13 ms·

Game Design Curriculum

265 points by hmmazoids 6y ago

tebruno99 6y ago
Bad joke sorry
- BoysenberryPi 6y ago
  I appreciate the snark as much as the next guy but I don't believe Hacker News is the right forum for it.
  - RobRivera 6y ago
    One could say such snark is...boysenous
  - tebruno99 6y ago
    I agree, sorry.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  Why has it become so popular recently to shit on something because of who made it? Is this not just a poor ad hominem?
  - tebruno99 6y ago
    In this case because they are positioned to become a form of role model of these students. Who will eventually find out that their favorite company can be horrible to negligible consequence.
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      You could justify almost any such attack like this. Can you not just appreciate what you’re given here for free, for once? The effort people have put into this? Just imagine pouring months into something like this and getting your post as a thanks.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - nonconvergent 6y ago
    Because they still benefit. They benefit when people consume their products and they benefit when they're given a forum within the community.
- ev1 6y ago
  People are downvoting you, but this is actually a ridiculously common thing in games. The entire game industry is pretty bad in general compared to tech or otherwise: one huge concept is that you have to "love the game"; you're willing to take low pay, low benefits, deal with overrun unpaid overtime hours, etc. because you "love the game". Most game companies freely tell you about how disposable you are because they have hordes of players, many willing to work for free. Riot has serious problems with this. The C-level that was repeatedly reported (for years) for grabbing testicles, dryhumping employees or farting on them is still in their role and hasn't been removed - they were just suspended for a month or two and reinstated. The gender-discrimination forced new legal counsel just a few months ago due to possible collusion.
  - echelon 6y ago
    How the hell does this fly? Why haven't employees sued the hell out of the company? Why don't game engineers demand better? Start a company with decent work hours and comp and refuse to work elsewhere. The games industry is sickly and broken.
    - ev1 6y ago
      From 2018 case (just google "riot farting" honestly): https://html2-f.scribdassets.com/6454fy6neo6mwj3w/images/5-70337ee921.jpg https://html2-f.scribdassets.com/6454fy6neo6mwj3w/images/5-7... > Why don't game engineers demand better? Start a company with decent work hours and comp and refuse to work elsewhere. Some do! I would imagine many indie game companies are not like this. There's kind of a split, where you have "strictly-business" companies - many Asian MMORPG publishers that have a subsidiary in the US are like this. There is no gaming culture, it's just a standard workday. You might get some plushies at the office or a poster or two. The "cool" companies, like Riot and Blizzard, complete with campus statues of game characters and a culture to match, conference rooms named after game characters or items, are what gamers seem to want to look up to, though. If you've played any MMORPG long enough, you'll see a lot of recurring themes, kids gleefully willing to "answer support tickets for free" and "I'll be a GM they don't even need to pay me" -- this probably is part of the reason that produces toxic culture, along with the fact that if you strictly hire only gamers, you're already going to almost certainly have a higher toxicity demographic in the first place, depending on the game. If we're talking something like Harvest Moon or similar, of course there's going to be close to no toxic players. Riot's primary product involves matchmaking you into 4 other random people that you have to cooperate with for anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour or more, where one person can lose the game for everyone by repeatedly dying to the enemy and making the enemy stronger. If you leave, you get banned or penalised for abandoning your team; this includes virtually unwinnable dragged-out hour long matches. You can kind of see how this playerbase would differ from, say, the usual singleplayer or co-op indie or puzzle game. It's very difficult to boycott a game you've spent tens of thousands of hours on - a game that you're good at, that you have friends on, that you've spent heaps of cash shop currency on lootboxes for. Even if you desperately dislike the developer. This happens for many companies - look at all the loudmouthed people on reddit et al screaming about how no one should support EA or Blizzard, and then a month later go buy the new expansion pack for something and buy lootboxes and forget about it.
Animats 6y ago
They put a PowerPoint into a PDF into a scrollable window too small to display a full slide. Ouch. The course itself is interesting, in that it's not a programming course at all. It's about what makes a game fun. Download the PDF and look at page 6, which has the useful info.
- ihuman 6y ago
  There's a download link above the PDF view that allows you to view/download the PDF directly
- asutekku 6y ago
  Game designers in most companies do not program.
tester756 6y ago
I must say that they're probably the most competent studio on the market LoL is probably the only game that I play (maybe once a year I decide to spend up to 50h over some peroid on one title like GTA V or something) for years and it almost always feels "fresh" and very competitive.
- young_unixer 6y ago
  I hate that they release new champions so often. My incentive to play is climbing the ranked ladder and, like you, I play in bursts separated by months, but each time I start playing again there are like 5 new champions whose abilities I don't know or understand, which keeps me at a disadvantaged position. I don't have time to study all the new champs abilities. I think their high champion-release rate drives the casual, but competitive-minded players away.
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    They release like 5 champions a year, most of them in late summer and late fall. Most months there are no new champions.
- Trasmatta 6y ago
  I think there's lots of studios just as competent or more competent than Riot. They've made so few games, it's hard to compare them to other studios in that way.
  - tester756 6y ago
    That's very fair The way they do esport is huge part of their success
  - debaserab2 6y ago
    I agree. I do not like Riot's "startup" approach to game design, where gameplay elements are plucked from the most popular titles on the market. The games have never felt innovative to me, they just seem like they took from everyone else and then focused on iteration so much that it gives the features and gameplay a level of polish that a lot of games don't get (especially from a esports vantage point). The art style also feels so accessible to me that it lacks a certain soul that defines a good game.
mooman219 6y ago
(Riot's less than stellar history aside) I see these takes on game design a lot, and they're interesting to see because everyone takes their own stance on how to construct a fun game from distinct smaller concepts. Yahtzee’s Dev Diary [0] talks a lot about loops (And I give it a watch recommendation), while at your average GDC talk you hear about the concept of pillars [1] and their role in shaping games. I'm interested to hear if anyone else has resources on other game design takes. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbArC2mvokQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbArC2mvokQ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzQDVtysXjA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzQDVtysXjA
