Dumb it Down

I just realised I wrote the intro to this entry but ended up on my rant about enthusiasm for our licensed project. Ka-whoops. But the same kinda applies here. So if you just want to skip back to the last blog and read the first paragraph before you carry on. I can wait. Done that? No? Wish I’d stop doing this bent ‘it’s-like-he’s-talking-to-me’ thing? Righty-ho!

But yeah, basically I was saying I think everybody comes into this industry (as a designer, at least) hoping to create the new and wonderful ideas that future generations of gamers will be viewing with the same reverence afforded to Mario 64 (everybody knows that was a big innovator, right? I mean personally I didn’t like it much, but then I’d already played Banjo-Kazooie before I got to play Mario and I thought that was way better… Sorry! But Nintendo pretty much INVENTED the 3D platformer with Mario 64, so obviously it’s a key example of the whole new and wonderful thing I was yakking about).

I wanted to go into the industry to make RPGs. There’s a few problems with this plan. Firstly, I’m talking JRPGs (Japanese RPGs) which, funnily enough, are largely made in Japan. (Western RPGs make me want to crawl into an oven soaked in gasoline. Too many orcs and goblins) So not much chance of that happening for me without learning the language and shipping off to the East. Secondly, JRPGs are hardly the hallmark of great games design; they rob ideas off each other shamelessly, and are generally only distinguishable in their combat systems. I love the genre to bits, but I’m being realistic – usually the game itself is a bit basic (outside of fighting), which is made up for (ideally) in good characterisation and plot. Like in the amazing Skies of Arcadia (below).

Anyway, the point of this is that I wasn’t coming into the industry expecting to be an innovator. I have mixed feelings about this attitude, mind. I’m of the belief that not everything can be original, and that some things are perfectly acceptable being an old idea that is just done well in a new way. Still, a games designer should really have something new to bring to the table. Even now, I don’t think that’s me. I prefer to take bits from other games I’ve enjoyed and try and implement them into my own designs as well as I can, mixing things up to effectively create something new. Like taking a whole load of pick ‘n’ mix and stuffing it all in your mouth at once. Or something. It felt like an analogy moment.

Even so, when I was asked to create my first level design document, I had plenty of ideas. Perhaps nothing massively original, but I had quite a lot of them, and I went to town. I was pretty excited. After a few days of knocking together my ideas into a coherent whole, I showed it to my fellow designers. They took a look at it, and, dead nicely, suggested where I should chop and change things. After all, I’d just started, so I wasn’t 100% on how the game worked, so some of the things I’d implemented went against our design document or weren’t doable in other ways and so on. Shockingly to me, one of my main ideas was too ambitious. I went away and made the changes, then resubmitted it for judgement. I’d done a few things wrong again, and some of it was still a bit too complex, would I mind rejigging this so it was a bit simpler? No problem. I went back and did it again. This repeated for about a week before we were all happy with it. My design barely resembled my original idea. It had been stripped down to the most basic bones of what I originally had in mind.

Just so you know, I’m really not typing this with bitterness or anything like that. I’m perfectly fine with that level the way it is. It’s just strange how what I conceived as a simple idea to start with was made into something that really, had I started with that in mind, would have taken about 2 minutes to write up, and probably less to play through. The obvious fact is, ambitious ideas take more work to implement, and it’s just easier to keep things simple. Much of the game had been designed already when I joined the company, so really all I was being asked to do was familiarise myself with existing elements and reuse them in different ways. While that may sound like a lazy bastard’s recycling dream, it actually takes a bit of effort to shrink your idea into something doable. And really, as a designer, you have to design something that can be feasibly made or there’s really no point in designing it at all.

So since then I lowered my bar a little and kept things simple. I’m always worrying that perhaps I keep things TOO simple now, but recently when I show my designs to my colleagues there’s fewer revisions to be made. There are times when I wonder if I’m sacrificing my artistic integrity and all that jazz for an easier ride – it’d take more effort to argue my point about a more complicated idea that I was adamant would work better, and I could piss the peers off, etc – but I guess I won’t be able to see how valid that worry is until the levels are made and I can play through them. If they’re so basic and dull I fall asleep – or worse, they remind me of a Silent Hill level – maybe I’ll have to raise the bar a little more again. But then, that’s what redesigns are for, I guess.