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TapDefense Reviewed Through the Eyes of a Game Designer

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

As I was stepping on the plane for a holiday visit to San Diego, I went on the Apple App Store on my iPhone and downloaded the free game TapDefense. As a rule I generally do not expect much from free games, especially for the iPhone and just got the game because it was high on the popularity list and to waste some time on my four-hour flight. I was very surprised by how good this unassumingly named game was. The game itself is a tower defense strategy game that is surprisingly deep.

TapDefense Title Picture

The Premise
Your job is to defend the gates of heaven from 41 waves of invading demon hordes through the strategic placement of a variety of different defensive towers. There are three different difficulty levels in the game and the only difference (and it is an important one) between easy, medium and hard is the path the demons take to the gate. Easy mode’s path is very circuitous and the map provides a number of great choke points to place towers, while medium mode has fewer turns and a more direct path to the gate and hard mode is nearly a direct path. At the start of every level the player may place towers without the threat of the demons. The player may also pause the action in the game at any point and upgrade existing towers or place additional towers.

TapDefense Tower Placement Picture

The Gameplay Mechanics
As I play games I am always analyzing the gameplay mechanics and boiling it down to a few tenants of game design that I believe the developers had in mind when creating the game. The game mechanics are designed to work in a certain way to encourage the player to play in a certain manner. Here are the two game design tenants that I see the game mechanics supporting.

1) The first tenant is that the player must strategically place towers and properly allocate resources.

How TapDefense accomplishes this is through the way the game gives money to the player by using compounding interest after each level is complete. At the end of each level the player receives interest on their remaining gold. The rate is 10% at the start of the game and can be raised to higher rates by spending Halos.

The interest rate game mechanic is an interesting one and certainly has its tradeoffs. The mechanic weights its punishment of mistakes made at the start of the game heavily, making it nearly impossible to recover during the later waves. Perfecting the opening is much more important than the ending. I call this feature out because it is exactly the opposite of what most game difficulty curves are like. In general mistakes at the later levels are punished more gravely than at the beginning.

In the end, I believe that it was a good choice because it furthers the design tenant by rewarding players who scrutinize their tower placement and to win each level with the minimum resources necessary. It also encourages replay value as players attempt to maximize their money totals.

2) The second game design tenant is that the player must utilize a variety of towers.

TapDefense achieves this through the use of the different varieties of demons that the game throws at you each have their vulnerabilities and resistances to different kinds of towers. In order to be successful the player must use a variety of towers.

These game design tenants in TapDefense keep the gameplay interesting and varied. So based off of the design tenants the key to winning is the proper allocation of resources to maximize effectiveness and the use of a variety of towers.

Tower Variety
I will list out the various towers the game has available. TapDefense begins with the player only having access to the Arrow Tower, Bomb Tower and Water Tower. Additional towers are unlocked through the use of Halos, which are earned at predetermined level intervals.

Arrow Tower

These are cheapest towers to place and upgrade. They have good range and have a fast firing rate.

Bomb Tower

These towers are more expensive than the Arrow towers and have a slower firing rate and range, but more than make up for it by doing very good area effect damage.

Water Tower

This tower slows enemy movement and when fully upgrade does decent direct damage.

Storm Tower

These towers have short range, but they take off a percentage of a demon’s life. Storm towers scale incredibly well. While these towers are not useful early on, since most of the enemies do not have a high health total, in later waves when enemies have outrageous hit points these towers become essential to victory.

Ice Tower

This tower slows down entire enemy groups.

Magic Tower

This in my opinion is the most important tower to have during the higher waves. The Magic tower has a high rate of fire, the best range in the game and when fully upgraded do very good area of effect damage.

Earthquake Tower

This tower has decent range and causes very good damage, but it takes up the equivalent space of four towers. The Earthquake Tower is also special in that it is the only tower that requires the player to manually operate it by shaking the iPhone.

TapDefense Towers Picture

Problems I would like to see addressed in the game

1. Occasionally the game will stall and not load

This issue was not just isolated to only my iPhone as my girlfriend’s phone had similar issues with the game.

2. Frame Rate Issues

When there are a lot of demons on the screen and lots of towers shooting at them, the frame rate can drop very significantly. This can hurt the game to the point where the game will not respond to your command to pause.

3. The sell tower button is in the same spot as the pause button

Since the pause button is such an important button (used frequently to assess the situation), the UI choice to place the sell tower button in the same spot with no confirmation leads to some very unhappy accidents. Selling a tower only recoups a small fraction of the cost to build the tower so this is simply unforgivable.