- mattmanser 6y ago
  I've not played duskers (2). But from watching the video, sounds like he was super lucky. A happy accident, rather than an utter disaster. One of those definite cases of survivorship bias.
  - rdw 6y ago
    I was privy to some of the development process of Duskers, and I would say that Tim worked pretty hard to create opportunities for happy accidents to befall him. There were several other prototypes that he was working on at the same time, but only Duskers crossed the finish line. This is not uncommon among game developers I've known; generally they're bursting with ideas and have many in-progress experiments in various stages at any time. It's a little like an incubator, where there's a diversity of ideas in order to have a better chance of having one be a hit. There is survivorship bias, but it's kinda all happening within the one designer.
- trynewideas 6y ago
  The three books I've read and then gone back to over the years are: - Brenda Romero (credited on the book as Brenda Braithwaite) and Ian Schreiber's Challenges for Game Designers[1], which uses a series of design exercises to illustrate concepts like balancing and mechanical loops, and at least from a cursory glance at the Riot curriculum is very similar in structure to it. The exercises still help me bootstrap my understanding of mechanics that I don't always employ in designs, and still occasionally inspire new ideas just by going through one almost like a karate kata. - Raph Koster's Theory of Fun for Game Design[2], which is more introspective about the nature of games rather than a pragmatic how-to guide. Koster's views are often contentious, particularly on defining what a game is or can be, but I usually go back to this book when I want to step back and remind myself what kinds of audiences might be in my blind spot for a mechanic or concept — I might think something is fun because I think it's fun, without interrogating why, and even if I don't agree with Koster on how he goes about defining it the book does a good job of demonstrating how one builds a definition in the first place. - Jesse Schell's Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses[3], which just got a 3rd edition last year that I haven't had a chance to read yet. It's a framework for interrogating a design — and I say "interrogating" literally, as the lenses are a set of questions to ask of your design — that touches on mechanics but also how viable an idea is to make into a game in the first place. Walking an idea through the lenses serves like a second pair of "eyes" when I don't have another person handy to bounce that idea off of in depth. There's a card deck version[3] of just the lenses that are handier to have on the desk. It's likely that there are newer books out there covering similar ground;[4] these are the ones that were around when I came up through my first game design experiences around 2010-2012.[5] These are all high level enough to be pretty general works on the nature and purpose of all types of games, even if all of them have digital games at or near front-of-mind, without being so focused on theory and philosophy that they don't give you actionable things to apply in a design. (Also, I've found that all three of those names are polarizing, often for very different reasons. I find the works valuable regardless; books don't tend to yell at me in a Discord chat or on social media when I read them, which is a nice change of pace.) [1] https://www.amazon.com/Challenges-Game-Designers-Brenda-Brathwaite/dp/158450580X https://www.amazon.com/Challenges-Game-Designers-Brenda-Brat... [2] https://www.powells.com/book/theory-of-fun-for-game-design-2nd-edition-9781449363215 https://www.powells.com/book/theory-of-fun-for-game-design-2... [3] https://www.schellgames.com/art-of-game-design/ https://www.schellgames.com/art-of-game-design/ — and of course there's a booster pack available, because game designers are insatiable post-publication tinkerers [4] Procedural Storytelling in Game Design, co-edited by Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress and Tanya X. Short of a bunch of procedural indie games and formerly Funcom, is exciting in concept, and Darius Kazemi is always fun to read on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Procedural-Storytelling-Design-Tanya-Short/dp/1138595306 https://www.amazon.com/Procedural-Storytelling-Design-Tanya-... Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design, by Geoffrey Engelstein and Issac Shalev, looks like it ports the cookbook concept from software development to tabletop games, which feels right up my alley: https://www.amazon.com/Building-Blocks-Tabletop-Game-Design/dp/1138365491 https://www.amazon.com/Building-Blocks-Tabletop-Game-Design/... (It seems notable that both of those are by CRC Press, which I associate more with academic textbooks, but neither really fits the usual bill for them.) Calling it "newer" might be a misnomer, but I'm desperate to get around to the illustrated The Making Prince of Persia: Journals and wish there were more books with the perspective of a journal during development — watching along as opportunities open and close, instead of as a post-mortem that's colored by the end product and invariably focused on what went wrong/how to avoid it. Also it just looks gorgeous: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Journals-1985-1993-Illustrated/dp/0578627310 https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Journals-1985-19... [5] Steve Swink's Game Feel has been on my list of to-reads on the subject forever, but I've never gotten around to it: https://www.powells.com/book/game-feel-9780123743282 https://www.powells.com/book/game-feel-9780123743282 I bounced off Katie Salen/Eric Zimmerman's Rules of Play, but it's lauded enough that it's hard to omit it. If you like Koster's ideas around orthography in game design and want to see a predecessor that takes it further and issues prescriptive rules, or if you have more of an interest in design criticism than creation and want an intro to a critical vocabulary, it might appeal more: https://www.powells.com/book/rules-of-play-game-design-fundamentals-9780262240451 https://www.powells.com/book/rules-of-play-game-design-funda... Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop is a great read, and even more well suited to a classroom environment than Challenges for Game Designers, but it's _too_ classroom-y for my tastes, focused more on getting from point A to a very specific and more directed point B, instead of laying out a more open-ended task where the boundaries can be a creative aid. I've never felt compelled to return to it as a result, but there are folks who swear by it, so it's still worth mentioning: https://www.amazon.com/Game-Design-Workshop-Playcentric-Innovative-dp-1138098779/dp/1138098779 https://www.amazon.com/Game-Design-Workshop-Playcentric-Inno...
madrox 6y ago
Despite thinking Riot has excellent insight into competitive game development, I'm pretty cynical about their recent wave of sharing since it wreaks of image repair. It doesn't matter what there is to learn from Riot if the culture is poisonous, and I don't believe it's changed much since the last wave of allegations. It's a shame, since this looks pretty substantive, but I'd rather learn this elsewhere.
- mooman219 6y ago
  It's extremely difficult in Riot's case to separate the content they make from the culture of their company, and I agree with you that it's not really possible to do. I think that this resource is still an interesting collection of material and it's worth the time evaluating on its merits while keeping the perspective of the company's values in mind.
- Jare 6y ago
  They have held an extremely interesting tech blog for years, but it makes sense that they would talk more about design only after they had more than one game on the market.
