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Cliff Bleszinski Writes for Edge
I’m often asked what my “design philosophy” is for Gears of War 2. It’s pretty simple: dream big and polish often.
I’ll often have very fun, crazy, high-concept ideas, with specific examples of what I think would be cool. But I also have to select which interesting concepts to harvest from the development team. Epic polishes its games to the point where you can see your reflection in them, so design here is inherently a very iterative process.
But that’s just the framework for the general process of creating a game. With Gears 2, for example, I'll have my own ideas about where the story needs to go over the course of a level. I'll work with our scriptwriter Josh Ortega and senior producer Rod Fergusson to cycle on that level until we have basically a two-pager of what we think should happen in the overall story arc of the game.
From there, we’ll break down the level into different locales and decide how those locations could fit into the story. Our senior gameplay designer, Lee Perry, might say, “I want to see a mountain hamlet; let's see how we can fit that in.” And so we’ll pore over the level breakdown of the various locations, at which point our lead level designer Dave Nash will cycle heavily on those settings.
We then work with art to define the locales. Ultimately, when we agree on a level’s settings, say the mountain hamlet I mentioned, we’ll have what we literally call “Post-It Note meetings” where Lee Perry, Dave Nash and I will get together and come up with the coolest possible moments we can fit into the scenario. Let’s collapse some bridges, crash some choppers, have Brumaks shouldering into vehicles, and make things fly off cliffs while the ground opens up. We’ll come up with a dozen of these types of ideas. That's where we literally generate the water cooler moments from the game.
The level designer takes what we’ve given him, and, with the objectives from point A to point B in mind, starts filling it in, inserting something exciting and interesting to look at every few minutes on top of the really great cover gameplay mechanic. And then, of course, we add elements like new weapons, and it all comes together as a fun, cinematic roller coaster.
I’ll often have very fun, crazy, high-concept ideas, with specific examples of what I think would be cool. But I also have to select which interesting concepts to harvest from the development team. Epic polishes its games to the point where you can see your reflection in them, so design here is inherently a very iterative process.
But that’s just the framework for the general process of creating a game. With Gears 2, for example, I'll have my own ideas about where the story needs to go over the course of a level. I'll work with our scriptwriter Josh Ortega and senior producer Rod Fergusson to cycle on that level until we have basically a two-pager of what we think should happen in the overall story arc of the game.
From there, we’ll break down the level into different locales and decide how those locations could fit into the story. Our senior gameplay designer, Lee Perry, might say, “I want to see a mountain hamlet; let's see how we can fit that in.” And so we’ll pore over the level breakdown of the various locations, at which point our lead level designer Dave Nash will cycle heavily on those settings.
We then work with art to define the locales. Ultimately, when we agree on a level’s settings, say the mountain hamlet I mentioned, we’ll have what we literally call “Post-It Note meetings” where Lee Perry, Dave Nash and I will get together and come up with the coolest possible moments we can fit into the scenario. Let’s collapse some bridges, crash some choppers, have Brumaks shouldering into vehicles, and make things fly off cliffs while the ground opens up. We’ll come up with a dozen of these types of ideas. That's where we literally generate the water cooler moments from the game.
The level designer takes what we’ve given him, and, with the objectives from point A to point B in mind, starts filling it in, inserting something exciting and interesting to look at every few minutes on top of the really great cover gameplay mechanic. And then, of course, we add elements like new weapons, and it all comes together as a fun, cinematic roller coaster.
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
I have always looked at other games for inspiration when working on my own concept documents, it’s a fantastic way to see what works and what doesn’t, and can oft lead to entirely unexplored areas of design, one gameplay mechanic can be fantastic in every way but one, and in musing in ways to fix its single fault you can find completely new ideas to use, ideas that can, as a whole, make for a better game.
And I would tend to agree that polish and simplicity is paramount in this day and age, while I personally prefer an immensely complicated and involved gaming experience, many feel daunted when presented with such, and I believe that it is through the mentioned intuitiveness and polish that one can achieve highly sophisticated mechanics that are approachable by the masses. Which, if WoW proved anything, it’s that polish sells, and where as I hardly feel WoW is complicated from my standpoint, and I must admit feeling great personal animosity towards it for what I feel it has done to MMOGs as a whole, I cannot deny the fact that it proves what the majority of gamers look for, approachability, something EPIC has excelled at in my view point, all of the game mechanics just make sense, and even the more advanced aspects such as UnrealEd are simple to learn to a point of functionality, and that’s something many more publishers should strive for in my opinion.
Sounds like a great design process, you guys rock dude! I think its great that designers are being more open lately about borrowing ideas, Too Human and Metal Gear seem to both pay homage to Halo's Man Cannon for example. I can only hope designers will pay a homage to your Active Reload system, that was brilliant!
Did you notice in GTA when you fail a mission they say different things? Maybe you guys could borrow that idea, I must have heard "Look at all dat JUICE!" fifty times! Thankfully I was able to just open up my friends list whenever I got really frustrated and invite someone in for reinforcements :)
That was a great read, Cliff. Hopefully you won't stop there and you continue to write for the new Edge.com!
And I agree that designers/developers should always learn from what has been created before. I'm a game designer myself, and when making a game, I try to see what someone else has done and expand on it. I even do that for simple things, like menu flow. You can't expect to recreate the world, so every little bit helps:)