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danctheduck's profile
Daniel Cook
Daniel Cook
Daniel Cook
@danctheduck

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Daniel Cook

@danctheduck

Chief Creative Officer: http://Spryfox.com  Blog: https://lostgarden.home.blog/  Game Design: Triple Town, Alphabear, Road Not Taken, Steambirds, Cozy Grove, etc

Seattle, WA, USA
lostgarden.home.blog
Joined July 2009

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    Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

    The joke goes: An expert game designer is 20x more effective than a newbie. They are correct 20% of the time instead of 1%. Why are game designers wrong 80% of the time? 🧵

    10:58 AM - 30 Dec 2020
    • 426 Retweets
    • 1,802 Likes
    • BatGojko (E2P) Inari ➡️ Helsinki ➡️ Game Camp (FR) Sam Alex Gedevani Aimee Zhu 阿敏 Cukia "Sugar" Kimani Ben McInnes 🔍 Igor Aaron "Scare Quotes" Lim 林家丰
    27 replies 426 retweets 1,802 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        Sometimes they are wrong by a little. Sometimes by a lot. Is it poor planning? Are they morons? An expert painter does not produce a completely broken picture 80% of the time. Why is this so hard?

        4 replies 0 retweets 150 likes
        Show this thread
      3. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        I lay a lot of blame on the much larger gap between authoring a thing, experiencing the thing and revising. - Many types of media (like drawing or painting) allow for real-time 'self-playtesting' with the author as the playtester. - Game design does not.

        6 replies 12 retweets 240 likes
        Show this thread
      4. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        When I draw, I am constantly engaged in a tight real-time iteration loop of authoring marks, viewing the marks, reacting to the experience as a viewer and adjusting the next steps. There are 1000s (often tens of 1000s) of feedback iterations.

        1 reply 2 retweets 197 likes
        Show this thread
      5. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        Same goes for writing. There are larger editing passes that occur at lower frequencies, but even within those passes, I'm in a real-time create-experience-revise loop. The first draft is really the 5000th draft of the 'self-playtesting' process.

        1 reply 1 retweet 159 likes
        Show this thread
      6. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        Now, when writing and drawing, I can't predict *exactly* how someone-who-is-not-me will react. Death of the Author and all that. But an experienced artist and writer can often get within the ballpark for a familiar target audience. Sad scenes are sad. Happy pictures are happy.

        2 replies 0 retweets 140 likes
        Show this thread
      7. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        Contrast that with games. :) Some issues where the create-experience-revise loop breaks down. 1. Much longer iteration times. If I'm lucky it takes minutes to make localized changes and test them out. More typically it takes longer.

        2 replies 1 retweet 166 likes
        Show this thread
      8. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        2. Due to interdependencies some changes can't be fully experienced by the player until months later when all systems are fully in place. I just worked on a game where it took 1.5 years before we were able to test the basic flow and balance. This is *common*.

        1 reply 10 retweets 231 likes
        Show this thread
      9. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        Imagine having to paint a picture blind and wait a year before you can look at it and see if you painted it correctly.

        1 reply 13 retweets 220 likes
        Show this thread
      10. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        3. Game developers often are corrupted playtesters. Many games involve mastery and knowledge. The designer, due to knowing what they know, becomes blind to issues new players will face. Empathy only goes so far, even when designers roleplay the 'new player'.

        4 replies 6 retweets 236 likes
        Show this thread
      11. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        4. Other systems (social systems, emergent complexity, proc gen, randomness, exponentials) are just hard to mentally visualize. We can plan them out, but the experience of playing them is often (deliberately) a surprise.

        1 reply 0 retweets 146 likes
        Show this thread
      12. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        There is no accurate 'self-playtesting' for these systems. A game designer's has limited ability 'play the game in their head' and so real (slow) playtesting is required.

        2 replies 1 retweet 134 likes
        Show this thread
      13. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        I don't know of a perfect fix for any of this, but we have some tools.

        2 replies 0 retweets 104 likes
        Show this thread
      14. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        A. Sketches: Movie makers (who also have extended pipelines) create low fidelity animatics that get to viewing the experience faster and cheaper. Game developers create prototypes that serve a similar role. It doesn't work perfectly for all systems, but better is than nothing.

        2 replies 1 retweet 145 likes
        Show this thread
      15. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        B. Genre expertise: Teams keep rebuilding games in the same genre over and over again. It might take years, but eventually you get to those 10,000 iterations. In large part, this is how expert designers even get up to that not-so-respectable 20% rate.

        4 replies 1 retweet 132 likes
        Show this thread
      16. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        C. Community playtests: A large population of players + live development (early access, games-as-service) maximizes playtest feedback. Richer feedback can help counterbalance the slow iteration.

        3 replies 1 retweet 113 likes
        Show this thread
      17. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        D. Content systems friendly to late-stage fixes: If you know that you are almost always going to be making big changes due to late feedback, you can build flexible pipelines that are easy to refactor.

        2 replies 0 retweets 129 likes
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      18. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        A proc gen system that creates 1000 levels constructed from modular components and centralized formulas is easier to tweak than 1000 handmade levels. Neither change is safe right before release, but at least the former is feasible.

        3 replies 0 retweets 108 likes
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      19. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        E. Planning up front. There's room for more waterfall style approaches. Particularly if you are reusing code, tools and have an experienced team. It works for things you know that you know. But this is surprisingly limited in other areas that comprise the bulk of game design.

        2 replies 0 retweets 111 likes
        Show this thread
      20. Daniel Cook‏ @danctheduck 30 Dec 2020

        So unlike writing or painting, the meta of game design is painstakingly building a process where you can iterate as quickly as possible, while making as few changes as possible, while still enabling big change to be feasible late in the process.

        13 replies 8 retweets 215 likes
        Show this thread
      21. End of conversation

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