Sid Meier's Pirates! Designer Diary #4
Associate producer Dan Magaha reveals the secret to good game design at Firaxis.
With Sid Meier's Pirates!, famed designer Sid Meier will attempt to remake one of his greatest games. The original Sid Meier's Pirates!, which debuted in 1987, was an addictive blend of action, strategy, role-playing, and adventure. In the upcoming remake, you'll once again take on the role of a dashing, heroic young pirate of the Caribbean, looking for fame and fortune, as well as some romantic interludes with fetching governors' daughters. In this edition of our designer diaries, associate producer Dan Magaha discusses the many challenges involved in making a game like Sid Meier's Pirates!, and what the secret to the company's game design is.
Tornado Wrangling
By Dan MagahaAssociate producer, Firaxis Games
At Firaxis, we've dedicated ourselves to creating the most compelling, fun games in the world. That's a tall order, but then again, we also have a not-so-secret weapon that goes by the name of Sid. And we utilize a development process--iterative prototyping--that complements our strengths as a company and helps us stay focused on our goal of creating great games that will stand the test of time.
In this diary, I'm going to discuss some aspects of iterative prototyping, and our production process in general.
You've all heard the cliché about how games were made back in the good old days, where one or two people would make a best-selling game "out of their garage." These days, it's a much more involved and complicated process, with dozens of people working together, writing thousands of lines of code, building tons of 3D models, and recording hours of sound. At the center of all this chaos are producers. On Sid Meier's Pirates!, there are two producers: Barry Caudill, who heads up the PC side of things, and me; I'm primarily focused on the Xbox version of the game. It's our job to harness this tornado of assets, ideas, and energy, and steer it across the finish line in the form of the most entertaining and highest quality product possible.
Just as there is no perfect formula for writing an engrossing novel, and no secret technique for painting a masterpiece, there isn't a single way of producing a game that guarantees it'll be fun. (If you have one, let us know and we'll trade our ping-pong table for it.) However, many game developers start with a design document. Design docs are exactly what they sound like: a reference piece that explains the important design considerations of the game. This can include everything from backstory and plot to diagrams of levels and charts listing out all the objects and locations that have to be created. The idea of a design doc is that the designer writes it, and then everyone uses it as a blueprint for building the game, exactly as it's described.
This leads to a plethora of unforeseen, interesting issues that can come up in the development process. For instance, what happens if the game is completed exactly to the specs listed in the design doc, but just isn't fun? Or if an unforeseen technical issue, caused by one of the design requirements, causes the game to run at an unacceptably low frame rate? And the list could go on and on...
At Firaxis, we use a different process, one that we've found to be extremely effective at helping us "find the fun"--iterative prototyping. It's a lot simpler than it sounds: iterative, because we work in a cyclical fashion, taking a pass at improving the game, stepping back to evaluate it, then building on that foundation with the next pass; and prototyping, because we start with simple models and simulations of things and then connect everything together once we've nailed the really good stuff.
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