Realistic game design approaches for Indie games

[Mikademus]

Since I like to theorise and find principles I've been musing over the constraints and options of indie game development.

In making games there's a direct relation between scope (game size, game ambition, game contents, all-details technological edge-cuttingness) and resource demands, and since indie developers usually are on budget constraints magnitudes smaller than full studios indie games must consequently be of smaller scope.

What I'm thinking of if there's any general principles of indie game development that follows from this, any typical paths of design and development taking this into account, and I think there are. So far I've identified three.

I've written a blog post (http://noeticus.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/indie-game-watch-i-the-bare-essentials/) about the first principle, which I call "Reduction to bare essentials", that is, taking an idea (a genre or whatever) and boil it down to a manageable, possible very minimal, constituent aspects. This might sound very obvious but the two best examples of this I've found (discussed in my blog) manages this in a remarkable way. The game GalCon reduce the RTS concept to the uttermost essentials, as does Oasis with the turn-based strategy (TBS) form, and these games are impressively good.

Another way could simply be called "refinement", where you focus on one or some successful, entertaining or interesting aspects of something and build a game of refined quality in a narrower scope. I'd like to write a blog entry about this later when I've thought more about it and found more examples, the best I've found so far I'd say is Bit-Blot's Aquaria.

A third way would be to make ultra-narrow, ultra-casual games, that is, your typical match-3's: generally quick and dirty games only adding some slight or graphical twists to a simple concept.

What's your thoughts on this? You have more or better examples? Do you see any other "ways of indie design"?

[KNau]

I don't know if the "reduction to bare essentials" is done out of lack of resources so much as to appeal to a wider audience.

Deep, process intensive games are certainly possible in the indie space (usually the strategy titles, but RPGs as well) but in the effort to broaden our reach beyond "that hardest of the hardcore" we tend to make streamlining a default part of the design process, for both better and worse in my opinion.


But is reduction absolutely necessary for indies? I not so sure. In fact it makes it harder for us to differentiate from the mainstream who are engaged in their own efforts to make games as simplistic as possible. Note that I'm talking about design intensive as opposed to graphics intensive.

[lakibuk]

Since i had to quit my last game project due to incompetence i came up with these design guidelines for indie projects:
- 2D.
- tile-based / grid-based.
- use 3rd party library.
- single-player.

[Mikademus]

I don't know if the "reduction to bare essentials" is done out of lack of resources so much as to appeal to a wider audience ... in the effort to broaden our reach beyond "that hardest of the hardcore" ... for both better and worse in my opinion. ... In fact it makes it harder for us to differentiate from the mainstream who are engaged in their own efforts to make games as simplistic as possible.

That's some very good points there. I think it is important to distinguish between "simplification" and "essentialism". The mainstream, in my opinion, is as you imply very much about simplification, that is trying to reduce their games to fit the least common denominator in the same mass-market ambition that both the movies and music industries are afflicted by. However, essensialism would be trying to find the core of something, to polish away everything superfluous. These are two approaches that superficially appear similar but yields games of very different quality.

Put it like this: studio-produces mass-market kids music is stupid, Philip Glass is not.

[Dan MacDonald]

My own perspective is very much in line to yours though I don't think that your advice is of much practical value to people who haven't tried to design a game and fallen into the trap of oversimplifying it. Even in something like an action game, there's a tendency to try and boil the whole game down to the interactions between a player and an enemy, when in reality that grows stale and repetitive quite quickly. You need to keep the player learning and feeling like their making progress.

If you have fixed enemy patterns then people can learn the patterns and the more they play the more success they'll have. If you have random enemy spawns you better have some other meta games or really interesting boss fights that happen frequently to keep the player engaged. Maybe it's something like a shop, or a skill tree, maybe it's the challenge of figuring out a bosses weakpoint an exploiting it. Maybe like mega man you get a weapon from each boss that can be used against another boss and it's up to the player to learn which is the best order. Some games try to really keep that basic interaction between enemy and player interesting by doing special attacks and deaths for each enemy ( God of War?).

It's very easy though to oversimplfy and remove a critical element. The God of War style interaction really isn't available to indies because it's incredibly content heavy and content is one of the biggest challenges for a small team. It's very easy to fall into a trap and say "I'm just going to focus on the basic gameplay" and inadvertently create a flat and stale experience.

