Speaker A
thanks to game maker for sponsoring this video I've been making games for 30 years now and I've used a lot of different tools to do that but whether you're a pro designer or you're just getting started sometimes you just want
Indie Game Clinic reviews three games on novelty vs. familiarity in design, using snake-tower defense, deck-builder, and Plants vs. Zombies examples. Sponsored by GameMaker.
Key Takeaways
- Successful innovation requires enough familiarity for players to understand and engage with new mechanics.
- Combining two game concepts works only when the systems are deeply integrated, not just placed side by side.
- Legibility of interactive elements is critical; players must understand how their decisions affect outcomes.
- Frequent playtesting reveals issues that designers cannot see on their own.
What the video covers
- The video opens with a sponsorship segment promoting GameMaker, praising its accessibility, documentation, community support, and one-time perpetual license.
- The host argues that game design balances familiarity (genre conventions, controls, tropes) with innovation (novel mechanics).
- Too much innovation without familiarity leaves players with nothing to latch onto; too much familiarity makes a game feel unoriginal.
- Genres like first-person shooters share control schemes that give players a head start, freeing them to appreciate the novelty.
- The first game reviewed, Land Trains (a Snake and tower defense hybrid), has a cool concept but separates building and playing, making build decisions hard to understand.
- Suggested fix: integrate the two systems, e.g., constant snake gameplay with pausable real-time building, similar to FTL.
- The host explains that a good X + Y combination needs the pieces to integrate into a coherent whole, citing Plants vs. Zombies as a successful example.
- The second game reviewed struggles with its mix of ideas and its ammo system and timer clarity; the host recommends repeated playtesting to refine it.
- The third game is a puzzle/deck-builder hybrid with cute animal battlers; it feels familiar but lacks enough depth in its destruction and blocking mechanics.
- The host closes by noting that clear legibility and playtesting are essential for turning unique ideas into playable designs.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
to get an idea crafted and playable as quickly as possible and that's why I always keep coming back to game maker both for my own projects and when it comes to teaching other people I used to teach game maker to University students
Speaker A
every year and found it really accessible even for folks who've never done any programming before the software is really easy to use and you can start with a visual language and then transition to written scripting as and when you need to of course it helps that
Speaker A
the documentation is really thorough and that there are excellent support communities on Discord Reddit and other social media but a lot of the time I've always found that the language is so intuitive and so close to plain English
Speaker A
that I can work a lot of things out myself not a void funk in sight there's tons of learning content available on the platform which will take you all the way from beginner projects up to learning the sorts of skills that you
Speaker A
might need for more profession level Dev work then when you do level up to the point where you're thinking about commercially launching games game maker has a onetime Perpetual license which is a breath of fresh air in an era when
Speaker A
lots of creative software is trying to lock you into monthly subscriptions so download Game Maker today using the link in the description and start building games [Music] today every time you design design a game you are always balancing these two
Speaker A
different forces of familiarity and Innovation on one hand if a game has no innovation there will be no hook to pull people in and promise that they're going to get a unique novel experience but on the other hand if there's too much
Speaker A
Innovation and there is no familiarity there will be nothing there for players to latch onto in terms of things that they already understand this is one of the reasons why genres in games tend to be based around things like how you
Speaker A
control the camera right if we look at first-person shooter games most games in the category will control the same way like the W keys and the mouse or the the way that the GamePad works there's a a big chunk of familiarity already there
Speaker A
in terms of like how you control the character that familiarity with the genre allows players to quickly play this new game and to actually get to the point where they can experience the novelty that's there whatever it is
Speaker A
there are other points where familiarity is more to do with theming using tropes in terms of like your world building and and stuff like that will make the game easier to understand right how the bad guys look how do we know their bad guys
Speaker A
how do we know which bad guys are going to spit fire at us all of that kind of stuff it's to do with familiarity because game design is fundamentally a language and we are always in discussion with what players already know and what
Speaker A
they've already experienced and we have to kind of integrate what we're trying to do into that on my stream this week I played a bunch of new games and three of them stood out in particular as games that are wrestling with this problem of
Speaker A
of how do I use what people know but also do something unique and today I want to just take you through those examples and talk about how they did in relation to this problem of novelty versus familiarity so the first game I'm
