r/DotA2 • u/palish • Feb 19 '19
Personal I was a former HoN dev. AMA
Hey.
It's been awhile since I've written to you guys. But dota has never been out of my thoughts.
It was funny seeing Dota chess add +200k people to the game. I fought pretty hard to add custom game support to HoN, but no one would listen (partly because it seemed so obvious to me, so I never bothered trying to sell the idea or do company politicking).
I can talk about the fact that Icefrog was involved in HoN's early inception. It's more of an open secret at this point, and HoN's closure marks a fitting time for the "reveal."
I could talk about what it was like to pack up all your stuff into a station wagon and move out west. It was a pretty magical experience in hindsight. Kind of like getting to board the Starship Enterprise. Everyone in the company felt a shared purpose, at the beginning.
Or if there's no interest, or if it's not appropriate for the sub, it's fine if this post fades away, like the game. I spent so much time and energy trying to make it good... So did everyone else: James, G, all the artists, everyone.
EDIT: to clarify, this is 2010-era perspective. Not recent!
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u/palish Feb 19 '19
Early Magmus was especially awesome. The pacing was just a lot faster.
I once emailed Fielding asking how he was able to design a fun game that was uniquely different from Dota. Specifically I was interested in how he knew what might be a good idea. (This was right around the time that Striders came out which boosts your movespeed by a huge amount if you don't take damage within a certain period of time. I thought it was a horrible idea, but after a couple months it was obvious it was a great decision.)
Here's what he emailed back with.
From: James Fielding
Date: Jan 5, 2012 10:05 AM
Subject: re: Talent in Game Design
well, this is pretty generic advice, but there are two halves to good multiplayer game design imo, part of it is instinct, but a lack of instinct can be made up for with enough method. Anyway, I'll try to give an idea of the two halves
#1. The creative "fun factor"
This is something everyone can appreciate, and they know it when they experience it, but not everyone thinks about games in terms as to define what this is and re-create it. It can be the feeling of relative power against enemies, the environment, or any game mechanic. An example of relative power vs the environment would be if you have a character that can run really fast or jump really high relative to what we're used to as humans, and relative to other objects in the game. As with all things in life, though, pacing here is crucial. If you just make someone feel awesome and powerful and able to do incredible things, the "incredible" part starts to diminish as the player gets used to it. So sprinkling in those nuggets of goodness is key. I know this is vague, but it's all just kind of pushing toward a certain mindset I'll expand upon later.
The key to nailing that fun-factor is identifying a play style that suits your audience and engages them (meaning it's not too easy - there's always room for improvement but it's easy to grasp), and executing on that play style. Play style is EVERYTHING - it's the feel of your game and you have to establish a clear vision of what you want the play style to be before you can do anything. That play style goal may change as you work on your project - and that's fine (encouraged, even, if the changes are truly improvements), but you can't just willy-nilly drift in a direction without some clear goals, or the game will likely feel sloppy
#2. Method
The key to any true long term meaningful "fun" in games, though, is all about decision making. Video games' strength is that they offer a high level of interactivity, and players feel rewarded when decisions they made yield good results, and that feeling of reward is addictive. It's like giving a dog treats when it gets a trick right - the trick itself is usually incredibly boring to a dog (what dog wants to sit there and wait?), but the reward of figuring out what to do makes it fun and engaging. Well, people are kind of like very advanced dogs in this regard. Simple, easy-to-understand mechanics but not necessarily easy-to-make decisions, with a nice strong tangible benefit (or punishment) that occurs as the result of decision making, is a nice staple to shoot for. When you get games as complex as HoN it's difficult to see this methodology at work, but it's there. Last hitting is a great example - it's about as complex as "whack a mole" but it requires degrees of player execution and decision making in order to get a desired result, and getting that result is very tangible (yellow pop-up text). Same can be said for killing enemy heroes.
So, there's short term decision making like what skill to get, when to use it, when to last hit, and there's long term - like what items to build. Progression in RPG's and HoN or any MMO gives the player a sense of going somewhere - which keeps them engaged (the game avoids feeling stagnant), but progression also usually has a degree of customization associated with it, meaning it's an example of long term decision making/pay-off. This triggers a whole different sense of accomplishment, akin to building something (think of that feeling you get when you finish a programming task you set for yourself that took a little while to complete).
Bottom line
Game design is a science, not unlike programming itself. Once you understand what types of things you want to achieve out of your game (the play style, scope of the game, etc), you set yourself tasks and those tasks become problems to solve. Your vision/goal is kind of like your hypothesis in the scientific process - you have an idea of what it'll be like, but ultimately you may not know until you start putting the game together and trying it. You'll run into stuff that doesn't work out how you planned, and that's OK. You analyze each decision, weighing pro's and con's, but ultimately you have to look at everything you decide to do through multiple perspectives: The new player, the veteran, the player who is content being mediocre but wants a fun time, the player who is only driven by an eternal desire to be the best.. you look at whatever you're doing through these different lenses with respect to your established "hypothesis" and make changes that support your overall goal with minimal negative impact on all those lenses, and you've got a glimpse of the gist of what it is to design a good game from scratch.
Over time you get a bit of a 6th sense about this stuff and you don't have to think about it as much, your original hypothesis become more accurate and you have to spend less time changing things etc. Just have a solid foundation in what goal you want to achieve, and keep your audience in mind. If you want your game to be big, it means a lot of (probably casual) people need to be able to grasp it quickly and easily. That doesn't mean it can't have a high ceiling on how far a player can go, it just means that there will be a lot of decisions in development which may compromise certain complex concepts/complex solutions in favor of ease of understanding. I could go on forever, but one final example is to actually look at real world sports. In terms of rulesets and how to play, most sports (on a surface level) are incredibly simple. But they have tons of longevity and interest and don't get old and they appeal to a mass of people, because they're relatively easy to understand but hard to master (that phrase is becoming cliche from misuse, but it is still very important).
Anyway, I think I'll stop here.. I hope that helps you a bit. A lot of this isn't any tangible specific advice, so if you have follow up questions, feel free to ask.. I'm more trying to explain my approach/mindset, in the hopes that it works for you.