Interesting idea about turn-based gameplay. I guess it does make sense to incorporate some sort of discrete action-reward sequence even in real-time games. I can see this even in terms of replay, for games like Canabalt.

This part I don’t really understand:

“Because of the lure of your game to show constantly / often new things (your creatively created sub-mechanics), players will want to continue to play and because of the meta-game will fall in love with your game.”

Do you have any thoughts about how to design sub-mechanics that will continually create new experiences? I’m not really clear on the relationship between these and how “players will want to continue to play”.

But to offer some words of my own insights: I think agile is really not suitable for any kind of game. Like Krystian said: I can be hard to engineer emotions that way. I think, agile gamedev is mostly interesting for level-based games, like bubble bobble, advanced wars or meat boy.

I also think like Krystian, that sound and graphics cannot be outside the prototyping-phase. I’d love to talk about “tracer-code” – not prototypes.

It is always more important to think about, what to left behind, than what to add!

But slightly (but not really) more seriously, skeptical Krystian is skeptical:

1. Actually, the experience of me, Yu-Chung and Fabricio was unanimously that we all tend to remove features. The first prototype tends to be too complicated and too bloated.

2. How can you tell if a game “feels” right if content and art is completely missing? In some (not all) cases, both are quite important for the enjoyment of a game. This is a dilemma we already addressed in one of our podcasts (in one of them that wasn’t released I think) and still have no proper answer for.

3. You define “Fun” as the ultimate goal. That’s bascially what we have right now and there are some concerns about this approach. “Fun” has no morals and no meaning – it’s hollow. That doesn’t mean that the game can’t be fun but shouldn’t there be more ambitious goals? Where are these defined in your process?

4. This sounds like you favor a bottom-up approach to game design. I recently had a talk with Peter Thierolf who described how he made his first game (a shooter). He used a bottom-up approach as well but when it came to designing levels, he found out that his approach started to fail. The levels were boring. He quickly ran out of gameplay elements and even if they were nice and sophisticated, they couldn’t hold the attention for longer then half of a level or so. He realized that in this case, switching to top-down made all the difference: he first defined a couple of what I think he called “Gameplay Moments” – little episodes of gameplay that he wanted the player to experience. Like a certain surprising turn of events or a difficult decision for example. Then he implemented the gameplay elements and systems to make these moments happen. These were often things he wouldn’t even think about if he only focused on the mechanics.

7. You forgot to mention the trick! Turn-based addiction often comes from a low-hanging fruit setup at the beginning of each cycle. Daniel Cook wrote a superb breakdown of the idea in his Advance Wars DS Game Design Review.

8. Why do you think this is necessary? You expect players to WANT to solve difficult levels. But what if they go ‘meh’ and play Mafia Wars instead?

9. You think that players love the mechanics. Really? Game designers certainly love mechanics. Players are just as glad to play the billionth clone of a mechanic they already know. What hooks them are often things game designers never think about. See: my posts on the reasons why my girlfriend is playing games. Or the experiences of Cyan with Myst Tourists which we will discuss in upcoming podcast.

11. This is model where content (gameplay) and form (marketing) are clearly separated. But as game designers, shouldn’t we strive to create a process where these two aren’t separate and maybe even competing entities but actually two faces of the very same coin? And shouldn’t a game designer invest at least just as much time to develop the other side? What are the steps in this process?

Finally, if “Fun” is all you are going for, I think step 0 and step 11 are most important and most difficult ones. The other ones are purely optional.