 Any problems with the technical stuff? Not really. We kind of got that south. We can build pretty much anything. So, a game with unhaffamillion lines and actually quite simple. Doctors should be easy for us. But things are not. So, disciplines. Design, art, audio writing, coding. There are others, but I'm sort of going for a very high level here. The main thing to look at is is it polished? Every time you look at the game, there's something that jobs. There's something that you can do to improve it. So, on the design, is it Unix? Do you know this? I'm assuming this is not a spoiler because everyone's seen Jurassic Park by now, I'd hope. In Jurassic Park, you've got this fantastic world. They've managed to recreate dinosaurs from their DNA. Those are moving around. We believe every single world of it. And then this 12-year-old goes up, this is Unix. I knew this. And all of a sudden, you don't believe that world at all. You believe dinosaurs can be built from their DNA, but when you see that as Unix, it just takes you out. Every time that happens, you have to fix your game. You don't want any of those issues. That's the design level. That's the design phase. So, you've got to make that play-care. You've got the fact that I call it the Goldilocks Zone. It's just right. It's not too easy, not too hard. My general rule for this is always the first level of the game to be so easy, even I can win it. That makes you feel good. You play the game, win it, think, yeah, I get it. I understand this. I like playing this. Then you go on the second level and make a little bit harder. There's always lots of design questions. Put the hangman up there as a very interesting case of design. How many lines should there be in the name of hangman? How many lives do you get, or how many things you do before it ends? There, I think I've got about 10 or 11. That's probably a bad number. Hangman, you just guess letters to try and work out the word. The most commonly used letters in English language for English words is E-T-A-O-N-I-R-S in that order. Well, that's always 10 letters. If I just went for each of those letters in turn, after 10 of them, I have got 80 cent of the most common words spelt. So, having 10 on hangman is not a good game design feature. So, you've got to think, well, what can I do with no vowels for first three turns? How do you improve what can you change to make that game worth playing? Art stuff, most of the thing, your image data is not your collision data. You should be very generous with what you let the player get away with. And you should allow, you know, in the case of the hitbox, you want the player to feel, yes, I just managed to miss it. If they technically hit it, let them get away with it sometimes. Because it does make you feel good. And if it's too too accurate, you can get, you know, the player will die and the person will go, oh, God, it's only by a pixel. Really? Yes, let them off occasionally. Everything's, yeah, make the data interface. Remove, relocate, and reprocent. I tried in the iteration at the places I could find. The less interface you can have in your game, the better. Real life does not have a HUD, but every game seems to want one. If you can move it by putting into the game itself, making it something in-situ, that's more natural. What I did this years ago is, you know, you'd have health, but actually there's a picture of the main guy with blood coming out. And more blood there was, the less health you had. It was a very nice way to see you in game, which wasn't the HUD. You're not, if you're playing a game and you're like a first person and you're shooting everything in sight, you do not have the time to look at a school or look at health, read the number, parse it and work out, I'm really damaged. Can I go into this firefight? It's worth it. You just want to be able to look quickly and go, yep, I see that the health bar's right down. I can see there's lots of blood on the character so it's going to be dangerous. So you can see them on the gun, for example. If you can't, then move it somewhere where it's as intrusive. Audio, this is one of my favorite things. There's a lot of audio in real life. But it's not actually real. Newton Foley is partly named four size of Newton. He realized that for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction. And for a guy called Foley, who back in the 1920s, I think it was the 1930s, in Hollywood came up the idea that everything you see on film has to have sound. Now, even those in the cheap seats can't hear my footsteps. But if this was film, my feet would be making footsteps sounds. You can't hear there's enough other noise that means you can't. But if you see a film, you expect as a human to hear that noise even though it's immatical. So you've got to have those sound effects in there because you're used to it. Because Hollywood has brought you up in this way. And if you think about how many sound there are, you might be surprised. Tell you my example of the first person shooter again. How many sounds are there for a gun? Well, it's just a gun sound. Bang! That's it. But there's also the reload sound. There may be a separate sound for the safety catch. Cocking with the gun. You might have additional sounds for the bullet as it hits the wall. There may be a ricochet sound. Every different type of material in your world has a different ricochet sound. You might have the bullet casings dropping on the floor. Again, every different type of floor surface needs a different type of sound. This is seven types of sound effects for one gun. You want to have three or four guns? You're looking at 20 or 30 set effects. Every time you say, oh, I'll just add one more little sound to make it better. You are then creating another set of sounds that you need for every other gun. You want to make it better. Every time you add something, because it makes it good, you've suddenly realized you've got to then make everything else just as good. And the work goes on and on and on like that. Funnily enough, we don't pay enough attention to writing. It's the kind of thing we should. Everyone seems to have a word processor on their computer, and as a conference, everyone thinks they're writer. It's not that easy. Witting good dialogue is hard. Good dialogue is even harder. But even the banal shooter games have a backstory. Even if it's like Demon Quake, it's