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

We’re all talking about game length, something uppermost in my mind as we plan how long to make Cow Patrol on iPhone/iPad. I say how long, perhaps I really mean how deep – how much replay value we plan to have.

One of the most comment complaints from game journalists is that games are too short. As has become obvious within the many reviews of indie hit Limbo, a high quality game will still be pulled up and criticised over game length.

One of the most common questions publishers ask when pitched a game is, “how long is it?” On the assumption that they aren’t just being over-friendly, what they really want to know is how long it will take to play through the game; they want to know how much bang they get for their buck.

But how long is a game and how long should it be?

Let’s take an indie title like Castle Crashers. It took me an evening to play the game from start to finish. Although I loved it, I’ve not played it much since. Many others have been playing it through repeatedly, however, in order to unlock all the items and ramp up their characters. The game was much shorter for me than many other players.

How about Portal? At its heart, this is a simple puzzle game which took perhaps an afternoon to complete. However, I enjoyed playing Portal much more than many other games, even games which I may have played for much longer. I played World of Warcraft for far more hours than I care to remember but it’s not a better game than Portal because of its seemingly never-ending play-time. It’s a completely different game and needs to be judged accordingly. As a matter of fact, I played Portal through twice, the second time with my dad trying to solve the puzzles (there is no way he could handle FPS controls but he enjoyed the game otherwise). That said, Portal doesn’t have the replay value of Castle Crashers.

Castle Crashers, Portal and World of Warcraft – three games of different genres with wildly different playing times. More than that, they are going to be played in different ways by different gamers, with no one way being the right way. I’d put Limbo firmly in the Portal category by the way – most players will only ever play it once, and not even all the way through if they get stuck.

So, we don’t even have a simple way to measure the longevity of a game because it’s not easily defined. Not a good start!

How long should a game be? It seems to me that it depends who you ask.

Journalists seem to want their games long. Perhaps this is because they’ve been spoiled by those big AAA games of the past. Times have changed and I think journalists need to move with them.

Teenagers and students, who seem to comprise the vocal minority on gaming forums, gripe about game length – more so with full price titles than indie games. Perhaps this is because they don’t have the constraints on their time that take hold as the years go by – family and work for example. I certainly don’t have time for most games any more. Smaller games fit better in my life these days.

Publishers want long games with substantial content. I think this is because they are afraid of criticism from journalists and the vocal minority. It’s a terrible flaw within the industry that game length is prioritised over quality but that really does seem to be the general way of things.

Game developers want shorter games, generally speaking. This is because making bigger games costs money. Making games is a phenomenally risky business to be in, so making a game containing days of content for players to trawl through is simply not sensible. However, a trend within iPhone, iPad and Social Network games seems to be to launch small and then build the game up if people take to it. I’m a big fan of this approach but it’s rather scary and, to be truthful, it’s proving tough to get my head around.

And the majority of players? I think they just want a great game. Sure, game length will come into it, but if the gaming itself is of very high quality then I don’t think the game needs to last 10 hours for the average player. Portal and Limbo can be completed within 2-3 hours for a cost of perhaps £5-10. It costs £30 upwards to watch a football match (often poor quality as they can’t be ‘pre-reviewed’ unlike games) and £7 for a cinema ticket to see a 90 minute film (plus the excessively priced snacks of course).

I could write much more on the comparative costs of other entertainment but this is covered in some of the other blogs below and far more eloquently than I could put it.

So does size matter?

Yes I think it does, but it’s also just one of many factors that go into the melting pot that is a game. I must admit that I would like to see journalists not be critical of shorter games when they are at a lower price point, particularly when they are from independent developers. I think the typical indie game audience is perfectly happy with a short but polished experience, and perhaps this is more true of the wider audience then we all realise. Let’s not allow the vocal minority to speak for the majority.

To sign off, I shall just point you to a game of perfect length right here, and please read some of the other thoughtful posts on the subject below:

Anthony Flack

Jamie Cheng

Ron Carmel of 2DBoy

Chris Hecker

Jonathan Blow

Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games

Cliff Harris of Positech Games

Matt Gilgenbach of 24 Caret Games

Noel Llopis

Martin Pichlmair of Broken Rules

Scott Macmillan of Macguffin Games

Peter Jones of Retro Affect

Lau Korsgaard

Eitan Glinert of Fire Hose Games

Chris DeLeon

Greg Wohlwend of Intuition Games

Jeffrey Rosen of Wolfire

Michael Todd

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…

The future of gaming

Have a look at the graphics for one of the minigames… running on a clay arcade cabinet! Well, sort of – this is just a mock-up for now. Because the hands are seen in greater detail than they are in the rest of the game I had to experiment to find the best way of animating them.

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.