what makes a game good?

so i'm just screwing around with coding and trying to get back into game development after being mentally put through the paper shredder and i just want to know what makes a good game, i know of the basics such as level design and interactivity but i'm looking for something a smidge more specific, like environmental storytelling or attention to detail, so in your words, what exactly makes a game a good game? and how do i avoid making a bad game?

It's too vague a question since the answer depends on what kind of game you're making. Even a seemingly cover-all answer such as "it should be fun to play" fails to cover many games. Making a bad game is unavoidable - you might just decide not to publically release it, or even come close to completing it. Most developers refer to these as "experiments", but they are still games. The only way to avoid making a bad game is to never make one. You have to fuck up before you succeed, people learn through failure. You can't know what works if you don't know what doesn't, and you can't play to your strengths if you don't know your weaknesses.

But if you want specific advice, you gotta be a little more specific.

A good game is when a game is good. That question is so vague it's meaningless. What's a good doom map? Opinions differ, and that's all sharing the same underlying game mechanics. If you wanna make a game, then make a game. Don't over-complicate it. Join a jam or make something under jam-like conditions. Like, you have two days to make something on the theme, idk - "coming back." The key is to make things, the more things you make, and see your failings and successes, you get better at making things.

If you want something specific - learn about gameplay loops. There's things you do on moment to moment basis, the primary loop. Jumping in mario, shooting in doom, moving armies in warcraft, etc. That needs to feel engaging, and interesting. Then you have secondary loop. What you do minute to minute. Collecting stars in mario, finding keys in doom, getting unit upgrades in warcraft, etc. And the tertiary loop is hour to hour. In mario you're going for saving the princes or getting highest score, in doom that's 100% levels or getting to the secret ones or fastest time, in warcraft it's winning the battle, finishing the campaign etc.

Environmental story telling and stuff like that is just extra flair, you can't base a game on that. You need the core mechanics to be fun, everything else comes after that. Amazing, well-written story is useless if shooting a demon in a demon-shooting game feels awful.

If you play gamejam games, you'll see the experienced devs focus almost entirely on the primary loop. They have limited time, and they know how essential that moment to moment experience is. So they can make a strong gameplay prototype and build something from it later, after the jam is over.

How do you avoid making a bad game? By not making games at all. If you're gonna be making games, some of them will be bad. That's life, learn to be okay with that.

Every good game has its detractors who think it's the worst game ever. You don't make a good game by making a game that's "not bad," that's how you make a forgettable game. There have been several threads here to that effect but talking about Doom level design rather than game design in general.

A good game is a game that is not bad.

And definitely not a game about this..

idunno a game needs at least one muscly monster man i want to cuddle for me to think its good.

There are many important ingredients.

In my humble opinion, stellar level design, extraordinary weapon balance,
a phallic rocket launcher and a skewered John Romero make a good start.

When I review it and give it 5/5.

No metric outside of this matters.

Jokes aside, vague metrics for a vague question:

• Having it work
• It be engaging to play
• Having good level design
• Being able to actually make meaningful progress
• Story making sense is nice.

Can/will elaborate more later

When it's evident that priority #1 was making the gameplay fun.

Too many modern games forget that.

The player has C H O I C E

its not linear or shit, you can choose which path to go to, even if they all take a long turn and lead back in to the last area

Opinions will make a game good (To some).

• People will hate it.
• People will love it.
• People will not know how feel about it.
• People will feel indifferent to it.

All of these statements are true, and you cannot change that. Make what YOU want to make.

If you want to make a game that's monetarily successful then it's a different question you ought to ask: "Am I willing to sell my soul for financial stability?"*

^{* In some cases}

High replayability,

"Simple to learn but hard to master" type of gameplay,

Either full absence, or a VERY small amount of unskippable real-time/interactive cutscene segments.

That's it.

11 hours ago, ＤΞＬＴΛ said:

so i'm just screwing around with coding and trying to get back into game development after being mentally put through the paper shredder and i just want to know what makes a good game, i know of the basics such as level design and interactivity but i'm looking for something a smidge more specific, like environmental storytelling or attention to detail, so in your words, what exactly makes a game a good game? and how do i avoid making a bad game?

