Recommend me game design materials

[mazoku]

I am really bad at understanding players and designing my games. Can you recommend me good game design materials?

[b10b]

Play more Mario.

[mattstyles]

@b10b I haven't played it but I've read some great articles (via Twitter, which has Mariomania), love the idea of explicitly never punishing the player for failure. I was brought up roguelikes and the fairly recent glut of brutal roguelikes (only just roguelikes really!) means I'm a big fan of fairly brutal games, but the idea of the opposite is also very awesome.

@mazoku designing games/anything is hard, really hard, almost always far tougher than the actual implementation. Try to read anything by designers on the sorts of games you like, for me this is Richard Garriott, Sid Meier, Peter Molyneux, David Braben etc (I'm sure there are more current examples, I'm fairly/incredibly old school). Most modern high-end games (tougher for smaller shops and indies to have time for it, but there are still plenty out there who enjoy writing about what they do) have blogs (or use medium/reddit—kind of—for the same purpose), try trawling through those. Books, if you can find one you like by a source you like, are great but sometimes don't go into enough detail on seemingly small decisions—from experience, UX stuff generally has no small decisions, things that seem very small can often have very important impacts for users/players.

Consider, for example, a fog-of-war style mechanic in a top-down game (which affects field-of-vision), naturally, you might say, just make it so the player can see most of the screen but how much you reveal/hide can have a far reaching impact on how your game feels when played. This decision then moves on to how much you want the player to be able to modify the visibility range i.e. do I even allow them to get a torch to show more of the game? If I do and they light themselves to reveal more of the map then how does that affect how my game feels? Do I lose the claustrophobic or tense feeling that I've built up with a tight field-of-vision?

As with all things, its an experience thing, a thing that can be honed be iteration. Make the best decision you feel you can do, but don't get attached to it, then try it out with a group of players and learn from their reactions, then assess again whether it was a good or bad decision. This can be done automatically but there is no substitute for sitting down with players and getting feedback, if you do it in person though just be sure you don't introduce any of your pre-conceptions or judgements, you want to learn from players to improve the experience and you can't do that if you pressure them into a decision one way or the other.

Facebook is a prime of example of this sort of user testing, but they do it out in the wild (with focus groups in private also), its equally applicable to gaming, but can be quite resource-intensive and potentially harmful if you test something out that really doesn't work—facebook don't mind if they lose a few users from a group, they'll probably get them back and there are plenty more in any case, you likely don't have that reach so be a little warier of going balls deep on that one. The web is a great place to conduct this sort of user testing as you're not reliant on users downloading/installing your latest builds, although, to be fair, I can't seem to stop Steam games from updating whenever they please (there must be a setting somewhere!).

[Antriel]

I can recommend The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses.