Everyone wants to be a game reviewer. No, scratch that -- everyone wants to make games. Hmm, no, that’s not right either. Wait, wait – I got it: Everyone wants to get paid to play games. Ah, yes...that’s it. The ultimate dream job. Y’see, most people think reviewers and developers do just that. Man, I wish!

As a former editor of Electronic Gaming Monthly/1UP/Bitmob turned game designer at Bigpoint, I have a confession to make: Critiquing/creating games is a lot harder than earning rank 0 in the endless mode in NES Balloon Fight (done it) or coming up with an idea for the next World of Warcraft killer (don’t wanna do it). And making the transition from a journalist to developer is even more difficult.

But like in any game, progress through the stages, and you may just win in the end. So here are the five levels I had to conquer to understand just how different critiquing is to creating:

Level 1: Inception

No, I’m not making a dream game with sideways gun fights (though that would be kinda cool). Every product has to start with an idea.

Sounds easy, right? Well, because it is. At first. Until you start digging deeper. (OK, no more Inception references, I swear!)

When I was a reviewer, I always used to complain about the lack of creativity in games. I’d ask, “Why are there so many World War 2 shooters?” Or: “Urban sandbox games?” Or: “Defense-lawyer games?” OK, maybe not the last one....

But it wasn’t until I became a developer that I understood why creativity often falls victim to conformity: Popular genres simply sell. Making original titles is a big risk, because if the market is unknown, it’s also equally unknown if people will want to spend money on whatever crazy ideas we come up with.

When coming up with the game I’m working on, Ruined, we wanted to make something unique, and trust me, we had a ton of wacky plans at first. But at the end of the day, we had to make something people would play.

That’s why we settled with a multiplayer shooter. The company I work for, Bigpoint, is based in Germany, and our game is the first U.S.-developed project to come out of our studio. So right away, our bosses wanted something that would appeal to an American audience.

And what do Americans like to play? No, not defense-lawyer games. (I wish!) Shooters, silly. Americans like to shoot people in the face. Easy as that.

Level 2: Features

Coming up with features isn’t too different than brainstorming general game ideas. The genre, of course, dictates a lot of this. Shooters, for instance, have a cool feature where you can, uh, shoot people. Hmm...maybe that’s why they're so popular? 

Anyway, it’s easy to play something and want more, especially when you’re critiquing them. I remember reviewing God of War 2 and wishing the developers would have added more puzzles exclusive to the weapons. For instance, maybe Kratos had to use the Barbarian Hammer to knock down a pillar to create a path. Or maybe he could block enemies from approaching by using the bow and arrow to shoot down a gate. In my head, it seemed so easy. I mean, really, how hard would it be to go back and throw stuff like that in?

Answer: hard. Really hard.

I really had no idea what went into creating features until I started on Ruined. Once the development curtain was lifted, I began to realize the number of steps that go into the simplest of things.

For instance, we wanted to do an achievements system. Pretty basic stuff, right? Almost every game, from console to mobile, has it. So one would think it’d super simple to program. And, technically, sure, it probably is. (Hell if I know. I’m not a programmer -- haha!)

But the hard part comes when you factor in everything that needs to actually make up an achievements system. You need a way to track the players' progress (in our case, across multiple games, characters, etc.); you need a way to display the achievement unlocking on the screen; you need the art department to both create icons for the achievements and also a place to display them in the menus; you need a way to reward players for unlocking the achievement, etc. And this isn't even counting quality-assurance testing and bugs.

Yup -- all those tasks for something simple as achievements. And if it takes that much work to do something as seemingly easy as that, imagine how hard it is to do something major. That’s why Ruined seems pretty basic to start. But like Bill Murray learned in What About Bob?, it's all about the baby steps.

Level 3: Balance

Guns kill people in real life. Did you know that? Seriously! Usually takes one shot, too. So, uh, why does it always take so many goddamn bullets to kill enemies in games? Balance, duh!

Once a game has mechanics that work (i.e., players can use weapons to kill each other), the real challenge starts: balancing. I never realized how hard a task like this was. Think about it: In everything we play (especially multiplayer shooters), we want to kill people fast and efficiently. So, in essence, we want every gun to be really, really powerful, even if it doesn’t make sense for it to be (because, admit it, if you wield a pistol that killed guys with one shot, you wouldn’t be complaining).

But it’s actually really difficult to make sure each weapon does the right amount of damage to make it fair when playing against other people. For Ruined, we actually made an extensive Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that lists all our guns, the amount of damage they do, their rate of fire, and all sorts of other stats. Hell, we even made pretty graphs, too! And while we crunched numbers and thought we had everything balanced, it became clear that theoretical charts and graphs don’t perfectly translate to a real, in-game experience.

Because of this, we’ve had to change multiple things (gun damage, character speed and health, etc.) several times to what we as a development team thought was right. A lot of times, we don’t even agree with each other. This, of course, makes sense, because the balance of the game is entirely subjective, especially when you factor in player skill. So it’s our job to make sure we tweak everything  as best we can for all types of individuals. And that means no one-shot pistols, sadly.