The Importance of Speediness

Video games, as a fairly new medium, don't have much specialized language to describe them. Sometimes, people will be able to evaluate a game's "feel", and say whether it's good or bad, but they won't be able to go beyond that. The terminology simply doesn't exist, in some cases, to pinpoint their thoughts. This post is going to try and solve that for one concept...a concept I will call "speediness". So, simply put, what makes a game "speedy" (or what makes a game the opposite of "speedy", which we can call "sluggish"? Broadly speaking, a game is speedy if:

• It has a smooth framerate, not a choppy one. 60 frames per second is my personal baseline, although some people would be fine with 30 FPS or even less, depending on the particular game.
• It has minimal, infrequent or well-disguised load times.
• It has controls that are responsive. That means when the player inputs something, whether choices in a menu or player movement in a 3D action game, the game reacts quickly.
• It has little dead time--time spent by players where they're just unnecessarily waiting for something to happen. Times like when text is slowly crawling across the screen rather than appearing quickly, or when the player is waiting for the AI to calculate its moves, or when switching screens means long, slow fade-in/fade-out transitions.

Each of these categories deserves to be expounded on at length, but for now these brief overviews should give you a basic idea of what "speediness" actually means.

Speediness, in my view, is essential. Not just for the obvious genres, like racing games, fighting games, and the like, but for all games in all genres. A speedy game is a more immediate, immersive game. If a player presses a button and something happens right away, that player will naturally feel more strongly connected to the game--and they will be more strongly connected. Conversely, if there are obstacles to this connection, such as input lag, poor responsiveness, a lack of immediate feedback, and so on, the player will be removed from the experience over and over.

Immersiveness isn't the only reason that speediness is important. In fact, it's not even the most important reason. The most important reason is this: a speedy game has less boring filler/padding than a sluggish game. To illustrate this principle, let's take two hypothetical strategy games. Strategy Game A is speedy, and Strategy Game B is sluggish, with poor input responsiveness, slow load times, and other bad stuff. In all other respects, they are identical.

So why does Strategy Game B have so much more boring filler than Strategy Game A? Simple. When you play an hour of Strategy Game A, you get an hour of fun. When you play an hour of Strategy Game B, you get less than an hour of fun. The time spent on waiting for your button presses to register, or waiting for the AI to calculate its next move, or watching a load screen, is something that everyone can agree is not fun. It's pure wasted time.

This isn't just a theoretical concern. Plenty of games have suffered from this lack of speediness, both sales-wise and in terms of critical reaction. Sometimes, people just won't find these sluggish games quite as fun, despite not realizing the specific reasons for their dislike. Look at the latest main-series Pokemon game, and its needlessly protracted battles, with long pauses that occur for no apparent reason and painfully slow battle text. Look at the first Yakuza game on the PS2, with its frequent lengthy load times, and then compare that to the vast improvements for Yakuza 2. Look at the tepid reception for most recent JRPGs, then compare that to the adulation for relatively speedy JRPGs like Dragon Quest 8, Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, or SNES oldies like Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy 6.

Those are just the slightly less obvious examples. When you look in the realm of games like FPSes, compare the wild success of the ultra-speedy Call of Duty 4 to its sluggish competitors. Look at 3D action games; the speedy, 60-FPS titles like God of War 2, Devil May Cry 4, and Ninja Gaiden 2 dominate the genre.

Game design is a tricky art. Something that can work in one game may not work in another. There are virtually no techniques that will automatically make any game better. But when it comes to speediness, ignore that, and listen to this:

A game automatically becomes better if it's speedy. A game automatically becomes worse if it's sluggish.

It's really that simple.

