Hi Tom.
I agree on the characteristics and on your thoughts regarding games and
inovation.
However, player base can also be a fickle guide, sinse a lot of other
factors such as documentation, advertising, recommendations etc can have a
large impact on the community.
One example of this are the Zero site games from shard workshop. I
personally thought both the original game and it's expantion were
exceptionnally well put together, with a variety of missions and targits,
and weapons it took real skill to use, and I'd recommend anyone interested
in flight simulation action type games to give them a try.
however, for some reason everyone forgets about those games. I have no idea
why. They are available on windows, they have a low cost, a good demo and
comprehensive instructions and podcasts, indeed in terms of what developers
should be doing I'd say shard workshop did everything right. yet for some
reason the games haven't taken off (if you'll excuse the pun), and I'm not
sure why.
Then of course there is the nastier capitalist, or competitive monica of
factors other than good design contributing to a game's success. Despite
audiogames being a very small community, at the same time I have noticed
this happen.
To take one example, wecurrently have two available audio versions of
backgammon. That from Azabat software which can be bought as a stand alone
game, or on their disk, and pontes backgammon.
Of these two, I'd say from a design perspective Pontes is very much
superior. While it lacks the graphics of the azabat offering, it has
changeable sounds and ambience, online play and text chat, the ability to
change display of the board and it's points, ability to play in a number of
languages (even play online against someone speaking another language), with
the possibility to create more language packs, and a variable computer
opponent that provides a real challenge, and several game modes. Yet
unfortunately Azabat gets the distribution and publicity.
So, while I fully agree that there are! characteristics of good games, I'm
not absolutely certain whether the corrilation between what games get
distributed and played and what games don't is exact. There is undoubtedly a
rough corrilation here, sinse certainly games like shades of doom, Swamp,
entombed and other inervative titles have done well, however I don't think
discovering the characteristics of good game design is just a matter of
lining up all the best loved games and trying to find commonalities.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
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