4. No Undo

If you do manage to sell a tower or place a tower down by accident, there is no undo button. Not a killer, but occasionally annoying.

5. Add a level rewind feature

As far as I could tell there was no level save feature, even if they had this feature it would not resolve the issues, because mistakes early in the game ripple throughout the rest of the game. I would suggest the inclusion of a per level rewind feature to go back in time to the spot where the mistake occurred. Currently, in order to atone for mistakes the game must be restarted from the beginning.

TapDefense is an ad-supported game and there are ads after every level played. They are small and out of the way though and really never bothered me. If we can have more high quality games like TapDefense made free through ads, I am all for it.

If you have an iPhone, you should download TapDefense. The gameplay is addictive and provided me with hours of entertainment. It is free so what have you got to lose?

Tags: ad supported iphone game, ad-supported game, App Store Game, Apple App Store, blog, download game, Downloadable game, free iphone game, game design, game mechanics, iPhone 3g games, iPhone games, limitless units, limitlessunits, limitlessunits.com, review, riposte101, Tags: Tap Defense, Tap Defense Reviewed, TapDefense, TapDefense review, tony huynh, video game design
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Low Skill Cap and Luck (RNG) in World of Warcraft PVP

Monday, December 15th, 2008

Wow is built and designed around the casual player
WoW is built from the ground up to be accessible to new players. Blizzard’s VP of game design Rob Pardo described the design philosophy of World of Warcraft as the “donut design.” This is where the outside of the donut consists of the casual players, while the center is where the hardcore players reside. WoW is a game built for casual players with enough depth to draw in the hardcore players. When Blizzard designed the Player-Versus-Player (PVP) system for WoW, this design philosophy carried over and resulted in the inclusion of the global cooldown and luck or random number generator (rng) as WoW players call it.

Neilyo 14.5 Part 1

Neilyo 14.5 Part 2

The global cooldown
While reaction times and the number of inputs does play a factor in World of Warcraft PVP, it is greatly limited by the built in one second global cooldown between inputs. This places a lowered skill cap on how fast a player needs to input commands to be competitive. There are exceptions to this as certain abilities are off the global cooldown, but for most cases this holds true. It does not matter if you have an amazing ability to input commands at a very fast pace, you are limited to the artificial limit imposed.

StarCraft is a good example of a game without such a skill cap. For elite StarCraft players the number of inputs per minute is something to brag about. Some of the players can consistently achieve as high as 500 inputs per minute. These players constantly practice and strive to improve their inputs per minute and their ability to micromanage multiple units.

The global cooldown also lessens the mistakes that players can make. Because a WoW player is limited by the global cooldown and can only input so many commands per minute they are less prone to make mistakes because there are simply fewer decisions and inputs necessary. This makes the game much more accessible to players who are simply incapable of entering 500 commands per minute. The global cooldown supports the casual player by making the game easier for them to be successful. The great advantage of this is that it makes World of Warcraft PVP much more popular and accessible to more people.

Luck gives PVP greater accessibility and helps turn the casual player into the hardcore player
Luck (rng) is a difficult balance in a game like WoW. Too little and the game becomes stale and inaccessible to novice players, too much luck and players become frustrated. However, luck supports the design tenant of the donut by giving less skilled or out-geared players a chance to win or at least make games close.

Luck is valuable because beginners will enjoy the game more when luck allows them to occasionally win against a more seasoned or better-geared opponent. Conversely, if WoW did not have a luck component, a less skill opponent would never win and this constant negative reinforcement will drive away many novice competitors. It is necessary to reward novice players occasionally to keep their participation and push them to get better at the game. For example, the poker variant Texas Hold’em is popular and maintains its popularity because the game rewards new players and keeps them interested in the game by allowing them to win on occasion through luck alone.

Neilyo Interview

Luck increases the skill cap
Without luck (RNG), WoW PVP involving two equally skilled opponents or teams would be a pre-scripted affair whose outcome would be predetermined from the start. The game would play out something like this. The attacker begins with an attack and from then on each player might as well read off of a script and perform the best possible move in succession until the conclusion of the match. While WoW gives players the illusion of a lot of options, there is almost always a best move or path at any given time. If both sides play “perfectly,” the race, class and spec of the characters or the teams’ combination of classes determine the game because certain classes or team matrixes simply outclass others. The only time this pattern can be broken is through human error. For all the negativity that luck in the game of WoW receives, the game without it would be a very straightforward experience without much deviation.

