1. Physics: Every arty-farty, overrated FPS needs physics! Why? Because, through some magical power in the universe, physics = gameplay! And we know everybody loves gameplay, right? If people can't talk about your game without saying the word "gameplay" at least four times in every sentence, you know you've won. The best part about physics is that you don't have to make every last object in your game behave differently. Big or small, wide or narrow, light or heavy, it can all have the same weight and reaction to the environment! Big oak table? No problem. Just have it behave exactly the same as cardboard boxes, paper cups, soda cans, and other nick-nacks! Physics isn't hard, you just need to have shit bounce around when the player sneezes on it. You can get away with it because physics = gameplay, remember?2. Art style: Gamers who like gameplay and physics really don't like a dark or gritty art style. Keep it clean and overbright, like the first Unreal Tournament, or a really trendy web site. Even your grungy textures should remain bright and smooth. And, for the love of all things Valve (blessed creators, praise be to thee!) do not add dark areas!. Your completed game should have less than .0001% completely dark sectors, and you certainly shouldn't mix dark areas with lit areas, because contrast is bad, and most gamers are actually blind.3. Alternate fire: Alternate fire is IMPORTANT. You won't win over the snooty Mac heads and game-apocalypse-prophets if your gun doesn't have some wacky secondary fire option. Every weapon actually needs to be two weapons, which is pretty easy on you, because you only have to make half the models. Secondary fire also gives the impression of variety, which goes back to "gameplay". If there's more stupid shit for the player to do, like a gun that shoots sardines, it increases your "gameplay" quotient by ten billion hundred.4. Story: Nobody worth their black turtleneck and goatee plays first person shooters for shooting. They want a story. In fact, you could probably just plaster all the surfaces in your game with lines of text and dialogue, and just make the gamer walk through and read the story that way. And they could find books with book covers covered in text, and when they opened it, they could find text on top of text, and continue reading. Your gun could shoot storyline all over the environment like some sort of uncontrollable firehose, and your place in the Hall of Game Development Gods would be cemented. Make sure your story includes politics, coverups, underground resistance, plot twists, God, aliens, droning dialogue and girl characters with short cropped hair.5. Guns that aren't terribly fun: It's bad enough that you have to defile your great materpiece with something as filthy and lowest-common-denominator as a gun, but the player actually has to use them? Thankfully, you can counteract this by making them as uncompelling to shoot as possible. Make them quiet, make them boring to look at, make them have little recoil, make it so that enemies display as little damage or blood as possible, be stingy with ammunition, do whatever you can to make the player not want to shoot the guns in your game, ever. Shooting will only distract them from your storyline. Oh yeah, and the physics.Some things to avoid include: Action, explosions, running, loud noises, speed, music that isn't electronic/experimental/made with a beatmachine by a kid with huge and curly hair, blood, violence. All these things are lowbrow and therefore not fun.Remember, you like Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Half-Life, and Half-Life 2 because they have clean and overbright visuals, alternate firing modes, slowness of movement, and guns that aren't any fun to shoot. HL2 has the holy grail of them all - physics! You hate Doom 3, FEAR, Painkiller (okay, this does have alternate fire, but it also has hordes of enemies, demons, loud noises, and just about every other lowest-common denominator thing anyone could ever think of), and the Quake series because they're fast, dark and/or gritty, feature more than .0000000001% areas of darkness, have no storline, feature guns that shoot loudly or impressively, and therefore DO NOT HAVE GAMEPLAY. NONE.Next week's lesson: How to make an acclaimed fighting game!. Covering all aspects of forum-loved game elements, like tons of rotation moves, not having blood, avoiding bouncing breasts, and having enough guys with bandanas or spiky hair.
