The other side of the coin

"When you consider planes and books, I think it makes more sense."

This is the response that Tarn Adams offers to the idea of subtractive game design. Being the name behind Dwarf Fortress, which happens to be one of the most miraculously intricate indie games around, his opinion on the matter is arguably quite important.

"I think I understand the spirit of the quote," he adds, "and it surely applies to certain situations even in game design, but I've seen it quite often used to try to force keep-it-simple-stupid thinking that squashes video game innovation and I tend to think of it rather negatively when it comes to games."

Luke Arntson , a multi-platform developer, recalls his work on a contract project for Action All Stars called Pitching Ace. The game initially involved a rather complicated pitching scheme (relying on the mouse to draw an accurate path for a better throw), but after initial feedback from playtesters, the system was reduced and simplified for accessibility. He believes that this move was a mistake.

So the new control scheme was in place ... but our game was getting bad vibes from the higher ups. Another game was being made at the same time that involved batter pinball like those old machines, and it was actually pretty fun. So why was our game failing and the other contracted game doing so well? The truth is our design was too simple.

"[The game's development] felt like working with a piece of clay, where every week someone would come by and take away a different sized chunk, until all you could make were three small clay balls."

Chris Cornell, a developer with experience in both the indie and mainstream industries, looks at the matter from a more pragmatic viewpoint. In a world where additional features usually equate to additional resources (namely money), there's a very strong call to fix design flaws rather than removing them entirely. He cites his work with Leapfrog on their Leapster game system.

The initial round of games that he worked on was handled from a top-down design perspective: art resources were generated first, a lot of features were locked and others had to be reduced to meet workflow demands. This did not end well, and the design paradigm was changed to allow for a more flexible, additive process.

Over 5 years of working there, the round I still believe we produced the best games was during the 2nd year, where by a quirk of planning and schedules, we had a solid base of prototypes to start from and grow, rather than a large document full of ideas that we trimmed down."

Switching back to the more restricted process afterwards reinforced this point, as the games once again suffered from a poor reception — even though the team had, by then, a lot more experience with the platform.