Multiplayer Interactive-Fiction Game-Design Blog

Cost cutting

2 October 2005

by Mike Rozak

Still on the Of mice and elephants topic, I've been thinking about keeping costs low as possible. Here are some cost-cutting measures that I've seen implemented in various games...

The world can be designed to reduce costs:

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  Don't design the entire world - Table-top RPG game masters use this trick all the time. They only design the parts of the world that players are about to experience, and leave the rest empty.

  A corollary to this is for the designer of a MMORPG to see where players go and what they do, and add detail to those parts of the world... or is it the other way around? Should interesting content be added to the uninteresting spaces?

  
  
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  Procedural content - Procedural content is often cheaper than hand-generated content. Automatically generated landscapes and trees work particularly well. Cities and NPCs can be procedurally generated too, although less well. By the way, text-to-speech is procedurally generated speech.
  
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  Re-use content with variation - Reusing content (like graphics and sub-games) works well for cost cutting, but the re-used content should always be varied. Never use the same texture in exactly the same way. Likewise, make sure sub-games are re-used with variation. CRPGs rely extensively on the re-use of content. (See Sub-games with variation).
  
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  Replayable - Sometimes, a bit of extra design and content will allow the game to be replayed a second time. Games like Fable, that allows players to be good or evil, let players experience the game twice, once on the side of good, and a second time as an evil character. CRPGs that allow players to chose different classes also provide for some replayability. Unfortunately, most players don't replay the game.
  
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  Linear narration - Often, linear narration is cheaper to produce than an interactive experience. For example: A 40-hour text adventure-game takes about 2000 hours to write. In that time, an author could produce a 600 page novel, which would take 15 hours to read. But 15 is less than 40, so how is linear narration more efficient? Don't forget that the 40 hour adventure game is 39 hours of "difficult puzzles" (see below), most of which is spent in frustration (aka: not being entertaining). The first 10 minutes of solving a puzzle are fun, but the next 50 minutes are frustration. An adventure game whose puzzles were short enough that they never got frustrating would end up being about 5 hours long instead of 40.

  Linear narration has the problem that it's linear though. Players can't make choices. Hence, branching narration...

  
  
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  Branching narration - Choose Your Own Adventure books and most game conversations with NPCs are handled using a branching narrative. They're not as cheap as linear narration because players will only experience about 25% of the narrative when the play. However, branching narration encourages replayability, so most players (who replay the game several times) end up experiencing 50%-75% of the narrative.

  Unfortunately, branching narration introduces two problems:

  
  
  1. 
     The action that the player wants to take is often not listed. This happens because (a) the author can't think of every possibility, and (b) even if the author did, it's too expensive to write all the branches.
     
  2. 
     Branching narration inevitably requires a menu of choices. If players have a menu, they don't have to problem solve (as much) since they're left with a multiple-choice question.
     

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  User-created content - It's cheap, and users like creating content. They don't like experiencing each other's content though.
  
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  Player versus player - PvP can be less expensive than author-generated content because the author merely needs to invent the arena and weapons (which might take the form of a space trading game without any obvious arena or weapons), and let the players go at it.... theoretically. In reality, the game still has to be balanced and new features have to be added. Griefing can become a problem too, which leads to higher product support costs.
  
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  Player with player - Quests that require an unusually large group of players to complete (aka: raids) are cheaper because players have to spend a lot of their time organizing themselves.
  

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  Difficult puzzles - Adventure games like producing difficult puzzles that (metaphorically) cause players to bang their heads against the wall for a few hours. An adventure game that usually takes 20-40 hours to complete can be finished in about an hour when players use a walkthrough; this means that 95% of a player's time in a traditional adventure game is spent solving the puzzles.
  
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  Lots of travel - Many games, especially CRPGs and MMORPGs, require players to travel around the world a lot since travel-time is cheap content. Players get annoyed with too much needless travel.
  
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  Make work - When a quest to pick oranges from an orchard asks the player to pick five oranges, that's once thing. When the quest requires 50 oranges, that's "make work", also called "the grind".
  
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  In-game down-time - CRPGs and MMORPGs use in-game down-time, such as when a character must sit around 60 seconds and wait to heal up.
  
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  Offline down-time - You can't watch an entire TV series in one eight hour stretch because it's only broadcast for an hour a week. Likewise, if a game requires that players crossing the ocean "come back tomorrow" before they can resume play, the game will take longer to complete. Special events that only occur in specific seasons or holidays perform a similar role.
  
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  Minimise product support calls - Product support is expensive. A game's UI and design should minimise the amount of support players require. Additionally, if players want to support themselves (such as through forums), let them.
  
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  No live events - They're a crowd please, but live events are expensive.
  

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  Less/no eye candy - Most of what makes a contemporary game expensive is the eye candy. This includes 3D models, textures, animations, sounds, and ornate UIs. Obviously, reducing the number of 3D models, textures, animations, and sounds will reduce costs. For some other ideas, look at Japanese Anime, which are low-budget hand-drawn animations.
  
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  Backstory - Backstory is cheap to write. Populating the world with plenty of virtual books full of backstory is a cost saver that works well if knowledge of the backstory helps with the game.
  
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  Diversions - Card games, fishing, and other "mini-games" are diversions from the real game. They're cheap content that keeps the player entertained for awhile, but which aren't really part of the game.
  
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  Non-game activities - Not only does chat make a MMORPG what it is, but players spend many hours chatting with one another and not consuming content. The same can be said for forums.