Game Design :: Consider Something New

One of the most difficult decisions to make in game design is to try something new or unique.  Doing something that hasn't been done before can either work very well or not at all.  Without being able to see how something worked in other games, there is no easy way to know if it will work in yours.  Many game developers will not do anything new or unusual for any major part of their games.  They will add new things to the game that aren't all that important to the overall game because those have little impact of how well a game does, but just aren't willing to take the risk for anything that might make or break a game.

So does the risk mean you shouldn't even consider it?  Remember that a lot of the pioneers for video games had to create something new because just about anything they made was going to be new.  Of course, game development cost considerably less 20+ years ago, so it was easier to make a bad decision on a game and recover with the next one.  Even so, gamers want new and unique experiences in games and even if the game is only "good" rather than great, if it is unique, gamers are more likely to buy the game than they would a "good" game that's just like a dozen others.  Also, keep in mind that you can poll gamers for their thoughts on something you are considering.  If the results are really good, you should be able to use that idea and get good sales as long as you pull it off well.  If the results aren't very good, you know to avoid it.  That can greatly reduce the risk involved in making a game that is different or unique in some way from others out there.

As with making any game, you need to choose your audience and decide whether your idea for something unique or different in the game will go over well with that target audience.  Hardcore gamers won't likely be interested in a Match 3 minigame in their game, nor will casual gamers be interested in tons of stats.  As mentioned, polling your target audience can really help you decide what you should or shouldn't try.  Also consider whether that idea will work with the game genre you want to use.

Unique features don't always have to be completely unique.  You can build off features that are already there and just add something to them that's never been seen before.  Or you might decide to go all out and make a game that defines its own genre because the entire game is a unique experience.  Pulling that off can put your game at the top of sales for years, but is also the most risky.

So how do you decide what you can do that is unique?  One option is to look at non-game activities and interests of your gamers and see if you can incorporate something they enjoy from outside the game into the game itself.  Another is to look at ways of using popular features in new and unusual ways.  You might also look at some of the more unique games that have come out over the years, but which haven't had many similar games made.  If they've done well at the time, maybe it's time to consider making something similar again.  There are many ways you can come up with unique features for your games.  It depends on what kind of game you're making and what it's about and how unique you want to get with it.

Example 1:
Gamers enjoy finding different items in games.  Look at what Diablo did to loot items.  For perhaps the first time, you could loot a huge variety of items because of the random item generator.  This became very popular and has been seen in many games since then.  Years ago, there was a game Sea Rogue where players hunted for treasure in shipwrecks.  Even with the poor graphics of the time, it gave players a chance to hunt for items that were somewhat random and gave you a sense of accomplishment when you found something really good.  Sea Rogue was a very unique game.  I don't believe any other games have ever been made with a similar idea of hunting for treasure, whether on land or in the sea.  Sure, you have the Tomb Raider series, but the items aren't really random and they don't look very realistic, so you lose the excitement of finding the items and you're left with just a typical game where you run around doing different things to complete the objectives.

Consider the possibility of creating a new kind of Sea Rogue game.  With the computers we have today, there are vast improvements that can be made to what Sea Rogue was and still keep the same basic idea for the game - hunting for treasure.  As with Diablo, randomizing the treasure as much as possible really helps to make a game interesting.  You can also give players choices of where to go to look by giving them some information about the areas and what types of things they might find.  Throw in some random events (good and bad) and the game can become a lot of fun.  It doesn't even have to be based on hunting shipwrecks.  You might base it on archaeoligical ruins (a REAL tomb raider experience), for example.  You might set it up partly as a tycoon game, where you build up your treasure hunting business (whatever you want to call it based on what kind of "treasure" you are looking for).  Start out small with few contacts and limited resources.  In the example of examing archaeological ruins, maybe at the start of the game, you know of only a few well-known ruins that have been picked over often.  You might go there and try to find anything that is still there that might sell well to a museum or private collector.  You wouldn't have resources to do an actual dig to unearth a buried ruins and you wouldn't be able to really do much work at the few known ruins either.  However, as you build up your reputation and business, you will gain more contacts with people who know of other ruins or have heard rumors of some that no one has found yet.  Put together enough rumors to get a location to start looking and enough resources to fund it and you might discover ruins from some lost civilization that could be the find of the century.