Using Game Music Strategically

Historically, music has been a somewhat neglected part of game design. Not in terms of raw music quality--there have been many, many excellent soundtracks over the years--but in design terms. Too many developers have made poor decisions with regard to their music. They misuse what could be a huge advantage to a game's quality. Some lessons:

Make sure players actually hear the music:

Any soundtrack, no matter how good, is going to be wasted effort if players don't actually listen to it, right? This seems like an obvious lesson, but it's one many developers have ignored. Look at Crackdown, for example. From its wikipedia page: "Crackdown features over 100 tracks of electronica and sample-based music by a number of independent and video game musicians, including Amon Tobin, Atlas Plug, Celldweller and Hybrid. Music supervisor Peter Davenport was in charge of selecting the music for the game, a task that took three years to complete." Pretty impressive, right?

Well, it would've been if I could have properly listened to the music. The problem is that this (by all accounts, wonderful) soundtrack only plays while you're in vehicles. But a good 90% of the game will be spent by most players on foot, since the game's heavily focused on jumping, running, shooting, and brawling. This means that for the vast majority of the time the players won't hear music. Crackdown's a fairly short game in any case, which means that it's very unlikely that anyone will even hear all the music once, let alone enough for it to make an impact.

F-Zero GX had a similar problem. Each of the game's thirty or so racers had their own individual, diverse, excellent theme songs. Instead of putting the music in the actual racing gameplay so that players could listen to it, the designers decided to squander it by tucking it away in a submenu where players would maybe spend 15 minutes (and that's being generous).

Both of these games had missed opportunities in terms of music. Crackdown didn't get the huge acclaim for its soundtrack that the GTA games did, and F-Zero GX was widely considered to have an inferior soundtrack to its predecessors. Both judgements were unfair, but completely understandable. The developers could have solved the problem with very little development time.

Make sure players don't hear the music too much:

Generally, most people get sick of most music after a while, no matter how good it is. Listening to a song two or three times in a row is fine. After ten times, it'll start to get quite repetitive. After twenty times, it'll probably drive you nuts.

Despite that, lots of games ignore that and bombard players with the same tracks over and over. Western RPGs like Oblivion can have 100+ hours of gameplay, but they're lucky to exceed 2 hours of actual music. That means a lot of repetition, and even the best tracks start to get irritating after a while.

Japanese RPGs usually mitigate the problem of too little music. They often have their composers make 3-4 hours of music or more, sometimes by hiring more than one composer for a game. Unfortunately, while they might have enough quantity for their music, they get the distribution wrong, so the player still ends up hearing the same songs again and again. For example, look at JRPG combat. A huge chunk of most JRPGs is generally spent in battles, and yet relatively few have the sense to mix up the music playing during these fights. Occassionally the music will change for fighting bosses, but overwhelmingly the player will be subjected to one or two tracks repeating ad nauseam. It's even worse when the game has short random encounters and players only hear the first minute of the track, rather than the whole thing, over and over.

Final Fantasy Tactics is a notable example of a game that uses music very strategically (the music is also of great quality, incidentally). It has lots of tracks (made by at least two composers), almost all the tracks get a chance to be heard a few times, and they are distributed well--there are many battle tracks, for example.

Make sure the music fits the game:

This can be done in a lot of ways. Basically, try to integrate the music well. That can mean using dynamic music (historically, the Lucasarts iMuse system in their classic adventure games was a good example) so that the music matches the action on the screen, or it can mean simply playing appropriate tracks rather than just randomly picking one from the whole pool of available music (for example, making sure character themes actually play when the respective character is on-screen).

One neat trick is to play around with the source of the music. You can just play it normally, or you can try and make the music diegetic--that is, part of the game world. For example, you could pipe the music through stereos or loudspeakers placed in the level.

Use selective silence: Having a more-or-less continuous soundtrack is probably a fine approach for the vast majority of games, but selective silence can be a viable tactic as well. Half-Life 2 doesn't have background music for most of its gameplay time. Instead, the songs kick in at key moments to heighten emotion. The benefit of this approach is that musical silence can be immersive (real life generally not having a soundtrack); it also makes the player more aware of sound effects and increases the impact of the music when it does finally play.

