It is likely that this year you have finally decided to make your own game. Great goal! And it is definitely worth it!

You have probably heard the same advice from hundreds of other people many times: make the game simple. In his wonderful article, Edmund Macmillen wrote, “If you are a beginner, then start small, and then make the game even less.” In an equally good post, he is echoed by Tommy Refenes : “Just make your game the way you can, start small, and then think about the rest.”

The Extra credits channel has a good video about what “little game” means.
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But “simple” is not a standard unit of change. If you have never done games before, how do you know how simple or easy the game is? Does “simple” MMO mean TOTAL with three playable classes? Easy game - is it an open world with only two types of biomes and three technology trees?

I understand your confusion.

In general, I released five games and before starting the development of three of them I thought that they would be “simple”. In all three cases, I was wrong. It took me more than a year and a half to complete the first finished game . It was not "just."

The most common problem of failed game projects I see is that their creators are dragging themselves into the swamp of endless development, they lose interest and motivation, and then give up their dream of becoming a game developer.

It turns out that the development of games is full of hidden sticky traps, which at first glance seem simple, but pull the developers months and years of work, until they finally give up on the project.

The good news is that you can create an interesting game, while not falling into all of these interfering development traps.


Take a look at all these game designers who thought they could quickly create an MMO in an open world with transport, PvP, and crafting a procedurally generated two-handed weapon.

The goal of this post is to define a “simple game” so that you can realize your goal and release the game.

Serious talk

I will be very conservative in listing those games that can be considered simple. The fact is that in the process of creating the game is always expanding, trying to fill the entire vacuum, and in order to actually complete a simple game, you need to restrain yourself.

Some may say that my examples are full of not very original game ideas. Or that a game made on this list will not be able to survive in a highly competitive market. Or surprised by my dislike of the plot.

To most, I can answer that your first game will NOT stand out. Games are so hard to do that you need an extremely controlled environment to complete them. You can be a terrific expert coder or a great artist in a large studio, but in fact creating your own game requires juggling with graphics, code, design and marketing in the most unexpected combinations for you. You will have to make 1000 decisions, and each of them will increase the scale of the game. You just need to adjust the right balance, and at the same time you should not shoulder the additional burden of creating a unique masterpiece that can stay for centuries. Therefore, for the first attempt, do everything necessary to ensure that the game is released. And then start over and create a game of your dreams, which will become a new word in the genre of "horror pharming with an open world."

It is also worth considering that this list is applicable to your first pair of games. When you get comfortable with the process of releasing games, then you can proceed to the experiments. Again, I’m not saying that I NEVER need to make games of this type, I just advise you not to take on them if you haven’t released anything before.

And the last thing - you need courage to release your game.

There is a huge difference between creating a game and storing it on a hard disk and actually releasing something on the Internet and getting money for it.

Be brave. Lay out your simple game and specify the price of 1 dollar. Yes, some people will say that it sucks and will want to return the money. They will probably be right. Give them back the money. But you have to start selling it. A completely different view of things arises when you release a game under your name and ask for real money for it. This can make you work harder.

Even if you do it for the love of creating games, and not for the sake of earning money, you still need to ask for money for the game. Players are more honest (both in bad and in good) when they pay you money. When someone doesn’t like the free game, he just closes it and does something else, so you don’t know more about it than when you receive a customer review.

Before the release of my first game, I had a bunch of failed projects. The reason was that somewhere in the depths of consciousness, I told myself that I was just learning and gaining experience. Therefore, I easier threw my projects without reaching their completion.

One of the first failed attempts was a clone of Tetris. At some point I realized only 4 of 7 tetrominoes and said to myself: “I already understood enough how everything will be further, and took everything I need from it,” after which I abandoned the project. I was wrong! In fact, I have not learned anything.