For WoW, luck has the very strange property of actually increasing skill cap. Players need to be able to react to broken patterns not only from human error but also from bad luck. Players need to switch to a different track or branch in the previously mentioned script to adjust for attacks or defensive measures that fail due to bad luck. This keeps matches from degenerating into a stale affair. If a Rogue’s kidney shot (a move that stuns the opponent) fails due to being randomly dodged, he needs to adjust his next series of moves for his now interrupted stun lock. Another example, this time involving a team, is if a Druid’s cyclone, a spell that incapacitates another player, is resisted, the team must now communicate and coordinate another member to use a different ability to continue the incapacitate effect on the opponent. Luck forces teamwork and emphasizes adjustment to failed attacks.

Luck mitigates some of the balance issues
WoW is a far cry from being balanced and with so many abilities and classes and team combinations possible it likely never will be. Luck helps to mitigate some of these issues by giving lower tier classes or class combinations a chance against higher tier class or team combinations. Let’s say a Warrior, Warlock and Druid team dominates a Rogue, Mage and Priest team (whether it does or not is immaterial to this discussion) luck can help to turn the tide and the dominated team can actually pull off a win over the dominate team. When a weaker class matrix can occasionally overcome a dominant one, it helps to mask the fact that the game is not balanced.

WoW’s shift to the hardcore
Games over the course of time tend to eliminate luck and cater more and more towards the hardcore. WoW is not the exception to this rule. The shift to a lessened duration of stuns instead of an outright resist percentage and the removal of Mace induced random stuns are examples of this.

Conclusion
The World of Warcraft design philosophy of catering to the casual player is supported by the global cooldown and built in luck element of PVP combat. These pillars of the design keep the game popular and accessible to a wider audience and mask many of the balance issues in the game. Luck also has the effect of spicing up the game and increasing the skill cap as players and teammates must adjust to failed attacks. Lastly, if you are a hardcore player that does not like luck in your games, the World of Warcraft has already changed in your favor and over time will continue to move in this direction.

Tags: accessibility, blog, casual gamer, Comparison, donut design, game design balance, game play, gameplay mechanics, global cooldown, hardcore gamer, limitless units, limitlessunits, limitlessunits.com, Low Skill Cap and Luck (RNG) in World of Warcraft PVP, low skill skill, luck, luck in pvp design, MMO, mmorpg, player versus player, PVP, pvp balance, pvp mechanics, random number generator, riposte101, RNG, rng in wow pvp, tony huynh, video game design, video game education, World of Warcraft, wow, wow pvp mechanics, wow skill cap
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Call of Duty: World at War Through the Eyes of a Game Designer

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

I played through the single-player campaign of Treyarch’s Call of Duty: World at War over the long Thanksgiving weekend and again decided to compile my notes. As this is not a review of Call of Duty: World at War and more of a collection of my notes organized in a more readable format, it will contain some spoilers. You have been warned.

I have got to tell you that going in I was very skeptical considering I was less than impressed with Treyarch’s last outing in the series, Call of Duty 3.

Call of Duty: World at War brings the series back to its traditional setting of World War II. I am torn by this decision as I enjoyed the more freeform story that a modern setting afforded Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The modern setting allowed Infinity Ward more flexibility in their locations, missions and story. The developers even introduced a villain and made him perform evil acts so that the villain evoked an emotional response from the player. There was suspense in the outcome of the game as the way the game could end was in question. These sorts of conventions are more difficult or even impossible in a historic setting like World War II, where the player enters the game knowing that the allies win and how they win. Still World War II allows for very epic scenarios.

In the following sections I will outline the levels and events in the game that left a more lasting impression on me.

The first mission was easily the worst mission in the game. The level traps the player into really tight corridors. Invisible walls hem the player in preventing the player from entering areas of the level that are seemingly blocked by small bushes and knee high rocks that the player should be able to easily traverse. Worst still is the fact that very little cover is available in these tight corridors and because it is so tight in sections, it prevents almost all lateral movement. The end result is a player that is left out in the open with no cover and no place to move. I also really dislike the convention of placing enemies in places where the player is unable to travel. It is in many ways lazy and I feel cheated that a 3-foot wall or small plant is preventing me from a performing a flank or even approach the enemy position. By the conclusion of the first chapter I was almost ready to turn the game off and never revisit it. I am glad I continued.

