RiverMan Media

Work on Pizza Vs. Skeletons progressed steadily this week. We implemented several exciting (and weird!) new features. However, none of them are quite ready to show off. Instead, this week I’ll be talking more about process rather than product, and share a design strategy that we’ve found useful.

Graphical User Interfaces, or GUIs, are one of the most underappreciated aspects of game design. A game’s GUI consists of everything that you can see and interact with outside of the core gameplay. Menus, buttons, and checkboxes are all classic examples of GUIs. They help you guide the player to a game’s various modes and options, and navigate features like leaderboards and matching servers.

Recently, while reorganizing the menus in Deathfall and IKAROS, I discovered a simple technique that we’ve found to be very helpful in designing elegant and robust GUIs. This technique is so simple, in fact, that I’m afraid some of you may call it “obvious.” However, it took me six years as a professional GUI designer to stumble upon this process, so I’m hoping that it might also be new to some of you!

In this week’s Pizza Vs. Skeletons update, I want to talk about what I consider to be one of the most challenging aspects of game development: Knowing when “good” is “good enough,” and when “good” needs to be made “better.”

Last week, I posted about a new animation process I’m using for Pizza Vs. Skeletons, and I showed off an example animation.

When I made this animation, I considered it to be solid, and certainly passable for a cartoony iOS game. However, as the week went on, I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I’d taken the 3D rotoscoping process too literally. Instead of using the 3D version as a rough motion guide, I traced it pixel-for-pixel. The result was a nice, clean, animation. Unfortunately though, Pizza Vs. Skeletons’ artwork is supposed to be everything but nice and clean. The animation just didn’t have the character to match the rest of the game’s art. I faced a tough question: Do I let the art pass and call it “good enough,” or should I redo hours and hours of work in pursuit of an even better style?

Answering questions like these is not simply a matter of style or personal taste. These are significant business decisions. They are so important, in fact, that I would argue that the way a studio approaches the decision of when to redo work defines it as a company.

The Legend of Zelda had its 25th birthday this week, and to celebrate I'd like to discuss a topic that I've been pondering for awhile now: The idea of players forming an enduring, positive emotional connection to a game. In other words, the idea of treasuring a game. In this article, I’ll look at the ingredients that made The Legend of Zelda so successful at forming lifelong bonds with its audience.