How to make an open world game

How to make an open world game

How to make an open world game

Today, we’re going to go over the same problem because it lets us to talk about something we rarely get to discuss, the fact that sometimes when designing, the most important thing is how you conceptualize the problem you’re approaching.

People can approach the same design problem and choose to solve it in radically different ways depending on their perspective of the problem, which in turn, results in radically different games. If you think of jumping over a pit is being about precision, you get Super Meat Boy, but if you think about it as being about speed, you get an Endless Runner. If you view Action RPG combat as a way to make the player more connected to the character rather than seeing it as a weigh station between moments of character development, you get Demon’s Souls instead of Fable III.

So, it falls on us as designers, when we have the luxury, to examine our premises before we dive into the thick of the actual design process.

So, Open World games: There are at least two fundamentally different structures for thinking about how to construct an Open World game. You can conceptualize it as a game made up of town, dungeons and Open World encounters or you can conceptualize it as a game made up of modules in the old D and D sense.

“I’m looking forward to seeing a game crack the problem of providing modules and many adventures and tiny cohesive stories in a seamless Open World design.”
In the first structure, you build out towns, dungeons and encounters and then you slot them into the world as they fit. In the second structure, you compose the world as a patchwork of loosely defined areas, that each have their own adventures running through them. We end up using the Elder Scrolls series as an example a lot because it’s the biggest budget, most marketed, longest running fantasy Open World series out there, but it’s a good example of the first design philosophy.

None of us have worked with Bethesda before, but I’d wager that even their team structure is set up along these lines with different people making the dungeons, towns, and encounters and not a great deal of time is spent coordinating between the groups to make areas of the world feel like holistic zones with their own adventures and multi-quest micro stories running through them.

Baldur’s Gate, on the other hand, is an excellent example of the second design philosophy. Because the game itself is coming from a D and D pedigree, it makes a lot of sense that they look at Open World construction in this manner. If you look closely at that game, you’ll find that each of the zones on the map feels like a unified place with a mini-narrative running through it.

Personally, I feel like the second approach gets you stronger result, as it lends itself more toward interesting encounters rather than simply hack and slash combat problems. It creates a framework that allows designers to craft a strong narrative and an Open World environment without losing the freedom of exploration that’s so essential to Open World design.

Of course, the problem with the module approach is that it’s a bit tougher to pull off from a production standpoint. First, you have to organize your teams so that they’re working together on entire zones, which requires a lot more communication and a lot more management overhead.

Second, it means that while you may be able to salvage some stuff here and there, you are a lot more likely to have to completely scrap a bunch of work if one of the teams falls behind or their area just isn’t coming together.

This method also creates two design challenges for you. First, is the obvious fact that creating holistic micro adventures requires more work from your designers. The alternative of simply creating the constituent parts of those adventures, the dungeons, towns and encounters, and then scattering them about the world doesn’t require as much design staff. The second challenge is in how you delineate the boundaries of those adventures within an Open World framework.

Baldur’s Gate took the technologically necessitated but also simpler design approach of simply dividing the world into separate zones. They had boundaries between these zones and whenever the player crossed them, the game would pause to do a bit of loading. This gave them an easy way to delineate the module or adventure space. That is much harder to achieve with the Elder Scrolls seamless world.

Dark Souls II, which feels less like an Open World game to me, but I’ve had enough people insist to me that it is that I’ll use it here; anyway, Dark Souls II also creates clear zone delineations, but they do it through visual aesthetics, and by having the zones actually all be spokes off of a central hub rather than a truly free roaming space.

Dragon’s Dogma, on the other hand, provides a more module based experience than Skyrim within a true Open World by having its contents seemingly designed as areas rather than as pieces. It’s basically an Elder Scrolls type of game with a more Baldur’s Gate ASCA Module philosophy for their Open World design, but even they didn’t truly go all the way in creating the module-like feel of old Black Isle games. Instead, they settled for giving each area a unique sense of theme, tone and design, but eschewed the series of quests and encounters that would make each area a small adventure in and of itself with its own story to tell.

baldurs_gate_enhanced

Actually, some of the best modern examples of module-based Open Worlds come from MMOs. If you look at World of Warcraft, many of the zones there, especially later in the game, feel like unified adventures with little stories of their own, but they, too, couldn’t do it without clearly defined zones.

