The advantage of shorter games for players and developers
UI Buzz Short Games
===
Peter: [00:00:00] What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the UI Buzz podcast. I am your host, Peter Witham. You can find me and this podcast at PeterWitham.com. Been thinking a lot lately about short games and the satisfaction that they give from being played and completed. Now, there's two different lines of thought here, right?
Long vs. Short Games
---
Peter: There's the games that you like to play for a long time, and, a lot of that tends to be open world, where yes you go in, you truly live this world for as long as you want. A classic example there, of course, would be World of Warcraft, of which they just recently announced that they are expanding the original classic version, and the in-joke there is that it'll live forever, which is probably true.
The Satisfaction of Short Games
---
Peter: And that's fine. There is a place for those, and I certainly played Warcraft for a long time. But then there's the [00:01:00] satisfaction of playing short games. And I have found lately that I like those short games, and by that I mean, something that can take anything from a couple of hours to, maybe six or seven hours, couple of days worth of play, something like that.
Idle & Progressive Games
---
Peter: And the reason I'm thinking about this is I've been playing a lot of idle and progressive type games, and that tends to be where these kind of games live. Especially if you go to something like itch.io, where you will see, descriptions that it's like a short idle game, takes a few hours to complete.
And I think that there is a benefit to those in that you can play them, complete them, forget them, and move on, right? And the benefit to the developers, of course, is it takes less time to make those because you don't have to plan [00:02:00] for the long play, and you don't need content that'll go on for, a very long time, right?
Developer Benefits
---
Peter: Of which things like the idle and progressive mechanics are perfect for those kind of things. You progress through to a certain point, and then you're done. Okay? Or maybe you do what they call prestige, and you start again with some higher level, and it just works. If you're into those kind of games, it just works for you, and that is certainly me.
I love playing those kind of games, and I like creating those kind of games. And I think that it also provides another benefit to the developer in that it gives them an end goal, right? And what I mean by that is you've got that win that is gonna be far more immediate than some huge game that's gonna take you months and months years, whatever it may be.
Because I think, for a lot of folks, [00:03:00] especially solo developers, I noticed the, those kind of cycles s- quite often will end with it just never being finished, right? Things come along, you get something else you gotta get involved with, you lose interest you can no longer do it for whatever reason, those kind of things.
Game Jams & Scope Creep
---
Peter: But if you are approaching something that is short, you've got that defined goal of, okay, this is gonna take me a couple of months, and then I'm done. And it's a different mindset. And I think that also that's why game jams work so well because you know you've got a certain amount of time, so you're immediately scoping yourself to what can I get done in that time, which is gonna be different from somebody else, and that's what you're gonna work towards because you don't have the time For scope creep.
It's just not a thing that you can do, right? Or at least big scope creep. [00:04:00] And I think that's why these things work. And also these days, especially with the proliferation of mobile games, I... it's very difficult to get people's attention and it's even harder, I think, to keep their attention.
So if they play something for a short while and then they're done and they move on, you've got that win. Whereas if they're playing something for a long time, something else will come along, guaranteed, that's gonna get their interest and they'll probably forget about your game. And maybe they'll revisit it later, but they certainly won't play it to completion in the first pass, right?
And so there's that as well. You don't have to worry so much about something so compelling that you will keep them playing it for, some ungodly amount of time, whatever that may be. I think that works both for the player and for the developer. [00:05:00] So just putting it out there.
But I think that, I certainly have always gone more for the short term. I did a one that was a long term and it just, it never panned out because it was it essentially, the, the end goal was this thing is gonna grow and grow over time. That's great, but that is an entirely different demand on you than, "I'm gonna make this thing and it's gonna go to this point and it's done."
Final Thoughts
---
Peter: And I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this. Reach out to me, PeterWitham.com. There's a contact there. Share your thoughts, tell me what you think. But personally, that's why I like developing and I love especially playing shorter games because all that passion from the creator is, pushed into this smaller project and you really get to appreciate it without the sort of drawn out, "Oh my [00:06:00] gosh, I'm still doing this."
Especially on games with grinds. That's it, folks. Speak to you in the next one.