Even if you have written a game that you can play, and there is even a Game Over screen in it, this does not mean that it is complete. She is ready for only 10%. There is still a lot to do with it: implement the store API, store, marketing materials, the options menu, and finally, improve the game to such a state that people agree to lay out money for it. If you put the game into the store and put a price of $ 1, then society will put additional pressure on you, which will make you try harder. Even if this is just a hobby for you, still sell the game.

In addition, you need to realize the fact that the game will not be a hit. You are a new game developer that no one has heard of. What are you expecting? This topic is discussed in more detail in another article of mine .

The gaming press likes to write rainbow stories about amateur developers who have earned millions of dollars in their first game. Understand - this is extremely rare cases. And the fact that your first game is not perfect does not mean that one day you will not create a masterpiece. This does not mean that you are not a genius. Move on and keep releasing the games. Most of us just go back to work and continue to release.

So what is a “simple game”?

In fact, I will give a definition through the description of what is “not simple”. I made many of these mistakes in my own development process. Next to each of the traps, which fell into himself, I put an asterisk. Please do not repeat my mistakes.

(Another reminder, if you have not read my previous note) ... I'm not saying that you never need to make games with such characteristics ... I just mean that you should not try to implement them in the FIRST game. In game development, there are hidden pitfalls that can distract you and stretch the work process, increasing the likelihood that you will abandon your honorable work.

Do not fall into these traps:

* Play with plot

For you, this may be a disappointment if you are attracted to games with a rich lore, plot and characters of classic RPG. However, creating a holistic story is a difficult skill that is hard to learn.

Attempting to juggle characters, multi-structure, climax, decoupling, and themes, while mastering technology to accurately convey all these aspects, is like trying to assemble a ship in a bottle while controlling a real ship in the middle of a hurricane.

During the development process, you will encounter a conflict between the plot and the gameplay in the form of a ludarratic dissonance , and you will have to redo the gameplay or the plot, or both. DO NOT try to implement it in the first game.

* Puzzle games

If you are inspired to create your own game Braid, Limbo, Talos Principle or newer games, for example, Gorogoa, then be careful. Puzzles are very difficult to make difficult enough for them to be interesting, but not so difficult for people to abandon the game. To get into this eye of the needle, you will have to constantly test the game on users who have never played it, and to recalibrate each puzzle, achieving the desired level of complexity. This means that you have to constantly recycle the game to make it interesting. Creating a game based on puzzles is actually similar to creating a game made up of several small ones.

* Dialogues

This item is related to the plot item. This is a slippery slope in the morass of narrative, because if you have dialogues, then as soon as the characters open their mouths, they begin to tell stories.

Multiplayer

Although it is very interesting to play such games, you will spend a lot of time balancing the rules so that they feel fair. The only way to test your game is to find people who will play against each other, and this is another burden that slows down the development process. In addition, after the release, it will be difficult to find one person who would agree to buy the game when there are not enough players to play against.

Network part

It is difficult to write a network code, and you will spend a lot of time on its correct implementation even before you start working on the game itself. In addition, the network code implies that you are likely to develop a multiplayer game or MMO. See “Multiplayer” and “MMO”.

Open world

If your game is not interesting to play in one room, then it will not be interesting in the open world. First, learn the basics of how to make the game interesting, and then create an open world in the sequel. The only thing that means open world is that you will need to create a whole bunch of content so that players do not feel that they are exploring the desert.

Artificial Intelligence

The problem with AI is that it can suck up an infinite amount of development time with only minimal improvements. Instead, try to focus on the games that allow you to get away with the task of simple behavior of enemies - let them randomly run around or move to the player in a straight line.

Procedural generation

Same as with AI. You can spend an endless breakthrough of time, making only minimal improvements in each iteration. If you really need to introduce variation into the world, make it random and stop there.

* Platform (both 2D and 3D)

I know that Super Mario Bros. It looks very simple, but in fact it is not. Creating a platformer that “feels right” is an extremely difficult task. You will spend a lot of time on the correct implementation of physics. If you do not succeed in this, then the sensations from the game will be terrible. Do not try to do this in your first game.

