When I see a game design or a completed game, it takes me about 30 seconds to know if the game designer is early in his or her career.

The clue?

When I look at the game screen, I see too much going on. Too many things on screen, too many moving parts and pieces, too many things for the player to do at once. To a player it’s overwhelming.

How did I learn this?

I made the mistake when I designed my first full game (NanoTek Warrior, an arcade shooter for the PS1).  I was so worried about there being something fun going on that I overloaded each level with enemy ships and structures to dodge.

It was unplayable. Even after I later got a clue and went back and redesigned the levels, it was still too overwhelming for most people.

My mistake is that while I thought I was following an existing “formula” for making a game, I still didn’t really understand what I was doing in terms of “making fun”.

I still needed to learn about how to create the right sense of pacing for the experience I was delivering.

For a different perspective, think of your favorite movie. There are fast parts, slower part, exciting parts and emotional parts all crafted into a singular linear experience.

It’s the pacing and mix of these different “parts” which make your favorite movie interesting and enjoyable.

The same thing holds for games.

If you want to see a great example of pacing in a game, check out any of the levels in Mario Galaxy.

Have a game you love or love to hate?

The month of December flew by, but not before I got a chance to spend some quality time with some great games.

The ones that I liked most:

Mario Galaxy, BioShock, Mass Effect, Drawn To Life, Pain (PS3 download), the free Hex game (360 download).

Loved finishing Mario Galaxy, but haven’t gone back yet like on Mario 64 to get all the stars, find all the secrets etc. The creepiness and world created in BioShock is lots of fun. I esp like how they tell the story with tape recordings. It doesn’t slow the action and I can listen or not.

A special note about “Drawn to Life”, can’t wait for the sequel. There seems to be so much opportunity with the basic concept just waiting to be played with.

Anyone else enjoying this game as much as I am?

Who would have figured the right handed joystick skills I developed on Mario64 could translate so easily to my left hand on the Wii?

In all seriousness, I’m finding the game enjoyable, interesting, not particularly challenging (yet), but very reminiscent of the experience I enjoyed while playing Mario64.

As a game developer, the things I find most interesting in the game design are:

1. How tossing in falling “star bits” can instantly liven up the game experience in areas where the game play might get a bit slow

2. The ability to have a second player collect star bits, stun enemies and in general help out the main player. Perfect way for the younger ones to get some great play time with an older brother or mom and dad.

3. How the new controller for the Wii takes the classic experience a step forward and then how “going upside down” takes it even a further step forward. There have been games that have done similar “upside down tricks” before, but in Mario Galaxy, it just seems natural. Bet it was fun for the designers to be thinking in all the directions 3D can provide.

4. Fun, light and bright levels that don’t draw on violence, nightmarish fears or shock to involve a player. The bee levels and the bubble level are great examples of content that feels fresh even though similar things have been done before.

I want to make a special note about the “upside down play” aspect of the game. It’s long been said that we “create worlds” when we make video games. Most worlds so far though are digital mockups of worlds fairly similar to our real world, especially in terms of things like gravity and time. The “Matrix” broke the barrier to freeing us from “regular time” by using “bullet time” and games followed suit. Mario helps break the barrier of “normal gravity” of platformers by introducing their new “relative gravity” concept. Very cool. Imagine what the future holds when more of these traditional type of constraints are broken….

And immediately dominates by selling 250k units in the first week.

Apparently it also sold more units than the next 9 top selling titles put together (more in this article from GamesIndustry.biz).

The next bit of interesting data from the same charts is how many of the top 10 titles were on each platform.

The tally:

6 of the top 10 selling games were on the DS

2 of the top 10 selling games were on the Wii

1 of the top 10 selling games was on the 360

1 of the top 10 selling games was on the PS2

Another sign of the strength of hand helds for sure. I love it when companies know their stuff and just execute no matter what the conventional industry thinking is. Go Nintendo!

I just finished up 3 days of talking to a random sample of kids (8 to 14 yrs old) from the Los Angeles area about how math is used in developing video games.

One of the cool parts about doing this sort of work is that I get to find out from the kids which machines they have and they games they are most anticipating.

What I found:

1. Seems like an even split between kids claiming to have Xbox360 machines vs Wii machines at home. It was extremely rare to find someone claiming to have a PS3 at home.

2. Most the boys had all heard of Halo and knew that Halo 3 was coming out soon, with the older boys showing the most excitement about it.

3. As a group, the boys also were very much waiting for Smash Brothers Brawl as well. The younger aged boys in the group there held as much interest in Smash Bros as the older ones did for Halo. They also seemed to have more certainty that they would actually be allowed to play Smash Brothers Brawl (as opposed to the uncertainty that their parents would allow them to play Halo).

4. There was confusion about which platforms are needed for which games. The confusion was painfully clear with one student saying he would buy a Wii just to play Halo3. Anyone else see an opportunity here?

5. The girls that attended the event were barely interested in Halo 3 at all, but had a fair amount of interest in Mario Galaxy. None of them had ever heard of Spore.

6. One of the adults helping organize the event mentioned having a PS3 at home that would likely soon be turned into a media server because it wasn’t being used for gaming. Another mentioned that they might buy the PS3 and use it as a “Blue Ray player that just happens to also play games”.

Draw conclusions as you will, but there’s nothing like interacting with hundreds of kids to find out what is on their mind about gaming.

I spent a good part of last week preparing for a presentation to kids about how we use math and science when developing video games.

Part of that prep time was spent looking at screen shots for Mario Galaxy and that process re-ignited my passion for that game.

GameSpy had some recent hands-on time and has good things to say: GameSpy Hands-on with Mario Galaxy

This game is set to ship in November 2007.