![]() And we really couldn’t stray too far from the Crime City design.Ī lot of the features that went into it were small evolutions over Crime City. I think the limitation was that we were starting with the Crime City engine. And actually taking that to inspire the design.ĭo you have an example of when you recognized a constraint or a limitation within your team or within your company, and how you used to improve the quality of the design?ĭC: Kingdom Age is a good example, which is out on Google+ right now, and is coming to Facebook. While, on the other side, we do also have the appointment mechanic which forces people to come back every day.ĮL: It sounds like you approach design from a very pragmatic sense in recognizing the limitations and constraints of the people you’re working with and the team you’re on and the budget. There are certain things where we try to make it really fun. I feel like social games are getting there, too. Obviously there are other mechanics that are very fun. But it does have the same certain set of mechanics. But I feel like you see that in all sorts of games. I think, just with anything, there’s a sense of addiction and manipulation. Now you’re taking your crap from the people playing your game and what they actually want, and what their behaviors actually are.ĭC: There is some truth to the soulless part. Whereas you used to have to take on reasonable requests from a marketing department or someone who controls a giant budget, and “ruins” your “artistic vision.” Only, someone else designed the business model for you: sell at $60 and spend millions and millions on marketing. You are clearly embracing metrics as “this is the world of game design now.” It always strikes me that selling games for $60 is just as soulless. So, I think you have to consider everything, but game design to me, at the heart, is that system-level design.ĮL: With regards to metrics, having done a free-to-play game recently too, I feel like you go to GDC and there are a lot of people who crap on it and say it’s soulless. ![]() I just vowed that would never happen again. ĭC: Which, that game just totally flopped. Which comes back to like my original experience in the industry. I think more than ever, it’s important for game design to incorporate a lot of business thought behind things. There are these things that may not be fun but may just be addictive.Īnd those things are important to have the game make money. You have a lot of elements that, it’s hard to say whether it’s more addicting than fun, but I kind of feel MMOs are the same way. But if it’s good enough and it’s fun enough, then word of mouth will travel and review scores will be high. They might play for half an hour and then return it to GameStop for $35.ĭC: Yeah. So that game better be fun.Īnd then once they’ve bought the product, it doesn’t matter, right? They’ve already given you their money.ĮL: They might hate it. So, with traditional games, the business model was you buy a $60 box product and then it basically comes to your Metacritic score, right? Your Metacritic score is high, that means the game is really fun or you paid awesome reviewers, right? And that’s what the game lives or dies by, is just that review score. And then retention, which I feel is the same thing as fun. But there are just the realities of making the game monetize well, making the game viral. You have to optimize the game around these other metrics, which some people might say is soulless. Nowadays, in Social, what I like is that it’s not just about making the game fun. ![]() And just the talents and kind of the DNA of the company, as they say. I like to tailor the design to all the limitations of the company, whether that be the resource limitations of being engineering heavy or light, or art heavy or light. ![]() I guess calling it “defining the core loops” has become the fancy term that people throw around.īut to me, that’s really at the heart of everything is designing how all those systems work together, to make a cohesive, clean and consistent design.ĮL: And it sounds like you trend towards system design, is kind of your passion at the heart.ĭC: That’s definitely what I’m passionate about. Then, there’s the system level design how the game actually works. There are people that are just great with the numbers, tuning, the economy. There are obviously people that are good at writing story and coming up with characters. I feel like it goes down to the talents of certain types of game designers. Dan has worked as gameplay engineer on Xbox launch title New Legends, lead designer on the casual game Wandering Willows, and most recently lead designer on social/mobile games Crime City, and Kingdom Age.ĭC: There are so many different parts of it. Dan’s work runs the full gamut of design, including releases in the Core, Casual, Social and Mobile segments of the industry. The following are excerpts from a conversation with Dan Chao, Lead Designer at Funzio.
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