'The Door Problem' of Game Design

An anonymous reader writes "Game design is one of those jobs everybody thinks they can do. After all, they've played a few games, and they know what they liked and disliked, right? How hard could it be? Well, professional game designer Liz England has summed up the difficulty of the job and the breadth of knowledge needed to do it in what she calls 'the door problem.' Quoting: 'Premise: You are making a game. Are there doors in your game? Can the player open them? Can the player open every door in the game? What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open? What happens if there are two players? Does it only lock after both players pass through the door? What if the level is REALLY BIG and can't all exist at the same time?' This is just a few of the questions that need answering. She then goes through how other employees in the company respond to the issue, often complicating it. 'Network Programmer: "Do all the players need to see the door open at the same time?" Release Engineer: "You need to get your doors in by 3pm if you want them on the disk." Producer: "Do we need to give everyone those doors or can we save them for a pre-order bonus?"'"

Comments

Will the door have windows?

[ciderbrew]

I'd like little windows so people can see into the next room. These are always missing in games.
ALSO, I want to shoot something through the doors and blow them up with things.
#FeatureCreep

Re:Will the door have windows?

[ciderbrew]

I'm going for a manager vibe. I've read the word json somewhere and I think all company use of HTML should in the Json now. So if you could just implement that and fill out this TPS report that would be great.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[Assmasher]

I love that "Feature Creep" is both adverbial and can be a noun. "Oh, look, it's the feature creep..." ;)

Re:Will the door have windows?

[ildon]

Doors infrequently have windows in video games because they are used to block visual information from the renderer and gameplay information from the player. But doors with windows do exist. Even Half-Life 1 had some.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[ciderbrew]

If you're going to disprove my point with facts and logic that's unsportsmanlike.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[BasilBrush]

I don't think so. What makes a good simulation of real life doesn't tend to make for a good game. Real life is mostly boring, which is why people turn to games in the first place.

There are categories where maximum reality is desirable, but they tend to have "simulator" in the name. Flight Sim, Formula One Sim, Train Sim, Theme Park Sim.

But what people usually want in games is problems to solve, and/or skills to develop, to make progress, all at a level that tests their ability at nearly all times, but doesn't overcome them. And trying to be more realistic only limits the amount to which you can do these things.

Take the article's example of a door, and the question of how you can tell if it's a locked door or not. In reality, you can't tell whether a door is locked without trying to turn the handle and push it. But in games it's usually better if you can tell by looking whether a door is unlocked and openable. There are plenty of games that go for the reality route, and you have to try to open all the doors to find the openable ones. And it's a tedious task that rarely adds anything to the gameplay.

Another example is the concept of health levels, multiple lives, and re-spawning. Remember the US army created a game of their own called "America's Army". It was as realistic as the could make it, including the fact that you get shot once, and you are dead, and you couldn't rejoin the multi-player game until it was over. And that made it a dull game, as you typically spent half the time waiting rather than playing.

As you say, you like Metroid (I guess Metroid Prime?) which was far from realistic. But yes, a great game.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[BasilBrush]

It's funny. In he intervening years, text adventure authoring has come a long way. It's now possible to create games in a near English functional programming language.
http://inform7.com/

BUT the games compile down to the age old Infocom game file format, and so are limited to the ancient concepts of wandering between rooms and manipulating objects. And whilst the range of user input that can be understood has expanded, it's still just combinations of "verbing" and "object" or moving by compass directions.

Still, some authors have managed to be creative even within this limited game engine, and create games that don't APPEAR to be simple rooms and objects games.

I wonder, would a truly unlimited interactive novel be fun to play? It could be tested out by a kind of Turing test scenario. Have a player play such a game, and have a real novelist provide the "game" text. Of course such a thing would entail the player waiting a considerable time between "moves". But it would mean that their input would be boundless, they could do anything in the "game".

Considering how hard it is for most authors to get things published and make a living whilst they are writing, this might even be a feasible real way of gaming, allowing authors to make a small income whilst doing their chosen activity. Though it would need to be a pay-per-move system.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[nine-times]

I wonder, would a truly unlimited interactive novel be fun to play? It could be tested out by a kind of Turing test scenario. Have a player play such a game, and have a real novelist provide the "game" text. Of course such a thing would entail the player waiting a considerable time between "moves". But it would mean that their input would be boundless, they could do anything in the "game".

Well when I've thought about it in the past, I imagined it a bit like having an old-school D&D game with a dungeon master. Of course, that'd be a hard thing to do.