Ultimately, thinking strategically about music costs very little time and effort, and can potentially yield large dividends in terms of the game's immersiveness, emotional impact, and variation. Having lots of great music for a game is one thing; using it in such a way as to maximize its effectiveness is another.

Designing Difficulty: Picking a System

Here's a breakdown of some of the major options, with advantages and disadvantages.

Static Difficulty:

This sort of system is pretty simple in concept--it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Each player goes through the game with a single, fixed, level of difficulty. It's surprisingly uncommon nowadays in comparison with other systems, although it used to be ubiquitous. Most NES games used static difficulty, for example.

Advantages: Every player gets the same experience. This means that the designer only has to make everything once, with no need for tweaking enemies, item placement, game mechanics, etc. depending on the difficulty level. This relative ease and focus of design can lead to gameplay that's better-balanced and more highly polished--at least in theory.

Disadvantages: Every player gets the same experience. Casual or crappy players can get frustrated, skilled players can get bored, and in general each player will have to conform to the game rather than getting the game to conform to them.

Selectable Difficulty:

The game lets the player set their difficulty. There are lots of little variations on this technique. Maybe the game lets the player control the difficulty of different components or sections of the game; maybe difficulty can be changed only at the beginning or maybe the player can alter it throughout the duration; maybe different settings involve a tweaked variable or two (like less health for the player) or maybe they mean entirely new level layouts, enemy placements, AI, etc.

This is a very common system today, particularly among action games like Ninja Gaiden II and Halo 3.

Advantages: Lots. Beyond the obvious benefit of tailoring the game experience to the capabilities of each player, different difficulty settings can be a great boost to replay value (particularly if there are lots of changes between each setting). Goldeneye on the N64 was one of the more prominent early examples of using difficulty as an incentive for replay; it did a lot of things right. Each level had individually selectable difficulty (with extra objectives and potential rewards for each setting), and that greatly multiplied the longevity of each bit of content. Modern games have taken that approach and run with it, with generally good results.

Disadvantages: Balancing one, static difficulty is hard enough--what about balancing, say, four or five separate settings? There's also the potential problem of the game only really working properly on certain difficulties. Halo sort of sucks on the easiest setting, and God Hand gets too frustrating to be fun on harder settings, to name two (arguable) examples of this problem. It's also not obvious to players which setting they should pick when they start, because the difficulty of each game isn't calibrated on some sort of universal scale. What's "easy" in one game may be considered "nightmare" in another.

Dynamic Difficulty:

This system entails the game automatically customizing itself around the player's skill level. SiN Episodes: Emergence (I felt the screenshot below was the best representation of the game) is an example of this sort of system. Basically, the better the player did, the more enemies would spawn and the more difficult and dangerous the game got.

Oblivion could be considered to fit in this category, too. The oft-criticized level scaling in that game meant that the more powerful the player became, the more powerful the enemies got. Depending on how effectively the player built his character over time, the game would get progressively easier or harder.

Lots of other games have small elements that add some dynamicism to the difficulty. Remember the painkiller cabinets in Max Payne? The number of painkiller bottles in them was directly related to how much damage the player took.

Advantages: The problem of a player not knowing what difficulty to pick is solved with this system--the game will automatically adapt until it theoretically reaches a perfect level of hardness, completely matched to the player's skill level.

Disadvantages: Besides the practical difficulty of implementing one of these systems (shown by the many, many problems with the scaling in SiN Episodes and Oblivion; problems that made the difficulty in these games often veer wildly) there are some theoretical flaws. Making the gameworld revolve too heavily around the actions of the player makes it feel less real and more artificial and contrived. Besides obvious wackiness like lowly bandits wearing ancient magical elven armour because the player character is high-level, or saving the world as a lowly level 1 character, the whole enterprise starts to feel like a treadmill. The player simply cruises through, not making any real progress--after all, the better they do, the harder the game gets, wiping out their advantages

Organic Difficulty:

This isn't really a separate, distinct sort of difficulty system. Rather, it's a general approach and mindset to actually implementing a system. Put concisely, it's an approach where the designer integrates the game's difficulty in a natural-feeling manner rather than going with "gamey" contrivances like selectable settings.