This is sort of an elaboration of your statement...

If done wrong this method may yield something lacking, insufficient and boring, but if done right, the result may be engrossing and teach us developers something about games we overlook without realizing!

it's very very easy to do wrong :) and there's a real subtlety to doing it right.
In the end the only thing really out of reach for a small team is lots and lots of high detail content. Anything else can be achieved if you chose a look and feel that you can crank out quickly. I am of the opinion that games that are reduced to their bare essentials (but are still incredibly fun, like your examples) are what indie games should strive to be. There simply isn't enough of this essentialism in retail game development, it seems that designers like to achieve design "Depth" though complexity and randomly piling on extra features and content "just because".

[cliffski]

I don't think that small teams means a narrower design scope. the design scope gets magnified by your technology to provide the final dev costs. If you want to simulate an entire galactic war as a turn based text game, you can do it alone. if you want to do the same thing but have it look like Revenge Of The Sith, you may be in trouble.
It all depends how your present things. There are probably just as many career paths in Kudos as there are in the Sims, but in Kudos they are just text, so it didn't cost me anything :D

Of course, if you are going to sacrifice the immersiveness of the 3D mega visual experience, you need to compensate in other areas, probably good game design and an interesting basic premise. But there is no automatic need for indies to do narrow, or simple games. As we can afford to be profitable with niche markets, I'd suggest the opposite is true.

[Dan MacDonald]

I think we're all saying the same thing, you can do the essentials without the fluf. Essentials doesn't mean simple.... it means essential. So if you want to simulate galactic war.. you can, you'll just need to focus on the essence of that, and not the 3D visualization of that. Simplifying galactic war to dragging and dropping one galaxy on top of the other isn't going to be fun to anyone... well maybe casual gamers, but who really knows what they want.

[Mikademus]

Even in something like an action game, there's a tendency to try and boil the whole game down to the interactions between a player and an enemy, when in reality that grows stale and repetitive quite quickly. You need to keep the player learning and feeling like their making progress. ... If you have fixed enemy patterns then people can learn the patterns and the more they play the more success they'll have. If you have random enemy spawns you better have some other meta games or really interesting boss fights that happen frequently to keep the player engaged. Maybe it's something like a shop, or a skill tree

Your comments reminded me of one of my old favourite shoot'em-ups, Xenon 2 (http://www.mobygames.com/game/xenon-2-megablast), by The Bitmap Brothers (1989). That game was a perfect refinement of the design structure you're describing: the basic gameplay was simple: vertically scrolling spaceship shooter (with some quirks, f.i. you could reverse thrust back down the map), pattern-based enemy swarms and end-level bosses. However, the levels and enemies evolved qualitatively so you had to improve your tactics (approach) as well as your reflexes to progress, and you expanded your load-out in intermittent shops, offering you some degrees of freedom to adapt a personal style.

Xenon 2 gameplay screenshot (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/xenon-2-megablast/screenshots/gameShotId,153771/)
Xenon 2 shop screenhot (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/xenon-2-megablast/screenshots/gameShotId,2329/)

It can be argued if this is "essentialism" or the "refinement" model I mentioned in passing, above. I'd say that you're spot on with the description that "simplifying" a design to the basic-most interaction aspect is a failed design. If we use the term "gameplay hook" then for an action game it should very much be build on top of this rather then on it, it should be about, as you say, the player evolving through it rather than merely performing it. Whenever a game turns into a chore then it has failed.

I am of the opinion that games that are reduced to their bare essentials (but are still incredibly fun, like your examples) are what indie games should strive to be. There simply isn't enough of this essentialism in retail game development, it seems that designers like to achieve design "Depth" though complexity and randomly piling on extra features and content "just because".

Then we do think alike. I'd argue that almost all good game ideas are really relatively simple. This is not to say that good games are simple, but that good -manageable- complexity comes from the interaction of (relatively) simple ideas rather than from convoluted, artificial or forced constructs. And mainstream industry seems to abound with forced complexity rather than fundamentally good game models.

Essentialism could thus perhaps tentatively (and somewhat vaguely) be defined as identifying the interacting aspects constituting a particular game model, determining and removing from them anything superfluous, and "naturally" (as opposed to "artificially") reassembling them into the minimal meaningful (which is not the same as "minimal possible") way.