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Do you rely on any Guiding Principles when making game design decisions? You've referenced "this is what would happen in real life" a few times so I take that as one but do you have others that guide your problem solving?

Well, quite a few! I mean, obviously real life is a really great example and, you know, past history, are good examples because you can see sort of how something works. And also people that are playing the game can also really relate to it because it's something they have seen everyday in real life. So, the idea of, say, insurance on a spaceship you can relate to because you have insurance on your car, and for the same kind of reasons that we would have in space. So definitely having some level of real life inform the gameplay, but of course, you want to make the game FUN - so that's a big guiding principle. So it's sort of focusing on much more of the fun aspects, and less of sort of the boring, mundane aspects, because I think most people - even glamorous people - a lot of their day-to-day stuff is fairly mundane, and of course you're not play a game to do mundane things! (Maybe if you're playing something like The Sims, but even The Sims is a very abstracted kind of more fun version of real life!)So I would say that real life is part of it. Part of it is making it fun - sort of the bit where you feel empowered, and you feel special, and can do cool stuff that you can't normally do in real life. But then also to a certain extent making it be easy at the beginning - sort of draw you in. Like, one of my big principles is I really like immersion, and immersion I think is really facilitated by really rendering the environment, the world, the characters, like in very high fidelity. And even though you could say, "well, the game mechanics aren't particularly different," when you render something put a little extra care and attention to detail in it, it makes that world seem more alive. I mean a really good example is the Uncharted series that Naughty Dog has done, and if you look at the base gameplay mechanics it's not that different than what Tomb Raider did a long time ago, but the difference is they added all these little details and moments. You know, like Drake's going up a staircase and he reaches and touches the banister. It sort of all makes it feel a bit more real and alive, and the same with The Last of Us has a lot of these touches too. And so the same gameplay mechanics that maybe in another game don't feel quite feel as connected, do in something like an "Uncharted" because the attention to detail sort of pulls you in and so all of a sudden you start putting yourself in that world instead of always thinking of playing a game. So having a high amount of immersion is a big principle for me to really just pull you into the game. Because, you know, even if we look at what we're doing in Star Citizen, a lot of the core game mechanics aren't that much different than what we've done in the past on things like Wing Commander, or Privateer, or Freelancer. And there is a lot more sophistication, there's a lot more stuff, but some of the core ideas, like the whole idea of travelling between planets and earning money so you can upgrade your ship or buy a new ship, has been around for a long time, but it's a very satisfying sort of play path. And so we're just sort of doing that with a high fidelity, and we've got a lot more tweaks and of course there's the multiplayer and the co-operative aspects, and there's a lot of things that are gonna make it really rich. BUT, you know it's still the same basic core game mechanics which, if you look at a lot games, the core mechanics tend to have been very similar for a long time, and a lot of it's about implementation, and the nuance, and sort of accessibility for people.So I would say for me, my game design principles are about immersion, they're about accessibility, they're about adding depth to a game beyond the accessibility, right - so there's a very famous saying which is sort of like, "easy to learn, difficult to master," and I think that's a very good paradigm for games. I mean it's much easier said than done, but in general it's something that you want to have in your game, so someone can just pick it up and have fun, but they don't feel like they've mastered it and they're bored with it right way - it takes a long time. So, I would say something like a "Starcraft" or something like that had a very good sort of "easy to learn, difficult to master," thing where you could play it, and you could just play it with the mouse, but if you really wanted to get good at it, it just took a lot more time and attention, and you had to be a whole different level of player. And so that's kind of one of the things that we want to do in Star Citizen, and then in general just create this really big world where I'm really going for a sandbox to allow people to do what they wanna do, and sort of live out their fantasy life in space. I mean, it's a fantasy that I've had, and I think most of you guys out there have had.So those are all aspects that go into the design. So, I wouldn't-... I'm not saying there's any sort of silver bullet. A lot of it also is all sort of instinct and intuition of, like what seems to make sense to me, versus anything else. And I just happen, I think to a certain level, to have a sense of gameplay and style that a lot of other people sort of agree with. But there you go! There's my principles... if that helps at all?!

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Published on this date.2014-09-08
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