just something simple. You are a marine who have to go and shoot stuff. That is enough of a backstory to go, okay, I get it. But you still have to create that story. There's no reason there. Are you running towards something? Are you running away from something? Even those two different simple ideas actually changes the way you as a player think about that game, how you interact with it. Create yourself a non-locature. If you're saying press the A button, don't switch it to touch the A button a little bit later on. If you're talking about firing a bomb, don't switch the terminology. Say Missile, halfway through. This includes available namings as well. Only three things hard, you know, caching, validation and naming things. Oh, and off by one note. So keep the same names everywhere. And try and use contextual and emotional language at all possible. The pirate game example is a Kadankan example. If you're writing a pirate game and you have to have health in this game, how do you label the health? Maybe percentage, maybe a little bar. Well, how about having health ranges where it's made as rabid, infested, crippled or something like that. Words that really point out that you are a pirate. A life of a pirate is not nice. So create those words which really match into that environment. And with the pirate thing, it's very easy because you can say, well, even the 100% health level is called rabid, which shows you that life as a pirate is never nice. Even when you're at maximum health, you're still a bit syrupy related. Oh, and if you're doing games in the crossover between English and American, then words like punk and lid are kind of the same thing. But if the game is set in America, you have to use American words. It might seem obvious, but it's the obvious things that get missed. I even had to translate one of my games from English into American once. It was quite surreal. On the technical side of meeting, handle translations. You have all the text in a separate file so again, you as a developer don't have to go through the mass animations when someone updates the text. You also have a lot of collateral to write. It might seem like the easy bit at the end. I'll just write the instructions later or I'll write the website copy or odd. There's still a lot of work needs doing to write all of that stuff. Coding. This is kind of really easy bit. Make sure you test everything. The length one is a really fun example. There was a game way back where you could go into a store and you could buy minus one bullets. This actually meant you got given money and the computer just says, oh yeah, number bought, multiplied by cost and add this on. It's a really nice way of getting through the game. You've got to check this stuff. Random is not random. I take everyone knows that but it's unfortunate because it makes testing really awkward sometimes. I'll go onto Space Bounce and say this is a simple game. It's just a simple five thing. I'll just play through it. I'll briefly play through it and see what that might be or cover assuming it's going to work. It says I've got Wi-Fi. If not, this talk will be even shorter than that. Oh, okay. We're loading again. I'm aware that the fade is slow. It's an iPad. Well, another thing you can't hear here actually is there's a three chord motif. It's just to say, it's a title screen. There is an identity associated with it. Again, it's not a big thing to put in but it is something you should always remember to put in. Here on the title, the O of bounce in the area of space are slightly different to the normal form. That's giving an identity. Doesn't take a lot to do but again, it's a nothing. Yeah, it's only a little thing to little thing here. If every little thing here just takes one hour to write to put in as a hundred things that you need to do, that's already a hundred hours. So let's play. Here we go. This is a little space eye. Oh, now he's got sort of he's going down this chart. If I press the button, he'll jump across and he's going, he does so. He's collecting the dilithium crystals here which help power the spaceship so that you can escape from the planet. Again, it's not big but it's still to an absolute age to do. So when we get to the bottom here we go. Success. And it goes on to the next level which is slightly faster. So, what's actually going on in that game? What are the extra bits that put in there? Well, give yourself a point for everyone you've spotted. So, the stylized font, it would look pretty silly if it was using a font like the 18 or something like that. The imprints we did was fading in there although it's lower in my pad. Each button has an in-out version and a hover. The level design. Of course it's been put in a position to ensure that it is possible to do every level. The wind sequence at the start is unique. The health bar fades in. It's impossible to lose that level even if I didn't touch anything and you hit everything on that screen you'll still get through it. All the fading in and out that's all in there. Each level, that's going on and on there's more crystals, it's deeper and faster. So every single time you go into a new level something changes. There's a little bit extra going on. There's lots of nice visuals in there. The sky is a gradient. Did anyone spot the moon on the game? Nope. Well, the moon's up there in the top left and what I do is I actually look at the time and date from the computer and I put the moon in the correct astronomical position which is to say if it's a full moon out that moon on the screen will be in full moon and the crescent in the moon will be crescent. Who could honestly say they spotted that? These are stupid little things that I enjoy doing and when the audience that plays your game see that you've done that they suddenly go, ah, they paid attention, they care about this game enough to waste time on something that seems so useless but actually you suddenly look at it and go yeah, they love writing that game as much as I love playing it. And there's animations on everything the screen effects loads of pulsating things so I'm going to wrap up there and open to questions these are the books I've written on games but I get so little in royalties it's not worth you buying them just buy me a beer and I'll do everything that's in them and anyone who asks good questions I actually got a couple of copies here which I