Designing a good online game isn’t simply a visual thing or how many Rounds Per Minute your 3D rendered mercenary can pop off; it’s largely based on how well you know your client and their end user. It can make or break a young designer or even an established company.

At GameHouse, we design online games. We’ve designed for a large spectrum of client types and game purposes, from online casinos to religious children’s games, to tie-in games for TV, film, and consumer products, to self-promotion. Every specific placement of a game creates its own strengths, weaknesses, limitations, and possibilities that a designer needs to consider before he/she even comes up with a concept.

This article runs through a general list of elements that merit consideration for online game design. We’ll skip delving into the intricacies of developing downloadable games, which have their own special breed of considerations and focus on ‘instant play’ games, which are primarily developed in Java, Shockwave, and more recently, Flash. We’ve used a couple of scenarios as examples that utilize different use and placement to show how these considerations can vary.

The first step is to consider the client. While this seems intuitive, we’ve received calls more than once from clients who had started work with someone else and ended up with a half-completed game aimed at a demographic that didn’t even use the company’s product.

You must ask: Is your game for a consumer product? Does it need to highlight a particular use of a product? Is it for children? Is it trying to tap into the ‘gamer’ market? Will it tie into an online game contest? Is it intended to promote "stickiness", or build an online community? Will it be designed in-house and resold to a variety of clients? Will it be a completely custom game developed for one-time use? Is it for self-promotion or artistic pursuit? Maybe you just want to experiment or push the limits of a new technology. The answers to these questions will directly affect what kind of game you’ll develop and how it plays.

One of the first technological questions you’ll be faced with is which format to develop in. As we’ve mentioned, there are generally three main choices for online game development: Java, Shockwave, and Flash.

Does your client care if you need to download a plug-in to play the game? Java is your probable choice if they do. Based on the results of an informal poll of 2.5 programmers in our office, of the three, it’s the most programmer-friendly. Java, however, can be limited by its unpredictable results across OS and browser types, or even versions, often resulting in more testing time. Audio quality is limited to 8 KHz, and doesn’t do high-pitched tones very well. A soft high shuffle can turn into a harsh sounding clank after compression, making it difficult and time consuming to find sounds that work well.

Jpegs and Gifs can be used interchangeably, although getting into the habit of putting as many graphical elements as can be managed onto a single document is advisable, as each separate file increases download speed by about 1 second. Making a ‘reel’ of any animation frames, and a single document for all like-sized graphics (like the little aliens and bombs for your shoot-em-up) makes everything cleaner, more efficient and orderly.

We highly recommend using a product called Jpeg Optimizer (www.xat.com) for custom jpeg compression. This application allows you to selectively compress certain areas of an image more than others, retain color saturation, and even save the compression map as a separate image map in case you need to update a graphic or compress like images. For the lazy artist (or those who like to work ‘smart’ instead of ‘hard’, take your pick) they have the "Magic Compress" wand, which will do a pretty great job of selectively compressing high-contrast areas with the press of a button.

Shockwave is very friendly to embedded media, giving you the most control over what the user will see and hear, and this tends to hold true across OS and browser configuration. It does require a plug-in, and just because you’ve got the latest version installed, Mr. or Mrs. Designer, don’t assume your average user does. In fact a significant portion of your average consumer will click on the ‘back’ button rather than download something they might not feel they need, don’t want to bother with the time factor, etc. Your average ‘gamer’, by contrast, will do just about anything to play some new groovy game (including self-immolation), so plug-ins aren’t such an issue in this market.

The release of Flash 5 has seen much advancement in its action-scripting capabilities, therefore making it a more robust and valuable game creation environment. File sizes can be aggressively low, if you stick to optimized vector graphics, but not if you’re tossing in loads of gifs or jpegs. Although Flash requires a plug-in, a ridiculously high percentage of users have at least Flash 4 installed, we’ve heard this rumored to be somewhere around 95% of the user population.

