Developer, reviewer, storyteller; those three roles are more similar than they seem. In all three cases, I have an audience. That's the part you fill in right now. Also, each role is partly about deciding what to share: choosing the most interesting game features, the most entertaining games, or the best anecdotes. Here's an example.
When me and my teammates were designing our game, we envisioned teleporting blocks, entanglement badges, decaying walls, a lot of good game mechanics which we had to discard because we had a lot more ideas than we had time for implementing them. Our tight deadline was due to the fact that we were competing in the GitHub Game Off, a programming competition inviting teams and individuals to create a web-based game in one month.
Finishing a game in one month is harder than it sounds. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the contestants failed to deliver a playable game at the end of the month. All of these flops became problematic during my second role, as a game reviewer: if I had not been smart about this, I could easily have spent more time discarding failed projects than playing and reviewing actual games.
Dealing with an overwhelming number of possibilities is a common problem, which I'm sure you also have to face sometimes. Here's how to fight back.
Ask other people for advice
When we were working on our game, we knew that our goal was to make a game which players would appreciate. We therefore decided that our first priority was to create a small, but playable version of the game, so that we could show it to our friends and ask them what to improve.
I thought I would have had to compile many suggestions and identify the most frequent requests, but to my surprise, almost everybody reacted to the game in almost the same way! Sadly, this common reaction was incomprehension, because our game mechanic was very complicated and not very well explained.
It turns out I was so familiar with the game that I was blind to its complexity. Play-testing early was a great plan, as it allowed us to discover the problem early on and to improve the clarity of our game throughout its development.
Did we succeed? See for yourself by playing it here!
Look around for inspiration
After our game was complete, I compared it with the competition. As I played one game after another, looking for my strongest competitor, patterns started to emerge.
There was a recurrent hero: Octocat, the mascot of GitHub. The contest page featured a few Octocats dressed as various game characters, so it was an obvious choice.
Our game was also using an Octocat until the last day of the competition, when we learned that this was against the rules! We changed the artwork, renamed the game, and then the server refused our changes because we ran out of disk space, something which shouldn't even happen on GitHub. It was a very dramatic climax at the end of the race.
Practice
Another common occurrence was games which were clearly aiming to emulate existing well-known games, like Osmosis and World of Goo. Imitating a game concept which has already proved to be a lot of fun sounds like a winning strategy, but it isn't, because games are about mastering new skills. In this case, however, I suspect it was not the players who were supposed to learn new skills.
When I first learned to code, I wrote a Pac-Man clone. Then I wrote a second one, to see if I could get the ghosts to animate smoothly instead of jumping from cell to cell. Then I wrote a Mario clone, and so on and so forth.
We game developers learn how to make games by copying the work of the masters, much like musicians begin by learning how to play famous songs before they become ready to compose their own.
There were also many documents in which contestants described their dream game in detail, without actually reaching the point where they would start implementing it for real. Again, I've been there. When I was a kid, I would draw detailed, life-size Mario-style levels... and then I would lay down the pages on the floor and jump on them. Always play-test your game as early as possible, kids!
I think the trend here is that learning to develop games is a long process, and those artifacts represent the different stages you have to go through before you become ready to create your own original games. So sure, as a game reviewer I have to say that the clones didn't introduce enough novelty and that a design document is in no way a substitute for a game. But as a fellow game developer who has been through those stepping stones, I say keep up the good work! Don't give up, you're on the right track.
Use tools
After comparing my game with all those clones and design documents, I was sure that we were going to win... but I was wrong. I had not compared our game against strong enough competitors.
To find my strongest competitor, I was willing to play through many clones and incomplete prototypes, but I quickly grew tired of the non-playable entries.
To help me on my quest, I used the GitHub API to obtain high-level information about all the contestants. I tried to filter the entries by code size and by the date on which the contestants had stopped working on their game, but neither metric clearly separated the games from the flops. Instead, I simply eliminated the entries which did not provide a URL at which their game could be played, and that turned out to be enough.
After encountering many comments on the internet from potential players who couldn't find the games among all the flops, I realized the value of my reduced list, and I decided to publish it.
Be persistent
Even with the list reduced to a tenth of its original size, there was still a large number of games to go through.
I kept looking at more competitors because every ten games or so, I would encounter a game which was genuinely fun and original, and this would motivate me to keep looking for more gems.
The fact that good games were so rare made me realize that publishing a list of all the games, even after filtering out all the flops, was not going to be very helpful. I had to sort the list! It is at this point that I took on the role of an amateur game reviewer.
Drop information
Comparing the games turned out to be more challenging than I had imagined. Among the top contenders, there was no game which was better than the others in every single respect; rather, I would find one game with impressive graphics, another game with stimulating music, and another one with an original new mechanic. It was like comparing apples and oranges.
Professional game reviewers often solve this issue by rating each game aspect in isolation. They then combine the individual ratings into one unified score, using a fixed weight for each aspect. That's a good idea, but with more than 150 games to review, I needed a more expedient scoring method!
I ended up separating the games into categories, then sorting the categories. For example, all the games with good ideas but poor execution ended up in one basket, and then I only had to decide whether I favoured games with great execution or games with great ideas. When I published the list, I concatenated all the lists and removed the category names, so that I wouldn't hurt anyone by telling them that their game was in the "poor execution" category.
Conclusion
Only sorting the baskets meant that games belonging to the same category would appear in an arbitrary order, falsely conveying my preference for one over the other. I decided that this did not matter. After all, my goal was not to share my preferences, but to help gamers find the most worthwhile games. No order I could have came up with would have precisely matched the preferences of all my visitors anyway.
In fact, once the results of the contest came out, I discovered that my preferences were even less representative than I thought. Some of the games which the judges decided to highlight had appeared very low on my list, and conversely, some of the games at the top of my list were not mentioned at all.
Do you agree with the choices made by the judges, or is it my list which most closely matches your taste? Check out the official GitHub Game Off results here, and my much longer list of all the games here.
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