So what does that actually mean? Some examples would help. Super Robot Taisen: OG for the Game Boy Advance is a game that does it (and does it very well). It's a strategy RPG with the usual basic structure common to the genre--you get party members, you customize them, and you fight a long series of detailed battles. But you don't pick a difficulty level at the beginning. The game also doesn't automatically adjust itself to your skill (at least, not completely). Instead, it uses a "skill point" system. Basically, each mission has two ways to complete it. You can either do the mission the easy way (by fulfilling basic requirements), or you can fulfill extra, harder objectives and complete the mission the hard way. For each mission completed the hard way, you get a skill point. Get enough of those skill points, and the game will present you with an alternate set of more difficult missions, with their own skill points to get. Keep getting skill points, and you can progress through the game with even harder missions. On the flip side, missing skill points will keep you doing easy missions.

It's ultimately an intuitive, flexible system that feels natural and meshes well with the story and gameworld. It's part static, part selectable (albeit indirectly), and part dynamic. I'd be hard-pressed to think of a better-designed difficulty system offhand, in fact.

Other examples occur in most RPGs (both Western and Japanese), in the form of optional content and sidequests. These sidequests can be of varying levels of difficulty. If the game gives some indication that a particular quest is harder than normal, the developer has essentially integrated organic difficulty into the game. The player can tackle hard challenges if they're up for them, or stick to the main, easier quest if they don't want a hard experience. Again, there's no need for difficulty selection, or any contrived or unnatural scaling system--just an organic, well-integrated difficulty system.

Advantages: Already covered; organic difficulty, when implemented properly, feels more natural than the other systems (which increases immersion), and can combine most of their advantages.

Disadvantages: Organic difficulty can be hard to design and can vary wildly depending on the game. It can also result in wasted content; if, say, 25% of the game is designed for expert players, that's 25% of the game that beginning/intermediate players won't see.

Again, these are just some of the major design styles for creating a game's difficulty. It's by no means an exhaustive list--there are probably other systems that don't really fall into any of these categories--but this list can serve as a brief overview and a way to spur further thinking on the topic of difficulty.

Designing Difficulty: Introduction

A game's difficulty is a pretty fundamental component of its design, but despite that importance many developers haven't given the level of attention to the issue that they should. Part of the problem is that the optimal level of difficulty depends heavily on a slew of other factors--game genre, target audience, particular game mechanics, etc.

What's clear is that a suboptimal level of difficulty can have severe consequences for a game's quality and popularity. Too hard, and otherwise superb games like F-Zero GX can flop in sales and frustrate even fans of the game. Too easy, and games can be considered to be shallow or "kiddie", even when they have interesting gameplay. Of course, setting a good level of difficulty is more complex than just picking a spot along the "easy--hard" continuum, but that move is a start.

So where you do begin when deciding a game's difficulty? One good place to start is figuring out a difficulty system to use. Do you want every player to experience the same thing? Do you want adjustable difficulty settings? Maybe you want to use a dynamic system that adjusts how hard a game is as the player progresses? These are some of the more obvious routes available, and I'll discuss them in the next post, but there are other, more subtle options for difficulty systems that I'll also get into.

Introduction

What's the purpose of this blog? As you might guess from the title, I aim to analyze game design, with a strong focus on video games (rather than their board game, card game, etc. cousins). To get at the core of the issue, and find out what makes game design "good" or "bad", I'll use a variety of methods. Discussions of game mechanics, detailed looks at individual games, following various design trends in the industry, and any other techniques that I think of--I'll do these things in an attempt to provide insight for anyone interested in video game design.