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Pitfalls of the Working Game Designer: Bright, Shiny Objects

Most of the game developers I know play a lot of games. On one level, this is simply because the people who are most likely to get into making games are the ones who love playing games. On another level, though, it can be a critical part of doing your job. As a designer, specifically, it's important to know how other people are tackling problems you might face in your project, what the audiences are responding to positively and negatively, where innovation succeeds and fails, and generally what the standards are for games in the industry. However, there are dangers lurking in this process, and one in particular that I'm going to focus on is the bright, shiny object.

It happens all the time. Someone comes into work, jazzed up about something they've played, or seen, or read about. It could be a gun, or a physics behavior, a level design, a graphic effect, a line of dialogue. As designers, we live for creating these moments in our own games; there's nothing better than to have someone play your game and get that "wow" feeling. We spend endless hours trying to get as much of this effect out of the limited resources we have to work with. And, we dread it when someone else comes to us with one of these moments from someone else's game. Why? Because the inevitable sequel to "I saw this really cool thing" is "We should do something like that."

It's easy to understand the impulse. If it exists in one game, then surely it is possible to put it into another game. The fact that it can be done is staring you right in the face: someone else already did it. And if it's good in this game, and we're making a game that's got similar stuff in it, then we should be able to do it, too, right? Well, sure, in theory, but it's important to resist the impulse.

First, it's impossible to just lift a feature from a game. It should be a given that every game exists as a matrix of potential interactions and that an individual feature only takes shape in relation to all the other features of the game, but sadly this is too little understood. Just for one example, let's say a game comes out and it's got this really cool gun, and you're making a game that's got guns in it. On the surface, making a really cool gun just like that, or even better, totally makes sense. However, you have to look at how that gun and its behavior is going to balance with all the other guns you have in the game. Can you support the physics interactions of that gun? Does your UI allow you to put that gun and its functions into your world? Do you have the animations and effects to properly sell the impact of it? Is it going to work with the level spaces you're building: is the range of engagement right, are the effects going to fit in your spaces, do you have the graphics bandwidth to display that really cool effect? Will your AI be able to use the gun? Or will it be able to react appropriately? Does the fiction of your game world allow for guns like that existing, and would it make sense that your character would have or use such a thing? It seems simple. It's just a gun. But the problem is that a gun doesn't exist in a game without a way of representing it, both using it and the effects that it has in the game world; it's one tool among many others, and it has to fit with everything else that's in the game. What made that gun cool in that other game isn't just the idea of it, it's the way they created the whole scenario of that gun in relation to all the other systems of making that game world feel compelling. The same is true for any feature; it just can't be dropped into the middle of a new game, because its relationship to all of the other features in that system is going to be different.

Second, the shelf life for bright, shiny objects is short. While you and your co-workers are playing this new game and all excited about this new feature, so are hundreds of other game developers at dozens of other studios. If you're finding it interesting, chances are the people who are working on your competition are, too. Since it takes time to put anything into a game engine, by the time you get your product to market with version 2 of the bright, shiny object, there will be half a dozen other games that have grabbed the same idea and trumpeted how they're making it even better. So, by going after this new feature, you've just made your game more like "one of the pack". On top of that, the game audience is going to have in their minds the experience from finding that feature the first time, and if you don't do anything more than just do it as well as it was done before, they're going to slag you for being an inferior copy; even if you do it better, it has to be way better, because what you don't have going for you is that spark that comes from fresh experiences.

Third, and this is the big one, adding any new feature involves moving the goalposts for the project. This is generally a bad thing (although occasionally necessary), but it gets even worse when you start importing features because they're the bright, shiny object. Once that feature becomes a focal point, you're going to have to go into developing all the related features (as related above), since otherwise, you're not going to have this new, key thing. Now you're not just adding a feature, you're adding whole groups of features, and you have to look at what else can be cut. Even assuming that you can cut enough to make room for the new feature sets, now you've got to re-integrate the whole design so that the new feature works with all of the other systems, and if this is now a key system, that can mean major overhauls to space design, mission design, story, character, etc., etc. In other words, trying to lift the wrong features can put you straight back into preproduction. If your schedule isn't flexible enough to allow for that, or the understanding is that this one thing (which is really many things) can just be seamlessly added to the mix, you're in for a world of hurt. Now, you not only have an inferior version of the bright, shiny object (since you didn't have to time to put in all the associated features to really sell it), but your core design is all out of whack because you had to steal time from other features, because you didn't re-adjust the design to fit with the new systems, and so on.

It's difficult to resist the allure of the bright, shiny object. Nothing sells like success, and when something comes out that has the effect that all game developers are looking for--namely, people buying the game and being all happy and excited about it and telling all their friends how great it is--it's a natural impulse to try and grab a piece of that success for yourself. There's nothing wrong with stealing, in this case at least; all designers are thieves. You just have to make sure that when you grab for that beautiful ivory tusk, you don't end up trying to fit the entire elephant into your backpack.

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