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Crawford On Making Balance Of Power
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to GameDev.net's excerpt from the new Chris Crawford On Game Design book, in which the famed strategy game creator and writer of The Art of Computer Game Design discusses the development of his classic '80s cold-war strategy game Balance Of Power, from initial concepts ("A game, like a story, must have a conflict") through execution ("Polish, polish, polish! Take a minimum of six months after alpha for polishing.")
I guess three years of polish will result in a great game then. OR NOT!
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And risk running out of funds? That's a bad way to go about it.
Here's the short, fun way:
1) Come up with great game idea
2) Draw ideas up in PowerPoint
3) Present ideas with any working demos or mockups to investors
4) Get money (PROFIT!)
5) Develop game to Alpha stage
6) Release and gauge market response
7) Continue improving game if market likes it, drop development like a hot potato if the market thinks your idea sucks
8) ???
I have been pwned because my
Great article.
Crawford did some great stuff back when b&w bitmaps were considered state-of-the-art graphics. I remember his games fondly.
I think some of Crawford's games would do well today. I'd love to get a version of Balance of Power that would run on Mac OS X.
His advice is pretty spot on as well. Of course, on Internet Time 6 months to polish is simply not realistic. The advice is clear: a good game is simple, but not trivial to create.
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It's all very well saying that a game needs 6 months of polish. In my experience almost any game will benefit from that much polish. But how do u convince your publisher (or producer if it's an internal project) of that? How do you convince them that spending an extra £700,000 (just a guess) on the time between alpha and gm is worthwhile? It would be great if someone were able to compile a set of statistics regarding the relationship(s) between polish time and game profit. Anyone?
He's a good read - but Crawford doesn't have any modern game development experience.
I got and played Balance of Power when it came out, and I love games of that genre. I got into learning all the rules and the map and thinking about what to do and was really into it. But when I had played a few times, I realized that you could not win. I always either had the world blow up or lost badly by points. I ended up trying hard to win for a while, and was never able to. (I am gnerally good at games.) I finally gave up. Later I read an article about how he wanted to educate people politically using that game, and teach them how bad the cold war was. I was pretty unhappy, as he had made a game no fun *ON PURPOSE* in order to try and make a political point. So I think that makes him a terrible game designer. Games are supposed to be fun, and he actually made a game no fun on purpose. He has great ideas but if the game is not fun, it's no good.
It did not suprise me that BoP did not sell well. No fun should = bad sales.
Make sure a game has conflict? I love Chris Crawford, but Balance of Power lacked any and all conflict. I was expecting a game similar to that found in the movie War Games. Little did I know that Chris Crawford also used the philosophy that if a nuclear war started, the game was essentially over. I tried to enjoy the game, but it has so many design flaws to make it *not* fun.