4 Pieces of Advice to Create A Game That Sticks
For the past few weeks, I have been sharing tips from GDC talks done by independent studios. I believe they share valuable insights because they have achieved success from humble beginnings. For those that want to make a new name out of themselves, there is a lot to learn from these studios to gain a foothold in this extremely competitive gaming industry.
This time I decided to look at Slime Rancher. It is quite different from many other games that I’ve played, but I especially adore this one. Slime Rancher is a first-person life simulator game developed by Monomi Park. As the game title suggests, you ranch cute, bouncing, gelatinous, ball-shaped alien creatures for profit. It evolved from a joke about melon and cabbage ball pits to a bright and goofy game that has sold over two million copies. I will share some tips from Nick Popovich, lead developer of Spiral Knights and now co-founder and CEO of Monomi Park, on creating an impactful game.
Make Your Game a Shark
Popovich used a quick biology lesson to (hilariously) illustrate an important takeaway in game development. A shark has rows of razor-sharp teeth, can detect one drop of blood in one million drops of water, and has experienced few evolutionary changes; everything about the shark makes it good at being a killing machine. A pug, on the other hand, has trouble breathing, commonly has skin and joint disorders, and its eyeballs can pop out of its face (seriously); the pug is loaded with features that hinder its success at survival.
Producers and leads should make sure that every feature informs the game’s core, making the game better. This helps the team focus on making the core part of the game mature and build confidence in it. This is lean game design, and I think it is especially relevant in preproduction, the idea generation and early prototyping stages of development.
Use Your Constraints
Monomi Park’s resources were considerably limited in the beginning as an unknown company with only two people in it. However, they acknowledged their constraints and took advantage of them to create a full experience. They couldn’t animate, so they made limbless slimes. Scripting and maintaining story sequences is difficult, so they made the game open world. They couldn’t compete against mainstream FPS games, so they added the weird element of slime ranching but saved the muscle memory of using familiar FPS controls (this also means no character model needed for the first-person view).
This is a refreshing perspective. More often we’re told to overcome our limitations, but we can actually acknowledge them and focus on how you can make up for them. For producers, it is important to recognize what your team can do. Take advantage of that and work around the limitations, use your team members’ expertise to add in your team’s own twist and create something unique.
Allow the Game Freedom
Popovich said that the more control a designer is willing to give up in a game, the greater the capacity for emergent storytelling the game has, and even a little can go a long way. He defines emergent storytelling as the collision of wants and needs. Needs are what the actors require to live, and wants are things actors do that are not essential for survival. Popovich said that the intersection of wants and needs create new verbs that players perceive, creating emergent storytelling or fun moments.
For example, I have caught slimes “escaping” their corral by stacking on top of each other. Another time I saw a slime “rescuing” another by flying and carrying them away. Once in a while, I would see a slime “scattering” items across the map, the result of which could be innocuous or massively chaotic.
Now, this is what fascinates me the most. According to Popovich, none of the actions I mentioned above were deliberately scripted into the AI. These are happy little accidents created by collisions of needs, which is to move or eat, and wants, which are scripted behaviors like stacking, flying, or blowing things up. Because the designers allowed freedom instead of restricting it with rules, I was able to witness these moments, create narratives in my head, and make these moments much more memorable.
Be Mindful About Releasing Early
Popovich said that developers have this fantasy that by releasing the game for early access, players will embark on a journey with the developers, going through the ups and downs and make great changes to improve the game as needed. The cold reality is that you’ll get conflicting demands from your players. Some expect regular content updates, some expect some unimplemented features to happen because development is ongoing, and others dislike any changes altogether. The other thing is if you receive negative reviews in early access, those reviews stay even after full release.
This discussion takes a different direction of “sticking” as suggested by the blog title. I think that to get useful feedback, it is important to have the core fleshed out before release. Producers and leads should help the team know what their game is, and build confidence in it. By doing so, you don’t need to change your game’s fundamentals after release, your game stays true to itself, and you can create new content that revolves around that foundation and reinvigorate hype.
Conclusion
I believe the key to a game’s success is the ability to leave behind an impression, to give you moments that you can remember and tell others. Slime Rancher by Monomi Park has succeeded in this by acknowledging their constraints and turning it to their advantage, creating a lean game around the core idea of wrangling bouncy slimes, and allowing freedom in the game world to create emergent behavior that is entertaining while still immersive. It is also important to allow the game to fully mature, meaning the core is implemented, before release for the game to stick.
So how would you help your game leave an impact?
