Blog - Design Tips: Mercy Killing
Monday, May 19, 2008Sorry for a lack of posting here.
My cable (internet and television) has been down for a week now at my house and my cable provider fails to show up any time I set up an appointment for them to come figure out what's wrong.
I'm currently posting from a computer lab at SCAD.
Anyway, it's time for another design tip:
"Mercy Killing is the Law (Don't put band-aids over crap)"
If something isn't working in your prototype/design, and attempts to fix it are going nowhere, then get rid of what's not working before you waste any more time. This is also known as the mercy-kill: just let it die, as it's for the best.
Brenda often uses the great line "don't put band-aids over crap" to put another metaphorical spin on the mercy-killing concept. You can try to fix it all you want, but everyone will still be able to know that underneath all your fixes: it's still crap. It's especially bad as often fixes will throw other dynamics out of whack, and trying to fix that will require more fixes which break something else, etc. etc.
Now, throughout my time as a game design student here at SCAD I've had a handful of projects where I took this mercy-killing 'law' to the extreme: what I will, for a lack of a better term, refer to as the total systems implosion. Where you kill so much of the game you basically start over.
A great example was Artificial Evolution, where we recognized that our alpha milestone was basically upon us already and the game's core system wasn't working.
It technically worked, or we wouldn't have gone that far along, but the process of writing it into the design document let us see how bloated and clunky the system was.
So we decided to kill it, our core system, and redo it in a newer, smoother, intuitive way. It nearly killed us, but the effort (and loss of sleep) was worth it: the game was much better once the core was rehashed into something that wouldn't take an engineering degree to play. That game was the one from our class picked by industry designers as the best project produced, so we must have done something right!
Well, the same thing just happened in a current project of mine: We switched our tabletop RPG's combat system from one that involved dice rolls and a bidding system to one that involves a CCG. The best part of it all is that the old system worked great and was even pretty fun: fairly innovative, involved plenty of strategy, and worked smoothly enough.
It was just, as we all felt, a little more complicated that it should have been (particularly for our target market) and plus we liked the novelty of a CCG-based tabletop RPG and the initial prototype of it seemed just slightly more fun (just as strategic but more intuitive and fast-paced.)
Unfortunately, switching to cards basically meant throwing out our entire game and starting over: our old player stats didn't fit neatly with card-based mechanics.
We basically tossed our past month-and-a-half's worth of effort and did it over again (differently, better) in the span of only two very crunch-y evenings.
Because we rock. ;)
As terrifying as it is each time (apparently I've caused total systems implosions on 3 different projects now...) the mercy killing has always proven valuable and in the end rewarding.
Especially so on the student level, as it lets me try out variations in design and encourages me to push my limits, designing with more speed and efficiency.
In this way it is similar to giving oneself regular 30-minute/1-hour "design challenges", which are great exercises for aspiring designers.
So remember kids, in game design mercy-killing is the law, and don't put band-aids on crap.
Labels: design, design tips, mercy-killing
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 5:06 PM
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