johncutterdesign.com
John Cutter
  • Home
  • Bio
  • Games
  • Other Interests
  • Blog
  • Resume / CV

how I design

9/15/2014

0 Comments

 
I had a sort of interesting mini-revelation about ten years ago. It relates to creativity and my personal approach to game design.

I'm a pretty collaborative guy, so when I'm working on a new design idea I talk to my friends, my family, and other designers. I pepper them with questions. 

Most of the designers I know, or have worked with, tend to keep their new ideas to themselves, which made me wonder if my approach was a knock on my creativity? In a moment of self-doubt I wondered: Why do I ask so many questions? Am I relying on other people to help me design my games for me?

I thought about these questions for awhile and here's what I discovered about myself. I'm a very creative problem solver. If you give me a crayon and a piece of paper and ask me to come up with something cool, I'll be kind of lost. Won't even know where to start. But if you give me the same mission with a shoe box, a paperclip, and a piece of string, I'll immediately start to generate crazy ideas.

What this made me realize is that when I'm asking all my design questions I'm really just defining parameters... I'm building myself a puzzle to solve!

This is how I design games. If I am making a casual RPG, for example, I play the top games in the genre and do a bunch of research. From this I learn that there are certain core staples that players expect. Then I ask friends, family, and colleagues, "What do you like and dislike about the casual RPGs you have played?"

When I have enough information I filter out the noise and anything that goes against my own design sensibilities and that leaves me with a core set of features that I MUST include, and a bunch of design goals that sometimes conflict with those core features, or even with each other. This all becomes the puzzle that I must then try to solve. 

Fortunately, I'm pretty good at solving puzzles, especially those that force me to "think outside the box". And that's how I design games.
0 Comments

john cutter, marketing weasel

3/5/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
"Star Rank Boxing" for the C-64
One of the first games I ever worked on was called "Star Rank Boxing" for the C-64. The gameplay was pretty simple: you could punch high (head) or low (body), and defensively you could push up or down on the stick to defend against head or body shots. 

As we were getting ready to implement the computer AI, I read an article about some Russian scientists who were experimenting with coin flip predictions. They tested hundreds of people and discovered an "optimal" pattern of results that was the most difficult for people to predict. I decided we should use this pattern for the computer's decisions to punch to the head or body. 

I'm not sure how much impact this actually had on gameplay, but I have to publicly admit that I implemented the feature so we could include this text on the box:

Advanced artificial intelligence from russia!

Players are a lot smarter now. You can't really get away with stuff like that today.  ;-)
0 Comments

    Author

    Veterans in any industry tend to have lots of stories and I'm no exception. Here are a few of my favorites... and other ramblings.

    Archives

    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013

    Categories

    All
    Celebrity
    Coding
    Design
    Family
    Game
    Psychology
    Robot
    Story

    RSS Feed

    View my profile on LinkedIn
© 2015 John Cutter, All Rights Reserved                                                                                                                                 The views expressed here are my own and do not represent any current or former employers