Capabilities and competitive edge

In my last post, I talked about the things a studio (and publisher, service providers) need to do to make games. I think that these capabilities can be broadly split into three categories.

1. Strategic
2. Value-add
3. Support

Strategic capabilities are the things that a business does to stand out from the rest. They should be difficult for other businesses to replicate. For customers to switch from what they already use to you, they need a good reason. There’s a cost to switching. Strategic capabilities are what you invest in to attract new customers and retain existing ones.

Value-add capabilities are the things that a business does that customers care about. If you’re a manufacturing plant, it’s what you manufacture. If you’re a search engine, it’s delivering information and advertisements to users.

Support capabilities are the things that a business needs to do to sustain itself. Customers don’t care about these things. It’s usually HR, accounting, quality assurance, etc.

I’ve been asking myself what strategic capabilities my studio should focus on. I need to take a wider look at the industry landscape and understand how best to set us apart.

Embracing mods

Games are going to be modded whether I like it or not. Luckily, I do. I recently booted up The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim for the 61st time on console and discovered that it supports most of the mods I’ve seen on PC. I downloaded mods for higher resolution textures, better lighting, improved AI, more realistic movement speed, nicer base character models, new beginnings to the main quest, quest markers for the Stones of Berenziah, and a whole new set of talent trees.

This process took me about an hour and I got an entirely new gameplay experience. I don’t see a compelling reason to disrupt modders who are doing their work. (Obviously this does not mean I endorse all mods).

I also don’t see a good way to monetize mods. If I want to encourage modding, the least productive way might be to charge modders for extra for content creation tools. It increases the barrier to entry without a substantial return. I could also monetize the mods themselves…but even if there was a way to share the profits of paid mods, I think goodwill among our users would suffer.

Which really just leaves making it easy for modders to do what they do. I don’t think this is simple. It will require a conscientious game architecture, scriptable mechanics, and data-driven content. I’m going to validate this assumption in the coming weeks.

Highlighting the gameplay

Something else that I’ve noticed in the many, many games that I’ve played is that I usually don’t stop playing a game for terrible gameplay. Sometimes I do, but the majority of the time it’s because I have trouble getting to the gameplay. For example:

Performance

One of my favourite games is Rune Factory 4. It was formative – I’m sure that if I played it again I would remember all the secrets and strategies I developed when I was younger. For that reason, I was watching Rune Factory 5‘s worldwide release very closely. But I’m not…excited anymore. I think it’s not going to be a great experience. The reason? I watched a trailer for it and saw, for a game that should not be resource-intensive, that there were regular frame drops to below 20fps.

Games continuously deliver information to players through visual, audio, and in some cases tactile cues. Players have trouble focusing on the game’s mechanics and content when that flow of information is interrupted. This is why performance issues are such a mood-killer.

Usability

I played through Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, all the way to the end. It was grueling. That’s not to say it wasn’t good at its core, but one thing that stuck out to me was using its pause menu. Every time I opened the menu, I would see the inventory screen, which is the one I probably used the least. After flipping to the map, I’d see it littered with icons of pictures other players had taken. (There wasn’t a way to disable that – I checked.) At best, I’d get a map covered by these giant rectangles when I accidentally dragged my cursor too close to these icons. At worst, the image would have time to load and I could have some aspect of the game spoiled for me.

The problems didn’t stop there – the talent tree was huge. It had something like 100-200 talents in a giant sprawling tree. The tree was obscured by a fog of war until you reached a new group of talents, which made the long-term planning of my talents needlessly difficult. Resetting my talents was free. I’m not sure if this made it better or worse, because on more than one occasion I:

1. Reset my talents
2. Reallocated them to clear away the fog of war
3. Repeated steps 1-2 if necessary until the fog was cleared away
4. Planned out my desired talent tree
5. Reallocated my talents one final time
6. Tried to remember my long-term plan for as long as I could

It was a nightmare. AC: Valhalla was marred by these kinds of usability issues that ultimately made me try to avoid the map and talent systems as much as possible. Players need to be able to enjoy the gameplay without being confused and frustrated by the game’s peripherals.

Functionality

I’m sad to say this happened to me when playing Psychonauts 2. Within an hour of starting, they had introduced a new type of enemy (it leaves patches around the map that slow your character down). I was getting used to the mechanics, defeating the waves of enemies that came my way until they just…stopped coming. My NPC partner was encouraging me to finish them off, so I don’t think the combat encounter was over. But the enemy was nowhere to be found! I turned the game off and haven’t tried playing it again.

This is not uncommon. I make a point to play in-progress games by amateur developers so I can better understand the mistakes they make so I can avoid them. I will accidentally break a game by exploring so often that it kills any sense of fun I had. Players need to be able to trust that they don’t need to mitigate the developer’s mistakes. If the bugs are infrequent / recoverable enough, players find them silly, not worrying.

Managing risks

It seems like independent studios make more risky investments than what AAA studios pursue. This is a broad generalization. There are counterexamples, but I can’t think of a single person who would disagree. I also can’t think of a single person who would disagree that the real gems are more likely to come from indie studios. Pursuing art instead of entertainment comes with higher variability and a greater chance of failure.

I’d like to pursue art. How can we combat the risk that comes with it?

Prototyping and playtesting

These two things go hand-in-hand. Prototyping is building something to answer a specific question. For example, “can we fit this many actors in a scene and maintain 60fps?” or “does giving each player a double-jump enhance the gameplay?”.

Playtesting is giving something we’ve built to people who can answer our question. These don’t need to be prospective players. There could be several variations on a prototype. A book could be written on how to playtest effectively. There’s some overlap with design of experiments (DOE).

This seems to be the single best way to reduce or eliminate risk about game-related decisions.

Robust documentation

I believe that, among other things, documentation is useful for communication and memory.

I’m working at a company right now with an overreliance on “tribal knowledge”. Most of the information we need to keep us going is in peoples’ heads, not on paper. We’re feeling growing pains as we try to scale.

We’re also not adequately documenting experiments we’ve run and problems we’ve dealt with. Doing what we’re doing quickly in the short-term is important, but not documenting what we’re doing sabotages us in the long-term. We may duplicate experiments or spend time exploring paths that lead nowhere. If we’re going to scale effectively, we need to focus on meeting our goals in the long-term in a way that’s consistent and repeatable.

High technical standards

Requiring high technical standards is implied by everything else I’ve written here. I don’t see a way to retain momentum on a software project that needs to support and encourage modding, prototyping, and rock-solid play without ensuring it’s maintainable. This means:

• Consistent organization
• Following good design principles
• Ensuring the code is testable
• etc.

Next steps

I’m going to build a prototype of a game in the next few weeks. Once it’s functional, I’m going to start refactoring, including mod support, exploring how to manage its changes on version control, etc. I’m going to write a series of blog posts documenting lessons I’ve learned.