I always loved the old text adventures, but it's annoying that they were restricted to canned responses. You might come up with a great solution to a problem, but if it wasn't what the programmer had anticipated, you'll get get a message saying something like, "I'm sorry, but you can't do that." I would think coming up with something that allowed you more freedom would be an interesting problem to tackle and a good challenge for an AI researcher.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[CptPicard]

There is also a legendary internet phenomenon with kinda your surname. I would not recommend googling for it.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[Quirkz]

Good one. I'm stealing it and putting it in my novel about a parody dungeon crawler video game. I'd give you credit, but, frankly, "Thanks to Assmasher" isn't something I'm willing to put in print. Er, a second time, since I guess I just said it once.

Article is empty

[Noughmad]

The article doesn't really say anything. For starters, it took me a while to realize she's talking only about computer games, and then even more specifically only about first person adventures / RPGs. From what I understood from the list of problems, I got that you decide on game mechanics and then generally boss people around.

Re:Article is empty

[O('_')O_Bush]

I couldn't distinguish her "doors problem" from any other mundane problem in a complex system that some of us deal with every day.

Re:Article is empty

[tepples]

Perhaps the door analogy is her way of expressing what it's like to have a "mundane problem in a complex system" to someone who has never faced a system as complex as a video game.

Re:Article is empty

[joshuao3]

Which is the authors point. A programmer, not just a person who programs, has a special way of looking at the world and its systems. The conversation she's having with people is designed to separate those two kinds of people. Systems are generally more complex than they appear on first glance--and a real programmer is very able to visualize, define, and describe the system to whatever level of complexity is required. That being said, a GOOD programmer (and his manager) is able to keep feature creep in check by not getting distracted by out-of-spec parameters.

Re:Article is empty

[bzipitidoo]

She skipped right past the first parts of game design to focus on minutae. Made good points, but about implementation details, not game design.

What game designers must do before worrying about doors is, well, design. What is the game about? Killing bad guys? Racing against competitors? Collecting money or points? Solving puzzles? Exploring worlds? Building things? The tricky part is picking the mechanisms. The question isn't which doors are supposed to open or have windows, it's whether doors are an appropriate and fun method to make reaching the goals, whatever they are, challenging without being impossible. Or they are a necessary evil to deal with limitations.

To find out if a game play element is possible and balanced and fun requires analysis and testing. It can be done in an agile way, making some elements, testing the game play, then making changes. For one example of unbalanced games, can look way back to the early Ultima games. In Ultima 2 and 3, the heroes were so powerful they could easily kill all the non-player characters in an entire city, without consequence, because to reduce memory usage on the computers of that era, the design simply loaded the initial state every time a city was entered. (Not that they couldn't have easily set aside just one bit, an "evil bit", to track whether the heroes were no longer heroes, but for whatever reason, they didn't.) Consequently, an easy way to get more money was kill the enitre town and take all the treasure, exit then reenter and do it all over again, until the player was satisified with the haul of loot. Tedious but effective. Not what the designers wanted, I'm sure, but they did go so far as to make the best of the problem by making a few towns especially juicy to loot. Ultima 3 especially was criticized for being too easy.

Or, design is often done in an ad hoc manner. As an example, many fantasy MMORPGs have a crafting system which the players can use to make equipment. These are a sideline to the main goals of progressing through the fantasy world, doing quests and gaining levels. The way MMORPGs implement it, crafting is dull, tedious, and limited. The players can't employ imagination to create novel items, they are restricted to a small set of fixed recipes. The game designers couldn't allow much latitude on crafting, or the players could and would make items so powerful that they completely unbalance the main game. It'd be rather like crafting and using machine guns, while the rest of the fantasy world continues to use swords and bows. Or the whole fanatsy world advances, and then it's not fantasy anymore. A crafting system that is just a little more realistic could inadvertently allow such things. After all, in real life, what stopped the people of the Middle Ages from having guns? Lack of knowledge, nothing more. The players will all know about modern technology, and will not be held back through ignorance, so the game designers have to resort to other methods. Science Fiction is not much help. A crafting system that allows novelty could likely still be used to break the game.

um

[Charliemopps]

Those issues sound like any feature in any other software project I've worked on...

Are there "Save" buttons in your application?
Can the user click them?
Can the user click every button in the application?
What tells a user a button is click-able?
What happens if there are two user?
Does it become read only after both users click it?
What if the UI is REALLY BIG and controls can't all exist at the same time?'
'Network Programmer: "Do all the users need to see the record save at the same time?
Release Engineer: "You need to get your buttons in by 3pm if you want them on the disk.
Producer: "Do we need to give everyone those buttons or can we save them for phase 2?

Re:um

[thesandtiger]

This article isn't for actual software engineers, but "idea guys" who think making games is easy and don't actually understand what goes into real game design.