* A game whose action takes place in a circle

This is a beautiful scheme, but at the same time a trap for which you will spend a lot of extra development time. Any game that is interesting on the circle, interesting and on the line. Management in round robin games is very tricky and difficult to implement correctly.

Rotato was a “simple game,” because of which I added to the list with this item. Do not repeat my mistakes.

* Cutscenes

Katstseny seem harmless. But if your game needs a cutscene, then it shows that there is a narrative in it. Worst of all, “cutscenes spawn cutscenes.” If you have a cutscene at the beginning of the game, it means that you will need it at the end, and then you will need to create content to fill the time between the beginning and the end. See “Play with the story”.

Boss

This is another secret hint that there is a narrative in your game. The presence of the boss means that you have some content leading to it, that is, to get closer to the boss you need to increase the intensity of the game. And after defeating the boss, you need an animation of the climax of the victory. Moreover, boss fights are puzzles in their own right, where you need to add boss weaknesses, phrases, and various forms of it.

* Levels

By levels, I mean manually created content that a player will pass for a small fraction of the time it took you to create it. It may take you a month that a player can consume in less than 30 minutes. Instead of levels, think about using algorithmic waves. Each wave should be a bit more complicated than the previous one, because we bind complexity (speed, health, damage to the enemy, etc.) to an ever-growing function curve. But do not delve too much into the algorithm (see paragraph “Procedural generation”).

MMO

See all of the above.

What do we have left?

It was a rather cruel list, and I think that you are already thinking what kind of games still remain within these limitations.

The good news is creativity comes from limitations. When you set hard boundaries, you will experience more insights than just looking at a blank screen when any opportunity is available to you.


This is Chuck Close. He has prosopagnosis, he has suffered a stroke and suffers from paralysis, but nevertheless creates surprisingly creative pictures. I think you can try to create a game with less restrictions than his.

Start with the basics of video games.

If you still do not know where to start, then you should look at the history of video games. It turns out that most arcade games of that period, beginning in 1962 (from the Spacewar release) to Donkey Kong from 1982, were able to avoid these cunning game traps. Below I will list good sources of inspiration for choosing a starting point. I divided them into categories:

Collision Games - Pong (1972), Breakout (1976)

Shooting - Galaga (1981), Space Invaders (1978), Centipede (1980)

Obstacle Series - Frogger (1981), Marble Madness (1984)

Shooters - Robotron 2084 (1982), Gauntlet (1985), Asteroids (1979), Missile Command (1980)

Scrolling Games - Spy Hunter (1983), Toobin (1988)

Collecting Games - Pacman (1980), Crystal Castles (1982), Snake

Puzzles - Tetris (1984), Klax

Accuracy Games - Bowling, Golf

Construction and Destruction Games - Rampart (1980)

Repeating Puzzles - Sudoku (1979), Solitaire, Minesweeper (1989)

Games with a light gun - Duck Hunt (1984), Operation Wolf (1987)

Crane Games


Dona Bailey is the creator of one of the best-developed games of all time: Centipede. In addition, it is surprisingly "simple" game.

These old games usually remained simple due to technical limitations, and also because of their business model — players had to feed as many quarters as possible to the arcade machines. If you “pass” one of these games, then most likely you will not return to it anymore. That is, the passage should be based on a gradual increase in the complexity of the basic game cycle. Each wave of enemies should approach you faster and deal more damage.

The goal of the player is not to observe how the plot develops. He is trying to get into the best table. The designers of the first Pacman did not even expect to complete the game, they simply let the memory run out, after which the game hung.


Pacman didn’t need an end, it all ended in memory overflow.

There are modern simple games

Although they have become much more developed than their predecessors with machine guns, they still have a very simple game cycle. But it should be noted that a lot of difficult elements were added to them, so that they would feel modern. However, if we consider the basic game cycle, they still remain “simple games”.