withinrafael 6y ago
I was genuinely interested in this, however, after clicking around I couldn't find anything more than PDFs with empty areas for taking notes and vague curriculum module descriptions. Am I missing something? Perhaps there's missing content when viewing the page via mobile. Will revisit from my PC later.
- mooman219 6y ago
  The content here is a guide on how to teach the concepts outlined in the curriculum, and is not necessarily a self instruction course. See module one: https://www.riotgames.com/en/urf-academy/fun-and-feeling https://www.riotgames.com/en/urf-academy/fun-and-feeling
  - withinrafael 6y ago
    Sure, but how do you teach these concepts without a source of truth? I can't find any reference material. Edit: Just discovered the lesson plan download link under the headings, separate from the buttons at the bottom of the page. It helps, though am still confused about how anyone would use this material.
jimbob45 6y ago
IMHO the biggest innovation Riot brought to the industry was player outreach. They were the first to heavily (30+ posts per day across multiple devs) interact with their player base. Even better, their patch notes were the first to have paragraphs explaining each change. Even better, they stuck to a bi-weekly patch cycle religiously, unlike Blizzard, who had to be begged to put out a patch every six months. To players who actually played SC2 and LoL circa 2011, it wasn’t a surprise when LoL became the premiere e-sport and SC2 withered away.
- CyanBird 6y ago
  I never picked up lol early, but I do vividly recall all the screeching wars between Hon (heroes of newerth) , Dota and lol people The agreement was that lol won because it was free, tho it looked and played worse than either Dota or Hon, but the free aspect won riot the entire emerging markets sector Me as a SC2 player through and through I just looked down on them overall, so feel free to correct me if I am wrong
munificent 6y ago
Game design (whether computer or even board games) is a valuable topic to learn even if you never make a real game. If you make any kind of thing that people use, learning a little about how to think like a game designer can help you make things that are more rewarding and pleasant to use. One way to think of videogames is that they are useless software. Imagine a word processor that couldn't save or print files. Or a compiler that didn't generate executables that ran on any machine but your own. Why would anyone ever use such a pointless thing? Well, games are in many ways exactly that. They don't really touch any part of the outside world or produce anything materially useful. They're self contained. So why do people sink time into them even though they can't get anything tangible in return? It's because the process of using the software itself—playing the game—is so intrinsically enjoyable. If you can learn a little bit of that and apply it to software that does do something useful, you can end up with the kind of programs that build devoted fanbases.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  I take serious issue with the description of games as useless. They don’t do anything in the same way as reading a book doesn’t do anything. Or playing chess doesn’t do anything. You absolutely get something tangible in return. Whether it’s a new perspective, new friends or utter humiliation. The idea we should capture the way games build tangible experiences and apply them to “useful software” is to misunderstand both what makes games useful and software that achieves a task. Gamification is swimming in the shallow end of game design. Swimming in the deeper end is beyond what most productive software should be doing design wise. The goals are different, the results are different and more importantly building software that fuses games and learning is different than either.
  - munificent 6y ago
    > I take serious issue with the description of games as useless. I figured some might. Try to charitably understand why I chose to emphasize with that word. Yes, obviously, playing games provides all sorts of meaningful things to the player. As I said, playing games is intrinsically rewarding. But what most games don't do is provide extrinsic utility. Playing a videogame does not pay your mortgage, fix your leaky sink, cure your halitosis, or get you an A in class. (Ignoring professional game playing for money, of course.) Your electricity company's website can be a slow, bug-ridden heap of PHP 1.0 garbage and you will still use it because it lets you pay their bill and keep your lights on. A videogame has no such luxury. If using the game itself is not enjoyable, you have no users. That means good game designers are very well trained in making things people want to use. That's a great skill for anyone who wants to design beloved things. > The idea we should capture the way games build tangible experiences and apply them to “useful software” is to misunderstand both what makes games useful and software that achieves a task. There is definitely an important aspect of games that cannot be harnessed by useful software. A key, perhaps the fundamental thing that makes play play is safety. There is a lower bound to how much harm playing a game poorly can do. That keeps the stakes low, which allows you to get into a freer, more exploratory mindset. Obviously, the app you use to pay your mortgage cannot offer that freeing sense of delight. While that safety is what makes games games, that is not all that makes games enjoyable. > Gamification is swimming in the shallow end of game design. Oh dear, I certainly didn't have "gamification" and all the sleazy things that has been used for in mind, though I can see how what I said was ambiguous regarding that. Maybe a more direct way of stating what I was getting at is that game designers have a greater appreciation of usability than many others. Every tool has some mixture of utility (what it can do) and usability (what it makes easy/enjoyable to do). If a tool has important utility, users will suffer using regardless of its usability. If a university's slow automated phone system is the only way to register classes, well, I guess you're gonna sit on hold for three hours. But you won't like it. Since games have no utility, they must have usability. Usability ("fun") is foundational in a way that it isn't in other fields. And I think there's a lot to be learned from game designers about how they approach that.
MaximumMadness 6y ago
Of all the non-FAANG gaming companies Riot is the one that most closely operates like a tech giant to me (with the exception of maybe Epic Games) They have an incredibly robust M&A division, have mastered land + expand with their esports, are putting down roots in pretty much every major gaming category, and have modern monetization practices down to a tee. Excluding the clearly egregious cultural issues, I would be fairly confident in betting on Riot in the long term
- Aerroon 6y ago
  >I would be fairly confident in betting on Riot in the long term Tencent already did that more than 10 years ago. I wonder how they pick who to invest into, because it seems that in the gaming space they have their hand in almost everything successful. And how come others aren't doing the same?
- codnee 6y ago
  >Of all the non-FAANG gaming companies So, out of all of them?
bovermyer 6y ago
The thing that I take away from this is that this could be indicative of a shift away from the modern concept of university and towards a strengthening of the old master-apprentice models of learning.
DreamOther 6y ago
