Polish: Turning Onetime Players Into Diehard Fans

How can a game feel like it was made by the developers “out of love”?  How can a game seem like the developers implemented everything that they thought would be fun and interesting, lacking nothing?  How can a game feel like it went 110% to provide a top-notch experience?

There are many components to making a game.  There are the Base Mechanics, the rules of how the game works.  There are the Punishment and Reward Systems and Long Term Incentive, which fuel why the player plays and for how long.  And there is the Aesthetic Layout, the artwork, sounds, and polish layered on top of the rest of the game that help to fill out its Core Experience.

We’ve discussed before how the gameplay, what they player is actually doing, is more often than not the most important aspect of a game’s design.  But left alone, the Base Mechanics of a game are just mathematical constructs.  Without aesthetics, the game feels stale to most non-engineers.  These rules and gameplay blocks must be built.  However, once that has been taken care of, how can a developer get their game to be perceived as the highest quality?  What are the indicators of a good versus a great game?

This final, key 10% of the game is what is referred to in the industry as “polish”.  It is the time in development when the game could in fact be considered “done”, but just a few more features, tweaks, and sparkles will help it to shine through to players and stand out from the crowd and breathe life into it.  Well polished games are described with words such as “charming”, “engrossing”, “fascinating”.  Well polished games are loved by their players.

So what are some of the ways that a game can be polished?

One Strategy: Polish as Narrative Excess

There are three games I’d like to highlight in this article that both do this masterfully through similar styles.  Night of the Cephalopods (NotC) is a short action game where you play as a young intrepid man trying to survive some kind of horrible disaster.  Armed with only a shotgun and limited ammo, you trudge through the swamp seeking to stay alive as long as possible.

But the polish in NotC is in the narration, or the “narrative excess” as the developers claim.  Almost every action in the game spawns an audio clip from the main character, with such lengthy lines as:

I had run from the cottage in a blind fear, having time only to grab my shotgun with a handful of shells.  Hours or minutes later, when the madness finally fled from my heart, I found myself lost but, blessedly alone…

The main character is constantly talking aloud.  When you reload for the first time, when you fire and miss, when you enter a new area or go to the same area twice, there is almost always a new paragraph of audio narration that plays.  The narration doesn’t have any effect on gameplay, it only serves to pull the player into the fiction of the world even more as the main character drops hints of the tragedy that unfolded.  It is a purely aesthetic feature.

Orton and the Princess is a different free game where you do classic but difficult platforming action.  Jumping up and down “like a plumber” while avoiding dangerous obstacles is accompanied by a cheeky narrator in the form of a text box.  This text box begins by teaching you the controls, innocently enough, but within the first few levels it begins to mock you, effectively becoming a character that continually breaks the fourth wall.  The comments are fun but informative and, like NotC, seems to be peppered throughout the game in excess.

Finally, the critically acclaimed pro game title Portal uses narrative system as a mechanism for its polish as well.  Very similar both to NotC and Orton, Portal features a robotic guide named GlaDos who guides and narrates to the player through the mind-bending puzzles of Aperture Science.  Using the portal gun, the player solves impossible obstacles and has a one-way dialog with the computer, who cracks jokes, provides humor, and is also informative.

Aesthetic Polish for Incredible Experiences

In the commentary for Portal, Valve reveals that one of the main reasons they decided to provide a narrator was because even though the puzzle and gameplay were challenging and interesting, after a period of time players began to get bored.  Each of these titles use the same strategy to get the same feel of a well polished game title.  Gameplay is the beginning, the most important building block, because without gameplay there is no interactivity.  But story is what keeps people guessing.  After the player has solved the game design challenges, the story and the aesthetic content coming up are what makes the game interesting and filled out.

Many independent games appear to innovate in terms of gameplay or mechanics, but few indie or student titles innovate in terms of narrative, story, or Aesthetic Layout. This is unfortunate, because with a story the game is a world, a fantasy, a place worth visiting.  Without story the game is a math problem, and while this may appeal to other programmers and engineers who meet one another at the game developer’s conference, many people are not content to just solve intricate math problems.

But beware: if the gameplay isn’t up to snuff, then no one is going to care about the narrative or visual or sound polish in a game.  If the controls had been sub-par or the level design boring in any  of these titles, then they would have been dismissed immediately.  But the fact still remains that many game developers miss out on an opportunity to turn their one time players into diehard fans by going that final 10% and adding aesthetic or non-gameplay polish.  The three examples discussed here used narrative to reach that goal, but that doesn’t have to be the only way.  Special effects, more detailed sounds or music, or stunning visuals are all other routes to express love of your game to your players.

As your game is nearing completion, ask yourself: what can be done to polish it and take it to %110?  What can be done aesthetically, in the sound or the art, to make it a richer, more immersive gameplay experience?  Answer those questions and you may find yourself with the happy problem of fans more dedicated than you thought they would ever be.