Gameplay - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 253

■ Avoiding elementary errors is the most important thing you can do. Bad pro-
gramming, bad music and sound, bad art, bad user interfaces, and bad game design
all ruin the player's fun. Find and fix those bugs!
■ Tuning and polishing are the second-most important aspects of making a game
fun. This means paying attention to detail, getting everything perfect. Dedicated
tuning sets a good game apart from a mediocre one.
■ Imaginative variations on the game's premise contribute to the player's fun.
Take the basic elements of the game and construct an enjoyable experience out of
them. Level designers do most of this work.
■ True design innovation is perhaps five percent of the source of a game's fun.
Design innovation encompasses the game's original idea and subsequent creative
decisions that you make.
The smallest and most mysterious part of the fun in a game emerges from an
unpredictable, unanalyzable, unnamable quality—call it luck, magic, or stardust.
You can't make it happen, so you might as well not worr y about it. But when you
can feel it's there, be careful about making changes to your design from that point
on. Whatever it is, it's fragile.
So innovation by the game designer contributes only a small part of the fun of the
game. That may make it sound as if there's not a lot of point in game design. But to
build a game, someone must design it and design it well. Most game design deci-
sions give little room for innovation, but they're still necessary. A brilliant architect
may design a wonderful new building, but it still needs heat and light and plumb-
ing, and in fact, the majority of the work required to design that building goes into
creating those mundane but essential details. The same is true of game design.
Finding the Fun Factor
There's no formula for making your game fun, nothing that anyone can set out as a
reliable pattern and tell you that, if you just slide in a really cool monster here and
a fabulously imaginative weapon there, the resulting game is guaranteed to be fun
every time. But there is a set of principles to keep in mind as you design and build
your game; without them, you risk producing a game that's no fun.
■ Gameplay comes first. Before all other considerations, create your game to give
people fun things to do. A good many games aren't fun because the designers spent
more time thinking about their graphics or their story than they did thinking
about creating gameplay.
■ Get a feature right or leave it out. It is far worse to ship a game with a broken
feature than to ship a game with a missing feature. Shipping without a feature
looks to players like a design decision; a debatable decision, possibly, but at least a
deliberate choice. Shipping with a broken feature tells players for certain that your
team is incompetent. Broken features destroy fun.