Ben Olding Games: Good Advice: Make your game fun

Ben Olding Games: Good Advice: Make your game fun:

About a month ago, the Flash MindMeld went live. This was a project create by a developer called David Fox, where 60 people in the flash game industry (including yours truly) were asked to record a 60 second audio clip answering the question: 'What makes or breaks a successful flash game?'

Have a look/listen here: [Click to View Link]

Stating the obvious?

Since then I have read a few blogs complaining that about 2 thirds of the people on there offered the advice 'make the game fun', and that this was obvious advice. I have 2 things to say about that...

1. Usually this was part of another tip, and to elaborate on the 'fun' part would be very difficult given that there was only 60 seconds in which to speak
   


2. Maybe it wouldn't be said so much if people did think about 'fun' more when creating their games...

The advice I offered was to start working on the fun part of your game first, and to abandon if you can't make it fun within the first few hours.

One blogger compared this to asking a chef how he makes his food so good and him saying 'I make it delicious!'. Fair enough. But if chefs were like flash game devs, then lots of chefs wouldn't be making food taste nice, they would be spending lots of time on arranging the food on the plate, they would be thinking about what additives they need to make their food addictive, and how to make it so that customers were still hungry after so that they would buy more, they would trying to optimize the price so that customers would get a taste for free, then gradually increasing the price as customers come back for more. If then, the food tasted bad, then none of that would matter.

Its the same with flash devs, on game dev forums you often get people showing off their game that they have spent months and months on, often with impressive technical accomplishments and/or high levels of polish, which often impress developers, but they have failed to take a step back and think, will people enjoy this?

You rarely see on forums people asking 'how do I make this fun?', you get people asking how they can get a game sponsored, or how to distribute a game effectively. Often when a game doesn't do to well, the developer will not even consider that their game isn't fun, they will blame everything around them and often the players. 'Newgrounds players don't like anything without zombies in' is something I've heard said a few times, but I don't believe for a second.

So developers...

When making your game, think to yourself 'Is this fun', when you add a feature think to yourself 'Why am I adding this? does it make it more fun? if not then for what reason am I adding it?'

Get other people to try your game, I would recommend a range of people. They don't all have to like it, but if they don't then ponder why they don't and see if it is something you can solve. Don't just get other developers opinions as developers are impressed by different things to standard players.

So how do you make your game fun?

This is quite a wide ranging question and will vary from game to game, genre to genre, but I will do my best to offer some tips

The challenge in a game should be the game, not the controls

If controls are difficult to pick up, then players will get frustrated because they can't get the game to do what they want. Instant fun killer. As the developer you will have had loads of practice and therefore will find it difficult to assess how easy/hard your controls really are, so get so other people to try your game and watch how they get on.

If your game does have difficult controls, then there can sometimes be satisfaction in mastering them. 'Mirrors Edge' and 'Street Fighter 2' are both good examples of this. But in both of these games, if you haven't mastered the controls, then the game is still playable and you enjoy playing while you are learning.

Difficulty

If your game is too difficult then people will get frustrated (enraged sometimes!), if it's too easy then it gets boring. So it's important to spend time getting this right [...]