For an example of using sub-focuses, I will return to theWinter Carnival Whirl-
windexample. As you may remember, you had come up with a focus for a game that
puts players in charge of a winter carnival. Now that you have the central focus forWin-
ter Carnival Whirlwindsquared away, you can consider what other goals the game may
have. What other aspects of the game should the development team focus on to assure
that our gameplay vision is implemented in the best way possible?
Now might be a time to explore what type of player you are thinking will want to
play your game. Are you appealing more to the hard-core gaming crowd, or to people
who maybe do not play computer games quite so often? This will have a direct effect on
many aspects of the game, including what level of simulation will need to be created
(the hard-core gamers will demand a more involved and complex gameplay experi-
ence), as well as the control system the game will use (hard-core gamers can put up
with a more obtuse and convoluted control scheme if that provides a deeper play expe-
rience in the end, while more casual gamers will need something they can pick up
quickly).
Perhaps it has long been your desire to make a game that all of your non-gamer
friends could enjoy. Thus you decide you want to go for the more casual gaming crowd.
This means you can create a sub-focus explaining what you will do to skew the game
toward this audience: “Winter Carnival Whirlwindappeals to more casual gamers.” It
makes sense to explain just what you mean by making the game appeal to casual
gamers. Probably the biggest issue is control; you wantWinter Carnival Whirlwindto
allow people to get in and play the game quickly, without confusing them with a lot of
keys to remember to control the main character. Your focus could read: “The game pro-
vides the simplest control scheme possible, with a player needing to use a small
number of easily remembered keys to successfully play the game. Novice players can
figure out how to play the game without reading the manual or playing the tutorial,
though a training mission will be provided.” Note that you do not actually want to go
into what the controls are at this point. Save that for the design document. Here you are
just working on your goals for the game, not so much the specifics of how they will be
implemented. You may also want to say something about the game’s difficulty level. If
you are aiming at casual gamers, you are probably going to want to make the game eas-
ier than it would be if it were aimed more at the hard-core market. You may want to
specify that the game will play at various difficulty levels: “Winter Carnival Whirlwind
is of a relatively low overall difficulty, with the player able to specify difficulty levels in
the game. Even marginally skilled, poor players will be able to play the game to comple-
tion on the easiest difficulty level, given enough attempts.”
It might make sense to talk about what type of engine and graphics your game will
have in one of the sub-focuses. We discussed previously whether the game should be
2D or 3D, but decided that aspect was not central to our vision of the game. Therefore it
was left out of the primary focus. It may, however, fit well as a sub-focus, something that
will help further define how the game’s development will carry out the initial vision.
Now might be a good time to explain the visual style of the game as best you can, to give
your art team an idea of what direction they should pursue, as well as your program-
ming team what sort of technology your game will need to support. Furthermore, you
may want to consider our previous sub-focus here. It states that this game is supposed
to appeal to the casual gaming audience, and that the game is supposed to be fairly easy
Chapter 5: Focus 83