can throw out so that's me, I'll update my scorecard now so there we go, 64 stems so questions, oh I'm ready does it mean that the astronaut in your game escapes the Earth since it's the actual moon from there? yes, it isn't really can you repeat the question? so the question is, is this nor actually technically on Earth because it's our moon and it's like, no I did not want to name for the planet do that, it's you know it technically isn't correct but I think people are going to be more interested in the fact that it is completely correct then they're going to start querying that you know what I said earlier about making sure the world is cohesive other questions oh yes we do so to someone I guess, would you say it's better to have a simpler policy than something with planets and graphics that actually doesn't play well? so the question is, is it better to have a simpler game that is nicely pushed and the answer is yes if you're going for a job you want to do this stuff commercially having one thing that's really nicely polished is better than having 200 things that are all half done, maybe a little bit broken here and there just get one thing it's safe to start something, it's so difficult to finish, if you can finish it with all the polish in you get a lot more costs and credit and everything else by doing that, definitely the way there's one, I've got two at the back first so the question is if you polish the title screen everything else does it not raise the expectations the answer is yes it does and yes it should you should set the player up to really want to get into this game there's a tea show in England called Mastermind which is a very simple quiz show you get us questions on your specialist subject and then on general knowledge the show starts with deep booming music the studio is black all you see is a chair in the middle there's a irrigation that sets up your expectation for the rest of the show which is firing questions at you one after another it's good to set up those expectations it really draws you in there's a question also here with early access games that release less polish than they would had they waited they would have more money to release a polish version because releasing the unpolished version early sort of takes the game's image to the public and you recommend they waited longer and the extra funding was finished yeah the question is with early release games would it be better if they waited and actually finished release the finished version and yes they really should unfortunately commercials such as they are require you to get something out because a game that has been released will make more money than a game that sits on someone's hard drive so there is that commercial requirement that's often above the integrity of the game you are pretty sure that every time you get a game that's a bit broken you know the developers who are broken they knew it shouldn't have been shipped but it wasn't their decision make or some management somewhere that said no we have to release this or there's no company I've worked in so many games companies where if we didn't get the game out there literally would be no company left but the margins were that small there's a question here this last question brings us to the open source mantra of release early and really often is it compatible with the games does it have a meaning to release it even if it's just beta so maybe you attract tributaries or something like that yeah so the question is this goes against the open source mantra for release early release often unfortunately it does and this is one of those dichotomies between open source and games you really don't want to release early you do want to be able to say this is finished again there might be other commercial reasons we've got to ship it out but if you are able to just say no it's you know you will get some people go oh I kind of like this I'm getting into it now I'm going to start helping on this project but a lot of the time it looks awful what I'm going to spend time on this particularly looks awful or it plays badly it's very difficult within this kind of environment with games for you to look past that something that's a bit short the question is what is the smallest practical size of a group of people to start on a game like you need so many disciplines you need the original people you need the right one what's the smallest number of people you can start a game with don't be one because it will always start with one it's very difficult to have an idea with someone you'll have the it would be great to do a game where you're falling down a mine shaft you then talk with some about that they go oh yeah this or how about that and from that point it starts growing most people have to be more to be disciplined in the arena because you'll get it from that idea in your head to something you can tell someone else about you have to at least do either a little bit of coding or a little bit of artwork it's not great it says this is my idea and then plant it that way but as I said you can get them you know you always start with one then maybe two generally an art and a code side and you work on the design bits together and it can just grow up to as many people as you could possibly fit in there was something over this side yes I was wondering you said you should make level one as easy as possible but if you make that you get it without doing action are you really not making it not playable because I would think you got to do something to know game mechanics so if you make the question if you make the game so easy you're not really given a game at that point and I do kind of agree with it the player doesn't know that the game is going to be that easy and when you start the game you are essentially giving them a training level you need to get them used to the controls they need to learn how to jump then they need to learn how to run and jump at the same time introducing these things progressively after the other allows them to experience the controls get used to it so when it really does matter and they're going to die if they don't jump at the right point they don't feel cheated if you do die it's like well I've had enough chances at this I've got through level one I've done all my jumps before it's in their fault for not having learnt the control system I think we should stop there okay