Blog 1: Design Delve

Hey there, hope your day is well, my name is Jack (or JacknCheese online) and I’m Surprise Studios’ designer and artist. I’d like to share our process for making design decisions and iterating our games. To clarify, this is not saying our process is the best way to do it for everyone, but to describe what works well for us.

Explore and Exploit

For our games, we go through cycles of exploring gameplay ideas and exploiting them. When exploring, we’re looking for the fun through new gameplay changes. Once we’ve found it, we exploit it by pushing those changes further, usually by adding similar content.

Explore

To start exploring we outline goals to push the gameplay in a certain direction. We then start identifying specific ways to reach those goals, be it a new item, changing the gameplay loop, balance adjustments, etc. With this in mind we start to test our new ideas as soon as they’re functional to see if they really did push us towards our initial goals (and to see if they actually work in-game). If our implemented idea was unsuccessful we go back to the drawing board and try again. If it’s successful, we begin to exploit it.

A whiteboard containing design sketches and goals for Come Hell or Holy Water
Ignore my terrible handwriting, here we identified our goals for the next cycle of development on CHHW and sketched some ideas for one of the changes.

Exploit

To exploit new gameplay ideas is dependent on what the change was in the first place. Sometimes to exploit a fun mechanic we add more of that content to the game, like the explosive barrels in Come Hell or Holy Water. We’re working on a suite of new interactions in the environment for players to have fun with because of how successful the barrels were.

Screenshot of documentation containing new gameplay elements
Possible new interactions you can find in the world

 

Sometimes exploiting a new gameplay idea means you realize some parts of your gameplay don’t work, and you need to change them. We recently finished a custom cursor system that players use to select options on-screen at the same time. We found that it was too slow and took players away from the action and away from the fun. So we’ve been designing a new way for players to buy weapons from the merchant and make pacts with angels and demons from other worlds.

The old cursor UI system mentioned above

 

Design sketch for a reworked merchant
Design sketch for a reworked merchant

Fail Fast

A common saying I’ve heard is “fail fast.” Usually this is in the context of education and business but it relates to the game design process as well. The idea behind the “fail fast” mentality is to learn through your mistakes by jumping into the fire and finding the fuel. Game design is similar; it’s all about iteration. Making something, trying it, identifying problems, and fixing them for your intended result.

When you design a game, you want to fail fast. Start making the simplest version of your game or changes, and analyze the result, then repeat until it works. Game development is incredibly time consuming, and efficiency is key to rapid improvement. So build fast, test often, and don’t be afraid to pivot your game in a new direction. If there’s one thing you take away, let it be this: No game is fun the first time you run it. Explore new gameplay ideas, exploit your success, and fail fast.

We can’t thank you enough for your support, you can expect to see these blogs more often in the future with sneak peeks into upcoming content for CHHW and news on where you can playtest.