On the production side, I think all of these problems are soluble so long as you go into the project thinking of your world as a patchwork of modules rather than simply a collection of dungeons, towns and encounters.

On the design side, it’s something you’re going to have to play around with in pre-production. It’s easy to do the module thing with clearly defined zone borders, but without zone borders or artificial gating, making these adventures feel natural and keeping the player from getting lost in a mish-mash of overlapping modules as they inadvertently cross between them, is something that will probably require a unique solution for your game, as there’s not a whole lot of successful examples to draw from.

Before we go, I wanted to say something about Sandboxes. Often we seem to use the term, Open World game and Sandbox interchangeably. They’re actually not though. Sandbox games are games where you, the player, create part of the fun yourself by playing around within the world the game presents you. Games like these may benefit less from module-based design because it’s not simply the adventure itself that makes these games engaging. It’s also in finding new areas to mess around in and new ways to play with the systems the game gives you.

Grand Theft Auto games get more mileage out of just building cool bits and socketing them into their world than a lot of fantasy Open World games because in GTA, a well-placed ramp is a new toy for you to experiment with. You could spend hours trying to use it to land your car on an impossibly high building or just enjoy throwing cars off it and laughing yourself silly, whereas, a random troll camp in an Open World fantasy game simply can’t be played with in the same way.

If you’re thinking about creating an Open World game, consider what your design approach should be. Do you want to conceive your world out of a patchwork of modules or would you rather create a single huge space and sprinkle dungeons, towns and encounters all over it? They both have advantages and they both work, but I’ve got to say, I’m looking forward to seeing a game crack the problem of providing modules and many adventures and tiny cohesive stories in a seamless Open World design.

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How to make indie games

How to make indie games

how to make indie games

Over the past few years we’ve done a series of “So you want to be … ” episodes talking about what it takes to fill the various roles in the game industry. Lately we’ve got more and more requests for suggestions on how to get into Independent Games Development, since it’s something that James has worked with a number of people on, we figured “Hey why not?”. Hopefully this helps some of you take the first steps towards getting more fantastic games out to the world.

Without further ado, Lesson 1:

The first thing you have to know as an Indie Dev. is that you are not going to be making a game with the scope of a “God of War” or a “Call of Duty”. For your first project think simple, think small. Whether you’re self financing for a few million dollars, or you’re living off of ramen, doesn’t matter, you want to keep your first project achievable. Something you can get out to market and into the hands of real people. Your first time through this process will teach you a great deal, even if you’re already a wizened veteran coming out of the Triple A industry. It’s a totally different experience working with a small team, actually getting to help call all the shots. If you’re not a veteran the amount you’re going to learn from this is just staggering! I can guarantee you this, your second project will be so much better and go so much smoother than your first.

“There’s a lot more to succeeding in this industry then just “Build it and they will come””
When it comes time to start your second project, think simple, think small again. James has an enormous amount of experience estimating project timelines, to this day when he makes these estimates he always adds an extra 50% to the schedule and budget. These projects always end up with a thousand little pieces and complexities you can’t possibly foresee before you’ve gotten stared.

Lesson 2: Being an Indie Dev. involves a lot more than just building games.

I have known plenty of teams that were great at building games who’s studio died on the vine because they didn’t know how to do marketing, or p.r., or how to get the project distributed. There’s a lot more to succeeding in this industry then just “Build it and they will come”. This is where the fantasy of being an Indie separates from the reality. You’d like to dream about working on games all day, but honestly you’re going to be wearing a lot of hats. If this company is your baby you’re probably going to be spending almost as much time answering emails, taking meetings, worrying about taxes and money, and so on, as you are actually developing your game.

If you’re working with more than one person I would highly recommend getting a lawyer from the outset. You don’t have to use them much, until it comes time to deal heavily with contracts, but someone who can help you set up your company right can save you a lot of headaches in the long run. If you can spare the $500 -$1000 to hire a lawyer when you start to get serious about launching a game it will be well worth it.

Once you’re all set up the key as an Indie, assuming you’re not working with a lot of money, is how to get viability. The best method is going to differ wildly for different games and different studios, so here I would recommend really studying how other games have done it. Whether it’s building in to the game things that people want to share, like in Minecraft, or using spaces like Kongregate the way Team Meat did, there are a thousand different methods to help your game stand out from the every growing crowd of indie titles out there. Remember, going viral is something that you work for, you have to stay on top of it, it’s not something that happens by itself, at least not 99.9% of the time.