Their MMR system has changed over the years to maximize revenue at the expense of player pain. They force the above-average player to play 100s of games climb to rank where they "belong" per season, gradually increasing the amount of time required to be absolutely absurd. Combine that with their lack of care for the toxicity in their player base and you have one hot stinky mess, and I wouldn't put a high schooler anywhere near their core game design values. Direct reflection of their (bad) company culture. In the micro, fun and well designed gameplay (Valorant too!). In the macro, their games are a terrible slog rooted in addiction science. All to maximize revenue from rolling skin and champion releases. Every single champion is released overpowered to add a temporary boost in play time and revenue. We can do better.
zanethomas 6y ago
Riot Games, isn't that the game company wholly owned by TenCent?
- terrycody 6y ago
  yeah I guess so, at least purchased most of its stock?
sali0 6y ago
Disclaimer: I am a DotA fan/nerd and am a huge fan of its design vs LoL's. I applaud Riot for this, but I think they're specialty and reason for their huge growth is more to do with outreach, as jimbob45 noted. For a company with such a focus on competitive PvP games, I would argue they are not very good at balance at all. I would even go so far to say that their monetization scheme is detrimental to the balance of the game because of the incentive mismatch with creating a balanced game vs a profitable one. With that said, I think they have gotten a lot better over the years, and no one can take away from their success.
- sudofail 6y ago
  I agree with you, but I also wonder if balance is somewhat of an anti-pattern. By changing the balance of the game, they're influencing the meta builds and play styles, which keeps things interesting. So in a way, creating imbalances is a feature to keep the game fresh. All of this within reason of course.
  - sali0 6y ago
    I would agree with you IF you take traditional view of 'balance' in the way that LoL and other simpler games do. I would call that ideal a 'symmetric' balance, where they want each element in its category to be compared to all other elements in the same category. LoL definitely strives for this, as do many other games. Each champion is balanced against other champions of the same role. Items are relatively inflexible and augment the already present abilities of the champion. Each champion is essentially a complete package and each uses items to enhance what they already have. But when you have such rigid categories, power creep and best-in-slot champions will naturally appear, as whatever is best able to maximize their item's stats will be meta. My first competitive game was LoL back in its beta, and I was hooked, but what opened my eyes to what balance could be was DotA's approach. DotA takes a systemic approach to balance. Each hero is a tool in the team's toolbox. Most heroes have very specific strengths and weaknesses, and their powerspikes are very pronounced. When you draft a team, you are specifically drafting a set of capabilities that you want to exploit against the enemy. This also leads to heroes having very hard counters. But I think the real beauty in DotA is it's item system, which allows you to patch holes in your team's composition and allow a huge amount of flexibility for each hero. I can keep going forever, as I really love its game design. But the most important thing that DotA does in terms of balance is its holistic approach that allows heroes to be individual components to a team, and have items to augment strengths or patch holes that the draft was not prepared for. (DotA's design and metagame sparked my interest in Complex Adaptive Systems, so I just nerd out about it any chance I get). So to your point, I think the whole need to create imbalance is caused because of the way Riot balances their characters in the first place. I think it is fundamentally flawed from a design perspective, but it obviously makes them a ton of money. They really mastered monetization of multiplayer games. They also made their game very approachable for noobs, and that I have to commend them for.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
smogcutter 6y ago
The “8 kinds of fun” have been a huge help to me as a D&D DM. It’s a great framework for running adventures that players will respond to and give everyone a chance to find their fun. It also helps answer micro, nuts and bolts like what kinds of rewards your players will respond to. For example, a player really into challenge might only care about the stats on a magic sword they find, but a player more into narrative or exploration will dig a sword with a mysterious engraving on the hilt even if it isn’t necessarily an upgrade. Real life people usually respond to multiple categories, but if you pay attention during the game you will see this at work. I got onto this via a post at theangrygm.com, who I really recommend. He’s super opinionated, and the “angry GM” schtick gets old, but he knows what he’s talking about.
BossingAround 6y ago
Is there any good game design curriculum you'd recommend? The webpage above is not suitable for self-paced learners...
runawaybottle 6y ago
The problem I have with courses like this is it validates careers that lack integrity. Game design 101 starts with learning to program or do graphics. The same with software development. Unfortunately, we as an industry validated an entire class of people with jobs where they literally manage software (agile people) without building actual software for years. It doesn’t sit well with me, but life is not fair.
- krapp 6y ago
  >Game design 101 starts with learning to program or do graphics. No it doesn't, any more than architecture 101 starts with bricklaying, or novel writing 101 starts with learning typesetting and printing.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    These are mostly false analogies. I don’t know enough about Architecture to point out the fundamentals that you should be making parallels to. For novels, typesetting is an incredible false analogy. You need to learn how to communicate via writing on a technical level before you can write creatively (e.g stories). Back to the shot at agile, I would not expect anyone that never dealt with deadlines or technical scoping to manage timelines for either of those things. If someone doesn’t even know how to write a game loop, they are going to move on to game design? If you look at a movie, some of your bad screenplay writing can be fixed via casting. Imagine not having any hands on experience with the process, but alas, you move on to movie director because you took movie directing 101. It’s insane, design is a holistic process that requires a lot of exposure.
    - krapp 6y ago
      >For novels, typesetting is an incredible false analogy. You need to learn how to communicate via writing on a technical level before you can write creatively (e.g stories). Remember that the purpose of games is to communicate with the player, just as the purpose of a novel is to communicate with the reader. Novels do this through language, games do this through direction, design and assets, not the code. I think the analogy to typesetting is correct - writing the code that runs the game is a far lower level activity than writing the game itself. >If someone doesn’t even know how to write a game loop, they are going to move on to game design? If they do, it's only because a company doesn't want to hire outside of house. But one doesn't need to know how to write a game loop to know how to design a game, any more than one needs to know how to design a game in order to write a game loop. They're completely separate disciplines. >It’s insane, design is a holistic process that requires a lot of exposure. Not necessarily to programming. It can be useful, and sometimes with small studios or a single developer, it's unavoidable (but good design in those cases is usually the exception rather than the rule.)

