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today I want to talk to you about two things that a game needs to do in order to do well and some common problems with games that I see all the time both in games I randomly play and the games that
Indie Game Clinic explains that games must be both appealing (to attract players) and engaging (to keep them playing), warning against weak core toy-like interactions and environment-first design.
Key Takeaways
- Engagement and appeal are distinct but overlapping; both are needed for success.
- Build and polish the core moment-to-moment interactions first, like a vertical slice, before expanding content.
- Make player activities intrinsically fun, and avoid relying on environment or raw difficulty to hold attention.
- Focus on interesting decisions and a strong central fantasy that makes the game appealing.
What the video covers
- The video distinguishes appeal (whether players are drawn to a game initially) from engagement (what keeps players playing once they start).
- Engagement depends on game design: the activities given to players and how those activities feel moment to moment.
- A common problem is games that are just a series of challenges without interesting decisions or problem solving.
- A common problem is games that are essentially environments or worlds not designed around an activity.
- Good games are like strings of 'toys': individually satisfying interactions (e.g., a sword that feels good to swing) strung together with goals, rewards, and punishments.
- Developers should build a single polished vertical slice and get core interactions feeling good before adding content such as levels, story, or enemy variety.
- Environment-first developers, especially those using Unity or Unreal, often add beautiful immersion without gameplay, which players do not stay for.
- Difficulty alone is not engagement; most players want interesting or difficult decisions rather than simply more health or shorter timers.
- Appeal can be achieved by identifying the central fantasy a player would enjoy and building a strong theme and mechanics around it.
- Making a game appealing and engaging can also be simplified by choosing a clear, achievable scope that suits the developer's skills.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Engagement vs Appeal
- 01:29Engagement and Core Activities
- 02:57Toys, Challenges, and Game Feel
- 04:22Vertical Slices and Content Scope
- 05:30Environment-First Pitfalls
- 07:22Difficulty and Meaningful Decisions
- 09:00Designing for Appeal and Central Fantasy
- 11:00Playtesting and Closing Thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
I'm sent for this channel now these aren't the only two things that a game needs to do you may use other words for these Concepts you may have heard other words used for these Concepts but I'm going to be talking about making a game
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that is engaging versus making game that is appealing and these are slightly different ideas but they do overlap in some cases so what's the difference well engagement is ongoing it's what happens when you play a game initially and then
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you see something in it and you want to continue playing it it's the the thing that keeps you involved whereas appeal is more down to whether someone is going to even look at your game in the first place whether someone is going to
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download the demo whether it just looks like the sort of thing that they would like now these two things are definitely linked but sometimes we see a game that is very engaging but it doesn't have a very unique appeal and sometimes we see
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a game that has like quite a cool unique appeal and then when you play it it's not very engaging so I think it's worth trying to separate these things out a little bit so if engagement is what actually happens when players are
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playing your game and you want them to have a good time and you want them to continue playing your game then it's kind of more to do with the game itself and to do with the game design I.E the
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activities that you you give to players and how those things feel and two of the really common issues that I see in this area are one that your game is just a series of challenges and it doesn't have
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interesting decisions or problem solving and then the second one is that your game is just an environment or a world and it's not been designed thinking of the activity first these aren't the only problems that games have with engagement
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but I would say that 80% of the games I see that I see issues with they fall into these categories to think about the chall one first I see this a lot in difficult games where there is a game
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there there are lots of mechanics you play the game and you are trying to get as far as you can and avoid being defeated but the momentto moment action of the game doesn't feel enjoyable enough for that to be rewarding one of
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the ways I like to think about this is in terms of games versus toys so if you think about a toy it is something that you play with and it's inherently fun to play with whatever it is is you swing it
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about you squish it there there is a good feel to using that toy or it could be something that you you move around and you use your imagination with like Lego figures or something like that but a toy is something that is inherently
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fun to play with even if it doesn't have a goal or any rules and what a good game usually feels like and this is particularly applicable to action games and games of challenge is it feels like you've got a series of toys that are fun
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to interact with and then you strung them together with challeng Alles and goals and rewards and punishments to give a more concrete example a cool sword that makes a really nice sound when you switch it and has a cool
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animation and when you hit things with it there screen shake and all of that that's a toy but you put that in a game about surviving and defeating enemies and it becomes part of the game and then and then that game has other toys in it
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right so picking up coins is going to feel a certain way opening a chest is going to feel a certain way all of these little bits of interaction are like toys they should be inherently pleasurable and then you string them together with
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rules and goals and so on to make a game but the the momentto moment feeling of playing the game and being engaged with the game is only going to feel as fun as that all of those toys added up together
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that sword needs to feel fun to use on its own one of the issues that I see over and over again with challenge based games and particularly with games about combat is that the momentto moment gameplay just does not feel good and
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there have been entire books written about this is something you can look at other games and study but it is really important to get right because no one is going to care about the challenge of your game and surviving another level
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and getting to the next boss if the moment to moment of swinging a sword and hitting things doesn't feel good this is one of the reasons why I always recommend making a single level vertical slice of your game and focusing on
