Juuso at Gameproducer.net has just posted what he thinks are the 7 greatest things you can put in a game that would appeal to him. It’s a fairly wide ranging list, but I’d collapse his number 6 (reflective water) and 7 (details), since, for me, reflective water is a little detail. It’s nice, sure and adds reality to the unreal. But it’s not like it serves much purpose beyond that, just like his theoretical flocks of birds.

He asked others to write their seven greatest features, and, since I won’t be blogging for a couple of days, I thought I’d throw this out there for discussion.

Here are my eight greatest features for strategy games. Not every game needs to have all of these, but they are things that appeal to me. Why eight? Because I had seven but thought of another one and didn’t want to remove any of the others.

1. Random maps – This is huge for me. Even if you have a lot of maps like Command & Conquer 3 or really pretty maps like Empire Earth III, nothing beats randomness, even if it is patterned randomness like you find in Age of Empires. One of the great strengths of the Civ games, Imperialism or Combat Mission is that you never quite know what you are going to find. Sure, this isn’t really feasible if you are doing an historic battle or even some grand strategy games, but random maps add longevity to otherwise pedestrian games.

2. Rollover Tooltips – These is the most important interface innovation ever. There’s really no excuse not to use them. They can serve instructional purposes or provide detailed information beyond what’s visible on screen. They free the player from having to look for things in the manual or the online encyclopedia. Games that don’t use them start with a count of 0-2.

3. Clear Iconography – Okay, this is another interface thing, but stuff on screen shouldn’t look like other different stuff on the same screen. If you have hero units, make them stand out, like in Rise of Legends. And there’s no need to be subtle here, Creative Assembly, all right? Why the hell am I always mixing up my skirmish cavalry and my lancers, or my archers and my really good archers? The great thing about the NATO symbology is you always know what unit type is what. There’s no chance of mixing up your self-propelled artillery and your armor. Empire Earth III has moved to exaggerated, cartoonish units to get away from this sort of crap – it plagued the second game in the series. Some people think this is a mistake; I think it’s brilliant.

4. Multiple Valid Starting Options – You can’t really eliminate the “build order” mentality, but you can do a lot to reduce its influence by not forcing the same moves on everyone the moment the game opens. To quote one of the Laws of Geryk, “If you are making a game of World War II and there is one single best way to invade France, you should just start the game after the invasion of France.” One way to do this is to make each side in a game radically different (Age of Mythology, Rise of Legends) since this forces re-evaluation based on who you are facing on which map. Another way is to make different kinds of play immediately possible and viable for different sorts of players (Europa Universalis, Civilization). If you find all your beta testers start a game in exactly the same way, maybe you should rethink the design a little.

5. Layered Diplomacy – This doesn’t work for RTS and Wargames, but is necessary for anything approaching 4x. What I mean here is more than a love/hate, peace/war relationship. If peace and war are options, then preparation for war and relaxation during peace should be possible. War should rarely just pop out of nowhere; if there is a sudden declaration of war it should be immediately obvious why it happened. The Paradox games do this well, Civ IV does it well. Imperialism got it cold with a really simple diplomatic system. The Slitherine grand strategy games failed miserably on this level. The Total War games often seem arbitrary in their diplomatic side, creating wars just to keep you from winning another one too easily. (Yeah, yeah, balance of power. But three province Pontus doesn’t care about Carthage.)

6. Real Superweapons – This is for the RTS people. I love superweapons. But they have to be more than just the biggest weapon on the end of the tech tree. They should take effort to mobilize and then be more than a match for any four or five normal units. The effort involved should be enough to make rushing for them prohibitive, but if you are willing and able to make that investment, you should be able to just stomp things.

7. Special Powers with Cool downs, not one shots – Another RTS thing, and learned, like superweapons, from Age of Mythology: The Titans. The problem with one shot powers, like most of the races in AoM had, is that you run the risk of never using them. The tension between conservation and firing away is a good one, in principle, but if you fire too soon with Zeus’ lightning bolt, for example, that’s pretty much it. A powerful spell is gone. The expansion gave Atlantis powers with limited uses and a cool down period. Age of Empires III lets you refresh some cards in the final age, a fine compromise. Cool downs seem to be design law now, so hopefully the one and done is gone.

8. TCP/IP and LAN Connection – I understand the appeal of using proprietary internet multiplayer lobbies like Gamespy or EAOnline. It keeps a community together, makes it easier to track numbers of players and get ladders going. But please make TCP/IP and LAN not just possible but feasible. Considering how much difficulty I often have even getting a TCP/IP game going in those titles that support it, I wonder if it’s even tested properly. But let me LAN or do a direct internet connection. Because I always forget my login password.

Feel free to add, amend or attack.

I’m not sure we need a manifesto for tutorials and manuals, but Nayan Ramachandran has written one anyway. And it has some solid points to make about the place and purpose of these training tools in contemporary game design. (Spotted at Game, Set, Watch.)

Ramachandran diagnoses the problem thusly:

For the most part, people seem to find tutorials intrusive and irritating if they’re too structured not integrated into the game, but find the game intensely unapproachable and inaccessible if no help is provided at all. What is a developer to do?

And the summary isn’t that far from the truth.

Manuals and tutorials have, for too long, been redundant, intrusive, and sometimes completely useless. Considering both of these tools can make or break a player’s initial impression of a game’s environment, one would think they could spend some more time on the “first impression.”

The meat of his post is his six point manifesto. Lots of good advice there (using visual cues, skipping simple movement, keep the tutorial on topic) but his view on manuals is so much at odds with contemporary game publishing that it’s almost a pipe dream.

The best manuals, these days, are full color ones that not only provide reference material if a player forgets how to perform a specific action in the game, but also offer background information for characters, objects and the world as a whole. It’s especially nice when a manual provides several pages of optional back story and mythology to read through, like Starcraft or Diablo II.

Provide large manuals that don’t just offer redundant tutorial information, but also offer full color art, additional literature for the player, and some other extras.

Of course, Ramachandran cites two PC games as his models since consoles have rarely had color manuals filled with mythology and back story. The largest console manual I have is for MLB2k7 and it’s got a thousand commands for me to remember. The tutorials in many console games are terrible, but this is often because they want you to have seven fingers on each hand. Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia has this problem on the 360. But even in the PC realm, substantial manuals are a thing of the past, replaced by ingame tutorials or cutscenes to explain the backstory.

There’s a little bit of nostalgia going on here, I think. Starcraft‘s manual isn’t really large, at least in page length, though the paper size and font are huge. Backstory is one of those things that doesn’t interest me unless the mythology of the game captures my imagination and, trust me, no one would care about Protoss or Zerg history if Starcraft wasn’t a Very Important Game.

Ramachandran is right, though, that a manual should add value to the game whether it be through historical analysis (European Air War or Great Battles of History), charts (Dominions 3) or personality (Pirates!). But this sort of thing takes time and money and few game developers have time and money. The whole idea of the “manual” is to teach how to use a product, and writing down a series of commands and unit descriptions is much easier than say, including a designer’s note.

Tutorials are another matter, and developers walk a fine line here. As much as I hate being taught to left select/right move in every single RTS, I have to remind myself that every RTS could be somebody’s first. I am certain that this was overwhelmingly the case with Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a game whose slow and infuriating tutorial seemed aimed solely at the inexperienced. This basic training needs to be there, and is increasingly being well integrated into the open stages of story based campaigns. Of course, I have little use for story based campaigns in my RTS.

Then there’s the strategy guide racket, of which the less said, the better.

Fill the comments section with nostalgia free thoughts on teaching gamers what to do.