What makes a game amateurish?

#21 @andy: Good advice. Adding features deffiently kills a game. But at the same time I have to agree with what Joe said. Its hard to really know what's fun before you've played it. I think you allowed for that in step 4.

I also think its a valid point that to lead a team you must be a jack of all trades. You have to know art, music, and programing (at the very least). Programming may be the least intuitive, but you need to know how long a feature will take to add and what it will mean for the system. There's a lot of two man teams out there. A programmer and an artist. The only way this could work is if both have the exact same game in mind or if one of them knows how to do the other's job. Its easy to get inconsistency in that situation which makes a game feel amateurish. If you're going to have a team you need a leader who knows how to do each job.

Anyway, most of what everyone said sounds good to me, especially the post right above this.

-Peter

#22 "5 Sticking to the original scope doc implement all the features (don't add more - EVER!)."

I disagree. Feature creep for the sake of "guess what I came up with" is a bad thing. But as Peter pointed out (and I said earlier), you'll never have it right until it is playable. I feel the best way to handle it is to implement the features, but allow for some evolution during development based on what you have seen so far.

I am a firm believer that you should be focus testing your game with your target market as soon as possible, even in a very unfinished state. We started playtesting and getting feedback for Rumble Box as soon as you could run around in the level and punch people. I think this helped immensely, and other project that I've been on that didn't start focus testing until alpha stage were much less polished in the end.

But this testing feedback is for naught if you don't allow your features to change based on that feedback. You just have to design the feature out to make sure that it:
- Adds to the game's playability
- Does not detract from ANY aspect of the game.

Of course, this is my own approach, but I have found it to work very well.

#23 For me it's usualy rigid non flowing player controls, and rigid pivot camera. It's amazing what even the subtlest secondary camera motion can do to your games.

Those are both polish things too, and something that has greatly enhanced all the projects I have worked on so far.

In Aerial Antics, originaly the camera was much like any FPS game, a pivoting camera with the player attached much like a model on a stick. Very rigid and looked incredibly amaturish. Towards the end we added secondary motion, a little secondary damping on the camera went a long way to giving the controls a more polished feel and helped gameplay immensely by aiding the player navigate the area and get their visual bearings.

#24 I think Kirby meant to say that polish like 'beauty' is an objective term. I may view art as being more polished than someone else. I think sheer laziness and carelessness make some indie and 'mainstream games' amateurish. If you don't wanna make money from a game that's cool and the final quality doesn't matter.

If however you want to make money then your efforts should speak to inteligent design and consistency with your game's elements. I feel like this. If you get paid for your hobby it is no longer a hobby it is a profession. What you do after that is up to you. But amateur shouldn't be used in such a negative way..... because sucky is sucky whether you're getting paid or not

#25 To me its all the little things that make a game feel amatuerish... that screen didn't flow into the next one well, that button animation just doesn't fit, the music in this level just doesn't match, the animations on that player don't transition well... etc.

All those little things add up to a point when the game gets an unprofessional feel. The bigs things are hard to do, but easy to know 'what' to do. The little things take less time to do but more time to figure out what to do.

#26 Yeah I know what you mean Mathew. I had problems working with jeremy because he sees no value in polished menus etc, and only sees the game. Kind of shows in Aerial antics where he designed the menu's in code, and I just made the buttons the way he wanted.

It's a shame as you don't get a good feeling before you start playing the actual game. Where a more consistent polish througout gives the player an impression of quality. Of course no ammount of polish can make up for a lack of gameplay. But all the most popular games to seem to be the most professional and consistently well designed throughout.

Probably going to redo Aerial Antics in torque now that we have a new art path that loads all our old media.

#27 Polish to me mean re-doing the same piece of art or sound countless tiimes until it's near perfect. Never settling for less than you have to. Harry Gregson Williams sent Kojima many versions of music for the same scene so that Metal Gear Solid 2 could have the very best soundtrack to fit the mood for that scene perfectly. I believe what a lot of indies do is make one version of art and say "cool that's good enough, lets roll with this" and 9 times out of 10 your second third and fourth try is going to be better than your first. It's hard to realize your fist effort isn't that great until you see the second effort and compare. To me that's polish.
-Ajari-

#28 @ Joe : This step means that at that point in time don't ever change it. At step 9. the time comes around again to scope out things that will work.

The point is to keep things in perspective during the production cycle.

There's a time and place to add / remove stuff just not before a milestone. Other wise you never reach the milestone.

#29 "Polish to me mean re-doing the same piece of art or sound countless tiimes until it's near perfect. "

A post will be coming that says "but indies don't have the kind of time and resources to do this"

So to counter it before it comes, I will say: Scope your game so that you DO have the time to do this. Less resources, more time will be spent on each individual resource. A good way to decrease your resource needs to this level is figuring out procedural ways to do certain things.



However, I do want to add that Art and Sound aren't the only things that need polish. Gameplay needs just as many revisions. In Rumble Box we had set the character movement speed, and nobody seemed to complain so we kept it there. However, people were complaining that the gameplay felt too "robotic". So months later I came back and played with that number, and nearly doubling it made the game much more fun. We haven't had a complaint about "robotic" controls since.

The point is, much of the time we settle for the gameplay that is good. But if we put that extra effort in we will instead have gameplay that is great.

#30 Why define polish?

If you take the real meaning of Polish, it's like that:
When you polish some thing, you try to make it the less rough possible.
If you touch that thing all over it's surface and feel some rough surface, you feel it's not good.
If you polish it too much, you can destroy it.
If that thing is like a well polished shining jewel, that seem beautiful alone, it's good.


So, it's the same thing with games, or anything else isn't it?

In our particular case, if the game make the player feel that it's not a whole universe alone, if something breaks the suspension of disbelief (those things are rough surfaces), if this game feels like it's a patchwork of ideas and/or if this game don't maintain it's world until the player is satisfied, then it looks amateurish.

Why does Doom3 have interfaces on game textures that let you use game's computers without switching to "interface mode"?
Why does HL2 let you feel you're in the game in the main interface?
Why is there so much details like mouse icon, control interface and loading screen that are linked to the game universe in Warcraft?

And a last word : details are important. If it's a professionnal game ;)

...



Sorry for my poor english XD

#31 To professional developers, alpha means feature complete and beta means mostly bug free, followed by release candidates and finally gold.

But to amateur developers alpha means gold! "It's done so let's release it."

#32 @Joshua

You kind of hit the nail on the head there I think.

Coming from a professional background. I consider a polished product to be one that feels consistent throughout.

For a polished game, I see that as one that flows correctly and that does not un-intentionally draw my attention to the things that are wrong with it.

By this I mean having to fight my way through three menus when a simple start button would have done the job. Control layouts that make the game harder to play yet, can't be customised. Graphics that don't have a theme so feel cobbled together. Selling a game in five countries but, only supporting english! Having music that can't be switched off is another sure sign of the un-polished game.

Polish does not mean perfection. It means consistently high quality and attention to detail.

Here for instance are two screens from my up-coming Gunshoe game.


The main title page


The high scores

These are simple and carry the same look and feel throughout to give a sense of consistency.

#33 @Peter - intriguing graphics there. Care to share a link to your game?

#34 All the talk about polish and amature feel remind me of a lesson that I had to learn well:

"You can do an ambitious thing poorly, or you can do a humble thing well."

We see this even among the big time developers, but since they have more resources to throw at the problem they usually get closer to their ambitions than indie developers do. As indie developers it is important to remember that we have limited resources, so we need to keep our goals humble and within reach if we want to make a game that really feels like it was done professionally.