Game Design Tips from Tom Hall (1994) | Hacker News Reader

Game Design Tips from Tom Hall (1994)

3drealms.com

75 pointsRondom15 comments

Anyone interested in game design should read the Anatomy of a Game series that Jeremy Parish has been doing: http://www.gamespite.net/category/games/anatomy-of-a-game-ga...

Right now he's doing Final Fantasy 6, but has previously done Super Mario Bros., Mega Man, Castlevania, Castlevania II, Castlevania III, The Legend of Zelda, The Legend of Zelda II and Metroid. Unfortunately, I can't find a good synopsis page which links to the games individually.

edit: synopsis page here, but Jeremy recently moved all of his content back onto his blog, so this doesn't contain his recent stuff on FF6: http://www.anatomyofgames.com/anatomy-of-a-game/

"- Never have treasure you can't get."

" - Your first mistake." - King.com would say - " - Make it unreachable and leave users no choice but to pay to cross the difficulty threshold."

Hall talks about how to make enjoyable games, not massive margins. Sadly, the two seem to be increasingly disparate these days.

A bit of a classic, I found Jesse Schell's book, The Art of Game Design very helpful. The paradigm he constructs for how all the elements of game design fit together helped me approach game design from angles (or lenses as he calls them) I hadn't considered before.

"- Don't make the player go all the way to the end, then all the way to the beginning, then all the way to the end again."

I'm looking at you, Metal Gear Solid.

Portals could be an in-app-purchase, so it's better to do exactly that all the time.

I think it made the location in Metal Gear Solid seem much more real. Aside from maybe Deus Ex I don't know any games where this worked well without feeling like backtracking.

For me, I just felt that brought on a sense of monotony. The entire sequence could take a good couple of hours. Good game design drives you onwards because you're excited about what's coming next (the same rule applies with good novel writing). I would instead groan to myself and think "ugh, again?".

The story was the redeeming feature throughout this sequence however.

How do you guys feel about the backtracking in games like Super Metroid? I find that going through an area with all this stuff you can see but not reach leaves wonderful mental hooks so when you pass through again with grapple or space jump you get all this additional exploration and get to feel good because you've remembered stuff.

I think Metroid is more akin to the open world games of today. It presented a large world (for the time) and there was a sense of exploration. In a game which is essentially on rails... I don't want to run back to the beginning because there's no goo reason to do so.

To get the top "grandmaster" rank, Tetris: The Grandmaster 3 requires you beat the game to the second hardest rank 4 out of 7 consecutive runs. To even get that second hardest rank once require years of practice. (Yes, I've been watching AGDQ this week to learn this. Supposedly only 5 people have ever accomplished it.)

If you don't know who Tom Hall is, I highly recommend the book Masters of Doom. It's definitely a fun read.

Mmm, Rise of the Triad and Anachronox.

Ludicrous Gibs!

"-Challenge--this must be very carefully balanced. It must be sufficiently tough to make the player want to keep trying, but not too hard so the player gets frustrated quickly. Having different skill levels is helpful, but you still have to balance the game so it is progressively harder. It should be fair."

I'd like to add my hate for "balanced play" that punishes success. I was just playing 18 Wheels of Steel Across America and I purely hate how your truck suddenly handles like crap and loses power simply because the numbers in your bank account are larger than somebody thought you should have.

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