Beyond that you’ll need to figure out how you’re going to get your product distributed. Getting on Steam doesn’t just happen. Many of the much smaller digital distribution services aren’t going to glean you more than a few dozen sales. Really think about and give yourself at least six months prior to launch to work on pursuing distribution.

Lesson 3: Is budget.

This might seem simple as an indie studio, you just take the minimum amount you all need to live each month, multiply that by the number of months you expect the project to take and voila you got your budget! Wrong. No. It turns out there are licenses you’re going to have to buy, legal fees you’re going to have to pay, then there’s taxes, and of course somebody’s cars going to break down at some point. Then one of the computers is going to burst into flame, you’ll have to replace that, plus all the work that was on the hard-drive that people forgot to back up. All that’s just the start of it!

Often you build your first games simply to get people to know who you are, and to gather a small following of fans. To get people interested you as a company, and make your work stand out amongst all the less well crafted Indie games out there. Often, even if your first game wins some awards and gets some press it’s not going to sell phenomenally well. Honestly, just getting noticed is probably a more important goal for your first game then sales. That does mean that you’re going to need to plan a way to survive long enough to release your second game, just keep that in mind.

Another important thing to know, many game distributing companies aren’t going to pay you until thirty-ninety days after they start selling it. James has seen to many indie teams suffer because they ran out of cash while waiting for that first decent size check. Of course, it’s not the end of the world if this happens, if you’re game is selling well enough people will be willing to front you some money; but that money is going to be a lot more expensive then you’d ever want it to be.

Finally, Lesson 4: Mechanics trump content.

This advice is for your actual game design. As an indie you can get away with a game that’s short. Your game could be a five minute web game that touches us in some deeply emotional way, or even a gripping eight hour adventure. What it absolutely must not be is twenty five hours of ehhhh, it’s all right.

Polish and scale are the weapons of the Triple A world. Indies can’t really compete with that. Unless you already have something spectacular, or novel, to offer your focus shouldn’t be about building more of it. Instead, concentrate your efforts on making that play really stand out. To often I see new indie companies cobble together some baseline, functional mechanics and then start building levels and creating new content. Doing that feels like a games getting made, it feels like tangible progress. That is the wrong way to go about things.

If you don’t make sure your mechanics are right first, you’re just going to have to redo all of that level design when you polish those mechanics. Or, worse, you’ll be afraid to change your mechanics for the better because of all the level design you already did. You’ll be stuck shipping a mediocre game.

Remember to test early, it may scare you, it may feel like your game isn’t ready or that people won’t understand it, but it’s almost never to early to test. You can always get valuable feedback. It’s often our own egos, our fear of being hurt, of having this thing we love misunderstood or rejected, that keeps us from showing it to others in an unbiased environment. An environment where it’s okay for them to rip it to shred right in front of us. To succeed as an Independent Developer, that’s something you’re going to have to step past.

To review:

Lesson 1: Plan your game scope well.

Lesson 2: Know what you’re getting yourself into.

Lesson 3: Keep your budget realistic, with hopefully enough in the war chests to make another game if the first one doesn’t sell

Lesson 4: Mechanics trump content.

Good luck! We hope to be playing your game soon.

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Games Can Improve Our Schools

Games Can Improve Our Schools

Games Can Improve Our Schools

Games are voluntary. You can’t impose games on people and expect them to get anything from it. Play is nature’s way of getting us to learn. It’s why it’s so great for education. Because it’s something we, and pretty much every other animal, or hardwired to want to do. Whether it’s a lion cub on the Serengeti wrestling with its brothers in order to learn how to better fight in the wild- or a human child in the twenty-first century, learning our world of electronics by poking at a tablet screen. The instinct to play is the most basic, innate, natural way for us to learn.

But a big part of that is that it’s something that we think we choose to do. That we desire and want to do for ourselves. So we’ll put more effort into it. Unfortunately, this isn’t fully part of the collective thinking on games and education in the US. Here, the approach seems to be a very “top-down” approach. The general idea seems to be that we will build games, we’ll put them in schools, we’ll make kids play them in class, and things will be better. And truth is, it might be. If well done, it’s probably better than some of what we’re doing today.

