for level designers to edit and constantly pushed the limits of our technology. It was also
one of the more complex levels in the game, with the player able to return to it later in
the game-flow, thus making it contain double the amount of logic found in most levels.
Because of the lessons learned from that level, subsequent levels were far more con-
servative. Though building the first level first worked out creatively in the case ofThe
Suffering, the many problems we faced with it from a production standpoint demon-
strate the problems with building the first level first.
Something you must be conscious of as you are building the first fully playable sec-
tion of your game is how difficult the game is to play. Often difficulty can be adjusted and
tweaked later in the development process, during playtesting and balancing. However,
games also have a fundamental difficulty, which is more intrinsic to their nature and
which cannot be easily adjusted late in the development cycle. As you are working on
getting your gameplay prototype working, try to look at it honestly in terms of how dif-
ficult it will be for novice players to get into. Bring in some friends or coworkers and
have them play the game. Observe how easily they manage to pick up the controls and
mechanics. It is much simpler to make a game harder than to make it easier. If you find
that your game is turning out to be harder to play than you had hoped, now is the time to
alter the game design in order to make the game easier to play, before it is too late. I
encountered an instance of this problem inCentipede 3D, a game that was far more diffi-
cult than we had hoped when it shipped. This was in part because it was based on a
coin-op arcade game that was designed to kill the player within four minutes of play, and
partly because we developers had played the game so much it did not seem difficult to
us. By the time we realized the game was too hard it was too close to shipping to fix it.
Because of the game’s simple mechanics (the player and her adversaries all are killed
by a single hit from adversaries) there was little that could be easily tweaked to make
the game easier, short of redesigning the way the AI agents worked. If we had identified
our difficulty problem earlier, we could have made fundamental changes to the game to
make it easier to play.
Going Through Changes.........................
A big part of the organic process of game design is being able to throw away your own
work and, potentially, that of the rest of your team. This includes art, code, levels, and
even general design itself; all of the game’s content may need to change as your
gameplay evolves. A particular asset may not be flawed in and of itself, but if it does not
gel properly with the way the gameplay is working out, you may need to abandon that
asset and start from scratch. Many developers are unwilling to do this, and it shows in
their games. Either their games are shackled to an initial design document that turned
out not to work as well in practice as it did in theory, or their games retain a hodgepodge
of components from before their direction was finalized. Once a designer decides that
the game’s direction needs to change, all of the assets of the game must be assessed to
see if they can fit with that new direction. If they cannot, they must be reworked or
remade.
As I have discussed,Centipede 3Dchanged course significantly in the middle of
development, which caused us to throw away a large amount of work. Fortunately, no
one on the team was unhappy to do so, since we all realized it was in the best interests
of the project. With other projects I have worked on, I have been more stubborn and
290 Chapter 15: Getting the Gameplay Working