?

it wasn't that freaking hard. really, it wasn't. challenging, yes, but not hard.

It didn't match the difficulty level of the rest of the game.

The most annoying part of ME4T CIRCUS was the rising water part.

[toblix]

Yeah, I didn't have any great problems with Meat Circus either (I think), but that wasn't the point. For many or most it was a disappointing ending part or something. You know.

Anyway, there's the promise and expectation thing, sure. When you're entering the last parts of the game, there's nothing you don't know about. There are no new features or gameplay types coming, and worst of all (for me) there's some big fight coming up, followed by a too short ending movie.

I think more games should mix it up a little, sort of like Bioshock alost did with the...

Big Daddy costume, giving you the obstructed view and thumping steps

I don't know. I guess I just want longer ending movies.

[DanJW]

So what do we consider to be some of the good endings that have been made?

Personally, I think MGS3's ending was excellent, both the gameplay and the movies that followed it. I used the unlocked level selector to watch the endings several times, I loved it so much; even the music over the credits.

[Nachimir]

I thought the Meat Circus was ok. It was annoying at the time, sure, but now I look back on it fondly. Likewise finishing the last level of Ouendan has meant it's a more satsfying memory: because the first half hour of attempts ended in seconds each, success results in a greater feeling of mastery.

[BooJaka]

Two words and one number: Monkey Island 2

I consider that ending to be superb but i can easily see how it could be put into the disappointing endings as well

[Thrik]

Oh yeah, totally agree there Dan. I think the MGS series in general has excellent endings, although a lot of people were so weirded out by the relative complexity of MGS2's story that they didn't really appreciate it so much.

I think it's largely because MGS builds towards the ending for quite a while with big chases, huge fights, and lots of character development; pretty much how the climax of a big action film might be approached, rather than the 'this is the final encounter; kill him' approach a lot of games take.

I'd say other great endings include Half-Life 2 and Beyond Good and Evil, which again take a lot of time building up to the ending. In fact, HL2 didn't even have much of a literal ending as such, but because they built up the final hour or so to the credits so well, it felt like an excellent ending.

Of course, we are talking about games that were generally brilliant throughout here, so the fact that their endings were also pretty great isn't going to surprise anyone.

I think Psychonauts is probably a game that built up to the ending pretty badly. Not only was the actual ending completely displaced from the gameplay you were doing minutes before, but the gameplay itself was more focused on pure gameplay and sacrificed a lot of the character development and general world interactivity that made the preceding entirety of the game so enjoyable.

I guess there's no particular formula for making a good ending, but I do think the final hour or so before it is the most important time. I suppose you could call it a really long ending, but it seems more correct to think of it as the crescendo to the the climax.

[toblix]

So, just having thrown my controller at the screen in rage, always the best time for me to comment on games, let's look at Dead Rising and how this game "mixes it up a little" towards the end:

For 80% of the game, the zombies have been your main foes. They're slow, only attack when you're standing next to them, and easy to kill. Then there's the bosses, who may be fast, and may have guns, but are still easy as pie to kill. If you've got the mini chainsaw, no boss takes more than four or five hits.

So, the last day, to make it fresh, in comes special forces with machine guns and body armor. They're not fast, but they run. They can attack from afar, their machine gun rounds stopping you in your path, and they can take multiple hits from a shotgun, a powerful weapon only available in one location in the game.

Granted, I've not played much after these guys arrive, mostly because when they kill me, there's the whole tedious capture sequence where they take everything away from me, and to reload I have to quit the game.But still, isn't this one of the most extreme increases in difficulty in any modern game, both in suddenness and intensity? I know I'm not taking the easy way out, aiming for the S ending, meaning I have to travel across the mall and back after the special forces outbreak. And then there's the Overtime mode, which I probably won't even attempt.

Anyway, this game is awesome, but I'm having problems with the Japanese ending rating system, where you have to be this crazy masochist to get the "True ending". It's really incompatible with my desire to do and experience everything in games, do all the quests and so on, and my spectacularly low tolerance for difficult gameplay. Whenever I play a game almost to the end, and then give up, there's a wound in my heart that never heals. A fear that, when someone asks me if I completed Dead Rising, I'll only be able to say "almost had it, but it got too difficult at the end".

