So, it’s “Size Doesn’t Matter Day” today? A worthy topic of discussion for a game designer, if ever there was one. I don’t think I would ever say that it doesn’t matter – I’ve probably spent more time over the last ten years pondering issues of game size and game scope than any other design element – but if there is one message that I would like people to take from this discussion, it’s simply that BIGGER ISN’T NECESSARILY BETTER. A game’s size should be appropriate to the game’s form, and what constitutes an “appropriate” size may often be smaller than you think.

One of my favourite games of all time, and a game that has influenced me a lot in terms of its design, is the original Sega Rally, the first major game by the brilliant designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Space Channel 5, Rez, Lumines). This is a game that I have sunk dozens of hours into over the years, trying to find ways to shave another half-second off my time in order to finish each race, then to finish the game in first place, and finally to gain enough extra time to finish the bonus Lakeside course and unlock the elusive Stratos. At various times over the last 15 years I have found myself hooked on the arcade game, the PC port, the Sega Saturn port, and finally the PS2 re-release. Sega Rally is like digital crack to me.

It is a game that manages to be exciting and rewarding to novice and expert players alike, without ever needing to resort to crude measures like difficulty settings, or (god forbid) rubber-banding AI. And yet, from start to finish, Sega Rally is a game that takes about five minutes to play through. The genius of it is that it makes you want to play over that five minutes again and again, obsessively, until you are intimiately familiar with every nuance of every moment of that five minute experience.

Another game I got hooked on a while back was a little indie game called Tower Of Heaven (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/544332). This game only takes about 10-15 minutes to complete the first time around, but after you have got to the end, the game then challenges you to go through again and try to set a faster time. When it was released there was a little speedrun competition held on the TIGsource forums and I spent an entire day playing it over and over, looking for ways to get to the end just a little bit faster. It was seriously intense! In the end, the winning time was, I think, 2:18 to complete the entire game – my best time was a few seconds longer than that. I definitely didn’t expect such an intense experience to come out of playing such a small, simple game.

Now, the point I’m trying to make isn’t just that big things can sometimes come in small packages. The point is, neither of these games would have engendered this kind of obsessive replaying if they were significantly longer games. I would never have speedrun Tower of Heaven over and over for an entire day if it was going to take an hour to get to the end each time. No way. And I would never have gained the mastery necessary to really appreciate Sega Rally’s perfectly-tuned gameplay if I had to memorise thirty different tracks (a point that seemed to be entirely lost on the makers of the bloated and clunky Sega Rally 2008). The games’ small size made the challenge manageable; made it appealing and enticing rather than overwhelming and exhausting.

And now, I find myself thinking about size again, as I am in the process of designing my own “micro-game”, Cletus Clay Cow Patrol for the iPhone/iPad. The entire game, from start to finish, clocks in at around 16 minutes, and you don’t even have to play through from the start each time. Alex and I are currently in discussion as to whether that’s long enough, or whether we need to extend it and put another few levels in. People love to accuse games of being too short after all – they seldom complain about games being too long, even though they quite frequently are. But this is a game that has been designed with competitive high-scoring in mind. I want people to play it over and over, to find ways to squeeze those extra points out and beat their friends’ scores. If I can achieve that, then it might not matter so much if the game is short.

More than that, if high-scoring is the aim it might actually be BETTER to keep it short.

Jamie Cheng

Jamie Fristrom

Alex Amsel

Steve Swink

Quarter To Three thread started by Chris Hecker

Rob Jagnow

I’ve been back-and-forth a bit on the subject of the game’s music for a long time. I had recorded a few tracks a long time ago; mostly raucous bluegrass-inflected stuff as you might expect, but I don’t want to simply do the obvious thing. It’s going to have to have some banjo in there – that’s inevitable – but I also want to mix in a chiptune/old-school arcade game angle, and some retro sci-fi ambience as well. And find a way to put these elements together in a way that sounds genuine, rather than just a pastiche.

Banjo-tastic

Anyway, these are a couple of instruments I’ve had for years, which I have recently been trying to repair. The first one is a banjo mandolin which I’ve always hated – it’s fiddly to play, impossible to keep in tune, and has a tone that is reminiscent of a traffic accident. But having recently taken off half the strings, dropped the action significantly, and restrung it as a banjo ukulele instead, I think it may have some potential after all. The other is my Yamaha 20M analogue synthesiser, which I love, but it stopped working several years ago. Being 30 years old now, a lot of its internal electronics have simply worn out, and I am slowly replacing all the fritzed components with new ones. It’s a big job – it’s like a TARDIS in there – but I hope I can successfully get it working again one day.

Together, these instruments kind of sum up what I’m trying to do with the music for Cletus Clay. Minimal, but with character. A mixture of retro and retro’s granddad. Stubbornly analogue, lo-fi, anachronistic and unusual. And just to make things more interesting, I’m going to attempt to create this new kind of music while simultaneously developing a video game…

Recently I’ve been playing with ideas for a tutorial area. I always had a rough idea of how this would go, but as usual it comes out a little bit different once you actually sit down and try to work through all the details. The idea is that Cletus has a barn decked out with combat training equipment that he uses to prepare for Armageddon…or trespassers.

Slice! Splurt! Splat!

Squishy1: Any idea what Lost is all about? Squishy2: Aliens

After turning out hundreds of animation frames of the aliens performing all kinds of actions, this week I spent some time working on things for them to do while doing nothing. Because at the moment, when they do nothing, they really do nothing. They just stand there, and maybe blink a bit.

I hadn’t really given much thought to what they would do when they were doing nothing. I assumed they would be pretty busy doing stuff most of the time. But it turns out that it’s actually desirable for them to be idle quite a lot of the time, at least when they aren’t actively pursuing the player. Otherwise they just tend to pace around the place in a fairly unnatural-looking way. Either that or they just stand there, blinking.

So this week I got out the old alien model and added some fearsome new moves to their repertoire. Now the Aliens have such fancy moves as flexing their hands, folding their arms, putting their hands on their hips, gesticulating, and scratching their arses.