Although it may be little more than a myth to some, the lesser spotted ludus modus singulus — also known as the “single switch game” in day-to-day discourse — is a very real and fairly common kind of game. It operates on just one rule: input must be limited to a single keystroke. No arrow keys. No mouse magic. Just a handy little button on your friendly neighbourhood keyboard or gamepad.

This kind of interactive entertainment has fascinated game developers since the beginning of existence itself, and oral traditions speak of a time long ago when such games ruled the earth, roving the vast plains and humid marshes of a much wilder planet. To this day they are still relatively untamed  by man, and only the most skilled — or foolish — of developers attempt to create them. But the rewards for demonstrating mastery over this genre are immense. Ask the creator of iPhone hit Canabalt if you have any doubts.

Nowadays, the average input device really spoils developers for choice. Keyboards are a sea of possible letters and numbers. Gamepads have thumbsticks, shoulder buttons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers up the wazoo. Even the humble Wiimote has quite a few input tricks at its disposal, especially when you consider the versatility of its motion sensor. But truth be told, not enough designers put that much thought into how players interact with their games: even when designing titles for something like a touch screen, too many devs try to force “many-button thinking” into a button-shy environment instead of forging new ground with the given platform’s unique restraints. I’ve seen it happen with cellphone games, iPhone prototypes and even mint dispensers, and the results can become rather… well, rotten. And rotten mints are just plain wrong.

One-switch games evolved as a tool to enable accessibility for disabled gamers, but they’re a damn useful exercise for developers in their own right. Offerings like Strange Attractors are excellent demonstrations of how versatile and interesting a project can become when given a one-button constraint, testing the developer’s ability to think in terms of context-sensitivity, emergent complexity and the various effects that any given environment can have on players. And sure, sometimes projects can be just plain fun (like the ever-delightful Dracula Cha Cha), but sometimes they’re also pretty astounding exercises in lateral thinking.

An interesting analogy would be to compare good game development to physical fitness (possibly the first and last time this will ever happen). For some poor, untrained bugger, doing a few laps across the swimming pool could pose quite a challenge. But if you force them to swim across the Atlantic — eliminating the practical drowning possibility, of course — those couple of laps suddenly become a lot less intimidating. Placing developers into such a restrictive situation can inspire levels of creativity and modes of thinking that otherwise may not have emerged.

A demonstration of some interesting one-switch games can be found in the Gamma IV games showcase, a collection of more than 150 titles which have also been featured at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Have you ever tried making a game with a weird and creative constraint? Throw in a comment below and tell the rest of us about it!

Arguably one of the most difficult skills that a game designer can learn is the ability to duly cut something from a game. This isn’t simply about minimalism, or dropping features due to time constraints: no, this is all about hunting down and removing a piece of your own hard work from a project because the core idea unavoidably sucks.

We all hate undoing any sort of work that we’ve put time and effort into, but it’s something that’s important in just about all aspects of life. Writing several drafts of an essay can improve the final script, graphic designers often make multiple concept drawings for a single image and even scientists needs to be open to scrapping older theories in favour of newer, more accurate knowledge models.

Some game developers, however, seem to consider themselves exempt from this particular consideration: they hold the strange belief that once any given feature makes it into a game, that feature needs to stay there indefinitely. Somehow, subsequent versions of the game need to work around said feature’s flaw and turn it into an asset — after all, the more direct route of completely removing the feature would be too painful to even consider.

"The Team Fortress Engineer: always accept the possibility of your hard work being completely *obliterated*."

Fair enough. It’s difficult to kill one’s darlings, even for those who know that it may well be the right thing to do. We all have bad ideas from time to time, and such ideas can vary in scope: maybe it’s an errant menu option, or an unwanted enemy type, or even an entire section of the game. Of course, the size doesn’t really matter — if it turns out that an idea is well and truly poor, it’s time to throw it into the garbage compactor.

Many games go through an initial expansion phase, particularly if they’re complex or experimental in nature: early builds will attempt as many ideas as possible, usually because the best way to test an idea’s effectiveness is to simply code it in and see how it turns out. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a massively popular Roguelike which has been in development for years, has taken this approach in many areas. This expansion, however, is tempered by an overall tightening of the design: along with every new feature added, the devs also remove classes, races, status effect groups and even entire spell trees — some of which have been in the game for a very long time.