265 points by hmmazoids 6y ago

tebruno99 6y ago

Bad joke sorry

BoysenberryPi 6y ago
I appreciate the snark as much as the next guy but I don't believe Hacker News is the right forum for it.
- RobRivera 6y ago
  One could say such snark is...boysenous
- tebruno99 6y ago
  I agree, sorry.
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
Why has it become so popular recently to shit on something because of who made it? Is this not just a poor ad hominem?
- tebruno99 6y ago
  In this case because they are positioned to become a form of role model of these students. Who will eventually find out that their favorite company can be horrible to negligible consequence.
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    You could justify almost any such attack like this. Can you not just appreciate what you’re given here for free, for once? The effort people have put into this? Just imagine pouring months into something like this and getting your post as a thanks.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- nonconvergent 6y ago
  Because they still benefit. They benefit when people consume their products and they benefit when they're given a forum within the community.
ev1 6y ago
People are downvoting you, but this is actually a ridiculously common thing in games. The entire game industry is pretty bad in general compared to tech or otherwise: one huge concept is that you have to "love the game"; you're willing to take low pay, low benefits, deal with overrun unpaid overtime hours, etc. because you "love the game". Most game companies freely tell you about how disposable you are because they have hordes of players, many willing to work for free. Riot has serious problems with this. The C-level that was repeatedly reported (for years) for grabbing testicles, dryhumping employees or farting on them is still in their role and hasn't been removed - they were just suspended for a month or two and reinstated. The gender-discrimination forced new legal counsel just a few months ago due to possible collusion.
- echelon 6y ago
  How the hell does this fly? Why haven't employees sued the hell out of the company? Why don't game engineers demand better? Start a company with decent work hours and comp and refuse to work elsewhere. The games industry is sickly and broken.
  - ev1 6y ago
    From 2018 case (just google "riot farting" honestly): https://html2-f.scribdassets.com/6454fy6neo6mwj3w/images/5-70337ee921.jpg https://html2-f.scribdassets.com/6454fy6neo6mwj3w/images/5-7... > Why don't game engineers demand better? Start a company with decent work hours and comp and refuse to work elsewhere. Some do! I would imagine many indie game companies are not like this. There's kind of a split, where you have "strictly-business" companies - many Asian MMORPG publishers that have a subsidiary in the US are like this. There is no gaming culture, it's just a standard workday. You might get some plushies at the office or a poster or two. The "cool" companies, like Riot and Blizzard, complete with campus statues of game characters and a culture to match, conference rooms named after game characters or items, are what gamers seem to want to look up to, though. If you've played any MMORPG long enough, you'll see a lot of recurring themes, kids gleefully willing to "answer support tickets for free" and "I'll be a GM they don't even need to pay me" -- this probably is part of the reason that produces toxic culture, along with the fact that if you strictly hire only gamers, you're already going to almost certainly have a higher toxicity demographic in the first place, depending on the game. If we're talking something like Harvest Moon or similar, of course there's going to be close to no toxic players. Riot's primary product involves matchmaking you into 4 other random people that you have to cooperate with for anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour or more, where one person can lose the game for everyone by repeatedly dying to the enemy and making the enemy stronger. If you leave, you get banned or penalised for abandoning your team; this includes virtually unwinnable dragged-out hour long matches. You can kind of see how this playerbase would differ from, say, the usual singleplayer or co-op indie or puzzle game. It's very difficult to boycott a game you've spent tens of thousands of hours on - a game that you're good at, that you have friends on, that you've spent heaps of cash shop currency on lootboxes for. Even if you desperately dislike the developer. This happens for many companies - look at all the loudmouthed people on reddit et al screaming about how no one should support EA or Blizzard, and then a month later go buy the new expansion pack for something and buy lootboxes and forget about it.

Animats 6y ago

They put a PowerPoint into a PDF into a scrollable window too small to display a full slide. Ouch. The course itself is interesting, in that it's not a programming course at all. It's about what makes a game fun. Download the PDF and look at page 6, which has the useful info.

ihuman 6y ago
There's a download link above the PDF view that allows you to view/download the PDF directly
asutekku 6y ago
Game designers in most companies do not program.

tester756 6y ago

I must say that they're probably the most competent studio on the market LoL is probably the only game that I play (maybe once a year I decide to spend up to 50h over some peroid on one title like GTA V or something) for years and it almost always feels "fresh" and very competitive.

young_unixer 6y ago
I hate that they release new champions so often. My incentive to play is climbing the ranked ladder and, like you, I play in bursts separated by months, but each time I start playing again there are like 5 new champions whose abilities I don't know or understand, which keeps me at a disadvantaged position. I don't have time to study all the new champs abilities. I think their high champion-release rate drives the casual, but competitive-minded players away.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  They release like 5 champions a year, most of them in late summer and late fall. Most months there are no new champions.
Trasmatta 6y ago
I think there's lots of studios just as competent or more competent than Riot. They've made so few games, it's hard to compare them to other studios in that way.
- tester756 6y ago
  That's very fair The way they do esport is huge part of their success
- debaserab2 6y ago
  I agree. I do not like Riot's "startup" approach to game design, where gameplay elements are plucked from the most popular titles on the market. The games have never felt innovative to me, they just seem like they took from everyone else and then focused on iteration so much that it gives the features and gameplay a level of polish that a lot of games don't get (especially from a esports vantage point). The art style also feels so accessible to me that it lacks a certain soul that defines a good game.