You really aren't going to get a universal answer of what makes a game "good". That said (assuming you are talking about FPS genre), I guess some ideas/points that are commonly considered "good" can be:

• Variety in gameplay. Good variety of weapons and enemies. Enemies with different attacks that can be used in a variety of ways and weapons being useful for different situations.
• Good flow to level design that is easy to navigate and rewards exploration. Half Life 1's level design is still really good.
• Environmental storytelling (assuming you are trying to tell a story). Some cutscenes are fine, but don't overdo them and allow them to be skippable.
• Nice aesthetics/animations and sound design. Some people say that graphics don't matter, but I think they do. But by graphics, I don't mean having shiny 4K RTX level graphics, rather having atleast good and consistent (if not memorable) artstyle. Likewise, sound design tends to be overlooked. I think a good sound design is one where not only they sounds are satisfying, but also memorable. Like in Doom, you can easily tell an imp's sound from a demon or a cacodemon etc.

Craftsmanship and attention to detail in the interface, controls, interactivity/physics and feedback.

Compare:

Super Mario Bros. vs Psycho Fox

Sonic the Hedgehog vs Bubsy

Donkey Kong Country vs Aero the Acrobat

Spyro the Dragon vs Gex: Enter the Gecko

Super Metroid vs Milon's Secret Castle

Blood vs Witchaven

etc.

This is why Super Meat Boy, Celeste and Shovel Knight are so good.

A game being good is a matter of perspective. Games fall into x, where they get compared with games from said x. I would just recommend making a game, any game you'd like, not thinking about such specifics. It will probably not be good, and that's exactly how you will find out what "good" means to you!

The problem with qualifying games, or creative media in general, as "good" is that "good" means different things to different people. Some people like certain elements in game design, others utterly despise them. For example, some people liked the sailing in Zelda: Wind Waker because it was unbroken by loading screens and made the world feel big, others hated it because it could grow tedious and long-winded, especially since one had to stop to change the direction of the wind to make headway. Because there's so many different opinions on the elements of various games, unless if a game is technically faulty (crashing, freezing, or glitch-ridden), it's hard to really say that it's "good" or "bad," objectively.

That said, there are some things a designer can do to ensure their game is as well-received as possible, besides marketing the shit out of it. The big one is intentional design. One should have some kind of vision as to what their game is gonna look like, and have the tools and skills to match that vision as much as possible. Now, games change a lot during development, so the process isn't 1:1 (Halo used to be an RTS, for example). However, you at least need something to start with and a set of core ideas to follow. Another one is keeping the mechanics as simple as possible and avoiding scope creep. It's easy to get ahead of ourselves and make a game bloated with unnecessary fluff. I have firsthand experience with making games too complicated, so I try to get around it by keeping stuff purposeful and not throwing everything and the kitchen sink in because I thought it would be cool.

Anyway, I've rambled on for a bit, but here's the TL;DR: good games are subjective, but intent and purpose in design goes a long way to making something "good." 

Games that don't have orcs, lasers, or gibs max out at 5/10

I don't think anyone can honestly say what you should do to make a game "good", except make the game you want to make. It all comes down to personal preference, and at the end of the day, you should be making something that you are proud of and what you see as being a good and fun game. Don't cater to specific groups of people. Your game will find an audience. And most importantly, have fun while making your game. The game should reflect you, after all :)

ALWAYS put gameplay over realism.

You're asking the impossible. There's no formula. It's all fundamentally subjective. For me, it's when I play a game and think "hey, this is fun" and not "this is about as fun as trying to trim my nether regions with a blunt kitchen knife". Some types of game I simply don't like and never play. I don't like dickish, frustrating design choices and I will lose patience with such things very quickly. Some art styles I find unappealing etc etc. But some other people may like those things.

Make the game you want to make. No matter what it is. Do a prototype as soon as you can, get feedback, and adjust trajectory if need be within the context of what you're trying to accomplish. Do not try to please everyone. That's definitely in the "trying to ice skate uphill" category of foolish. It won't happen. Ultimately, creative works should satisfy their creator first. Others enjoying it, if you intend to distribute it, should be important of course but it's ultimately secondary. You need to accept that potentially no one will like what you create. If the satisfaction of having spent a long time on a project and bringing your vision to fruition won't be enough to satisfy you and only getting positive feedback from it will make you feel it was worth it, then you honestly should probably stop now. Because you're risking expending a lot of effort only to be met with disappointment. Game design is hard for teams, let alone solo. Few people get it right out of the starting blocks. You really should be doing simpler things first (like maps) and working up to it, not going straight at it. It might take an attempt or three to get something a lot of people enjoy.