Some players occasionally complain about the losses, but on the whole they tend to work towards a better game experience: even though the version number is at a mere 0.6, DCSS is successfully trimming a whole whack of game fat from its overall package.

Don’t be afraid of revising your own games: accept feedback intelligently, establish your project’s weak points and ask yourself honestly whether you can salvage them, or whether you need to remove them entirely. Remember that a wooden raft held together by frayed ropes is destined for trouble no matter how tough the wood may be. Strengthen your own raft by finding those weak points and replacing them with something better.

Anyone who has ever tried to make a game (or write a book / draw a comic series / insert long-term creative project here) is probably aware of just how gosh-darn difficult it is to keep going at it. Sure, that initial burst of creativity can fuel a working spree of a few hours, days, or even weeks if you’re lucky enough. But at some point or another, even the most focused mind working with the most amazing project is going to start wandering. Here’s some advice on keeping to the straight and narrow, creatively speaking:

1. Make shorter games

If you find yourself struggling with those big game plans of yours, try getting some practice with smaller projects first. If you find your average attention span for any given game to be about a week, start thinking about stuff that you can create in a few days or less. Not only does completing smaller projects give you a much bigger motivational boost than a mountain of half-finished Homerian epics, it also sets you up with a far more appreciable portfolio.

2. Be consistent

Sometimes our brains just deal better with clicking into steady routines. As tempted as you may be to engage in periods of frenetic game dev activity followed by long cooldowns, you’ll probably end up doing yourself a world of good by opting to work moderately — and consistently — instead. Giving your project even a little bit of love on a daily basis makes a huge difference when compared to working with sporadic “chunks” on the odd weekend. Remember: once you begin a work session, it becomes a lot easier to keep going!

3. Get organised

In general, people find it far easier to stick to commitments and work routines when they’re not operating in a realm of hazy uncertainty. Schedule time for your dev projects if at all possible — earmarking particular hours or days for your work is far more effective than simply thinking about “getting around” to it between games of DotA. Making yourself a nice, lightweight design doccie to sort your mess of a creative brain while you’re at it.

4. Chop it up

Jot down a bunch of project milestones and make them as small and frequent as possible. Doing this will help you avoid feeling overwhelmed by the task at hand, and allow you to feel a steady sense of accomplishment as you complete short-term goals. After all, it’s far less of a mental strain to consider your work in terms of the next sprite animation or level design than it is to think, “Holy crap, I’ve got a whole MMORPG to work on!”

5. Keep it fun

If you’re a hobbyist developer who happens to be game making for the pure fun of it, you can take quite a few liberties with your work. Hate designing menus? Make do with a crude splash screen, or just hop straight into the game! If you’re not into the art side of things, focus on games with small, simple sprites that can work with fewer animations. If your project really does become the Next Big Thing, there’s always time to work on the annoying details later. As long as you’re not completely abandoning or confusing the player, you should feel free to do what’s fun for you.

People tend to roll their eyes at the idea of making design documents for small-scale game projects. Fair enough: screwing around for a few hours to make a generic platformer doesn’t require the care, precision and co-ordination of, say, an Army of Two co-op snipe — it tends to be a more casual exercise with no concrete direction.

This in itself is okay, but creating a “lite” design doc for even your simplest of endeavours can move it from the realm of “something crappy and experimental” to the hallowed fields of “something crappy and experimental that has everybody going insane”. Taking your game seriously (or at least taking the time to document stuff) will benefit your final product immensely. The idea of becoming a more organised dev doesn’t guarantee passage to Awesomeville, but at least it can get you in the queue for a ticket.

For a real design doc, it helps to remember what you learned in those InfoSys lectures...

For a start, lite docs offer you the opportunity to clearly realise your own game goals. In the same way that crafting a one-sentence summary of your game is a notable marketing must, the ability to jot down and regularly refer to a few of your overarching design goals can be surprisingly valuable for the game creation process. Want to add a new enemy? Check your goal list: if it emphasises momentum-based platforming action, then you can design an enemy to slow you down or bounce you away instead of doing something cliché like firing bullets.

Scribbling these core goals somewhere, even if nothing else is added to your documentation, can help you fight off looming feature creep: throwing random movement schemes into a game intended to be purely deterministic would be a bad move, yet it’s one that’s startlingly easy to make if a written reference isn’t handy. And when the game gets bigger and more complicated, you may not always remember the reasons why you’ve gone in a particular direction: plans made at the beginning of a project may well become blurry or even forgotten by the time you’re halfway through. This, more than anything else, can cause undesirable departures from your core “game plan”.