I know a ton of people like that - they have an idea for some awesome next level stuff, but it's only a very vague idea with a few neat things in there, without any of the actual work that is needed to turn it into a game design, let alone a spec, let alone a game. Seriously, everyone I know who is a gamer and not an engineer is constantly babbling about how games should do X or Y or Z or whatever, but when you ask them questions about how any of it would actually work, they wave their hands and say it isn't important because the IDEA that they took a whole 30 seconds coming up with and articulating is somehow the hard part.

The idea is the easy part - I can toss out hundreds of ideas for games that would be amazing. Turning that amazing idea into anything resembling a useful thing is another kettle of fish entirely.

Easy answers

[DeathToBill]

I'm not convinced by TFS. The answers are, roughly:

1. 1. Are there doors in your game? Let's say for the moment there are.
2. 2. Can the player open them? Yes. If you have doors in a 3D game and they don't behave like doors, you have failed.
3. 3. Can the player open every door in the game? Yes. See point 2.
4. 4. What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open? It's a door. It opens.
5. 5. What happens if there are two players? Doors behave the same for all players. It's a door. See point 2.
6. 6. Does it only lock after both players pass through the door? See point 5.
7. 7. What if the level is REALLY BIG and can't all exist at the same time? Then your technology is not good enough to implement your vision and one or the other needs to change. See point 2.

Am I the only one who finds arbitrary restrictions in games, either because the technology couldn't cope, or because the game designer knows how you want to play better than you do, or just because, really annoying? If there's a door there, it should open. If it won't open, there shouldn't be a door there. How hard is this? Putting a door there that's never going to open just frustrates the player and destroys the suspension of disbelief. It reminds them that they're not really in this world they can see, they're in some arbitrarily limited construct devised by a "product manager" at some company to try to screw a few bob out of them. Of course there need to be some limits on the world, because the technology isn't infinite; good game design should make those limits look natural so that the player never even notices that the limit is there.

Tomb Raider games are amazingly annoying - some things you can jump and grab, some things you can't. The only way to tell is to jump and try grabbing it. If it doesn't work, maybe you can't jump and grab that thing, or maybe you just didn't quite get it right. I know, I know, this is not the point of Tomb Raider games, Lara is, but still...

Re:Easy answers

[mwvdlee]

I like your world where no locked doors exist; it's so very much like reality where I also need no keys to unlock doors.
Also in reality nobody can ever block a door. If somebody else (let's call him "player 2") blocks the door from opening, I'm still able to open the door. Because "It's a door. It opens", the door will magically pass right through the other person.
Also; what is behind every opened door? If there are doors behind an opened door, they should open too, right?

In my world, a locked door is normal. How can I see if a door is locked in real life? If it has a hole for a key and closed, it's probably locked.

Re:Easy answers

[Thruen]

This is a huge problem for me in exactly those types of levels. I do want to open every door, every single one, and I very rarely can. Admittedly, my favorite games are open world games which shouldn't have many areas inaccessible to the player, but I also play shooters and want the same thing. Battlefield 4 is full of elevators that only go from the lobby to the top floor or roof, I want to get out on the 32nd floor and kick the door in to the corner suite and set up my rifle where I won't immediately be spotted, taking that option away never makes sense from an immersion point of view. It only makes sense from a technological point of view. Does it create the possibility that 64 players will be roaming room to room with silencers in a hotel while ignoring the rest of a large map? Yes, and that's perfect. The previous post is entirely correct, while doors are important these questions are easy to answer.

Don't get me wrong, I believe game design to be rather difficult, but this is a poor attempt at explaining why. "The Door Problem" is not nearly as difficult as budget problems, working within technological limitations, or keeping a coherent storyline while letting the player make meaningful decisions. I speak from years of experience, in unrelated fields but experience none the less!

Re:Easy answers

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, DeathToBill, but you failed her test.You're making the classic wannabe game designer mistake of putting technical issues and your interpretation of realism above all else, because you don't like "arbitrary restrictions." So, so many games have failed because of designers who thought that way.

What you're saying is that you can't build a game with doors unless they're all openable and there's actual stuff behind them. For starters, that just blew your level design budget by 2x, so you need to trim somewhere else to make that back. Second, you don't want players getting bored walking into all these useless areas that you added just so there wouldn't be unopenable doors, and now you need to work that area into the game design itself. Your scripting budget has just gone up substantially.

While one person has a hang-up about doors, other people will be obsessed with arms clipping door frames (requiring some kind of IK solution), that you're putting things into a backpack that wouldn't fit in real life, and others will hate the fact that cars have infinite petrol. The end result is you make an unfun mess that a couple of purists praise as "realistic."