mooman219 6y ago

(Riot's less than stellar history aside) I see these takes on game design a lot, and they're interesting to see because everyone takes their own stance on how to construct a fun game from distinct smaller concepts. Yahtzee’s Dev Diary [0] talks a lot about loops (And I give it a watch recommendation), while at your average GDC talk you hear about the concept of pillars [1] and their role in shaping games. I'm interested to hear if anyone else has resources on other game design takes. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbArC2mvokQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbArC2mvokQ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzQDVtysXjA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzQDVtysXjA

mattmanser 6y ago
I've not played duskers (2). But from watching the video, sounds like he was super lucky. A happy accident, rather than an utter disaster. One of those definite cases of survivorship bias.
- rdw 6y ago
  I was privy to some of the development process of Duskers, and I would say that Tim worked pretty hard to create opportunities for happy accidents to befall him. There were several other prototypes that he was working on at the same time, but only Duskers crossed the finish line. This is not uncommon among game developers I've known; generally they're bursting with ideas and have many in-progress experiments in various stages at any time. It's a little like an incubator, where there's a diversity of ideas in order to have a better chance of having one be a hit. There is survivorship bias, but it's kinda all happening within the one designer.
trynewideas 6y ago
The three books I've read and then gone back to over the years are: - Brenda Romero (credited on the book as Brenda Braithwaite) and Ian Schreiber's Challenges for Game Designers[1], which uses a series of design exercises to illustrate concepts like balancing and mechanical loops, and at least from a cursory glance at the Riot curriculum is very similar in structure to it. The exercises still help me bootstrap my understanding of mechanics that I don't always employ in designs, and still occasionally inspire new ideas just by going through one almost like a karate kata. - Raph Koster's Theory of Fun for Game Design[2], which is more introspective about the nature of games rather than a pragmatic how-to guide. Koster's views are often contentious, particularly on defining what a game is or can be, but I usually go back to this book when I want to step back and remind myself what kinds of audiences might be in my blind spot for a mechanic or concept — I might think something is fun because I think it's fun, without interrogating why, and even if I don't agree with Koster on how he goes about defining it the book does a good job of demonstrating how one builds a definition in the first place. - Jesse Schell's Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses[3], which just got a 3rd edition last year that I haven't had a chance to read yet. It's a framework for interrogating a design — and I say "interrogating" literally, as the lenses are a set of questions to ask of your design — that touches on mechanics but also how viable an idea is to make into a game in the first place. Walking an idea through the lenses serves like a second pair of "eyes" when I don't have another person handy to bounce that idea off of in depth. There's a card deck version[3] of just the lenses that are handier to have on the desk. It's likely that there are newer books out there covering similar ground;[4] these are the ones that were around when I came up through my first game design experiences around 2010-2012.[5] These are all high level enough to be pretty general works on the nature and purpose of all types of games, even if all of them have digital games at or near front-of-mind, without being so focused on theory and philosophy that they don't give you actionable things to apply in a design. (Also, I've found that all three of those names are polarizing, often for very different reasons. I find the works valuable regardless; books don't tend to yell at me in a Discord chat or on social media when I read them, which is a nice change of pace.) [1] https://www.amazon.com/Challenges-Game-Designers-Brenda-Brathwaite/dp/158450580X https://www.amazon.com/Challenges-Game-Designers-Brenda-Brat... [2] https://www.powells.com/book/theory-of-fun-for-game-design-2nd-edition-9781449363215 https://www.powells.com/book/theory-of-fun-for-game-design-2... [3] https://www.schellgames.com/art-of-game-design/ https://www.schellgames.com/art-of-game-design/ — and of course there's a booster pack available, because game designers are insatiable post-publication tinkerers [4] Procedural Storytelling in Game Design, co-edited by Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress and Tanya X. Short of a bunch of procedural indie games and formerly Funcom, is exciting in concept, and Darius Kazemi is always fun to read on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Procedural-Storytelling-Design-Tanya-Short/dp/1138595306 https://www.amazon.com/Procedural-Storytelling-Design-Tanya-... Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design, by Geoffrey Engelstein and Issac Shalev, looks like it ports the cookbook concept from software development to tabletop games, which feels right up my alley: https://www.amazon.com/Building-Blocks-Tabletop-Game-Design/dp/1138365491 https://www.amazon.com/Building-Blocks-Tabletop-Game-Design/... (It seems notable that both of those are by CRC Press, which I associate more with academic textbooks, but neither really fits the usual bill for them.) Calling it "newer" might be a misnomer, but I'm desperate to get around to the illustrated The Making Prince of Persia: Journals and wish there were more books with the perspective of a journal during development — watching along as opportunities open and close, instead of as a post-mortem that's colored by the end product and invariably focused on what went wrong/how to avoid it. Also it just looks gorgeous: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Journals-1985-1993-Illustrated/dp/0578627310 https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Journals-1985-19... [5] Steve Swink's Game Feel has been on my list of to-reads on the subject forever, but I've never gotten around to it: https://www.powells.com/book/game-feel-9780123743282 https://www.powells.com/book/game-feel-9780123743282 I bounced off Katie Salen/Eric Zimmerman's Rules of Play, but it's lauded enough that it's hard to omit it. If you like Koster's ideas around orthography in game design and want to see a predecessor that takes it further and issues prescriptive rules, or if you have more of an interest in design criticism than creation and want an intro to a critical vocabulary, it might appeal more: https://www.powells.com/book/rules-of-play-game-design-fundamentals-9780262240451 https://www.powells.com/book/rules-of-play-game-design-funda... Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop is a great read, and even more well suited to a classroom environment than Challenges for Game Designers, but it's _too_ classroom-y for my tastes, focused more on getting from point A to a very specific and more directed point B, instead of laying out a more open-ended task where the boundaries can be a creative aid. I've never felt compelled to return to it as a result, but there are folks who swear by it, so it's still worth mentioning: https://www.amazon.com/Game-Design-Workshop-Playcentric-Innovative-dp-1138098779/dp/1138098779 https://www.amazon.com/Game-Design-Workshop-Playcentric-Inno...

madrox 6y ago

Despite thinking Riot has excellent insight into competitive game development, I'm pretty cynical about their recent wave of sharing since it wreaks of image repair. It doesn't matter what there is to learn from Riot if the culture is poisonous, and I don't believe it's changed much since the last wave of allegations. It's a shame, since this looks pretty substantive, but I'd rather learn this elsewhere.

mooman219 6y ago
It's extremely difficult in Riot's case to separate the content they make from the culture of their company, and I agree with you that it's not really possible to do. I think that this resource is still an interesting collection of material and it's worth the time evaluating on its merits while keeping the perspective of the company's values in mind.
Jare 6y ago
They have held an extremely interesting tech blog for years, but it makes sense that they would talk more about design only after they had more than one game on the market.