A design doc is also just a great way of forcing you to think through a game in advance. Sometimes, a project’s balance or progression can be vastly improved with a few scrawls and some pseudo-maths without writing a single line of code: for example, taking a page to summarise all potential enemies and their statistics helps you spot and fix undesirable effects before they emerge in-game among a bunch of more dissociated game objects and states.

...but an indie hobbyist's "design doc" can be hacked together in any form desired, for any purpose needed!

Remember: a lite doc doesn’t need to be “proper” in any way. It doesn’t have to be a cast-iron set of rules that you adhere to. It can take the form of a comprehensive game plan, a stats sheet or even just a to-do list (if your game reaches any level of popularity at all, you can bet that there will be far more feedback and suggestions than you can easily remember). You can use a tool like WikidPad to organise your thoughts, or just fire up a handy copy of Notepad and start jotting down ideas.

The ability to communicate and store your ideas is an important life skill, so why not apply it within the realm of game dev? It’ll help you out immensely — both now and later.

Sometimes a game relies on the element of surprise to keep players on their toes and generate tense or action-filled moments. Horror titles do this a lot — sometimes a monster will leap out of the closet, or your in-game avatar will be shocked to find that dinner is actually a bowl of cabbage soup instead of a candy bar fountain. Some surprises don’t go for the scare element, but nevertheless require a quick reaction to sudden events: for example, conversation threads in Fahrenheit, or the end-of-stage block changes in Lode Runner.

There is, however, a certain hard limit to how surprised a player is allowed to be. Shock them in a safe environment, sure. Maybe even throw in some danger as long as it’s not immediately lethal. But for the love of gooballs and meat men, don’t ever go down the dark path of complete unfairness. Avoid dickery: give your players reasonable warnings.

Good games, old and new, know when to “telegraph” the right messages to players in advance. In classic platformers, bosses blink or shift posture before unleashing an attack. In Shadow Complex, power armoured opponents laboriously lift their arms before unleashing a killer strike. No matter how subtle these warnings may be, players take note of them and use them to do something before they get sliced/squished/punched to death. Like important clues in a detective game, advanced warnings of any sort — even if they’re just half a second in length — make the difference between a fun, challenging experience and a purely frustrating one. Being proactive is a good trait, but in the world of gamers, skilled reaction can be just as important.

For example, consider the two different gaming experiences offered by these Super Mario Bros. screenshots:

You’ll probably notice right away that simply having access to the full screen offers players a vast array of warning information not provided by the subsection. Leaps of faith aren’t required — platforms can actually be seen before a jump attempt is made, and the presence of enemies is noted long before the player can make actual contact with them. Even “surprise” elements such as cannon balls or Bowser’s fiery projectiles still offer a critical second or two of “Hey look, I’m over here!” before they actually meet the player.

Would you be able to play through the adventures of everybody’s favourite plumber if you only ever had access to Screen B? And even if you could, would you really want to?

Giving players suitable warning space is an oft-overlooked and rather subtle feature in game development. This is hardly surprising: it’s just one of those game elements which goes completely unnoticed when done properly, but ruins everything when it’s screwed up. If you put surprise or shock elements into games — particularly action titles — always ask yourself two questions:

(1) Could the player have reasonably predicted this behaviour or event?
(2) If not, does the player at least stand a reasonable chance of survival?

Consider these questions carefully: answering them honestly may just make the difference between a crappy and frustrating game, and a totally rad one. Nobody likes leaping off-screen only to be instantly chowed by a giant walnut — don’t make the same mistake in your own work. Give your players the break they deserve.

People who know me well enough are usually aware of my obsession with a Rogue-like game called Crawl. It’s said to be one of the most fiendishly difficult offerings from an already fiendishly difficult genre (victory is a mixed bag of “holy crap, I’ve finally won!” and “holy crap, what have I just wasted years of my life on?”), and stands alongside the likes of ADOM and Nethack as a popular activity on any masochistic gamer’s schedule.

What fascinates me most about the game is the documentation outlining its core design philosophy. Everything in the Crawl world is purposefully designed to be affected (and used) by the player in some way, from subterranean plants and mysterious altars to smoke clouds, water puddles, and even ordinary dungeon walls.