• Tower Defense Games
• Fruit ninja
• Plants vs Zombies
• Physical Games: Goat Simulator 2014, Angry Birds 2009
• Bejeweled 2001
• Doodle Jump 2009

In general, the interestingness of all these simple games is to perform one of these simple tasks:

• Score maximum points
• Destroy everything on screen
• Collect everything on the screen
• Merge or align everything on screen

Games that seem simple, but are actually traps

Although excavating the history of games in search of ideas is a great way to find simple games, it is worth being careful, because some of them have traps:

Side scrollers and platformers

Examples: Donkey Kong, Burger Time, Moon Patrol, Joust, Super Mario Brothers. The success or failure of the platformer is determined by the sensations from them. You may need years of programming practice, lots of trial and error, to gain enough experience to create the right platform. If you try to develop them as the first game, then there is a real danger to spend a lot of time on ensuring the correct behavior of the game. Set aside the platform at a time when it is better to master the creation of games.

Adventures

Programming the simplest adventure engine is actually quite a simple task. Most of the logic lies in animating the characters and checking whether object A was dragged onto object B. However, you will quickly encounter a two-headed problem: a plot and puzzles. On the development of adventure you can easily spend years of work.

Rogeuelike

Yes, they appeared back in 1980 and there are almost no graphics. Therefore, it seems that they can be an excellent choice for creating a simple game. However, here the sticky trap is procedural generation. Moreover, when developing rogue-like, there is a temptation to create an infinite depth of simulation. Just look at how much time Dwarf Fortress has been developing. The complexity of rogue-like can be increased indefinitely, so beware.


Be wary of procedural sirens

How to make the development of a simple game not tired

Suppose you find a perfect, simple basic loop. You have decided that the goal of the game will be to get points, and the passage will be performed in waves. But you do not feel joy. You need motivation.

At this point, my advice to you is: cut, cut, shred, and cut again. But in a simple game the following elements are definitely worth it.

"Juice" and screen shaking

Even if your basic game loop is as old as the Reagan era, it does not mean that the same should be the graphics. Spice it up with spices and small things - this is one of the most interesting things in game development. Graphics and "juice" add interesting game. This is best demonstrated by the next couple of videos. Check them out and add as much detail as possible to your simple game.

• Juice It Or Lose It By Grapefrukt
• The Art of Screen Shake

Marketing

Yes, I remember that I advised you to prepare for the failure of the first game. But there is a possibility that your game will become viral. Therefore, you should always add the ability to subscribe to your mailing list within the game. When you make the second, not such a simple game, you will need to contact the players who found the first one.

Theme

I do not like the plot. It is a trap. But minor touches can add emotional depth to the game. One of the best examples of this is CANABALT. This game is ALMOST a perfect example of a simple game (it has 2d-platforming, which can be difficult for the first game). A simple design (a set of points depending on the distance traveled and an infinitely increasing complexity) is combined in it with a mysterious entourage that surpasses the main game cycle.


Why is this man in a suit running? Where did these destroyer robots come from? Why is the sound muffled? Why aren't birds afraid of this situation? There is no answer to any of these questions, but simply by adding an exciting graphic environment, the authors created a story without the participation of dialogues and cutscenes.

In your simple game you have to do the same. Add a few unanswered questions. However, in order not to deviate from a straight line, always add elements that create an entourage, and not a plot.

Do not make clones

We look back at the classic games and discard unnecessary details not to clone another game. If you do not blindly copy the design of another game, then your personality will still look through. It is impossible to completely hide yourself from your work. When developing your game, listen to your creative side.

Summarize

If you avoid the pitfalls, complete the game and be brave enough to publish it, you will be taken to a private game designers club. Releasing the game is incredibly difficult, and the most difficult is the release of the first game.

Many very clever and talented people spent years on the game without releasing it, because in their heart they decided that the first game should be something special and precise, otherwise they are just mediocre game designers.

Jeff Vogel said in the context of RPG development the following, but this applies to any genre:


“Developing an RPG is like sex. The first time is terrible and everything goes wrong. Each subsequent time is monotonous, and small changes support interest. ”

Everything will be ok.