Consistently, branding is a paramount consideration in a game. If you’re building a game for a client, it’s almost certain their big and occasionally unattractive logo will have to be prominently displayed somewhere. Even if it’s just a self-promotion piece or an interesting personal experiment, stick your own brand, or at least a copyright string on it. If you put it up for anyone to play, you have no idea who will link to your creation, what interest it could inspire, or potential work it could generate. Make it easy to find out who created it. If it’s a game you’ll be re-selling and licensing to multiple sites, how you brand it has a major impact on long-term profitability. If a designated branded area is on the background or on the background image, or the on the side next to the "score", that’s one thing, but texture-mapped to "balls of death" or pixel-poked onto a hood of a car is another. Assume, hopefully, that you’ll have to do it twenty more times when deciding that with only six more layers of effects layers in Photoshop it’ll look just right.

Whereas some considerations are more absolute, quite a few more are rather subjective. Just successfully choosing a game idea can be a feat. If you’ve played games for any amount of time, you can probably come up with a myriad of great game ideas, but arriving at an idea that’s appropriate for the intended application or within a restricted range of parameters can be challenging.

If you have a client that wants a game to reflect a product, it might be easy to use the product directly in a game, but often it’s not so obvious. Marketing types love a good metaphor, so use this to your advantage: "See the falling blocks? They represent, uh…accumulating data on a hard-drive. Use our optimization product!"

Even further, you need to understand how your game idea will monetized. Maybe your game is simply meant to augment brand awareness and it’s paid for out of an overall ad budget, but often a website will be relying on that game for revenue. It’s going to be making that return through ad revenue via the CPM of banner impressions, or even requesting an email address for data mining. It behooves you to design a game that A. Builds game-play over time to ensure maximum ad exposure. B. Is addictive enough to ensure return traffic. C. Is competitive, whether against other players or an individual player’s previous performance. But let’s break them down:

Point A. There are many ways to affect this. The idea here is to keep the player in the game cycling as many reloaded ad banners as you can. Does the game idea lend itself to levels? Having a "click to continue" button at the end of a level not only allows the player to heat up some pizza rolls, it’s making someone 1.5¢ richer.

How many times have you been playing a game of solitaire at work that’s been up and running in the background for 2-3 hours? A good, simple turn-based game can be very attractive to an ad-revenue based site.

Point B. This is the most elusive quality of a game. You want the tempo to feel natural to the type of game it is. Cards should flip over quickly. Aliens should move slowly enough in the beginning to allow a novice to achieve a moderate score and encourage him to keep playing, yet build intensity quickly enough to not completely bore a veteran player who’s waiting to get to the challenging stuff. A strategically based game allows a player to learn insights of game play over time to keep him intrigued and coming back.

Can you tie the game into a contest of some kind? This will often entail database configuration to get running, but people will sometimes go to extraordinary lengths just to win a one of those stress squeeze-balls. Anyone returning from a trade-show has witnessed this first-hand. The chance of winning anything, no matter how small, will intrigue players. This also allows access to valuable demographic information.

C. Whenever possible, quantify performance. I’ve played games that were really good, but just never ended. Milestones, whether game levels or incremental changes in game play (a new type of alien appears after a certain time) give a player a way to gauge his performance and try to surpass it. The most obvious way of doing this is by incorporating a hi-score list, if appropriate to the game type. Requiring an authentic email address to post a hi-score is an effective way to track game usage and impart valuable details to the game-site.

If the scale of your development includes multi-player capabilities, all the better. The feeling of attaining a hard-won victory over another actual person can be addictive and bring a player back repeatedly. Consider adding chat capabilities to enhance the interaction, whether in a "lobby" setting or the game itself, or both.

These points apply to most games, even if a client has specific ideas and parameters for a game idea. What if you are developing a game and want to reap the greatest value by reselling it yourself? Our best advice is to keep the game idea a general one. It makes sense: You hit the broadest market and you get the greatest return. Here’s an example:

We had developed a good game idea. During some meetings in the office we batted around some ideas for throwing a theme onto a "bunch of stacking blocks" concept. There were lots of decent ideas, but realistically, how many people are going to want to license a game of stacking and rolling gumballs inside a gumball machine? Good game? Sure, but simple (but nicely illustrated) blocks sell better to an online insurance company. And that’s an extra $1,500,000* in our pockets!

Overall, knowing your client, end use and technical limitations before starting to design for your online game will give you the best possible balance between great game play, aesthetic, branding and revenue generation.

*Numbers vastly inflated to look more impressive.

Look for future articles by the folks at GameHouse. Next installment: "Bitterness and Betrayal, The Sordid Collapse! Affair"

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