The game really starts to pick up at the start of the Russian campaign. The Russian campaign begins with a sniper mission called Vendetta. The start of the mission is nearly a direct copy of one of the scenes from Enemy at the Gates. As you gain consciousness surrounded by a stack of bodies inside of a destroyed fountain. You crawl to make your way to the edge of the fountain and are given a sniper rifle by a fellow survivor. Here you spot a group of Germans and must wait for planes to fly overhead to mask the noise of the sniper rifle before opening fire. Later in the level, while inside of a building you are spotted by Germans just outside. They pour fire through the windows of the building with flamethrowers and you must go into the prone position and learn to crawl to avoid the streams of fire. While crawling a bookcase that falls overhead was a simple, but very nice touch. There is also a sniper versus sniper segment further in the mission that was very well executed as well.

The tank level, while breaking up the pacing, was not fun. It consisted entirely of sitting at range and firing over and over at targets. If you came too close you would be punished by being pelted by Panzerfäuste carrying infantry or other tanks and quickly destroyed.

The Black Cat mission was one of the more memorable. It involves the player manning the turrets of a “Black Cat” PBY Catalina plane. Although the gameplay is 100% scripted, the running back and forth through the plane to switch to another turret was very exciting. In one scripted event, just as you sit down at your seat to man the turret, a Japanese Zero crashes into the water right in front of you. The mission is littered with exciting moments and there is always something to shoot.

Later in the Russian campaign you are asked to storm a German occupied city. As you prepare to storm the city, your troops line up in front of you forcing you to stop and watch a bombing of the building ahead. The group then charges through the fields screaming battle cries. I just thought this was a great gating mechanism that greatly increased the chance that the player will see the scripted event of the bombing happening and get the rush of charging across a field under fire.

In one of the American Pacific campaign missions, you fight your way up a hill and you arrive at a nice vista shot to close the level. Amazing vistas are a great way to reward the player for reaching a goal.

One of the departures from previous games in the series that I liked was the way the game made you feel heroic especially in the Russian campaign. Previous Call of Duties put you in the roll of a grunt soldier that was treated no different from any of the other soldiers. In Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare the player meant so little that the developers went so far as to kill the player’s character.

Some of the situations where the game made you feel like a hero were:

The Russian commander giving you a rest on the back of a tank for your performance, while ordering another grunt to walk.
The Russian commander also kept reminding you of all the harrowing circumstances you had lived through and that as long as you lived the Russian army could not be broken.
The Russian commander also gives you the honor of planting the Russian flag to signify victory over your German adversaries calling you out specifically for your heroics.

I am also glad to see Treyarch got rid of the quick time event hand-to-hand battles that you had no control over when they occurred from Call of Duty 3 and replaced them with a single knife button press and only if the enemy comes within range of you. This gives the player the ability to prevent these events from occurring by not allowing enemies to get within range. Although the frustration of these events have lessened by being able to prevent them from happening, when they do occur they can be frustrating because the game clock continues and this often leads to grenades landing on you that you can have no chance to escape from.

Issues I saw and improvements I would have liked to see in the game:

Enemy AI will occasionally just stand there ignoring the player or you will see two AI from opposing factions standing back to back ignoring each other while they engage more distant targets.
It is about time CoD fix their AI’s animations. The IK or something is off, they just occasionally get crossed up while moving and it looks very wrong.
The flamethrower was completely overpowered. It made any of the levels that it existed in a complete joke. You just fan it around and everybody instantly dies. It also has unlimited ammo. At least the developers limited the flamethrower to a few select missions.
Enemy guns should do more damage and grenades should do less. I could just stand there and be nearly impervious to fire on the Regular difficulty. Where as grenades are instant death over a very wide radius. Grenades accounted for 90% of my deaths. If the player moved forward and a grenade is already on the ground, the grenade icon would appear before instantly detonating and giving the player no warning before dying. These deaths feel very cheap. This could be resolved by reducing the instant death radius of grenades (falloff of damage), while at the same time increasing the damage of enemy guns against the player. This would place more value on the use of cover.
The achievements come few and far between in the solo campaign. Ideally an achievement should be handed out after every mission completed even if it is a small one in point value to keep the player motivated. It is like Warren Spector says, “have you patted your player on the back lately?”

Despite these issues, Call of Duty: World at War snuck up on me and surprised me with the quality of the campaign. The game starts off slow and the weapons are mostly familiar if you have played Call of Duty 1-3, but the game slowly builds momentum and ends on a very high note.