But it doesn’t really harness the full power of games. It doesn’t deliver on the magic of play that’s so powerful- that promises so much for education. You can’t just make somebody play a game. Any of you who have been play testers know that even the best game, when played over and over again because someone’s making you, isn’t fun or engaging. Play has to be an act of volition. It has to be something you engage in voluntarily. And fostering that desire, that drive to play games of worth, games that educate, is really how we’re going to succeed in using games to help bolster our ailing educational system.

“Because curiosity really is more powerful than even the threat of punishment.”
Because any of you who have really sunk deep into that desire to play, know how much of your brain’s base it takes. When you’re driving somewhere your brain’s busy thinking of optimal strategies. When you’re stuck sitting in a boring lecture, you’re sneakily writing out builds in your notebook or brainstorming ways to optimize the run you’re going to do when you get home. You know how you love to research the game and find out more? To really dig in and learn spawn-timers or drop rates? And do the math and memorize the geography? You know how it gives your brain something to work and cycle on all day? Something to engage with when otherwise you’d simply be zoning out or otherwise not tuning in? That’s what we want to harness. That’s what we want games and education to do. That’s what we need them to do.

But to do that, we can’t just impose games. We can’t just assign them as homework. Or tell you that, “From eleven to twelve this is the game you are going to play.” That’s antithetical to engagement. That works against everything we’re building games to do. So we need to think about more than just building games. We need to think about how they’re going to be used. How they’re going to be implemented in the classroom in a way that doesn’t abandon the best things they give us.

And I’m not even going to pretend to have the answer for this problem. This is a subject we’re just starting to explore. Something James, only just over the last few weeks, realized was a huge disjunct in how we view games for education. It may be part of a much larger re-think of how we view the classroom and how we see the role of the teacher. It may be part of the growing need to shift the teacher’s role to one of the mentor, tutor, and guide- rather than lecturer. It may be part of an over-arching requirement that twenty-first century education be more about focused exploration. About using the vast resources available to us, to help us teach ourselves under the guidance of a caring adult, who’s been down this road before. Rather than simply having facts drilled into us. It may be part of revamping the educational system. To make sure that personal desire for knowledge is a stronger motivator than a fear of punishment. I’m fairly sure the answer lies somewhere circling those three, but right now, it’s beyond my ken. We need more time to think and hear more dialogue on the subject.

Which, is why we’re doing this episode. I am sure we’ll do a follow-up episode later if we find a more concrete approach. At the present, all I can say for sure, is that it can be done. Because it is being done in a thousand different individual cases. I see small examples everywhere I look. They’re just too specific to point the way to a general solution.

As I say all this, I am thinking of the Reality Ends Here game being run at USC. It’s a subversive game about film-making to help launch students into creating. To get them excited and interested in do-it-yourself cinema. And then, providing them with creative challenges and intellectual prompts along the way. It lures students into a world where they want to do the thing they’re going to school to learn. Where they desire to practice it in their time off. Rather than just longing to get away from the subject they’ve been studying in class all day.

It’s amazing because it relies on almost no technology. It’s a card game essentially. It’s also a little bit of an ARG and a wee bit of a mechanism for social interaction. And the portal into the game relies, not on assigning it, but rather on piquing the student’s curiosity. Letting them drive themselves toward it. Letting them want it. Letting them desire to discover and play this game. While at first glance that may seem risky, last I heard, they had almost a one-hundred percent uptake rate. That’s way better than the number of students tuning into your average classroom. Where they’re being graded and where their future is at stake. Because curiosity really is more powerful than even the threat of punishment.

I’m just gonna leave it at that for now. As we so often do, I’m hoping the things left unexplored propel you to look further and dig deeper. This time we’re kind of counting on it.

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Design Teaches Us Without Words

Design Teaches Us Without Words

Design Teaches Us Without Words

Do you ever wonder why when you walk up to some doors, you don’t know whether to push or to pull to open them? Whereas with other doors, it just seems natural how they’re supposed to open. That’s often because of how they are designed.

