Shuhei Yoshida and Greg Rice share the secrets behind what makes a great game
What makes a great game?
It's a question with many answers, and one that came up during this year's Develop Brighton keynote, which featured PlayStation's Shuhei Yoshida and Greg Rice. In a chat with Fundamentally Games COO Ella Romanos, the pair – who have decades of combined experience in working with developers, and particularly indies – shared the common traits they find within the most acclaimed games and studios.
Rice began by noting that, while there are many different crafts involved in making games, technical mastery in one or two areas is no longer enough to elevate any given title.
"Back in the day… If you had a really good art style, or maybe a really good game mechanic, maybe that was enough," he said. "Now there are so many games out there, you have to excel across the board in most cases. [You need to have] a really beautiful art style that stands out from the crowd and is instantly recognisable, try to have mechanical gameplay hooks that are unique and different, and have a personality behind it that feels like it's something coming from a place of creativity and passion."
He added that developers should always aim to do something new and innovative. "I think a lot of people in this industry are chasing fads and ideas that have shown success, and when you're doing that oftentimes you're already behind."
Yoshida, meanwhile, said that since the key to greatness is how a title plays. "When you press a button, what happens? That interactivity is so core to this medium. When I was managing first-party or helping indies, giving them feedback, the first thing I would do was pick up the controller and point out issues that the developers might not have seen. That's a fundamental thing every game has to do first."
"Some developers can describe their game in terms of the emotion they want to [evoke] in the player instead of the mechanics or genre"
He urged developers to put their games in the hands of people who aren't directly involved with the project, and
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