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getting everything feeling really good before you then go and add loads of content your content includes things like story different levels and environments variations in enemies and weapons all of that kind of stuff it's important to eventually have that
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variety of content in your game but there's no point in making it until you've got one or two things that feel good right like don't make 10 weapons for your FPS if the first weapon isn't at a point where it feels fun to use but
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even if you're making like the opposite kind of game like a story driven cozy game a lot of these principles are still going to apply if you're meant to feel warmth towards the characters in a game then inter acting with them should feel
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good too can you imagine if you like went up to a character in Animal Crossing and it didn't have the when they speak and they didn't like turn and look at you and all of those little bits of of game field that are put into make
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you want to do that interaction you need to focus on that kind of stuff and and it's the same principle like write a single scene write a single environment make that really good and don't make any more game until you're at that point
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don't make a whole game until you've got a vertical slice demo of of a very good very small game and then you'll be on track to making a game that's genuinely engaging and there are also a lot of
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people who get into Game Dev who are coming at it from a sort of environmental art first kind of point of view and this has become really prevalent since we got unity and unreal because you can put a camera in an
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environment put some stuff in the environment and walk around and then because you've made a thing in a game engine you feel like what you've made is a game it's not a game unless there is an activity there to do and time and
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time again particularly on YouTube I see people working on these games for long periods of time where they're just adding stuff to an environment and adding like interactions to an environment that are beautiful and immersive but don't necessarily add any
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gameplay as well so that's another one to watch out for people don't play games just to be immersed in an environment they usually have to be doing something as well and you can say a similar thing about kind of pure challenge-based games
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there is a niche appeal to Super difficult rage games but generally speaking people want to survive in games where surviving feels like a reward in its own right because the momentto moment activity of doing the rest of the
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game is so rewarding right I don't want to die because I want to continue wandering around and picking up coins and finding Secrets or whatever it is one of the things I will say about Challenge and difficulty when it comes
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to engagement and making an engaging game is that this is an area where a lot of new designers get it wrong they think that just making the activity intrinsically more difficult to do like giving an enemy more health or giving you a
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smaller time limit or something is enough and often again that appeals to a very Niche type of very challenge focused gamer what most people want is to be making interesting or difficult decisions in their head for example in
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bad North which is a little mini strategy game about defending islands from Vikings I only earn money to upgrade upgrade my generals and give them better skills and equipment and so on if I save the houses each island but
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saving the houses requires me to put my Generals in more risk cuz I have to like come down from the advantageous position that they're initially in up at the top of the hill one of the things you can
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notice about the way I just described that game is my use of the word but like lie the word but indicates that the game has competing goals and objectives in it and that's one example of how you can
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make your games engaging it shouldn't just be an environment that you do some stuff in it shouldn't just be doing a really hard thing until you succeed what most of us want from a game is for there to be things competing for our attention
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things competing for our resources and decisions to make the the classic game design quote comes from s meire which is that a game is a series of interesting decisions now there are probably some games that fall outside of that
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definition and are beloved and have done very well but I think for the most part it's a it's quite a good definition to start with particularly if you are in this early stage of making and releasing games and you want to know how to make
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them more engaging where are the decisions in your game are they interesting if your game is just doing a challenge like racing games are often like this you know rock band or Guitar Hero kind of like this it's just can you
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press the buttons fast enough that is just a challenge even if you're making a very sort of Twitchy action challenge based game there should still be some little Split Second momentto moment decisions to make about oh do I do I
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play it safe or do I go over there to get more coins even though it's more dangerous that's that's really what makes games go in a lot of cases so the second area that I wanted to talk about is appeal and like I said
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earlier this is all of the stuff that is going to make people look at your game and want to play it in the first place and some of that is going to be the stuff in the previous section some of it
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is going to be the game design itself it could be that your game has an interesting mechanical hook like the portals in Portal and the the engaging parts of your game play can be part of its appeal but they're usually not
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enough on their own to make the game Stand Out versus other game give you some examples in a minute but often the appeal is going to be a mix of different things and only some of them will be to
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do with the actual design of the game play some of it's going to be creative Direction the game's art style and the sort of premise or theme of the game like take a look at animal well for example a puzzle platformer that did
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very well now puzzle Platformers are a little bit of a cursed genre um there is a bit of a sort of cargo cult Tea Leaf reading approach to game genres in the Indie space particularly among like marketers and so on where we like to say
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things like oh this genre doesn't do well on Steam and then fail to identify the reasons why particular games in a genre did do well or didn't do well so if you look at animal well and then you
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think about why do most puzzle Platformers fail what does this game have that those don't well it has very well-designed puzzles that's the engagement part that's the game design and those puzzles are welld designed because they require quite a