For the actual "treasure hunting" part of the game, it can switch from the tycoon "mode" to a first or third person view and you can make it action or adventure based for that part of the game.  The main thing with it is that the game shouldn't lead you to the items like adventure games usually do.  You should have full ability to explore the area and depending on your resources and tools, be able to do a variety of things that can unearth items that aren't visible otherwise.  As with Diablo, it would help to have some kind of random item generation for things that you can find as well as a way to hide those things in random locations rather than specific ones to make the game different every time you play it.  Obviously, for the items you find, you're not going to end up with the "Burning Vase of Invincibility" or whatever like you'd expect from Diablo, but you can still have an item generator that can create a large variety of unique items that can be found.  It would help to be able to theme them somewhat so that Egyptian ruins aren't going to have something that you'd expect in Mayan ruins.

That's just a barebones example of a game meant to give an idea of how you can use what has been done in the past, but rarely, and make it into something that feels new and unique.  Remember that the archaelogical suggestion is just one option for this kind of game, with shipwrecks being another.  You might set it in the future and have you exploring planets for alien artifacts or lifeforms, or some other "theme" as well.

Example 2:

Consider using a unique idea that has only been written about.  Take a look at the tournament in the Apprentice Adept series by Piers Anthony as an example.  You learn more about that tournament throughout the series, so it's worth reading the entire series to really understand how the tournament works.  A basic view of it is that two players decide on the game they want to play by choosing options on a grid.  One player might have a choice of One-on-One, or Teams.  The other might have a choice of Land, Air, or Water.  Each player only knows what they are choosing and not what the other player is choosing.  That means your own choice might be good for you if the other player chooses something that works well with it based on your skills, or it might hurt you if the other player chooses something that doesn't work well with your skills.  The players actually have more options than 2 or 3 in most cases and the combination of all choices from both players determines the game that is played.  It makes for a really unique way of choosing a game that can really work well for real gaming tournaments if the game were ever developed.  I recommend reading that series to really understand how it works as it's not possible to clearly explain the intricacies of it in a short paragraph, but this might give just enough to help you see the possibilities.

Now, a "game" like this would have to be created in a very unique way.  First of all, you'd need the main game selection area, which is really where the game is unique.  That is really not such a difficult thing to develop.  The real challenge, and probably the reason this would never really be developed, is the fact that you need a LOT of games of many varieties that can be played based on the choices made by the players.  The only way this could possibly be handled is through game modules.  By being modular, you can allow any company to make a game module for a specific kind of game.  The module can then be loaded into the main game selection program and set up as the result of a set group of choices.  Get enough modules made and you'd have a pretty good selection of games to work with without having to make them all yourself.  The idea with it would be that you'd sell your selection program and whatever "default" game modules you want to create yourself.  Then, other companies can sell modules that they make or perhaps even offer modules for free if someone buys another one of their games.  How that's handled would have to be determined by each developer who chose to make a module for the game.

It would be recommended that each game module be relatively small in comparison with most games coming out today, meaning lower graphics requirements for the most part.  This is because you'd want a player to have a bare minimum of 20-30 games for the selection process to even make much sense and you don't want 1GB or more for each module when you need that many.  You could also limit the types of games thereby making it easier to set up without as much work getting other game modules to be made.  For example, making a similar thing that focuses on only card and board games.  Those are small enough and easy enough to create quickly and the selection process used in that series can make choosing what to play fun and interesting and would still work for game tournaments that focus on card and board games, especially if you can include a built-in tournament scoring system and allow online display of results (preferably on both your own online server and also a user-defined one so tournaments could put up results automatically on their own sites).

Now, card and board games are fairly limited for a player base, but trying it out in that fashion first would give you a good idea of how well it would work and what kind of interest there is in the system as well as working out any bugs and problems involved in a modular game system like that.  You could then choose to expand it to another type of game and so on, perhaps later on allowing each of those to combine into the one main game selection originally discussed here.  The biggest difficulty for any games not included is that all players would need the game module selected to play it.  The selection program can automatically not show the options that lead to modules that both players don't have, but it does limit what modules people can play.  Having an online mode where you can find players and perhaps set limits on the minimum number of installed modules in some tournaments so there's more choices can really enhance it further.

Now, this example is unlikely to ever happen for reasons I've mentioned and because you'd probably have to get licensing or other permission from Piers Anthony to use the system.  However, it shows how you can create something entirely new and unique and how it could potentially become very popular.  Consider something like this in the hands of the Asian gaming groups that have huge tournaments of Starcraft and other games and spend hours and hours developing the best strategies.  If done well, it could become a huge success with groups like that.  And with that kind of success, you can expect more modules to be developed that will continue to make it that much more successful.

So there are two examples of ways you can develop something new that is either very unique or takes something that's already there and relatively unique and building off it to make something that really doesn't have many competitors.  There are many more examples that could be given, but they all revolve around the same idea... making your game unique in some way that will thrill gamers be it through just unique features or a completely unique design from the ground up.  Some games have pushed those boundaries in recent years, such as Assassin's Creed and Spore and done fairly well.