Max Nichols' Game Design blog
A short awhile ago I was interviewed by Play Sense, a game marketing company that, on the side, has a series of interviews with folks in or around the games space with. It was a really fun chat with Sandra Mad. We touched on my own history with Zelda and game development, why this website exists, and how it’s impacted me.
For years I’ve pondered a paradox:
1) The fact that crunch is poisonous to creative work.
2) The fact that many of my favorite games were made with crunch.
My answer:
Crunch allows a team to naively reach a crucial creative state, at high personal cost.
It can be reached without crunch.
“What’s your number one personal game design principle? And even better – does it have a cool name?”
The best games are made by centering the humans making them.
I thought about my answer to this for a few hours today, some folks may have seen me post and delete some replies, hahah.
But if I need just one? That truly encapsulates all my #1 priorities? This is it.
A drum I want to beat:
Overwork starts with management and planning, but half of why it happens is team culture.
Nobody has more impact on team culture than senior team members and lower-middle managers
If you are in the trenches and someone folks look to, then your example defines team culture.
I’m here to talk about two related topics!:
1. Tools teams should prioritize their users’ ability to maintain focus while working.
2. Not every second saved is equal, even for the same person within the same workflow.
There is a tendency for tools teams to use the metric “time saved” to help prioritize their work. For example:
– “This change will shave 5s off of an operation that is used 1000 times a day across the studio.”
– “This change will save 2 hours on a task that 10 people do once a month.”
After 9 years–fully half of my adult life–I was let go from Bungie this morning, along with MANY other amazing folks.
Getting to work on a game like this, where I made and helped make experiences that are enjoyed by millions of people, was a huge privilege.
But I don’t want to leave this off with a simple “it was a privilege, thank you Bungie”.
I gave a presentation on the Technical Game Design role via Twitch at the Indy Summer Showcase in July 2020. In it I include my definition of tech design, some examples of what tech design work is like in a AAA studio, and some detail on how one can become a Tech Designer.
Let’s talk about a problem that plagues live service games.
If your game relies on releasing MORE content in pre-existing categories –
characters in League of Legends or Overwatch, exotics in Destiny, new cards in Magic: The Gathering – then there are
two fundamental design problems you need to solve:
– Diminishing Returns: How do you make content that is as exciting on the Nth update as it was on the first update? How can your 50th piece of content compete with all 49 previous pieces?
– Narrowing Design Space: How do you leave room for each new thing to feel unique and different over time?
This week let’s talk about an important skill: Prioritization.
In a large studio environment, the ability to prioritize –
triage – every task or problem that comes your way is crucial, especially if
you’re in a role where you may be randomized or need to react to sudden pivots,
changes, or requests.
Let’s do some quick vocabulary. These are all terms that we use at Bungie. I can’t promise that they use these same definitions everywhere, but they’ll help us talk about these concepts:
“Technical game designer” as a role in the industry is hard to pin down. I’ve known people with that title who solely build tools, and others who never touch code or tools and instead build content. Ask around, and every tech designer will give you a slightly different definition for the role. Here’s mine.
“Technical Game Design” is a subset of Game Design as a discipline. There are two features that set the role apart:
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