In his talk: How to Birth New Games Without Cloning, at Casual Connect USA, Greg Costikyan discussed four different ways of devising truly novel games. Greg stressed how we can use these methods to improve designs even when you’re working under tight design constraints. “We are not truly agile in the games industry. We are a waterfall with agile frosting.”
Long before mobile, earlier than console wars, and at the dawn of personal PCs, Greg Costikyan was a teenager enjoying games and science fiction and doing whatever he could to have a hand in their creation. Now, over 30 years later, he continues to stay on top of the ever-evolving games industry as the senior game designer for Boss Fight Entertainment.
An Early Start
As early as the 1970s, Greg was playtesting games — the tabletop variety — for a company called Simulations Publications Inc. He fondly recalls spending Friday nights enjoying games under development at the company’s headquarters. In fact, he was around so often that the company’s head, Jim Dunnigan, took notice and hired him to assemble and ship games.
In 1976, the company published Greg’s first game. He recalls the moment when Jim looked up from a rules manuscript and said, “Pretty good for a high school kid” and calls it one of the biggest highlights of his career.
He continued to design games throughout high school and college. “I never had enough sense to get a real job,” he jokes.
He has since moved from board games to PCs to online gaming and currently works in the free-to-play mobile space, where he has spent the past six years working for companies such as Disney, Loot Drop and now Boss Fight Entertainment.
During that time he designed more than 30 commercially published games and also won the International Game Developers Association’s Maverick Award for the “tireless promotion of independent games” — another career highlight.
Everywhere he has gone he has learned something, whether it be the importance of physical systems in board games (essentially UI/UX) or harder-hitting lessons such as making sure not to work for unethical people.
The Boss
At Boss Fight, the boards are gone, but the work goes on. The first game Greg was assigned at the company was at an advanced stage yet had a dearth of documentation. He immediately undertook writing all the necessary documentation and putting things into order.
One of his favorite things about his job has been bringing a certain amount of rigor to the design process, though the high point “always,” he says, “is shipping product.” While the technology used to accomplish this is far different than the board games of the 1970s, some things stay the same.
“I’ve been in the industry for more than 30 years,” he says. “Technology is always changing, and of course you must always think about how a new platform, or a new business model, has to shape design; but design is design, and the thought processes involved do not change that much over time.”
Changing Times
Right now, Greg says, the game industry is working through the implications of its last big phase change: The shift to mobile and growth of free-to-play games. That means the industry is out of the growth and innovation stage and into the stage of consolidation, growing budgets, and a decreasing willingness to experiment.
He predicts that, much like the cycles before, things will continue along this path — spreading a certain “sameness” across the industry — until the next big change. While he isn’t sure exactly what that will entail, he does have an idea about what it won’t include: “I don’t think VR is going to be it.”
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