Manageable Complexity

Just came back from watching Indy IV.

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Very Minor Spoiler Alert,
that you probably already
know if you've watched any
of the trailers
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Sean Connery is *not* in the movie. They say he "died" or something, then go back to punching bad guys. Shia LaBeouf *is* in the movie, and he takes on the standard Indiana Jones role of runner-up, doing the 2nd half of all the good-guy action sequences.

I did think it was interesting, given how much they must have offered to get Harrison Ford to sign on for the film, and the fact that this is almost certainly the last Indiana Jones movie, that they didn't pull out all the stops and bring in Sean Connery, Gimli the Dwarf, and everyone else from the previous movies.

But I suppose the screenwriters were a little too smart for that, and a little smarter than many game developers. Indiana Jones has a pretty specific formula - you've got Indy in the center, a 2nd character for him to make snide comments to and to do silly 2-person co-op punching stunts with, and then one or two additional allies that mostly bumble around and remind you that he's not like the other "professors." This isn't an X-Men movie, and trying to have more than a couple substantial characters would take too much away from the action, especially if you're trying to tie everything up in a finale. For examples, see X3, Pirates 3, LotR 3 (even Tolkien made that mistake). The last Potter book is a brilliant counter-example, but they've already announced they'll have to take two films to do it justice, so I think it still proves my point.

But how often do you see a video-game sequel that for each new feature remembers to throw out an old one? Starcraft 2 comes to mind - I heard that the number of unique units was going to be similar to the original, in order to make each unit meaningful. But too often we view each feature as an incremental, always-positive improvement, and why throw out perfectly good code while you're adding more code? It's easy too forget the cost of complexity, the narrowing of demographics that occurs when your tutorial only covers the new features you've added for the sequel, and the pure intimidation factor of having 20 functions mapped to the controller, even if all of them would be fun on their own.

You're best off just finding the base formula that "works" for your game, and executing that, no more, no less. Hell, this advice ought to be heeded even if you're making the *first* game in a series. And best of all, doing less is cheaper, too!