This is the second article in a series about making commercial games, with a focus on efficiently iterating lane-pushing game design.

To find success, any new game must have...

• Novelty — to attract new players
• Accessibility — so they can bring their friends
• Depth — so expert players will stick around

This was a lot easier around 2010. Most commercial games launching in that era could inherit nearly 10 years of iteration on game loops, all perfected during the early years of DotA.

As a team making a new game, you don't have 10 years to iterate — but you can take this advice.

Lets dive in with 5 things to consider...

1. Understand Pseudolanes

Read the pseudolanes article and understand it deeply. Discuss it with your team. This is the central theory of the genre.

Expanding on this theory, I define the second generation of lane-pushing games as:

"those which use and explore pseudolanes beyond a fixed quantity of lanes".

This design space is almost completely uncharted, with boundless potential to connect the long-term engagement that lane-pushing games are so good at, with new audiences.

You will almost certainly want to be in the second generation. It is healthy for innovation, spectacle and marketability. And I'm personally looking forward to playing and being inspired by these new creations!

Examples

• Ascendant One explored having 6 lanes on a rotation, which is a step towards the second generation.
• Pokémon UNITE is the first commercial game to explore novel pseudolanes with its goal zones.

2. Study the History

Warcraft III had its golden era of modding from 2003–2009. This was a rare period when smart, inspired modders had the freedom to explore with:

• great tools,
• no commercial pressure,
• an awesome community of like-minded peer creators, and
• a receptive audience that loved these games and would cross-pollinate ideas between them.

I was one of those modders, though by no means among the best or brightest.

This website, Lane-Pushing Games, has 50+ articles describing old games with proven game mechanics. The work I've written about blows me away — every single game I've reviewed taught me something new.

The vast majority of these ideas are still novel to commercial audiences.

People who know my work and commercially work on lane-pushing games tell me, most of the time, that they've read or skimmed "a few articles".

I suggest you read the whole thing. Divide it up among your team. Find a format to discuss the games and the learnings. There is no reason to have blind spots with all this (free!) knowledge available.

Examples

• League of Legends is an example. I've spoken with early Riot staff and they did thorough internal research of all the mods in their early days. It worked out for them!
• Sirocco is directly inspired by the game Battleships. The game loops are well-proven, and it is likely to enjoy a huge advantage on mobile devices as the gameplay is so accessible for touch inputs.
• Causeway is my own commercial game, and it stands on the shoulders of giants in exactly this way. I found 4–5 games which each had a mechanic or two to contribute, and we've done some modernising and layered more ideas on top.

3. Inherit with Intent

Speaking of Warcraft III... it's common to see lane-pushing game design that was inherited from this monumental RTS.

Last-hits, denies, fog of war, and troop aggro behaviours are just a few examples — they've brought us great depth and emergent gameplay!

But beware. Brilliant game projects can stumble over inherited ideas.

The risk is that genre assumptions can be so baked into the designer's thinking that they're never revisited, even when the gameplay is stuck and something has to give. In the worst case, real innovations might be thrown out instead, and the game loses its character.

Your iteration process should always be open to revisit assumptions about what a lane-pushing game can be.

For example:

• How many troops should appear on a lane?
• Are the troops comprised of melee, ranged, and cannon variants?
• Should the melee ones all be the same size and strength?
• How much range should the ranged ones have?
• Should they march in a narrow line?
• How wide is the field of combat when they clash?
• Are these answers the same on all lanes?

Currently, the commercial games give nearly identical answers. If you're going to differentiate, be ready to test boundaries and try something different!

Examples

• REVN is a shooter-hybrid, and lets players use long-range guns like sniper rifles as a basic attack. To avoid "sniping from base" as a dominant strategy, they revisited an assumption and increased the time between troop waves from 30 → 60 seconds. That proved to be a great choice!
• Sins of a Dark Age ran an experiment in its early days to combine RTS and lane-pushing gameplay. But they had an assumption that character kits like those in League of Legends were best practice for the genre. Unsurprisingly, abilities with precise aiming and timing just don't work in an RTS setting, and they went back to the drawing board.

4. Craft Bold Equipments

I respect when a game has the confidence to define a new equipment to formally recognise a part of its gameplay.

Every lane-pushing game has equipments (items, talents, perks...), and every designer comes up with a twist on them — but the twist rarely matters, not on a fundamental level.

In my view, there are perhaps 2 things that matter for an equipment:

1. How subtractive is it? How did the designer protect the player from being paralysed by too many choices?
2. How assertive was the designer about pulling key concepts out of the primary equipment system, to make a separate dedicated equipment?

Done right, equipments are a powerful opportunity to shape how players view in-game progression, and to inform the vocabulary they use when discussing the game and its meta.

Examples

• League of Legends subverted the idea that only supports should place wards, by introducing Trinkets. This equipment formalises the idea that everyone on a team should participate in vision control.
• Dawngate lets players define their economic progression using Roles, which formalises how players draft and prioritise their time.
• Chaos Online had a dedicated equipment for Consumables, formalising their use as a key component of team-oriented play.
• Heroes of the Storm boldly has one equipment, and optimises for ensuring players have at most 4 things to choose from at once.

5. Discover your Verbs

Now, the critical part. Your differentiator. You need verbs.

I define a verb as:

"an action available to all playable characters, which has a dual-function and creates pivotal moments in combat."

At some point when iterating your game, there is hopefully an interaction that feels extremely fun. Your next step should be to see what the game looks like if every character has it.

If this works, you might have a new verb that shapes gameplay in a fundamental way. Existing lane-pushing games simply won't be able to pivot to replicate the experience, because they weren't designed with that verb in mind.

As the idea matures, you should design character kits, progression, and levels to lean into that verb as much as you can. Roll back some changes if you need to, but push it to the limit. Become able to articulate why the limit exists.

Even better, find 2 verbs that feel great together!

Examples

• perSonas "swap" is extremely well-done and integrated.
• Water War "dive/surface" is another standout example.
• Splatoon has "attacks" both deal damage and spread ink, which creates lots of great moments when creating/removing camouflage.
• Supervive introduced "glide", and its levels are designed to allow this verb to shine.

Conclusions

What I have outlined above is a process for "finding the fun" in a lane-pushing game.

Done right, some combination of researching old mods and drawing upon ideas and mechanics from another genre will result in 1–2 verbs that form the basis of your game loops or controls.

These verbs should appeal to 'who you serve' from the previous article.

Next, you'll carefully inherit the bits you need to form a lane-pushing experience around the verbs, and layer on equipments (and other mechanics) to normalise behaviours among your players.

At that point, you should have a feel for the game's novelty, accessibility, and depth — and this will let you make an informed decision about whether to enter production.

The next article in this series will dive into the technical considerations for building a lane-pushing experience.