The next time you are at a public building, look at the doors. If both sides of the door are the same, it is confusing, but if one side of the door has a bar that goes horizontally, and the other side has a bar that goes vertically, you intuitively know what to do. This is because your body knows how to interact with these two objects. The vertical bar is just natural to grip, and it’s much more ingrained to pull something we’ve grasped with one hand than it is to push it, especially if it is the size of a door. Conversely, the horizontal bar matches the breath of your body and practically asks you to put both hands on it. Once you’ve done that, the only intuitive thing to do next is to put the weight of your body into it and push, rather than try to back up ad pull with both of your hands fixed on the door.

So, why do we care? Because that’s what we call an affordance, and they are an important part of game design. You see, affordances in traditional design are things built to be naturally, almost physiologically intuited. The most common example is the handle of a teacup or a tea pot. Without being taught it is the part of the object you’re supposed to grasp, it is the first place a persons hand goes because, well, in the simplest terms, it is a hand shaped hole. Clearly for something meant to contain hot liquid, that is an important feature. That is just something you need people to get. Well this is a concept we have taken in game design and run with, extending far beyond our physiological understanding.

“You see, affordances in traditional design are things built to be naturally, almost physiologically intuited.”
We’ve had to work hard to get players to intuit things in a virtual world by trying to link them to their understanding of the real one. This pervades every part of game design, from controls, to mechanics, to narrative. The first, and the most obvious example, is simply modern controllers. We’ve tried to do everything we can to get players to naturally put their hands in he right place on a controller in order to play games based around moving, looking, and shooting simultaneously in a 3D environment because, while this may be second nature to most of us at this point, getting 3D shooters to feel even remotely right on the console was a huge challenge at one point. In fact, I would argue that most of modern controller design is based around that problem. Look at how the shoulder buttons have evolved to make it more intuitive to rest your fingers there instead of gripping the side of the controller. Look at how the thumb sticks went from being bowed out, to being curved in so they naturally seem like the place to rest your thumbs.

The concept of affordance in games goes well beyond this. We use it anywhere where form implies function. How do you know that those crazy sci-fi guns in your game, set in the distant future, even are guns? Well, they share a shape we already have associations for. How do you know to drop that boulder in that hole? Because the hole is boulder shaped and heck, getting back to controls, how do you know that the right trigger is used to accelerate and the left trigger is used to break in pretty much every game with vehicles there is? Because they are matched to the petals in your car. This is just the most basic level of affordance. It is important, and if you don’t think of it as a designer, you’ll fail to produce intuitive games. It is completely essential for puzzle design, and the lack of it was one of the biggest stumbling points for old school adventure games back in the day, but that’s just the beginning.

Let’s blaze through some of the more interesting uses. First, navigational affordance. We’ve talked about this a little in a previous episode, so I’ll keep it short, but how do you get your player to go where they need to? By making it the natural place to go; by implying where to go with a path, or a doorway, or a break in the barbed wire, or a brightly colored carpet, or whatever, directing a player down a specific path. Then there is environmental affordance. This is one of the most fascinating ones and I can’t take any credit for it. Harvey Smith turned us onto it a few years ago at a South by Southwest. Before the generation of super high res video gaming, designers often had to get you to understand what blurry textures or awkward graphics were supposed to be. In fact, the player has to intuit those things to stay immersed in the world.

Even today with third person games, we’ll often have objects that are simply too small for the player to see clearly, and yet, they’re the little details that make the world feel whole. So how do you get someone to understand what these things are? Affordance. Green rectangles and silver circles mean nothing to a player on their own, but if you put them next to an overturned cash register, wallah! Suddenly, they become dollars and coins in the mind of the player. Understanding how to use the objects in your environment to give definition and to make distinct the pieces of the environment that might not otherwise make sense, is a huge boon as an artist or a designer.

Lastly, let’s talk about systemic affordance. Spearmen beat horsemen, horsemen beat footmen, footman beat spearmen. How do you know? Because it just makes sense! Of course you could use a system like this without calling the units spearmen, horsemen and footmen. Technically the systems would be the same no matter what you call them. They could be broccoli, bean sprouts and a beluga whale, but no, you call them horsemen, spearmen and footmen because simply by labeling them in this manner, we offer the player an affordance. Instead of having to understand all of the math underlying your game upfront, the player can instead intuit how they should play.