My thoughts and impressions of the game were based off of a play through of the solo campaign set at Regular (the suggested) difficulty on the Xbox 360 platform.

Tags: blog, Call of Duty: World at War Through the Eyes of a Game D, CoD, CoD4, CoD5, game design, limitlessunits, limitlessunits.com, Modern Warfare, PC, PS3, review, riposte101, tony huynh, video game design, video game education, X360, Xbox 360
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10 Greatest Video Game Designers Part 2

Saturday, November 29th, 2008

These are the ten heroes of video game design. They have been responsible for games that have forever changed the medium and consequently the video game industry as a whole is indebted to them. Also included in this list is a career highlight list for each designer, a bit about how they personally influenced me as a designer and some fun trivia about them. This is part 2 of this list.

To go to Part 1 of this list click here.

5. Sid Meier
Sid Meier picture
The owner of my favorite game design quote:

“Gameplay is defined as a series of interesting choices.”

Every time a new Civilization comes out it ends up ruining any productivity of mine for months on end. They are so good and addictive I actually try to stay away from them because I know I will get nothing done as soon as I start playing them.

Also do you remember those keyboard key guides that you had to lay over on top of your keyboard that to came with F-15 and F-19? Those were complicated games.

Career Highlights
1. F-15 Strike Eagle
2. F-19 Stealth Fighter
3. Railroad Tycoon
4. Sid Meier’s Pirates!
5. Civilization

4. Warren Spector
Warren Spector picture

“Hell no we didn’t achieve what we were striving for on Deus Ex. What you do is you aim for the moon so you end up hitting Hawaii or something. If you aim for Hawaii you end up in Keokuk, Iowa or something, you know?” – Warren Spector

Warren Spector’s rules of game design in his postmortem of Deus Ex laid down the starting bumpers for me as a game designer.

a. Always show the goal. Players should see their next goal (or encounter an intriguing mystery) before they can achieve (or explain) it.

b. Problems not puzzles. It’s an obstacle course, not a jigsaw puzzle. Game situations should make logical sense and solutions should never depend on reading the designer’s mind. And there should always be more than one way to get past a game obstacle. Always.

c. No forced failure. Failure isn’t fun. Getting knocked unconscious and waking up in a strange place or finding yourself standing over dead bodies while holding a smoking gun can be cool story elements, but situations the player has no chance to react to are bad. Used sparingly, to drive a story forward, O.K. Don’t overuse!

d. It’s the people, stupid. Role-playing is about interacting with other people in a variety of ways (not just combat… not just conversation…).

e. Players do; NPCs watch. It’s no fun to watch an NPC do something cool. If it’s a cool thing, let the player do it. If it’s a boring or mundane thing, don’t even let the player think about it — let an NPC do it.

f. Have you patted your player on the back today? Constant rewards will drive players onward. Make sure you reward players regularly. And make sure the rewards get more impressive as the game goes on.

g. Players get smarter so games get harder. Make sure game difficulty escalates as players become more accustomed to your interface and more familiar with your world. Make sure you reward the player by making him or her more powerful as the game goes on.

h. Think 3D. A 3D map cannot be laid out on graph paper. It has to take into account things over the player’s head and under the player’s feet. If there’s no need to look up and down — constantly — make a 2D game!

i. Are You Connected? Maps in a 3D game world must feature massive interconnectivity. Tunnels that go direct from Point A to Point B are bad; loops (horizontal and vertical) and areas with multiple entrance and exit points are good.

Career Highlights
1. Wing Commander
2. Ultima Underworld I and II
3. Thief: The Dark Project
4. System Shock
5. Deus Ex

3. Peter Molyneux
Peter Molyneux picture
This man made me feel like a god. Peter Molyneux is the father of the god game. To his credit are some of my favorite games of all time. Populous was the quintessential god game, Syndicate was way ahead of its time (see my write up of Syndicate here), and Dungeon Keeper turned video game conventions upside-down by casting the player in the role of the villain.

Beyond being one of the greatest designers in history, he has what few designers have, an uncanny ability to sell. In fact he is so notorious with his tall tales; few take his proclamations without a grain of salt nowadays. Despite being skeptical whenever the man opens his mouth, I end up buying whatever the man is shilling because he has an infectious enthusiasm and a way about his personality and demeanor that convinces you that each and every game of his is going to revolutionize the world. With well-over two decades in this industry, Molyneux still remains relentlessly relevant. This is amazing in and of itself. This is a video of him selling you on the dog in Fable 2.

After watching that how can you not like the guy?

