A friend of mine is making a game that looks absolutely stunning. its a 3d action game, and its got a wonderful art style. The art ‘design’ is fantastic and the level of detail is really high. There are lots of tiny little interesting objects all around the world that have been lovingly modelled and textured and animated and had sound effects attached to them. It makes for a lovely world. The game is a sort of survival/action thing with some sneaking, but a lot of running, and as a result, you get through areas of the game relatively quickly.
Here is an icon from Production Line (my car factory sim).
If you play Production Line, you’ve seen that graphic a lot. Its in every game, all over the place. You see it maybe 10,000 times in the course of a decent play-through, and it may be on the screen 70% of the time you are playing, because its a key resource in the game. You can guess that, lovely though it is, it didn’t take days of artist time to make this icon. In other words, getting that piece of ‘content’ produced was pretty cheap.
Content is cheap, but at a certain level of output, the cheapness starts to multiply and become not so cheap…then expensive, then ruinous. This is why the realistic FPS scene is dominated by a small number of big players. You simply cannot make a photorealistic style FPS that is only going to sell 500,000 copies, even if they are all at $59.99, because you will go bankrupt immediately. Take a look at this:
Its awesome right? Its amazing that video games look this good these days. But textures that high-def take a LOT of time to make, vs the 128×128 pngs in Production Line. And worse still, MUCH WORSE, is that you are running around those worlds at a high pace, zapping, shooting, dodging, jumping. You are not sightseeing, you are running like crazy.
In a multiplayer FPS, things are not so bad. You can limit the fighting area, and get a lot of mileage out of a relatively small area. In a single player action game, you are going to whizz through that content at high speed. This means you need a LOT of content, especially when gamers are constantly complaining that a game that cost them $59.99 is *only* 40 hours long. (A pretty good cost/entertainment ratio in any media frankly). The situation is so bad, that even the huge budget publishers make sure that game stories include some reason why you have to backtrack, and ‘revisit’ older areas of the game for some nebulous story reason. This is not lazy writing, its producers and accountants telling you that you need 40 hours but only have the budget for 10 hours of content experienced at the expected pace.
Few indies are crazy enough to make an FPS, but plenty make ‘fast paced’ games. Be aware that you need to take the content-consumption rate into account when designing your game. It is, of course a balancing act. On the one hand, you want the player to constantly be exposed to novelty, to ‘keep the game interesting’ but on the other hand, you simply cannot afford to do this at high speed. You need to design your game according to your budget, or you risk making a heavily compromised game, or running out of money. Do not fall into the trap of thinking games need a ton of varied content to be good. Chess has few pieces and a tiny game area, yet has entertained people for an amazing amount of times. Some of the best, most classic TV episodes are those written with only a single set and 3 or 4 characters, for purely budget reasons.
If making the player move 10% faster adds 10% to the required content and dev time/budget, is it still a good idea?