There are hundreds of other examples of affordance in games, I’m sure you’ll easily pick out as you play, because as designers, we’ve got to do everything we can to make this inherently strange and remote task of playing a character on a screen, feel intuitive, and even natural. It has become even more important as we explore the uncanny world of touch-screens and motion games. We can’t do the concept justice here, but I hope I get you thinking on how to use it and how it’s been used on you in games. If you want to dive a lot deeper, I recommend a reading, The Design of Everyday Things. It is about physical design, but I think it’ll get you thinking about game creation in whole new ways.

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about this sonic re-design pitch

about this sonic re-design pitch

about this sonic re-design pitch

I believe if you’re going to criticize the creative content of others, bring a creative solution to the table with you. While this video analyzes certain aspects of Sonic’s game play, I do not claim to be an authority on game design. I only mean to present creative ideas to a problem I recognize in a struggling franchise.

Dear Sega,

My name is Javed. I work as an animator for a creative studio in Sydney, Australia. I’m also a game design graduate who develops small time games on the side. In this video, I’ll be presenting my case for redesign for one of your most enigmatic franchises, Sonic the Hedgehog.

It’s no secret that your Sonic has seen brighter days. As I’m sure you’re very aware, you don’t have to look far to find an opinion or article from writers explaining why they don’t like your games anymore. To be honest, they aren’t inaccurate. I haven’t seen their creative suggestions on how to remedy what seemed to be holes in the vision for Sonic. This is what I want to do here.

I want to look at the cold, hard data and present a creative solution for a redirecting, if you will, of your mascot. Before we go further, I think it’s important that we look at your sales and your ratings and take a look at how your platforming rival, Mario, is tracking as well.

“After all those years and these different attempts, I believe we’re left with something without an identity.”
Here is a graph of your sales to date in millions, telling us that Sonic on the Genesis has been your highest success in terms of units sold, coming in at six million. Sonic Boom, being your lowest at 400,000. Now let’s add in Super Mario. I’ve lined these out by year of release. Without any surprise, Mario’s first game, which came out during the very young and ripe age of gaming, earned spot number four on the list of best selling video games of all time at 40 million.

The sales fluctuate quite a lot, as well, which is completely normal. There are a few factors here that aren’t accounted for such as regions of release and also console sales data at the time of the game’s release. This does make this data a bit unreliable. I’ve put this here so we can start to get an idea of where you’re roughly sitting in your relation to the most successful platform series.

Let’s move onto reviews. These are very important in gauging how successful the game was in connecting with your audience. Here is a graph of Sonic’s reviews according to gameranking.com. This tells us that Sonic 3 on the Genesis is your highest ranking game, at 89%. Sonic Boom, again, is at the lowest at 33%. Now, let’s add in Mario.

What I think is worth noting here, is that at the beginning of Sonic’s career, each new game was connecting more successfully than the last. It seems Mario, in the beginning, struggled to find his feet. It’s important to state that I think Nintendo established the foundation for compelling platforming before Sonic arrived on the scene. Even so, it’s clear that your games were maturing at a promising rate.

The reason I’ve been adding in Mario is to show you that as a competitive platform game, he’s still connecting with his audience and pulling in a huge revenue, especially in this age where the platform game is no longer the king of the industry. Mario is doing something right here and I think it’s safe to say, judging by your very low and chaotic shifts in ratings, it’s something that hasn’t come clear to you yet.

This information is telling us that there is a disconnect happening between your games and your audience. I think I know what it is. Here, I will present my ideas, while at the same time explaining what I believe are the problems worth fixing. Let’s bring in Sonic.

First this to notice is the art style. You’re steering away from the 3-D models you’ve been using for the last seventeen years and bringing in a more organic aesthetic through paint and water brush. Colors remain relatively the same, but Sonic’s lean and a bit more animal as opposed to your former more attitude heavy design. He has a backpack symbolizing adventure and his gloves and socks are gone. He’s wide eyed and vulnerable. He’s still fast but isn’t cocky about it. In fact, he doesn’t have much expression at all. He’s a blank canvas. While I think the overall spirit and feel for Sonic is there, he’s a little bit different. Why? He isn’t designed to appeal to children.

