Polishing Your Game

A talk on how to make it through the last 10% of making a game.

Transcript

1. You can download the slides at http://bit.ly/gam-polish
3. is not really that difficult once you have a few under your belt but it’s the last 10% that will usually give you the hardest time.
5. usually the player has the most detail and other entities get rushed or you add in last minute elements that don’t feel right
6. Art by Iñaki Diaz @designatius
7. Art by Iñaki Diaz @designatius
8. if you are using more than one designer or switch designers in the middle of a game you will get uneven consistently throughout your game’s design.
11. You may have one style for the artwork in the game but use a different one in the splash screen or menus.
12. this happened a lot in older games that introduced video cut scenes. You would go from highly polished CGI to low polygon in game graphics.
14. not using in game artwork or screens for your promotional material. When people see the marketing imagery, they are expecting to see similar if not better visuals inside of the game.
17. Even before Flash games made Tweening (programmatically animating) popular, games have been using this technique to spice up splash screens for some time.
19. http://bit.ly/15cSC78
21. most PC games ignored cleanly laid out HUDs (Heads Up Display). Most games tried to cram in as much detail as possible but over time newer games have simplified what they show the player and tend to hide stuff that is not critical to the game action itself.
24. health bars are critical to the player so they should always be shown.
25. If your game’s character has some kind of rage meter that needs to fill up before it can be used or there is a bonus applied to the player’s action there should be some kind of visual indication for this.
26. While you may not think about it, pause is critical in most games and even more so in mobile games. Pause is important because it requires the player to be able to stop what they are doing and hit it.
27. If your player is limited by a set amount of ammunition then there should be some kind of on screen indicator of this.
32. Most RPGs have detailed sets of equipment the player can use. While equipment configuration is usually done in a dedicated screen, the player’s character should indicate what is currently on.
33. while arcade games in the past were heavily focused on score as their motivation there is little need to constantly broadcast that to the player. Score should be moved to a dedicated screen that is shown when the game is paused or if the level is over. Also be sure to break down how the score is calculated as well.
36. At the end of the day resolution comes down to aspect ratio, is your game 4:3 or 16:9 or even both? Good games can easily support either resolution, here is a sample from one of my game’s designs to show you how this works.
41. One of the biggest issues most games face is loading up artwork and assets in memory. By doing some simple image optimization you can cut down that loading time dramatically.
42. is a large image containing a collection of sub-images, or "atlas" which contains many smaller sub-images.
43. http://bit.ly/Yqwwty
44. There are many ways to clean up loading screens but something simply adding an image over a loading bar is enough to make the player feel better while waiting.
45. Some games will struggle to keep a high frame rate on slower devices such as mobile phones and tablets. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to simply run the game at a lower frame rate to smooth out the visuals.
46. Some games do a great job of transitioning from one section of the game to another by pre-loading artwork and other assets as the player gets near the edge of a level.
47. Free workshops focused on Game Development here in NYC. These workshops are broken up into beginner and advanced level and will run each Saturday from 10-12pm (beginner) and then 2pm – 5pm (advanced).
48. Don’t forget to visit jessefreeman.com to learn more about HTML5 and Windows 8 game development. You can download the slides at http://bit.ly/gam-polish