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lot of lateral thinking um and that's a thing that is very difficult to design but there's also the theme which is cute animals cute animals in a sort of mysterious location and the art style as well and if you think of the mood of the
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game and even if you haven't played it if you just look at this footage you can see certain things about the mood of the game it's kind of cute but it's also dark and mysterious at the same time it
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doesn't have a simple appeal that's just about one thing it's combining them and that means it appeals to multiple kinds of sensibilities at once and I guess it kind of brings us back to the the power of the word but in the in the previous
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bit you can make engaging game mechanics by having a sentence about your game where there is a butt in the middle right you're trying to do this but also you need to do this and these things are conflicting you can do that with
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Aesthetics and and creative direction as well animal well is successful partly because of this interesting mix of of kind of themes and flavors it has where it is cute and dark and mysterious at the same time another way to think of
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appeal is to think in terms of the central fantasy of what is the player getting to do in this game that they might like to do in real life so I've been playing Pacific drive and really enjoying that game it's not the easiest
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game to become engaged in because it's quite difficult it has quite steep difficulty curve and the controls and interface are a little bit clunky in places but there are a couple of elements of the central fantasy of that
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game that I find appealing so first off I like The Zone I like the stalker games and I like sort of psychedelic science fiction things like the movie Annihilation and stuff like that I'm also not a massive petrol head I'm not
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super into cars but I do like the central fantasy of having a cool car to look after so you can compare this game to other survival games like the forest or subnautica and it has a lot of the
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same mechanics but what subnotica doesn't have is like this everyday premise of people like looking after their cars and people like sort of personifying their car and treating their car like it's a character and all this kind of stuff so it has a different
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appeal even though it shares lots of the mechanics and then that theme of being a driver of this special car and this weird environment enables a bunch of the game's mechanics to make sense and therefore be engaging it's a survival
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crafting game but because we're only crafting things for the car we're not out in the woods felling 30 trees or digging ore out of the ground around with just scavaging scrap metal and stuff like that and so you've got an
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appealing theme which then leads to a set of mechanics which make the game easier to make because we have a survival crafting game where you don't need to be able to harvest every single thing in the environment because you're
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just working on your car there there's like an interplay here between the sort of creative Direction stuff that makes the game appealing I.E the the Sci-Fi premise and the basing it around a car and a driver and the mechanics that make
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the game engaging and make it work there there's there's a back and forth there the the central fantasy of having this cool retr futuristic car that gets beaten up and then you fix it up is is part of the game's unique appeal I spoke
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previously on this channel about collaboration and how there are lots of solo developers who would be making better games if they collaborated with other people and one of the slightly unpopular views I put forward in that is that if you are a good programmer and
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you're good at using a game engine that does not necessarily mean that you will be good at storytelling or creative Direction and a lot of the responses to those videos were people saying well I don't have enough money to pay an artist
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and I think some of you really need to step back from your current projects and realize that there are people out there telling stories making great art who are better at this side of things than you and if you were to network with those
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people and come up with an idea that was predominantly their idea in terms of this side of thing in terms terms of the creative Direction and The Narrative design and all of that kind of stuff and then you handle the nitty-gritty of the
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implementation and and some of the game design stuff you would be well on your way to making better games but a lot of people can't make appealing games because they are too focused on learning how to make a particular genre in a game
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engine rather than doing this broader thinking of like what is a fantasy that appeals to people that is currently not out there or is currently not being used in this genre remember that fundamentally no one is going to be
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interested in your game just because you spent a lot of time on it they the game has to speak to them on some sort of stylistic level and these top level kind of creative things about what is my goal
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and my role in the game are are the like the wide end of the funnel so in in marketing we often talk about funnels and you've got you know a funnel is like this shape and and you've got a wide end
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which is like the thing about your product or service that speaks to the most people the the area in which you speak to the most people so this could be like putting a billboard by the side of the road like lots of people are
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going to see that and then some people are interested so they pass down into the funnel and there's less people at this stage and and the the kind of more Focus the thing is the the less people there are but the the creative direction
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of your game is the wide funnel it's like people who like Vikings will like this game people who like motorbikes will like this game and then as they become interested because of the premise and the hook then the the kind
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of engaging parts of your game need to need to be strong because that's the point where they are interested enough to actually play your game download a demo or or whatever else if you're making like a a dungeon crawling Rog
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likee game you can of course just double down on people's expectations and and be like you are a wizard in a dungeon and you can just try and do that thing but there might be some other angle on it in
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terms of the theme the creative direction that allows you to make a good game in this genre that has a very very unique entry point for people to become interested in it and perhaps people who wouldn't normally play that genre when