Career Highlights
1. Populous
2. Syndicate
3. Magic Carpet
4. Dungeon Keeper
5. Fable

2. Will Wright
Will Wright picture
In many ways Will Wright is the antithesis of Miyamoto, you can easily imagine Will Wright growing up, staying in doors playing board games, analyzing their systems, and building model airplanes, cars and boats. Where the two are the same are their creative drives to make games that give the user new experiences. Will Wright sums up his own methodology for making games better than I could have:

“Well, one thing I’ve always really enjoyed is making things. Out of whatever. It started with modeling as a kid, building models… I think when I started doing games I really wanted to carry that to the next step, to the player, so that you give the player a tool so that they can create things. And then you give them some context for that creation.”

Will Wright’s speeches are always entertaining as well as inspiring. It’s incredible how his research and thought process for his games come about. As I could not embed the first video, you will have to click on the link in order to watch:
GDC 2008 – An Evening with Will Wright

This is a second shorter video of another speach he made at TED.
Will Wright: Toys That Make Worlds

Some additional reading:
Will Wright fan site

The history and hobby tabs were fascinating reads for those with the time and inclination.

Fun Fact from the “Game Master” article in the New Yorker: “Wright was a former Robot Wars champion in the Berkeley-based robotics workshop, the Stupid Fun Club. One of Wright’s bots, designed with the help of Wright’s daughter Cassidy, “Kitty Puff Puff”, fought against its opponents by sticking a roll of gauze onto its armature and circling around them, encapsulating them and denying them movement. The technique, “cocooning”, was eventually banned.”

Career Highlights
1. SimCity
2. Sims
3. Spore

1. Shigeru Miyamoto
Shigeru Miyamoto picture

“I think I can make an entirely new game experience, and if I can’t do it, some other game designer will.”

If you read the Will Wright entry, I tipped my hand on the #1 game designer, not that there could be any other choice.

If there is a face of gaming, it would be Shigeru Miyamoto. I would describe him as the Stan Lee of video games. After Atari’s collapse, everybody thought games were a fad that would go the way of the hula-hoop, but Nintendo made sure video games would have a bright future. Shigeru Miyamoto was at the forefront of the revival.

As much as anybody, Miyamoto’s creations influenced my childhood. I remember working my ass off doing chores and begging to get an NES so I could play Super Mario Bros. It took two successive Christmases of doing chores everyday and eating my vegetables before my parents finally got the system for me. That Christmas morning is my happiest childhood memory.

As you can probably tell, Miyamoto’s childhood story is a lot more interesting than mine. His upbringing is worth mentioning because it was so influential in his video game creations.

According to Miyamotoshrine.com

“Shigeru Miyamoto was born and raised in a rural community near his current home of Kyoto, Japan. Miyamoto was humbled by the natural world surrounding him. Add to that the lack of a television set growing up, and you have a boy whose sense of adventure and imagination was limited only to what his own mind could produce.

Miyamoto would often explore his natural surroundings in Sonebe to bide the time. Rice fields, canyons, grassy hills, waterways. the ideal setting for such an adventurous young man. Then one fateful day, Miyamoto made a discovery that would later resonate in his future endeavors, as would many things from his childhood. Shigeru had discovered a hole in the ground. Not just any hole, but a large hole. Upon closer inspection it was obvious that this hole was actually something more. It was in fact, the opening to a cave.

Young Miyamoto returned several times before building up enough courage to enter. Armed with only a lantern, he ventured deep inside until he came to another hole that led to another section of the cave. This was breathtaking for such a young man. Unforgettable even. And Miyamoto certainly never forgot.”

This sense of wonderment and exploration of a magical world translates so well in his games. Knowing his past it is easy to see where Legend of Zelda sprang out of Miyamoto’s childhood experiences.

I will never forget his GDC 2007 speech that I attended that implored aspiring game developers to occasionally put down their video games and to go outside to learn more about and explore the world around them. It was such a breath of fresh air to listen to him.

Career Highlights
1. Donkey Kong
2. Super Mario Brothers
3. Legend of Zelda
4. Nintendogs
5. Wii Fit

Go to Part 1 of this list.

Tags: 10 Greatest Video Game Designers, blog, Comparison, game design, Game designer career highlights, limitless units, limitlessunits, limitlessunits.com, Peter Molyneux, riposte101, Shigeru Miyamoto, Sid Meier, ten best game designers, tony huynh, top game designers, video game design, video game education, Warren Spector, Will Wright
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