Anyone can become a designer. It’s not difficult. You take an idea and flesh it out. Bingo you’re done. What makes a good designer however is one who can look back at his projects and say “I could have done better and here is how”. Know that may sound negative, but on the contrary: that is possibly the most useful skill for a designer to have. Why? Because if you always do things right, how do you know what to improve? Answer is you wouldn’t. In designing games, you are always trying to learn.
So, I am starting a series of articles where I will discuss the blunders in a game and how it could have been fixed. I will be doing these articles whenever I find a game that has had bad design issues.
I will be starting this series by discussing Legena : The New Dawn. This was my previous RPG I designed and developed and unfortunately it turned out average and as a whole the worst RPG I designed. Why? Because I didn’t plan it enough. It was my own fault, I should have started it during my third year of university. That was where my design skills reached their heights. So I will be detailing what I did wrong and the lessons I have learnt during the ordeal.
Number #1 : Finalize Your Story
I had intended to make The New Dawn the first episode in the Legena series. But I had a change of heart when I realized the story was that great and one day I will fix this black mark by remaking it. Halfway through developing the series, I took a change of tone for the next games in the series and as a result, The New Dawn stuck out like a sore thumb. For instance, the Channelling in The New Dawn was the source of a humanoid’s magic. However in Union Tides and onwards, it was changed to be used as an energy source thanks to the introduction of Feathers. This was sloppy planning and I wish I had thought about it.
As a result, I now always plan the story line before anything else and finalize it. From something as simple as Leon to a full RPG series as Legena.
Number #2 : Work with the Tools at Hand
This may sound odd but hear me out. During 2011-2012, Yo Yo Games confirmed they will be porting to Android in 2012. Noticing a place in the Android market for retro inspired RPGs, I set off to develop The New Dawn. Now I must stress this was before I had a smartphone so I was a novice at User Interface and Control design for smartphones. This was a mistake for two reasons. One, I developed the game without a smartphone so I had no clue how this was going to turn out in its controls and secondly, I developed the game before they released the Android porting so I didn’t know the rules.
So how did this effect the game? Well there were many errors. But this one I’m about to describe is the biggest. Because there was a change in how the Tiles were done for Game Maker Studio. This article explains the reason behind the change better than I could. As a result of the change, the game suffered the cracked tiles described in the article. And by this point, the game was almost complete and to fix the problem would mean building every single room from scratch.
So from now on, I research the requirements for the platforms as well as the rules for porting to that device from the dev kit.
Number #3 : Plan your Controls
The blunder of working before the Android porting was a big one. Because of the Tile fault and many more errors, I had no choice but to abandon porting The New Dawn to Android and focus on the PC version. Now this is where mistake number #3 comes in. Because I had developed it for only Android, I had used a Button focused control layout which meant there were no Cursor based controlling, like you would find in Final Fantasy 6 or Persona 4. This control layout would have been fine for Android, but most PCs don’t use touchscreens which is primary control scheme for a smartphone. I don’t need to say why the control layout I designed only for Android would work out well for a PC version. So I had to produce a basic keyboard based control scheme which although fixed the problem, wasn’t that great.
I’m going to detail the lesson learnt here the most because it is a big one. PLAN YOUR CONTROLS. I have seen countless Indie Games where I have said to myself “This is badly designed and this is why”. Sometimes they use the wrong keys on a keyboard or the put the Firing button on one of the shoulder buttons on the controller. Heck, I’ve done bad controls before and this game is the proof. So I must stress, when you are going to develop a game, acquire the controller/keyboard/touchscreen you will be using to control the game and design it with that in mind. Don’t try to make the control scheme universal. It will never work as every platform and device is different. And should be treated different.
For example, the next Legena game Union Tides is being designed with four control layouts. Keyboard controls for the PC, Touchscreen controls for the Android devices, Ouya Controller controls for the Ouya and GameStick controls for the GameStick. If you design the controls with a new control layout for each device, it should prevent the problems I had.
Number #4 : Split Up Menu States and Give Menu States names
Ok this isn’t a design mistake like the others but it is a good design mistake to list for Menu Design. In The New Dawn, there were 20 menu states at least and I tried to make them all accessible in two scripts. One for drawing and one for interaction. Now for each script, the average number of lines for each menu state was 50 lines. Now if you do the maths, that is roughly (20 x 50=1000) 1000 lines of code in each script. Now assume there is an error in the menu code and a tester reported it. Imagine the poor programmer who has to go through all 1000 lines of code just to find that one error because you didn’t design the menu states to be independent. This is what I had to go through for The New Dawn.
So the lesson here? Split up your Menu States into categories. By this I mean when designing the Battle Menus, design them so they only know about each other. Give them their own script. This may mean there are more scripts but it allows a programmer to isolate errors more efficiently.
So there you have it, four mistakes that turned The New Dawn from a great idea to an average game. But if I hadn’t made the mistakes, it could have affected Legena : The Union Tides with the same issues. In fact, I have had no menu issues with Union Tides thanks to the errors I made in this game.
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