Anyone else get this far? I seem to remember someone else mentioning not getting past these late game enemies.

edit:

Okay, so getting the A ending wasn't that difficult. I've unlocked Overtime mode now, though, which seems to bring some extreme gathering quests and a couple of tricky fights. Jesus.

[toblix]

Holy Jesus, this is horrible! After realising that I'll never in a hojillion years manage to do even the first of the many quests in Overtime mode, I just watched the replay of it on Youtube. Turns out there's a shitload of new stuff, cut-scenes enemies, locations (yeah!) that's only available to those who manage to fight off the difficult end-game baddies.

So I'm thinking about how, reportedly, most people don't finish a game like Half-Life 2, a game that's never gets even close to Dead Rising's frustrating difficultness, I'm thinking maybe a couple of hundred people actually played those last parts. This is a perfect example of reverse game design! They had all this cool shit at the end. Think about it, the player spends all his time inside the mall, and then at the end there are these new locations and stuff... but they make it so hard most people probably never know these things exist. Especially since you get endings that seem to sort of wrap up the story even if you "fail".

I'm glad I waited so long before getting this, so I could use FAQs and Youtube to get the experience I feel I should've gotten without them. I've said before how Japanese game design feels somehow fucked up to me. This is a prime example.

[DanJW]

You forget that Japanese otaku are all superpowered completionist ninjas.

[toblix]

It seems that way to me. I have limited experience with Japanese games (Silent Hill 2, 3, 4, Okami, probably a couple more), and although Dead Rising was supposedly a "Western" game, it still has all these weird things that these games have. Some of them I like, like great character design and textures and excellent cut-scenes with lots of motion-captured standing around and gesturing. The characteristic long silences and sounds of shoes on the floor. But there's also the fucking lack of consistent game difficulty, and always leaving me feeling I haven't fully experienced the game properly because there's some special ending that's the really real "Real and True Ending", and explaining almost nothing, so you have to discover everything yourself, or, as in my case, go to GameFAQs and read about them there. I bet Japanese games are responsible for 90% of all GameFAQs FAQ traffic (not counting walkthroughs). I'm ranting here, and probably ignoring facts, but I still have this weird feeling when playing Eastern games that I'm always doing something wrong, or I'm not spending enough time playing, or I'm not doing things in the right order, I dunno.

Dead Rising was fun, but I feel like I had to walk out 15 minutes before the movie ended and got the rest of the story explained from some smelly guy outside the theatre.

[miffy495]

Myself, I got to overtime mode and then started getting my ass kicked by the bosses. Haven't gone back to it since. I'd like to finish overtime sometime soon and maybe even go for a replay of the game, but you're dead right on the sudden difficulty spike. The military guys didn't mess with me too much. After killing one and getting his rifle, the rest became pretty easy. The bosses though, what the hell?

[SpiderMonkey]

Except of course, games aren't made like sausages, and the order of what gets made needn't have any relation to how it's arranged in the final box (and indeed can change many many times before it gets into the box). The quality of a particular piece of game content is proportional to how many cycles of iteration it receives, which means people looking at it and providing feedback and then that feedback getting implemented. The start of the game gets more attention from everyone involved, because everyone is acutely aware that you only get one first impression.

[Nachimir]

A guy called Dan Marchant writes some good stuff about the games industry, including this piece on why the rubbishness of a game is not always under the developer's control.

The assumption seems to be that there are a huge number of developers out there who simply don’t care if their game is good and thus it will be easy for a new team to come in and do well.

In my experience that is almost never the case. I have worked with a many, many different teams on a wide variety of product types including original games, conversions and licensed games and in almost every case the developers care deeply about the game they are making. So, if developers start out with the best intentions for the games they make, how come so many games end up being lacklustre? Could it be that making great games is actually rather hard? Could there be a reason for all the poor games out there? Actually I can think of 10 reasons just for starters….