FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

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.

■ Design around the player. Everything in this book is based on player-centric game design, as Chapter 2, "Design Components and Processes," explains in detail. You must examine every decision from the player's point of view. Games that lose sight of the player lose sight of the fun.

■ Know your target audience. Different groups of players want different things. You don't necessarily have to aim for the mass market, and in fact it's much harder to make a game that appeals broadly than it is to make a game that appeals to a niche market you know well. But whatever group you choose, know what they want and what they think is fun, and then provide it.

■ Abstract or automate parts of the simulation that aren't fun. If you model your game on the real world, leave out the parts that aren't fun. But remember your audience: To somebody who just wants a chance to drive a fast car, changing the tires isn't fun, but to a hardcore racing fan, changing the tires is fun and a critical part of the experience. If—and only if—you have the time and resources, you may include two modes. Otherwise, choose one market and optimize the fun for the members of that market.

■ Be true to your vision. If you envision the perfect sailing simulation, don't add powerboat racing as well because you feel that adding features might attract a larger market. (Marketing people are notorious for asking game designers to do this.) Instead, adding powerboats will distract you from your original goal and cut in half the resources you were planning to use to perfect the sailing simulation. Both halves will be inferior to what the whole could have been. You will lose the fun, and without it you won't get the bigger market anyway.

■ Strive for harmony, elegance, and beauty. A lack of aesthetic perfection doesn't take all the fun out of a game, but the absence of these qualities appreciably diminishes it. And a game that is already fun is even more fun if it's beautiful to look at, to listen to, and to play with.