Two take-aways from Games First Helsinki 2015
Last week I attended GamesFirst Helsinki 2015, an event for game developers organised by Supercell and Neogames, a celebration of the Finnish game development community and the love of making games . We got candy, slippers, good panels and networking opportunities.
I also got back home with two ideas:
Skill differentiation is as relevant in games for kids as it is in multiplayer games.
Rob Pardo from Blizzard Entertainment discussed ranking systems, game balance, players match-making and skill differentiation from the optics of multiplayer games like the World of Warcraft, in a modern version of a lecture he gave time ago in GDC.
We want to create games that are easy to learn, hard to master, Rob said. He used chess as an example. A game you whose rules you can grasp quickly but you could spend a whole life improving your game. In other words, it has high skill differentiation. Games like Uno, or Tick tack toe, have low skill differentiation, because there is not that big difference between the noob and the skilled player. Either you master the game or not.
The majority of video games for children and edutainment educations I know have a low skill differentiation. You either have the skill to tell a triangle from a circle or you don’t, and once you acquire that skill, the whole thing quickly becomes uninteresting.
It’s a paradox, if you think that children learn and develop skills so quick. This game design principle may be what makes 5 year olders prefer “Clash of Clans” over “Pipi and Pupu learn how to count”(sic), as much as the fancier graphics, social prestige , or other valid factors.
Can a game for kids offer something to a spectrum of players from the youngest to the elder brothers? Also, children learn and get new skills very fast, but each one in a different path. Is it reasonable to aim for such a “moving target” like that?
Digital toys like the ones by TocaBoca, and sandbox games like Minecraft excel on relying on creativity and openness to make sure they offer something to every kind of player at every stage. But there must be other ways to do it.
Digital storybooks, for example, have an underlaying thread of narration which could act as a safety net: Challenges for different skill types and levels could be built on top of it, offering meaningful rewards to those who dare to take them, yet “letting the show go on” for the younger, more unexperienced or passive players.
Be true to yourself and remember not to reinvent the wheel!
Karoliina Korppoo from Colossal Order talked about their successful Cities Skylines (over 1 million copies sold) and her game design philosophy.
I liked her friendly approach to newie players. According to her one shouldn’t be punished for not knowing how to do something within the game, but rather taught.
Trying to come up with a new game genre different to anything we have ever seen is not a good idea, she explained; take a known genre and make the best game in that type instead. In the case of Colossal Order, they used their expertise on traffic simulation and city modeling to make a city building simulator in the trace of the classic Sim City.
This advice may seem obvious, but it is a necessary realisation that every developer has to have by him/herself, and is applicable to any other discipline of art.
In my own experience, I spent some time trying to build “the definitive interactive storybook/graphic adventure/puzzle collection/VOD player for children of all ages and their parents”. I decided to step back, release a simple puzzle game and a pure, simple storybook first, to try to master those genres before revolutionising them.
As Pablo Picasso (most likely) said:
Learn the rules like a pro, then break them as an artist.
