Dana Callista Lexa 🏳️‍⚧️

Before I became a solo indie developer and made games like Chessplosion and Ducky's Delivery Service, I spent over a decade working for other game studios. I was mostly a gameplay programmer at AAA studios (~150 people) and "big indie" studios (~15 people), and I've done some engine/tools programming and some game design consultant work too.

I was going to write a big post on the game production process but I realized that most of it is pretty obvious. You come up with an idea for a game, then you make sure that the idea is good by prototyping its mechanics and planning everything out (also known as pre-production), then you make the rest of the game (also known as production).

It's just like any other type of art. You think of an idea for a drawing, then you sketch it, then you render the final picture. You think of an idea for a book, then you write an outline and a rough draft, then you write the final novel.

The only part that isn't obvious, judging from how I've seen this exact mistake being made over and over again on all sorts of games, is that you shouldn't move on from pre-production to production until you are 100% confident that the game is already good enough. I really cannot overemphasize how important this is. Ignoring this is by far the biggest and most common mistake that I see game developers make, and it is often game-ruiningly bad.

idle thought re that dragon's dogma "travel is boring" post but I wonder how much of the classic sense of "just traveling through a space with nothing to do" that open world games often induce has to do with the 'consumability' of the world design? Like a classic ubisoft style open world game that is just icons on a map? Once you've cleared out the icons, that section of the world is truly lifeless, beyond whatever respawning encounters are present.

I really do feel like, in order to design a world where traversal feels continually meaningful, the world mustn't be a checklist; there needs to be a sense of surprise and wonder in simply walking around, and that means not just nooks to explore but a consistent sense that any time you return to a place it could be different somehow; that a trip, any trip, is a journey with its own unique ups and downs, that you could be waylaid at any moment by anything, even in places you know well. And that's a VERY different allocation of dev resources than filling a space with hand-placed collectibles.

A big thing that I think gets missed a lot about most Japanese open worlds is that, philosophically, in direct contrast to western ones, they're much more directly descended from domestic adventure games than action games beyond maybe basic combat mechanics, when they even have any to begin with. When open worlds started to appear in Japanese games with the PS1 by way of stuff like Mizzurna Falls, Japanese devs, perhaps seeing the challenges in sufficiently populating such environments to fit other genres and gameplay styles, were primarily interested in exploring ways to engender a tangible relationship between players and the environments they're meant to inhabit, which is naturally easier to achieve with slower, more methodical games.

It's why Deadly Premonition, for instance, combines those really long car drives with York's extended monologues, to reinforce the idea that he's operating in a remote American mountain town where the population is scattered and nothing gets done quickly; as a Colorado native who's lived in and around the Rockies plenty, I can tell you, I've gone on plenty of meandering drives exactly like that. It's also why Irem's long-forgotten Pachipara games on the PS2 don't let you drive cars until pretty much the very end of the game, to the point where they're all but useless unless you engage in post-game content. You have to either walk, bike, or take the train everywhere in the meantime; your character is down on their luck and largely impoverished for most of those games and those limited means really impress upon you the urban, working class struggles they're pitted against. (Yes, the pachinko RPGs really explore these themes!)

I could go on and on with examples, but it's very much an approach that you only see when developers are comfortable with taking away players' control over their environments and I think a lot of western devs erroneously conflate complete or even relative player freedom with the format when, narratively and especially experientially, that can be more of a hindrance than an asset, at least if you're looking to do something genuinely different in the space. We're beginning to see people outside Japan come around to that with the Zelda games, which, for as explicitly derived from Bethesda and Ubisoft games as they are on a surface level very much so elaborate on those styles from that same lens. But I think it's fair to say there's yet to be a more widespread recognition that there are more ways to make a big open world than a GTA or a Skyrim or an Assassin's Creed and Japanese games have been investigating that for at least 25 years.

This is the funniest takedown of fast travel systems I've ever seen. So matter of fact. God damn

one of the other golden rules of indie game marketing is "give press an easy way to reach the interesting parts of your game." for example, SNAKE FARM has a secret cheat code that lets you unlock all packs instantly rather than unlocking them via achievements. sure, it might not be the precise play experience you want people to have, but streamers only have so many hours to devote to your project; make them count as much as possible

This is great for event judges, too! In IGF, being able to provide judges a way to see different parts of your game's intended experience is a way to make sure more judges actually experience what you're expecting them to experience.