withinrafael 6y ago

I was genuinely interested in this, however, after clicking around I couldn't find anything more than PDFs with empty areas for taking notes and vague curriculum module descriptions. Am I missing something? Perhaps there's missing content when viewing the page via mobile. Will revisit from my PC later.

mooman219 6y ago
The content here is a guide on how to teach the concepts outlined in the curriculum, and is not necessarily a self instruction course. See module one: https://www.riotgames.com/en/urf-academy/fun-and-feeling https://www.riotgames.com/en/urf-academy/fun-and-feeling
- withinrafael 6y ago
  Sure, but how do you teach these concepts without a source of truth? I can't find any reference material. Edit: Just discovered the lesson plan download link under the headings, separate from the buttons at the bottom of the page. It helps, though am still confused about how anyone would use this material.

jimbob45 6y ago

IMHO the biggest innovation Riot brought to the industry was player outreach. They were the first to heavily (30+ posts per day across multiple devs) interact with their player base. Even better, their patch notes were the first to have paragraphs explaining each change. Even better, they stuck to a bi-weekly patch cycle religiously, unlike Blizzard, who had to be begged to put out a patch every six months. To players who actually played SC2 and LoL circa 2011, it wasn’t a surprise when LoL became the premiere e-sport and SC2 withered away.

CyanBird 6y ago
I never picked up lol early, but I do vividly recall all the screeching wars between Hon (heroes of newerth) , Dota and lol people The agreement was that lol won because it was free, tho it looked and played worse than either Dota or Hon, but the free aspect won riot the entire emerging markets sector Me as a SC2 player through and through I just looked down on them overall, so feel free to correct me if I am wrong

munificent 6y ago

Game design (whether computer or even board games) is a valuable topic to learn even if you never make a real game. If you make any kind of thing that people use, learning a little about how to think like a game designer can help you make things that are more rewarding and pleasant to use. One way to think of videogames is that they are useless software. Imagine a word processor that couldn't save or print files. Or a compiler that didn't generate executables that ran on any machine but your own. Why would anyone ever use such a pointless thing? Well, games are in many ways exactly that. They don't really touch any part of the outside world or produce anything materially useful. They're self contained. So why do people sink time into them even though they can't get anything tangible in return? It's because the process of using the software itself—playing the game—is so intrinsically enjoyable. If you can learn a little bit of that and apply it to software that does do something useful, you can end up with the kind of programs that build devoted fanbases.

meheleventyone 6y ago
I take serious issue with the description of games as useless. They don’t do anything in the same way as reading a book doesn’t do anything. Or playing chess doesn’t do anything. You absolutely get something tangible in return. Whether it’s a new perspective, new friends or utter humiliation. The idea we should capture the way games build tangible experiences and apply them to “useful software” is to misunderstand both what makes games useful and software that achieves a task. Gamification is swimming in the shallow end of game design. Swimming in the deeper end is beyond what most productive software should be doing design wise. The goals are different, the results are different and more importantly building software that fuses games and learning is different than either.
- munificent 6y ago
  > I take serious issue with the description of games as useless. I figured some might. Try to charitably understand why I chose to emphasize with that word. Yes, obviously, playing games provides all sorts of meaningful things to the player. As I said, playing games is intrinsically rewarding. But what most games don't do is provide extrinsic utility. Playing a videogame does not pay your mortgage, fix your leaky sink, cure your halitosis, or get you an A in class. (Ignoring professional game playing for money, of course.) Your electricity company's website can be a slow, bug-ridden heap of PHP 1.0 garbage and you will still use it because it lets you pay their bill and keep your lights on. A videogame has no such luxury. If using the game itself is not enjoyable, you have no users. That means good game designers are very well trained in making things people want to use. That's a great skill for anyone who wants to design beloved things. > The idea we should capture the way games build tangible experiences and apply them to “useful software” is to misunderstand both what makes games useful and software that achieves a task. There is definitely an important aspect of games that cannot be harnessed by useful software. A key, perhaps the fundamental thing that makes play play is safety. There is a lower bound to how much harm playing a game poorly can do. That keeps the stakes low, which allows you to get into a freer, more exploratory mindset. Obviously, the app you use to pay your mortgage cannot offer that freeing sense of delight. While that safety is what makes games games, that is not all that makes games enjoyable. > Gamification is swimming in the shallow end of game design. Oh dear, I certainly didn't have "gamification" and all the sleazy things that has been used for in mind, though I can see how what I said was ambiguous regarding that. Maybe a more direct way of stating what I was getting at is that game designers have a greater appreciation of usability than many others. Every tool has some mixture of utility (what it can do) and usability (what it makes easy/enjoyable to do). If a tool has important utility, users will suffer using regardless of its usability. If a university's slow automated phone system is the only way to register classes, well, I guess you're gonna sit on hold for three hours. But you won't like it. Since games have no utility, they must have usability. Usability ("fun") is foundational in a way that it isn't in other fields. And I think there's a lot to be learned from game designers about how they approach that.

MaximumMadness 6y ago

Of all the non-FAANG gaming companies Riot is the one that most closely operates like a tech giant to me (with the exception of maybe Epic Games) They have an incredibly robust M&A division, have mastered land + expand with their esports, are putting down roots in pretty much every major gaming category, and have modern monetization practices down to a tee. Excluding the clearly egregious cultural issues, I would be fairly confident in betting on Riot in the long term

Aerroon 6y ago
>I would be fairly confident in betting on Riot in the long term Tencent already did that more than 10 years ago. I wonder how they pick who to invest into, because it seems that in the gaming space they have their hand in almost everything successful. And how come others aren't doing the same?
codnee 6y ago
>Of all the non-FAANG gaming companies So, out of all of them?

bovermyer 6y ago

The thing that I take away from this is that this could be indicative of a shift away from the modern concept of university and towards a strengthening of the old master-apprentice models of learning.