Sega, this is why I believe your games aren’t connecting anymore. You’re targeting the wrong demographic. Let me explain. Sonic 1 was released in ’91. This was the ad:

Speaker 2: Got to go. Hey, guy! You’re the first serious gamer I’ve seen all morning. Check this out! Brand new, 16 bit Super Nintendo and Super Mario World. Wow! Speaker 3: What’s this one? Speaker 2: Oh, this is Sonic the Hedgehog from the Sega Genesis. Hey! Look at these radical colors, huh? Speaker 3: Wow! Sonic’s fast, too. Speaker 2: No, over here! Speaker 3: I like Genesis and it costs a lot less. Speaker 2: But that game there. Speaker 3: I’ll take Sonic and Genesis. Speaker 4: Sonic the Hedgehog. More action, more speed. Sega Genesis, it’s all about more for less. Speaker 1: It’s pretty clear that because of the this is cooler approach this was targeted at kids and young teens between six and fifteen. Judging by those sales and ratings we saw earlier, you pretty much nailed it. Now, let’s watch an ad from 2014’s Sonic Boom. Speaker 5: Kitty, come down! Speaker 6: Let’s rock! Speaker 7: I got this! Speaker 6: Oh, yeah. Oh! Oh, no. We’re better at this in our world. Speaker 8: Sonic Boom, Rise of Lyric. You can pre-order it now.

Cute and slapstick. I’d say it’s still aiming for that same age group, not that this ad was bad. Sega, here is the main problem. The fan based you established with the first Sonic game in ’91 are all 24 years old here in 2015. While your original fans hold you most dear are in their thirties, you’re still aiming for that same age group and disregarding your original fan base. Guess what? You’re original fan base now have jobs with money to buy your games and now have extensive knowledge of the Sonic universe they’ll most likely share, AKA free, positive online publicity.

An Australian study held by [inaudible 00:05:54] University shows that the average gamer is 30 years old. Your games are actually going to be played longer and by more people if this is where you’re targeting. Not only that, the age group you’re aiming for, just don’t care about Sonic anymore. They’re more interested in the next action shooter or sports game. Why? It’s cool to be playing those games. They don’t have an emotional connection with platformers like your older gamers do.

Sega, your demographic is here in the 18 to 30 year old bracket. With this new found knowledge, we need to bring some maturity into the Sonic universe. This isn’t done through guns and action. It’s through strong propelling game play and a character to play that actually enjoys playing this. Let’s go back to Sonic’s new design.

The first thing to go is all voice acting, so any character development will be through movement and animation. One question we need to ask is what is his personality in relation to his ability? Sonic is fast. In the past, we’ve seen him embrace this ability with a too cool for school persona. This was totally relevant in ’91. Now, not so much. We need a character we can grow with. Sonic’s idle stance is a little bit cautious like the player, he’s a little bit unsure of what lies ahead. He’s vulnerable and this means we are on the journey with him. When Sonic runs, he keeps that cautiousness.

Here is where I want to propose something new. When Sonic jumps, he doesn’t become a ball straight away like the original games. A second action like the X button triggers a charge attack and here he is powerful against enemies. Down and X smashes Sonic into the ground. That’s called a [inaudible 00:07:27] body-slam. Left or right and X give Sonic a kind of air dash. While in his basic jump mode, he’s vulnerable, this adds a great tension into the game play by not making Sonic too powerful. The player is required to use fast, feeble work and quick thinking.

I think the spirit of Sonic is that keep moving approach. I believe this keeps through that but just in a different way compared to the approach of your most recent games, which brings me to what I believe is problem number two, the way we’re using Sonic’s speed. Speed is the identity of the series and it’s moved around a lot, pun intended. The way speed was translated from 2D to 3D had completely changed the way players approached Sonic games. The fan base had to learn a different Sonic language. In the mid-90s when we were being introduced to polygonal graphics. I think most of your fan base were open to that.

Personally, I think it’s important to evolve, especially in the fast-growing world of game design. I totally respect you for your courage to experiment with Sonic’s design. However, without needing to elaborate on the subject that some of your experiments were horribly unpolished, you haven’t arrived yet at a platform where Sonic’s speed can thrive in a 3D environment. You’re tried auto-runners. You’ve tried slowing him down. You’ve turned him into a hedgehog version of a Werewolf. You’ve added a combat system and even taken that away. You’ve tried making him even faster.

