Hello and welcome to this weeks installment of the Dev Blog! For those of you that have not yet picked up my role in the team let me introduce myself: I am Björn the resident Game Designer. Lets touch off with some general thoughts about design and priorities…

I find that there is a common misconception about Game Design being all about coming up with cool ideas. In fact this misconception may be attributed to most creative activities. In my experience there has never been a shortage of ideas and even if you come up with something that you think is unique it only takes a quick Google search to find out that it was already discussed centuries ago by someone’s grandparents. Part of it I think is the old myth of the genius. The guy that spends all his time coming up with great ideas that NO ONE has thought of before! Without any real references to base this on I am still pretty sure that even people like Da Vinci got most of his ideas from those that came before him. The reason for his success probably had more to do with timing and implementation than unique ideas (there’s another great example involving a certain fruit company but I fear I would get into legal trouble if we went there).

No, creativity and thus Game Design is more about finding ways to combine all the millions of ideas floating around into something new and awesome. The success of a good design does not lay in the underlying ideas but in how they are implemented.

Finding ways to implement ideas into the game is what I spend a lot of my working day doing. Ideas come from both within the team and from the community forum. The trick is working out how to integrate them into the general game design and even more importantly decide in which order to implement them.

Very few of the ideas we come across are bad ones, but even with the budget of the fruit company it would probably be impossible to do them all at once. Therefore one of our most important tasks are to prioritize in which order to implement them. Factors that play into these decisions can be summarized into a couple of categories:

• Gameplay
• Development
• Business

These are tightly entangled with each other and all of them need to be considered with every decision we make.

Gameplay
Gameplay is of course seriously important since it is what keeps players playing the game and thus this company alive. It is also one of the main reasons why most of us are in this business to begin with.

Development
For every feature we have to ask the question “How long will this take to implement and is it worth spending time on compared to the other things that we could have achieve in the same period of time?”

The answer to this question is relative to the resources available at the time it is asked. The resources we are dealing with are things like the technical state of the game (game engine, tools, code base etc.) and the different types of professionals available.

Everyone in the team has their own specialty and even though we sometimes help out with small tasks it is generally best to let the expert do the tasks that require their expertise (anyone familiar with the concept of “programmers art” should know what I’m talking about…).

Programmers Art?

For instance, this means that we cannot create more animations faster by adding more people to the problem since we only have one dedicated animator.

Business
Finally we always have to consider what makes sense business wise. For instance if a publisher want an exclusive weapon in order to let us go retail we may need to put other things on hold since retail is one of the places where we have the potential to attract a largest number of new players to the game.

Thats all for this week. I hope it was enlightening and at least mildly entertaining. In the coming weeks you will hear more from the other members of the team… Maybe some more programmers art, animation jokes or incomprehensible server talk? Only time will tell. Until next time, happy hunting!

Click here to go to the forum discussion about this post