Casual Game DesignDesigning games everyone can enjoy

Where does fire go when it dreams? Any game that allows you to not only be a ball of fire, but also to experience its dreams, must be worth checking out. Chris Bateman talks about the design of his most recent game, Play with Fire.

Originality

Playing a ball of fire is quite a novel concept. “If I’m going to be the lead designer on a project I absolutely want to deliver something new and different - something that hasn’t been done before,” says Chris. “I know I have skills that can take the medium forward in new and interesting ways - and that there are infinite new possibilities to be explored. If and when I get the chance, I *have* to try to make something new and different.”

The idea of Play with Fire came about when Chris attended talks at GDC 2005 by Keita Takahashi and Toru Iwatani, who described their personal game design process in a way that particularly focused on the verbs of play.. “What struck me was that innovation in play and innovation in verbs were related - all you had to do was find new verbs, and you’d have new game ideas. So I brainstormed a whole list of ‘verb game’ ideas and of them all, the best balance between being an interesting idea and being realistic to implement was Fireball, which was based on the idea of using ‘burn’ as a verb for play.” Because of a trademark issue, the game was later renamed to Play with Fire.

Learning curve

Because Play with Fire offers a unique experience, the player can’t rely on skills learned from other games, but instead has to learn a lot from scratch. “It didn’t occur to me until too late that I was asking the player to learn a whole new set of physics that were not necessarily intuitive,” says Chris. “The learning curve is principally maintained by choosing the sequence of fields that would introduce concepts sequentially. In the Fun path we put a series of tutorial levels that were designed to teach the player the rules of the game world. In blind trials, these seemed to work quite well, although the strangely abstract nature of the game was always a bit daunting to players not immediately comfortable with videogames.”

Audience

Play with Fire offers three different game modes - Fun, Puzzle and Challenge - each of which is aimed at a different type of player. “It was important to me that the Fun path in the game could be played by anyone at all,” Chris says, “so we made the fields in this path such that you couldn’t really fail to complete them, although that it might take time to do so.”

The game’s design document mentions that Play with Fire should be able to appeal to both casual and hardcore audiences. “The idea of offering two branding choices was to allow the publisher to decide which way they wanted to market the game - as an oddity for game hobbyists, or as an appealing game for a wider audience.” Still, Chris realises that Play with Fire isn’t the most casual of games. “A lot of the design decisions for the project were based upon the game being able to deliver play to a diverse pool of players, although realistically, I don’t think such an abstract game could reach a casual audience, which was my original hope.”

Design document

The design document for Play with Fire is available from Gamasutra for anyone who is interested. “Keeping the design document to ourselves benefited no-one,” Chris explains, “having Gamasutra publish it helps other people by showing them a working game design document, and it helps us a little by promoting the game. I was more than happy to do it.”

On the role the design document played in the development, Chris says: “The design document was the template from which the development tools and the game engine were developed. We continued to maintain the design throughout most of the development process, as elements of the design shifted, but for the most part the initial design was solid and remained unchanged.”

Levels, levels and more levels

Play with Fire contains a large number of levels. To help design all of this content, Chris recruited volunteers via his blog to create levels for the game, building a pool of newcomers who contributed as level designers on the game. “I expressly wanted people who hadn’t worked in games before, because I felt that was most fair - they’d get a game credit, and a share of royalties, both of which would be worthwhile for someone just starting out in games. I felt an experienced level designer would be taking too much of a gamble on an unknown game like this, and so that wasn’t a fair match.”

“We signed up about two dozen people for the pool, but most of them contributed nothing to the final game, but about half a dozen did contribute, and the ones that had the talent and taste for it just came into their own after a while. Although I made about half of the fields myself, almost all of the best looking, and most interesting, fields were made other people. They amazed me with their talent and their dedication.”

Chris says that, in retrospect, using an external pool of content designers was one of the best things about the development process. “The game wouldn’t be what it is without these talented people - especially Maurizio Pozzobon, Patrick Dugan and Ian Tyrell. I would love to use the same process on a future game with level design tools that were suitable for the task.”

Anyone who is interested in designing his or her own Play with Fire levels can do so, since the editor is distributed with the game in a folder named ‘Editors’. These editors are exactly the same as the ones used during development. “Just be careful not to put too many objects into any given field, as the game engine can only handle so much.”, Chris advises, and then adds: “There’s nothing quite like making something which you can then burn to the ground.”

A worthwhile experience

Understandably, Chris hopes the game will find its audience. “If the game manages to find the audience who will love it - and I know they’re out there somewhere! - I hope they will in turn get into making fields for it. That would mean the game has fulfilled its ultimate goal - to not only give people the play experience of being a ball of fire, but to make new dreams of fire as well.”

Regardless of how Play with Fire is received, Chris has no regrets about how the game was made. “I couldn’t change any aspect of the design without changing the game from what it is. I’m sure there were a myriad other games that could have come from the original core concept, but the one we have is a special game that I’m proud to have lead the project for, and delighted to add to my list of game credits.”

Download

You can download Play with Fire from Manifesto Games and try if for yourself.

I’d like to thank Chris Bateman for taking the time to do this interview.

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