On 1/21/2024 at 10:07 PM, DoomGater said:

In my humble opinion, stellar level design, extraordinary weapon balance

i'll be taking that into consideration, i think another thing that would make a good game is good enemy design, have them be a challenge but not to the point where you wind up rage quitting

On 1/22/2024 at 2:35 AM, Burgish said:

Games that don't have orcs, lasers, or gibs max out at 5/10

i don't got orcs in my game, but i got lasers and gore

43 minutes ago, The Cooker Of Goats said:

ALWAYS put gameplay over realism.

if civvie told me anything, it's that 2000's piss filter military shooters are garbage for attempting realism

On 1/22/2024 at 1:17 AM, Aaron Blain said:

Craftsmanship and attention to detail in the interface, controls, interactivity/physics and feedback.

a lot of my older projects were quite gimmicky and didn't have much in the way of interactivity, function over form i guess you can say, i do plan to change that with my upcoming games

On 1/21/2024 at 10:57 PM, Patrick_Plays_Doom said:

its not linear or shit, you can choose which path to go to, even if they all take a long turn and lead back in to the last area

something like doom 2016, eternal, or even cruelty squad in my opinion do achieve the whole non-linear level design, half-life 1 i think also did this and maybe some others too

Hundreds of hours of developer suffering.

43 minutes ago, ＤΞＬＴΛ said:

a lot of my older projects were quite gimmicky and didn't have much in the way of interactivity

I mean interactivity in the broadest sense, any two elements in the game affecting one another.

Here's an analysis of the kind of polish I mean in Celeste:

cutscenes and quick time events

"I know what is good when I see it." - Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles

KISS.

13 hours ago, Scrabbs said:

cutscenes and quick time events

That and boob physics.

There really is no one answer to this question.  My favorite bit of advice for Doom mapping really is extensible to any game design, that is, like Murdoch said: create what you want to play.  Don't try and engineer a game based entirely on what you think other people are looking for, in all likelihood it will be muddled and you will hate the process.  Everyone wants something different.  Hell, I want something different just depending on my mood--sometimes I want the quick movement and basic gameplay loop of Doom, other times the absurd intricacy and puzzly patience of something like NetHack (and Doom maps, we all know, cover a range of styles and moods in themselves.)  Don't try and make a game that's everything to everyone.  Hew to your vision, and assume that if you do that, a lot of people won't like it--but some people will love it and, most important, you will too.

Now, if you come back with more specifics about whether you're making a run-and-gun shooter or a turn-based RPG or a puzzle game or a puzzle RPG-shooter or a stealth exploration puzzle Myst-meets-Doom-meets-etc. etc. then I will probably have more thoughts, but everything I said above will still be the most true.

If I were to offer up a common thread of what I, personally, love in any game or mod I play, I guess it's that vaguely defined concept of "character", some aspect of the design or world that makes the game just a little more layered and colorful than it would be with all else equal.  Pac-Man is about the most basic "game" game in existence, but since I was a kid it had a certain draw for me.  Why?  There's four ghosts, with four colors, four names, each with its own special behaviour.  In a bare-bones game about a cheese man eating dots in an endless sequence of mazes, it gives a bit of personality to what might have otherwise felt very bland and mechanical.  NetHack (which has the barest visual element to begin with) is interesting partly because of its absurdly intricate D&D-style mechanics, but also because of all the humorous little details in the items and books and enemies and character classes hodgepodged together to make its world less dependent on generic medievalisms than it might have been otherwise.  Commander Keen, by contrast, isn't a terribly intricate game, but it does an exemplary job making its world feel richer with the signs, easter eggs, level names, enemy designs, and bits of flavor text and story that are there.  I feel always like I'm in a place bigger than what I can see, even if it isn't a realistic or plausible one.  In each of these cases, the mechanics are also super important, and my point is not to discount making the game work and play well (it really should), but for me anyway it takes a little extra quirk somewhere to make it truly memorable and lovable.  And I guess that's where making a game you're really passionate about can come in handy.

On 1/25/2024 at 11:50 AM, Kinsie said:

Hundreds of hours of developer suffering.

i feel that, the amount of "execution could not continue" errors i got and script warnings i got is probably more than there are stars in the universe lmao

Good storyline.