DreamOther 6y ago

Their MMR system has changed over the years to maximize revenue at the expense of player pain. They force the above-average player to play 100s of games climb to rank where they "belong" per season, gradually increasing the amount of time required to be absolutely absurd. Combine that with their lack of care for the toxicity in their player base and you have one hot stinky mess, and I wouldn't put a high schooler anywhere near their core game design values. Direct reflection of their (bad) company culture. In the micro, fun and well designed gameplay (Valorant too!). In the macro, their games are a terrible slog rooted in addiction science. All to maximize revenue from rolling skin and champion releases. Every single champion is released overpowered to add a temporary boost in play time and revenue. We can do better.

zanethomas 6y ago

Riot Games, isn't that the game company wholly owned by TenCent?

terrycody 6y ago
yeah I guess so, at least purchased most of its stock?

sali0 6y ago

Disclaimer: I am a DotA fan/nerd and am a huge fan of its design vs LoL's. I applaud Riot for this, but I think they're specialty and reason for their huge growth is more to do with outreach, as jimbob45 noted. For a company with such a focus on competitive PvP games, I would argue they are not very good at balance at all. I would even go so far to say that their monetization scheme is detrimental to the balance of the game because of the incentive mismatch with creating a balanced game vs a profitable one. With that said, I think they have gotten a lot better over the years, and no one can take away from their success.

sudofail 6y ago
I agree with you, but I also wonder if balance is somewhat of an anti-pattern. By changing the balance of the game, they're influencing the meta builds and play styles, which keeps things interesting. So in a way, creating imbalances is a feature to keep the game fresh. All of this within reason of course.
- sali0 6y ago
  I would agree with you IF you take traditional view of 'balance' in the way that LoL and other simpler games do. I would call that ideal a 'symmetric' balance, where they want each element in its category to be compared to all other elements in the same category. LoL definitely strives for this, as do many other games. Each champion is balanced against other champions of the same role. Items are relatively inflexible and augment the already present abilities of the champion. Each champion is essentially a complete package and each uses items to enhance what they already have. But when you have such rigid categories, power creep and best-in-slot champions will naturally appear, as whatever is best able to maximize their item's stats will be meta. My first competitive game was LoL back in its beta, and I was hooked, but what opened my eyes to what balance could be was DotA's approach. DotA takes a systemic approach to balance. Each hero is a tool in the team's toolbox. Most heroes have very specific strengths and weaknesses, and their powerspikes are very pronounced. When you draft a team, you are specifically drafting a set of capabilities that you want to exploit against the enemy. This also leads to heroes having very hard counters. But I think the real beauty in DotA is it's item system, which allows you to patch holes in your team's composition and allow a huge amount of flexibility for each hero. I can keep going forever, as I really love its game design. But the most important thing that DotA does in terms of balance is its holistic approach that allows heroes to be individual components to a team, and have items to augment strengths or patch holes that the draft was not prepared for. (DotA's design and metagame sparked my interest in Complex Adaptive Systems, so I just nerd out about it any chance I get). So to your point, I think the whole need to create imbalance is caused because of the way Riot balances their characters in the first place. I think it is fundamentally flawed from a design perspective, but it obviously makes them a ton of money. They really mastered monetization of multiplayer games. They also made their game very approachable for noobs, and that I have to commend them for.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

smogcutter 6y ago

The “8 kinds of fun” have been a huge help to me as a D&D DM. It’s a great framework for running adventures that players will respond to and give everyone a chance to find their fun. It also helps answer micro, nuts and bolts like what kinds of rewards your players will respond to. For example, a player really into challenge might only care about the stats on a magic sword they find, but a player more into narrative or exploration will dig a sword with a mysterious engraving on the hilt even if it isn’t necessarily an upgrade. Real life people usually respond to multiple categories, but if you pay attention during the game you will see this at work. I got onto this via a post at theangrygm.com, who I really recommend. He’s super opinionated, and the “angry GM” schtick gets old, but he knows what he’s talking about.

BossingAround 6y ago

Is there any good game design curriculum you'd recommend? The webpage above is not suitable for self-paced learners...

runawaybottle 6y ago

The problem I have with courses like this is it validates careers that lack integrity. Game design 101 starts with learning to program or do graphics. The same with software development. Unfortunately, we as an industry validated an entire class of people with jobs where they literally manage software (agile people) without building actual software for years. It doesn’t sit well with me, but life is not fair.

krapp 6y ago
>Game design 101 starts with learning to program or do graphics. No it doesn't, any more than architecture 101 starts with bricklaying, or novel writing 101 starts with learning typesetting and printing.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  These are mostly false analogies. I don’t know enough about Architecture to point out the fundamentals that you should be making parallels to. For novels, typesetting is an incredible false analogy. You need to learn how to communicate via writing on a technical level before you can write creatively (e.g stories). Back to the shot at agile, I would not expect anyone that never dealt with deadlines or technical scoping to manage timelines for either of those things. If someone doesn’t even know how to write a game loop, they are going to move on to game design? If you look at a movie, some of your bad screenplay writing can be fixed via casting. Imagine not having any hands on experience with the process, but alas, you move on to movie director because you took movie directing 101. It’s insane, design is a holistic process that requires a lot of exposure.
  - krapp 6y ago
    >For novels, typesetting is an incredible false analogy. You need to learn how to communicate via writing on a technical level before you can write creatively (e.g stories). Remember that the purpose of games is to communicate with the player, just as the purpose of a novel is to communicate with the reader. Novels do this through language, games do this through direction, design and assets, not the code. I think the analogy to typesetting is correct - writing the code that runs the game is a far lower level activity than writing the game itself. >If someone doesn’t even know how to write a game loop, they are going to move on to game design? If they do, it's only because a company doesn't want to hire outside of house. But one doesn't need to know how to write a game loop to know how to design a game, any more than one needs to know how to design a game in order to write a game loop. They're completely separate disciplines. >It’s insane, design is a holistic process that requires a lot of exposure. Not necessarily to programming. It can be useful, and sometimes with small studios or a single developer, it's unavoidable (but good design in those cases is usually the exception rather than the rule.)