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you trying to make a game more appealing you need to think about all the things that someone would see in a trailer for that game or might see in a you know a 15c short of someone playing your game
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the the art style is part of that and the theme and the central fantasy is another part of that now having an art style that is appealing is not necessarily about you being artistic or having art-based skills some of that
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might be using asset packs in a clever way some of it might be basing your visual Direction on something minimalist that's easy for you to do so you know if you take mini Metro for example that is a game that is based on the graphic
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design of subway maps and Subway signs and it's based on something that already exists in the culture and because the developers went down that route they didn't have to draw any characters in that game they didn't have to draw any
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real locations they they went for a minimalist style that made the game easier for them to make and also made it more appealing because it reminds people of the theme of the game in the real world in a clever way so looking for
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inspiration in places outside of games is really important and that's true for theme and it's also true for art having a appealing core fantasy is a result of spending time with popular culture outside of games so you know Pacific
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Drive dives into loads of ' 80s and '90s TV things like Night Rider Back to the Future Ghostbusters in terms of where it gets its inspiration from its car and then people my age are able to see that
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car and go oh my God it's the Ecto one I get to play a game where I where I have a car that I had a a toy of when I was a kid right taking us back to toys and
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games again from earlier so believe it or not most people who buy and play games have very rich and varied lives and are interested in more things than just games so your inspiration should come from outside of games both in terms
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of the visual art that you put into your games and the themes of your games and the stories they tell and the stories that they allow players to tell as with games like Pacific drive or Chucho Cho Charles sometimes if you pick a unique
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theme that theme then kind of gives you suggestions about how to make the mechanics more engaging because the theme sort of suggests particular types of interactions or challenges or environments and so on so your game's appeal is what is going
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to make people want to play it in the first place and whatever about your game is engaging is kind of all of the game mechanics and the game feel that kind of toy factor that make people want to
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continue playing it once they're playing it a lot of us are better at one of these things than the other if you are very good at programming little explosions and Squishy animations and stuff you're probably very good at some
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of that engagement type stuff but if you're not able to sort of Imagine a random person out there and and you know what types of fantasies they might have and so on you might struggle with the appeal side of things and this is what
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leads to the situation that we see over and over again which is people make a game it's not really made for anyone they release it into a void and then they come on here and do a boohoo my
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game failed video it needs to appeal to someone and one of the ways of checking that is kind of showing people what you want the game to look like this is what concept art is for it's about showing
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people elements of a game or a film or whatever that hasn't been made yet and getting them to Greenlight it and that might be your boss in the office if you're in a bigger Studio where you sort of show them a character what do you
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think of this character design but in your case if you're making your own games it can be about just seeing if people like a particular thing so I'm going to give an example from our Discord Jill in our Discord is working
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on a monster battling game and there is a character called oat which is like a cat cross with an acorn and when this was posted we all went wild about oat this is an example of the sort of thing
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and and you you shouldn't like hide your game away until you're ready to release it and then start showing people your game you should be showing people from the get-go so that you can gauge what people find appealing and as I said
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earlier appeal is only half of the equation and you need people to play your game you need people to play Early builds to give you feedback on the engagement side of things but showing people things like characters or
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animations and stuff like that early on can be a really important way of gauging what people find appealing there's a reason why we have a whole meme format of the sort of take my money meme right and if if you start getting that as a
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response then that's an indicator that what you're making has a market if you're not on social media showing people parts of your game or you're very precious about it and you don't want to show people things until it's finished
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do have a think about that because ultimately you are making it for them and they are going to vote with their wallets when it's finished so the best thing you can do to ensure that people are going to buy the thing that you're
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making is just is just to make it with them to some degree get their feedback it's a lot easier to do with appeal because you can just show people visuals you can show people fragments of stories and they don't need to physically
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interact with that thing engagement is a lot harder you have to organize play tests and and you have to do them frequently and you have to know how to run play tests and how to use people's feedback so yeah maybe that's another
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video that I'll do soon if there's enough demand for it I hope this has been useful to you like I said there are things that won't fall into one of these categories and there might be different ways of describing the same things this
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isn't like a textbook definition that you can use for anything it's just two concepts of areas I tend to see games being weak in one of these things right it's the the game design is weak there is nothing there to make me want to play
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your game for very long or that it's not appealing because the game is ugly or the game just doesn't have a a central premise that that I'm interested in right and if there's anything in this video that you'd like to hear me talk in
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more detail about then leave a comment and I will see what I can do thanks e
Topics:game designindie gamesengagementgame appealvertical slicegame feelgame developmentplayer experienceUnityUnreal Engine
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