Re:Easy answers

[ildon]

In real life, there are plenty of doors for which you will never find the key lying around. More importantly there, are millions (billions?) of doors that are of no interest to you, ever. In a video game, it would be very difficult to set up a series of long term societal detriments for going around trying to open every door, or to easily express to the player why the character they're playing has no interest in one door vs. another, or why what's behind most doors is not of interest to the gameplay or the plot of the game. But it'd also be extremely strange to walk down a city street environment and have there be no doors into any of the surrounding buildings. So we put up false doors as window dressing so the environment looks familiar, but then we build a visual metaphor that lets players see at a glance which doors are unimportant so they don't bother to try them. This can be by leaving them as a flat texture instead of modeled, making openable doors a different color or have specific lighting or highlights, making openable doors have handles and unopenable ones not have handles, or as the article suggests, putting rubble or something (depending on the context of the game) in front of unopenable doors. You can even make unopenable doors make a specific sound effect when approached, such as the sound of a handle jiggling on a locked door, or the sound of the character specifically saying "It won't open," etc. (although only communicating it once the door is approached can be tedious for the player).

Re:Easy answers

[rainmaestro]

Obligatory comic:

http://www.screencuisine.net/h...

A similar piece from Clint Hocking

[Sockatume]

Clint Hocking (of Far Cry 2) wrote a similar article last month, using the design of reload systems as an example:

http://www.edge-online.com/fea...

Re:RPG Games

[SJHillman]

It's A Long Way To The Top, If You Wanna Open Every Door

Re:Answers:

[91degrees]

> Are there doors in your game?

Probably.

Not the case for every game ever. Maybe not even a majority

> Can the player open them?

Some way or another, yes.

Do we even want access to every single room? We may want to illustrate that we're in a corridor. It would make no sense to be able to open all the doors and it would requitre a lot of level design time and memory space to have something on the other side of each door.

> Can the player open every door in the game?

Unlikely. Some doors will be locked, if only to remove the expectation that doors are no obstacle.

If no doors are locked then why do we need to remove this this expectation?

> What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open?

A locked door conventionally makes a distinctive thud sound when the player tries to open it. If there needs to be an indication that the door will never open, those doors don't make a sound (and typically have artwork indicating that they're not really usable doors.) There may be visual indications of a lock status (keypad, etc, with display, red=locked, green=unlocked) nearby.

This is one solution. Should we have a message saying the door is locked? If so, what message? Should all doors make the same thud? Does that make sense for a metal door? If we go for different thuds, is the inconsistency too jarring? How much space do the thus assets take up? Is a keypad the correct design given the setting of the current level?

> What happens if there are two players? Does it only lock after both players pass through the door?

Depends on the kind of event that you want the player to believe is the cause of the locking.

So which events will cause the door to unlock or lock for both players and which will cause the door to lock or unlock for only one?

> What if the level is REALLY BIG and can't all exist at the same time?

Does a tree make a sound if there is nobody near to hear it?

Yes. Now, how do you propose we deal with the memory issue created here?

> Do all the players need to see the door open at the same time?

Yes, if they can see it and the status of the door is relevant to the game mechanics.

What if the door is only usable by players with a certain key or character type?

> You need to get your doors in by 3pm if you want them on the disk.

What's the question?

It's not a question.

> Do we need to give everyone those doors or can we save them for a pre-order bonus?

Yes.

Sucks for those who didn't pre-order. We're now the subject of an internet hate capaign because our game is broken. Or, we don't get as many pre-orders as we otherwise would have.

Every one of these questions is a decision that has to be made. The decision depends on the type of game, the resoucrces avalable (both in terms of hardware and developers), and all the decisions you'e made already.

And the point is, this is just doors. You have a similar lot of questions for any other item in your game.

Re:RPG Games

[Remus Shepherd]

I spell it CDO, because it doesn't annoy me as much when it's in alphabetical order.

Manager vibe, you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

In games industry it's more like this: "I don't like the main character, change it to something more contemporary, a special-ops operative maybe? I don't care it doesn't fit with your theme of magic unicorn land, make the other magical creatures into taliban and we're sorted, right? Well then make it an FPS, no one plays plaforming games any more anyway. Oh, and throw in some realistic explosions, fancy mo-cap and destructible environment. No, you can't have more money. Just make sure the story is coherent and up-to-date. I don't know, look at the last 3 CoD titles' storylines and mix it up a bit. Heck, I DON'T NEED TO TELL YOU WHAT TO DO - YOU'RE THE DESIGNER HERE! NOW MAKE IT HAPPEN! And fix me up with a Gantt chart so that I have something to fiddle with while I'm talking to you next time..."