Better yet, every interaction is meaningful. Deciding how you’ll attack an enemy or deal with a dead body is never a straightforward process – the game is built in such a way that you’ll never have ridiculous quantities of any resource at your disposal. Even the most potent spellcasters will occasionally need to conserve mana and attack weaker enemies in hand-to-hand combat, while shop prices are structured in a way that forces careful spending of gold.

Crawl: a world where players should never, ever let their guard down

This is one of the secrets of absolutely awesome game design. Yes, a lot of games depend on rhythm and figuring out sequences through repetition, but other games inspire us through their lack of order – the idea that no matter how good you get, you’ll always have to pause and think about your next move and how it will affect you.

Some developers consider “obvious” decisions to be anti-game moments. If players know from the word go what needs to be done, the challenge is rendered moot and it becomes a matter of grinding one’s way to the finish line. The puzzle is solved in advance, the tactics have been figured out, and the intrigue is over with before a situation even begins. When victory is assured in such a manner, time investment becomes the only obstacle. And while steady progression and raw achievement accumulations are effective psychological hooks in themselves, the issue of meaningful gameplay can make the difference between a nice game and a truly great game.

If you’re designing a game (particularly a turn-based or puzzle title) remember that half of its value for a player will stem from making meaningful decisions. If there’s an obvious and one-dimensional way to approach all situations, consider designing instances and levels that force a rethink or even turn rules on their heads. When you add something to your game, make sure it has meaning and significance. Carefully consider every single element that you add, and try to give it depth – either on its own, or in the way it interacts with everything else. This doesn’t mean that you have to make a game as difficult and complicated as Crawl: far from it, in fact. The concept of meaningful design goes hand in hand with minimalism, and is especially important for indie developers who can’t afford to waste any resources on padding and weak concepts.

Do this, and you can turn your gaming experience from a routine chore into something that will engage and interest your players from beginning to end.

It’s rare to find a game where concepts like space and territory don’t play a pretty gosh-darn important role, but often people get too caught up on rules, enemies, and fun explosions to pay attention to some good ol’ level design. It is by no means something that’s easily mastered, but here are a few basic pointers that can help any beginner do their job a lot better:

Know that level design is everywhere

Action platformers such as the Castlevania series and puzzle games like 3D Logic rely on level design to shape encounters and (with the latter) drive lesser mortals insane. This fact is nice and obvious, but other kinds of games rely just as much on good level design – even if the link is more abstract. Branching options in text-based interactive fiction can be considered “level design”, and even chess serves as a good example of countless game scenarios emerging from one initial layout.

Any game which is considered spatially driven (no matter how tenuous that declaration may be) can benefit from good level design. Be mindful of this.

3D Logic. Oodles of complexity on one teeny tiny little cube.

Less is more

As the G-man once told Gordon Freeman: “The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.” When designing your own game, everything you lay down needs to be a potential Freeman: if you find yourself putting three spike traps into a narrow corridor, ask yourself whether you can achieve the same effect by placing just one instead. Always ask yourself which elements in your current level setup are game changers, and which ones could just be considered “spam”.

Sure, it may not sound like a problem right now, but every extra element that you place in your game has the potential to confuse or bore. Make players jump over a pit of lava? Cool! Make them jump across a hundred identical lava pits? They’ll probably come over to your house with a sledgehammer.

Go ahead and read or play anything to do with Anna Anthropy. That’s minimalism in action, and it works.

Yuck. No.

Place everything with a purpose. Everything

What’s the backbone of good level design? Enemies, pickups, and obstacles? Actually, it’s the stuff we don’t think about, like the placement of a single, inglorious wall tile. In this respect, the Megaman games are astoundingly well-designed: obstacles, ladders, cover, and platforms are all precisely placed to account for jump heights, enemy movements, firing arcs, and a whole combination of mind-boggling situations that make the difference between a newbie failing horribly and a veteran winning at everything forever.

A fascinating take on the idea is included in this blog post about reviving Road Rash which explains how its unusual use of the environment makes it a superior game. Think out of the box more. Better yet, think about the box itself.

A word in parting

Level design, as mentioned earlier, is a complex field – use these rules as a generalised starting point, but once you feel that you understand them, start breaking them! Discipline is not necessarily the same as limitation: if you feel a creative urge, go with it and see what happens.