Speaker A
going to talk about is land trains which was sent to me by baz who is uh one of our Discord members hi baz this is a really interesting game basically what we've got is is the game of snake you
Speaker A
know you got the basic gameplay of snake and then you have what is ostensibly a tower defense game is conceptually really cool love the idea of you know big bovie monsters and a cool big train covered in guns that fights them amazing
Speaker A
the way that the game is currently structured doesn't really make the best of these two elements working together we've got lots of zooming in to build which feels a bit awkward to be totally honest with you because I can't
Speaker A
now see which bit of the train is going to be firing from where it's a thing that's that that baz has done so that we can see The Cool Tech up close but I'm not sure it's going to contribute to the
Speaker A
player being able to make decisions in the best way the bit where I get to play Snake and my snake is shooting at stuff that that's fun right the building stuff on the train could be fun but at the
Speaker A
moment it's not because I don't really understand the decisions I'm making because the train is stationary when I'm building and I can't see how putting a gun here is a better decision than putting a gun here right and that's
Speaker A
that's kind of what you're looking for all the time particularly if you're dealing with trying to design strategic decisions for players trying to design situations where players are upgrading stuff or building something that has a a kind of a functional uh difference
Speaker A
depending on how you build it then if the players can't see how what they're doing has any effect and they're just randomly doing stuff right and that was the problem with the game cuz the the Tower Defense bit where you build is
Speaker A
totally separate from the snake bit where you move around and shoot at the same time the Cannons all look a bit similar there's a reason why in like a tower defense game you have like a blue ice tower and a red bomb Tower or
Speaker A
whatever it's not just because that's the color it would be it is about legibility as a interactive part of your game so my advice to baz there was to try and integrate them more perhaps to have the Snake Game constantly going and
Speaker A
then every so often you can pause and build stuff live with everything paused and then unpause and it will move around and shoot with the new weapons right that kind of pause and play gameplay that you get in games like FTL where
Speaker A
it's a real time combat but then when you need to make decisions and stop and think you can pause the game and do that I think think that would be a better direction for this keep us steady driver
Speaker A
our face no the very World worlds depends on it that's what she sounds like I can tell there's something appealing there about snake combined with Tower Defense I like that I think there is a theme there that ties well to
Speaker A
a snake like tank driving around with all of these weapons on is it feels like an anime kind of premise but but to really go there in terms of the game playay I think think it needs to not
Speaker A
separate these two things out and that's the problem with the it's X Plus y kind of method of ideation when you do this form of it's this plus this the the idea needs to fit together into kind of an
Speaker A
interesting end product Oh it's the last of us cross with The Walking Dead well those are both zombie things so I can't see how merging them makes a new thing if you say oh it's like The Last of Us
Speaker A
crossed with Animal Crossing then that is such a a big Gulf between the two things that it is kind of amusing to think of but it might be hard to actually use that to generate anything useful ideas wise the links between
Speaker A
those things how they are integrated it it's what makes or breaks it so if you take uh Plants versus Zombies as an example right shooting zombies while building a garden right because when you're playing it you just see them as
Speaker A
Towers but conceptually it is very weird but it makes total sense and it all fits together in the game zombies are slow moving threatening agents that want to kill you and plants okay they don't shoot in real life but they do stay in
Speaker A
place right so all of the game play is described in the title of Plants versus Zombies which is another one of these X+ y put to weird things together but the the execution of the game design is not
Speaker A
just about whether these two things go together it's how you make them go together the problem with land trains at the moment is that the snake and the building do not integrate in a way that is like satisfying to play
Speaker A
with the second game I want to talk about is wrestling with the same problem like how do you make this Innovative mix of things and make it work and I struggled with this game at first but after a few rounds I could really see
Speaker A
that it was working and basically you are for some reason on a big dice in space and there's this sort of math problem of you get given a random number from these cards and then you have to score that number each round to survive
Speaker A
if you win I will leave your plan Al the number that you score is determined by which face of the dice you're on so if you're on the two side and you need to score four you shoot two enemies on the
Speaker A
two side and you get four in total and and you're okay but if you were on the five side and you shot one enemy you would have overshot by one point and you would be out she's really distracting
Speaker A
