By dint of scouring conventions, testing new titles, I discover hundreds of new games every year.
I have observed that the games I test are often missing 3 features, especially at conventions.
I am well aware that game development is very difficult, very expensive and that developers, especially independent developers, often do not have the means to do everything they would like.
Nevertheless, here are 3 features that are inexpensive and time-consuming to implement:
As we know, a tutorial is very difficult and time-consuming to make. A good and effective tutorial that doesn’t bore players and doesn’t make them disconnect from the game, which is even more difficult!
Why not start with something simpler in this case, slides!
How To Play
At a convention, at an event, video game developers have very little time to explain their game and convince players to play it.
When the devs are not next to their booth, players end up with a build without explanation.
One solution: implement screens indicating how to play in text, with buttons and icons of the game that are already created. Explain the principle of the game in a few lines. With just a little slide system as if it were a PowerPoint. As if it were explained to children.
This kind of system was required by Microsoft for Xbox Live Arcade games, because there were suddenly a lot of them on the Xbox 360 Marketplace.
Many arcade games also had a few seconds of explanation to explain, just before getting into the heart of the game, which buttons did what, what the principle was, and how to activate this or that function. If this was often explained much too quickly, by dint of repetition (and chips in the machine), we began to assimilate the different concepts.
Do you find all this too expensive? Print out a sheet with explanations, or at least the correspondences of the controller or keyboard to the actions in the game.
Still in the arcade, remember the marquee cards? They were small stickers directly stuck on the arcade machines where the developers tried to insert as much information as possible.
At the time, we already understood the usefulness of explaining the game to players, especially when they oscillated between dozens of games in an arcade.
In a convention or playtest event, please explain the game as simply and quickly as possible.
Even when we play at home, I like to read these explanations to see the notions and actions that may have escaped me or to remind me of how the game works, by resuming it 3 months after starting it. It’s like a mini-textbook.
Controller Mapping
This is a bit like the point above, but having a screen to customize the controls has 2 uses:
- See which button corresponds to which action/function
- Change button/function correspondences obviously.
Why allow this?
Because there are a plethora of peripherals with different button configurations, even on console.
Because it’s a good practice in terms of accessibility and not everyone has the motor skills to press many buttons and sticks simultaneously.
If you don’t want to allow buttons to be changed, at least include a slide with button mappings in your How To Play.
Be careful not to change buttons for menu acceptance and go back with it.
Credits
I want credits screens, directly accessible in the main menu in your game.
Credits must include EVERYONE who has worked on the game, directly or indirectly. Even if he/she hasn’t worked on it for months. Even if you argued with it.
I don’t want to have to finish a game for 30 hours to see who worked on it.
You don’t have to do a very long animation and great orchestral music to display names, slides, it works very well.
Same, it was a very standard feature in the days of the Xbox Live Arcade on Xbox 360, and it should become so again.
As a bonus, go for an additional feature, important, but on the other hand more difficult, time-consuming and therefore expensive to implement.
Attract Mode
Warning: the following video contains many flashes of light
We go back to the arcade with what the Japanese called Attract Mode and that the West then adopted.
Attract Mode is simply the demo mode that runs in a loop on an arcade game in order to attract players to the machine and put a token in it.
Imagine an arcade with lots of machines, your game must stand out with lots of sound effects, voices, lights, colors to attract people.
It’s the same in conventions. You want to attract people.
Or even when the games were running on a loop in the stores, the demo mode could attract the curiosity of visitors and encourage discovery.
But then it is no longer useful nowadays?
To have a demo mode in your game, you need:
- Implement a system for recording player actions in each game, with a timestamp
- Implement a system for broadcasting these recordings
- Record interesting actions and parts of your game yourself
This allows you to have a replay system of your game.
This is essential in online games to ensure good network communication between participants, and to offer replays on your online servers.
This is also very useful if you want to debug the game. You will be able to reproduce the actions at will and find problems much faster.
And so it allows you to do the best part with optimized actions in order to make people want to play your game, and therefore make a video of it for YouTube as well.
So if you have the means, do it!
Featured image credits: Marvel Super Heroes Marquee Card / Capcom
Is this what you see from other features that are indispensable for gaming these days?
Write them in the comments below!
