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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.")
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.
My father is a blogger.
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.
I agree. BoP was a great idea with tonnes of potential, but hideously flawed in it's execution. Your opponent would always chose to escalate over the most trivial of things, and you'd either blow the world up or lose badly on points (by basically capitulating every time your opponent objected to some policy of yours).
I remember that, when I played as the US, I could blow up the world by objecting to the invasion of Afghanistan (fair enough). But when I was the USSR, the US would also object if I invaded Afghanistan, and blow up the world. I.E. the computer player could get away with stuff you couldn't do in the same position.
Which, to me, is bad game design. So gee, he wrote a book on it. Good for him. I'll pass, and learn my lessons from examining his works.