because she's like the only animated thing I look over here nothing is moving I look over there she's vibing and doing whatever she's doing it's quite distracting from the game it took me a little while to get my head around
Speaker A
but after I played a few rounds it started to become really compelling so I do think that there is something here that I think is worth developing this is going to sound really obvious right but it's not obvious when you're making
Speaker A
games I played it and I was bad and then I played it again and I was slightly better and then I played it again and I was slightly better now that might sound like a really stupid obvious thing to
Speaker A
say but if we do compare this to baz's game the train game that I played right at the start when I played it the second time I couldn't really see what I could do to improve with this game I can at
Speaker A
least try and puzzle the game out and work out how to get better at it right uh and fundamentally any skill-based game needs to have that quality to it and again I know that sounds really obvious but is something to watch for
Speaker A
when you're getting your games play tested because if people play it a couple of times and they don't get better or they don't know how to get better then that you got a problem there's a similar struggle as there was
Speaker A
with land trains of like integration between two parts but in land trains it was about the gameplay it was about two sections of gameplay that weren't really made to come together in a cohesive way here I think actually you've got an
Speaker A
issue of of like thematic cohesion so you you've got the dice and the cards that feel very arbitrary you know they look like they could have just been ripped from tabletop simulator and then you've got all this sci-fi stuff and
Speaker A
there's there's very little effort gone into making these things kind of talk to each other in an interesting way the ammo issue is the biggest gameplay issue for me and the timer just needs to be clearer and then just keep play testing
Speaker A
it with different people cuz I think there's something really interesting there but the biggest problem in this game for me is that the playing cards and the dice do just do not thematically gel with whatever's going on with the
Speaker A
Sci-Fi the Sci-Fi shooter stuff in this game and I think addressing that problem is is one of the easiest wins in terms of making this into a better game the last game I want to talk about was one called tick tactic which someone
Speaker A
in the Stream very amusingly said should be called a peck Builder because it's about ducks fighting which is very cute Peck Builder you need all credit for that if they uh decide to take that name off of you
Speaker A
because Peck Builder is such a good name effectively What's Happening Here is you are playing knots and Crosses which threw me off initially because knots and Crosses is a game that doesn't have a lot of crunch to it if you're an adult
Speaker A
and you understand how it works cuz you always win or block right it basically functions like a deck builder where after each match you get to swap out some of these tiles and replace them with tiles that explode or tiles that
Speaker A
spawn other tiles and stuff like this right so explodes when destroyed and you've got some stuff that destroys my stuff so I'm going to put that down here and see what happens I don't quite understand the destruction and blocking mechanics yet but that's
Speaker A
fine after I understood what was happening I thought this was a really compelling combination of things and I've talked before on this channel about doing design as a way of fixing a problem with an existing thing and in
Speaker A
games this could be you take a genre of game that you don't like or that is too simple for you or whatever and you try and address that problem right the the funny thing about this example is we
Speaker A
used to do this at the University where I used to work as like one of the first things students would do was to uh basically hack the game of kns and Crosses or Tic Tac to like what would
Speaker A
you change about it to make it more suitable for an adult audience right make the grid bigger add an element of Randomness whatever and the exercise wasn't really there to make the game better it was there to show people what
Speaker A
quickly making changes to a game can do so it's really funny to see this game cuz it's doing that right it's kind of saying Tic Tac Toe isn't really a game you would play as an adult most of the
Speaker A
time because adults kind of know how it works and it it it just doesn't uh doesn't really scratch the itch because there's not enough there to do what can we add to to make that work this is really neat it's got this kind of slay
Speaker A
the Spire combat thing where you you rack up damage to each other I guess that that idea of like using a puzzle game to make a battler work goes back to things like Puzzle Quest or super puzzle fighter so that's not new um but it's
Speaker A
it's a really good way to kind of make the Tic-tac-toe and the upgrading of the of the pieces that you use for the Tic Tac Toe make sense in this context cuz You' got your funny little ducks battling and yeah I it's just really
Speaker A
good it's a it's a good thing but I do think in order for this game to kind of be as successful as it can be the developer really needs to look at the bits of it that are hardest to
Speaker A
understand and just make sure that whatever helper mechanics or or tutorial pop-ups or whatever are needed are there when I was first playing this I really struggled with understanding like um what's in my bag right because the thing
