Chris Avellone Interview

Obsidian Entertainment’s Chris Avellone was on hand during last week’s GDC, so the folks at GameDev.net hit him up with some video game industry-related questions.

Tiffany: What in your opinion are the most common mistakes new game designers make?

Chris Avellone: Some of the common mistakes we’ve noticed is some new designers try to design a game that only they would enjoy, and they don’t take the player into account and what the fun factor is. Being a designer is a lot like being a waiter in a restaurant in the sense that you have to know what the customer wants and provide as much service and helpfulness as possible to get that fun factor across. That includes things like the interface, how you design all the menu screens for consistency, what sort of options you present, etc. You don’t want the player to have to do a lot of work to actually play the game and that’s one problem we’ve noticed with new designers, but we’re usually able to get that out of them pretty quickly. Beyond that, it’s just coming to grips with the amount of detail that you have to include in your design – it sure was growing pains for me when starting, especially from pen-and-paper games – but the designers at Obsidian have a pretty good grasp on that stuff.