Good [retro] video game design

The Game Room
1

As a fan of the Angry Video Game Nerd on YouTube, one thing I enjoy and noted about his videos of bad games is the element of design that defintes whether a game is good or bad. In other words, you could have an asanine premise/story, but if the actual game design is solid, a franchise can be born. Take the Mario franchise- a Fireball shooting, Turtle-stomping plumber rescuing a pricess :confused: ) by itself, the premise seems silly, but Nintendo managed to make a generation of platformers out of it.

Conversely, many games based on films are terrible. This is the opposite extreme, a good premise (popular movie/existing franchise) shoehorned into a shitty game. Superman 64 is a good example of this.

Some of the things that definite the level of design are often very simple things, to the point it makes me wonder how some companies missed the memo. For example, in MOST platform games, ‘A’ button is jump and ‘B’ button is shoot/action/whatever else. But some platform games decide to make ‘up’ jump, which has a lot of unintended consequences.

Other games consolodate different actions into one button/combo even though that platforms controller has multiple buttons. One thing I applaud about the SNES is that most of its games made very good use of the 6 button layout. Games’ controls can often be ergonomic, with the most frequently used buttons (the one for jump or shoot, usually) in the easiest part of the controller, and more obscure or situational actions being the more distant buttons. When people see a controller with a hojillion buttons they often groan, but I honestly thing its not the number of buttons per se, but their layout/use that factors into how effective they are in a game.

Another challenging aspect for platformers in particular is hit detection. Some games are so forgiving with mercy invulnerability you can actually use it to your advantage in some places (ie deliberately get hit, then use the invulnerability to bypass an enemy/content). Others are viciously unmerciful, either because of bad game design (The 2 zelda platformers for the CD-I in this case, in fact most of this post is about the many, many ways they went wrong with those games) or simply really challenging. Castlevania/Ninja Gaiden had a knockback effect that often sent you hurtling into pits, in fact often the lifebar was redundant because typically you’d die from falling in pits after getting hit, not getting hit too much.

But, honestly, I think the BIGGEST factor in game design to me in retro games was how intuitive it was to progress through games, in other words, would a kid be able to understand what to do to get to the next area? Older games were notoriously bad at this, which is annoying because its not like they didn’t have the ‘technology’ at the time to handle it- I suppose its a casualty of budget/time constrains on playtesting (though I have no cite for the level of development time/playtesting from 8 bit era to now).

The games I liked as a kid were ultimately well-designed. AVGN gives a glowing review of SMB3, and I agree 100%. The game was challenging but fun, the controls were good, level progression intuitive, not too short and not retardedly long, with a 2 player mode that let you either play cooperatively with a buddy, or competitively.

2

One interesting case is Megaman 2 (and possibly others; that’s the one I played the most). When you paused the game, there would be a very brief animation of Mega sort of “beaming up”, and the reverse animation when you unpaused. While the animation was running, you were invulnerable: Small projectiles would pass right through you. And the projectiles kept on moving while this was happening. So for some fights (especially a few boss fights), you could just fight until the monster was about to shoot at you, and then rapidly pause-unpause to withstand the attack, and then go back on the offensive for another few seconds.

3

When bored and cocky one semester in college, I started writing a manifesto about videogame criticism, the biggest thrust of which is that the very essence of games is essentially what you’re talking about. The “feel” of the interactions is the core to what games really are.

If I recall, I remember the main components I identified being “interaction metaphor” (ie how well does the user input feel like it relates to the in-game effect) and “progression of experience” (ie what does the game do to keep you interested and keep challenging you as well as guide you through).

The term I used to describe the whole shooting match was kinaesthetics, which I still like.

4

When I’m analyzing gameplay I look at what I call the “horizon of action”. That’s the moment to moment palette of meaningful things that the player can do. Whether a game is fun or not usually depends on how consistently it maintains a manageable range of choices in the player’s evolving horizon of action. Too few choices and the game feels boring and repetitive. Too many and the game feels overwhelming and frustrating.

In addition there are five other criteria that need to be satisfied:

[ul]
[li]**Variety **-- The horizon of action needs to change as you play. If you’re offered the same choice over and over again, it doesn’t feel like a choice any more.[/li]
[li]**Consequence **-- The choice you make needs to affect the state of the game. Your current horizon of action is determined by what you did in your previous horizon of action. Different choices lead to different outcomes.[/li]
[li]**Predictability **-- You should have a general sense of what the effects of an action should be. You’re not acting randomly – you’re trying to shift the state of the game in a particular direction.[/li]
[li]**Uncertainty **-- But sometimes things shouldn’t work out quite as you expect. If you can plan your future moves perfectly, then there’s no choice to be made when you actually make them. The game feels boring because you’ve already “played out” the future horizons in your imagination.[/li]
[li]**Satisfaction **-- Desirable states should be achievable. Making the right choices from moment to moment should allow me to gradually progress toward some goal.[/li][/ul]

5

What do you mean by “available actions”? Are you referring to “jump, shoot fireball, move left, move right, crouch”, or something more like “take upper path, take lower path, go into pipe”, or “fight enemy, run from enemy, trap enemy”?

6

It depends on the game. If you’re playing a twitch shooter then most of your actions resolve over the course of a few seconds, so the meaningful choices are very closely tied to particularly button presses. On the other hand if you’re playing a more strategic game, then mixed in with your immediate choices are other choices that play out over a longer time frame: Which route do I pick? Should I be conserving ammo? What upgrade should I apply? Mixing short- and long-term horizons of action is one way to create variety in the experience.