Speaker A
about a deck builder is you know you've got a deck of cards you Loosely know how many are in it and you can often look at what's been drawn and all of this stuff there is a feature to do that here but
Speaker A
it it kind of took me a little while to notice it and I I don't know if that's going to be a problem with other players it's the sort of issue that you only really resolve by testing it with with
Speaker A
lots of people and like watching them and seeing what they get confused by do the sort of play testing where you are looking over someone's shoulder that's what I keep going on about put your game on a laptop go to a convention they'll
Speaker A
usually you you get free tickets to go to events if you if you exhibit so it's a great way to go and get to go and see like cool stuff like cosplay and stuff without having to pay it's like phone up
Speaker A
a local con doesn't have to be a games con can be a comic Kong could be a Bard game convention I've demoed games at things that were definitely not games things before uh because it's just a good way to get free tickets but that
Speaker A
aside this is the sort of game where it would benefit from a lot of the type of play testing where you do not really get involved with the play test and you just watch them figure it out and watch where
Speaker A
they get stuck and then make notes on it overall I think this was a really neat game and and like a like almost a perfect balance of novelty and and familiarity and I think what makes it so interesting is it has familiarity coming
Speaker A
from multiple directions the the battler of the the two characters that you control through the puzzle that is familiar from various games the idea of the deck builder is familiar the kind of cute animals fighting is familiar but
Speaker A
you kind of put them all together in this unusual way and that's a really neat little game I like that one as designers we're always going to struggle with this tight rope walk of wanting to make sure the thing that you're making
Speaker A
is original not just for the sake of being original but so that people have a reason to pick it over something else it's just a a fundamental part of design that dates back to basically everything else that humans have ever designed
Speaker A
Raymond ly is talked about as being like the father of industrial design um design lots of things including the Shell Oil logo the logo for the US Postal Service and the Coca-Cola bottle and he had this principle called Maya
Speaker A
not a 3D modeling software because they didn't have that in the' 40s 50s and 60s it is an acronym which stands for most advanced yet acceptable really this This Acronym is about targeting like what the goal of your design is right it's about
Speaker A
trying to push your audience for your product right to the point where um the thing is about about as advanced as they can take it before they get their minds blown at the time a Coca-Cola bottle was like this it was it was a wibbly bottle
Speaker A
like this if they'd put like two Curves in it everyone's heads would have just spontaneously exploded because they couldn't take it that would have been too advanced and unacceptable unacceptable I think it's just an interesting bit of design history to to
Speaker A
think of here because this is not a new problem to games it's something that people have always been uh wrestling with whether they were designing Coke bottles games or cars or chairs of like trying to find this threshold of where
Speaker A
something is interesting and and novel enough to make people go oh wow without making them go what's that that's not a chair I'm not I'm not sitting on that look at the state of it anyone who has ever designed a thing has has taken this
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kind of Challenge on of how do I make this thing Maya how do I make it the most advanced thing yet acceptable and it's one of the things I love about running this channel is I get to see uh
Speaker A
people struggle with this over and over again and it's it's always like a really exciting invigorating thing to see a lot of what I do here is playing games that have sent me for review and what qualifies me to do that I've been
Speaker A
working as a game designer for 10 years I've run game design courses I've worked in a bunch of different areas of the games industry and just spent years and years sort of researching how games are made in different contexts because you
Speaker A
know I'm an academic as well as a designer and what I try and do on this channel is give people a place where they can showcase their games but we do it as a kind of game design class so you
Speaker A
know people send me their games and I critique them I'm at a point now where the backlog of games I have in my email is quite unreasonable I used to play everything I was sent and make a whole
Speaker A
video about it now I'm looking at other ways to manage the backlog which is why in this video you've seen three games kind of highlighting a general theme in design so if you're a returning viewer let me know how you feel about this
Speaker A
format because um there are so many games I can't get through them all and I think maybe the best way to try and get through them all now is to do this kind of format where we stream some games and
Speaker A
then kind of work out how to put them together into something educational after that point thanks for tuning in and remember keep innovating but not too much because otherwise people's heads will explode [Music] w [Music]
Topics:game designnovelty vs familiarityindie gamesgame reviewtower defenseGameMakergame mechanicsplaytestingLand TrainsPlants vs Zombies