After all those years and these different attempts, I believe we’re left with something without an identity. What is a Sonic game? I think it’s time you realized that Sonic’s speed thrived best in a 2D landscape. What helps me make this point is Sonic generations released in 2011. You’re highest ranking console game in ten years, with 79%. Not only did you give a small nod to your original fan base and the nostalgia, you gave Sonic only two dimensions to play with, for 50% of the game, at least. I believe the best way to use Sonic’s speed isn’t necessarily in a fast manner, but more so in a momentum based system where the player determines how fast or slow they wish to proceed.

Let’s talk about rings, Sonic’s staple. Collecting 100 rings gives you a life and acts as sort of a shield when you take damage. I could even go so far to say that the concept of limited lives is, ironically, dead. This is a very broad statement, but excluding Mario, most of the best modern platforms have taken the concept of lives out of the picture. I suggest we do the same. We want the player to proceed in your game. This does make rings a bit useless, but here I want to present a totally new concept to the core game play in Sonic.

Referencing, again, the survey held by BRAUN University, the most popular game genre across all ages is, surprisingly, puzzle games, with first person shooters and action games close behind. Platformers being the least popular. I think you know this, which is why you’ve tried to blend genres by bringing in slower puzzle-based sections in your latest game. I say puzzle here very hesitantly. The definition of a puzzle is a problem designed to test ingenuity or knowledge. Like a jigsaw, we have all the pieces but it’s the question of how those pieces fit together that generates the problem. There’s a great feeling that comes when the solution finally clicks in the mind of the player. This is compelling game play.

With Sonic Boom, however, that ingenuity and knowledge aren’t being tested. Without spending too long on this, pushing buttons in a linear progression to proceed is not considered a puzzle or even interesting game play. The button is there and we press it. There’s no need for this to exist and it comes across as a cheap way to create and ebb and flow and momentum. Here, I have an idea, which I believe solves our ring problem and our puzzle problem at the same time.

Remember those amazing power ups you had in your highest ranking game, Sonic 3 Knuckles? I want to bring them back, but also connect a collection of rings with them in a currency sort of fashion. If you press the Y button, Sonic opens his backpack and you see the four power up boxes. Fifty rings, essentially buys you one of these power ups and you bring it out into the world. Invincibility, fire, lightning, and the water shield. Not only do they give their respective protection, but we can bring in creative ways to use them in simple puzzle scenarios.

The important thing here is we have all the jigsaw pieces. You could find a secret area with a row of spikes. The only way over them is you bring out an invincibility box and this leads to a hidden collectible. You could have puzzles where you need to keep a button pressed down to hold a door open. Enemies can even use them. You could finish a boss by forcing him to open a lightning box but the shield brings out a bunch of spikes that destroys the ship. This completely expands options for level design, the way Sonic interacts with his environment and also adds huge re-playable value, while at the same time giving the collection and protection of rings some weight.

Sega, this is just one creative solution. The bottom line is this: respect the intellect of the player. Do we want buttons placed in front of us just to kill time? I don’t think so. Let’s talk briefly on this last subject, the story. With no voice acting to guide us, story will be told through animation and suggestion, which is fine. We don’t need everything over-explained for us and we don’t need a complex story line to keep up compelled. The maturity is all in the game play. With that said, we do need a reason to press the forward button.

Let’s look at the opening cut scene for your most successful game, Sonic 3. Okay, that was over in about twenty seconds. In this cut scene, we meet all the important characters, we establish who our enemy is, and we are given a motive for progressing through the game. This is all that’s needed. Sega, keep the story simple and give the player a simple motive.

With that said, let’s look at a brief overview of the new design. We’ve established that your target audience is not adults and no longer children. We’ll bring Sonic back into two dimensions and we’ll remove all voice acting and we’ll shift Sonic’s experience to feel us more vulnerable. Your new set is introduced which adds great momentum based game play. We’ve introduced a new gamer through the backpack and power ups, which opens up huge game play possibilities and replay value.

Sega, this all comes from a place of love for Sonic. The very first game I owned was Sonic 1 on the master system. I fell in love with gaming instantly. Your mascot made me love games and art. It’s been hard to see your franchise get crushed into the dirt. Even if you don’t take any of this on board, I hope you are very intelligent with how you approach your next Sonic game. Thank you for taking the time to watch this.

Love,

Javed

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