FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

The Intermediate Challenges

Most designs leave intermediate-level challenges implicit. If you give the player nothing to do except follow explicit instructions, it doesn't feel like a game; it feels like a test. Part of the player's fun lies in figuring out—whether through explora­tion, through events in the story, or by observing the game's internal economy— what he's supposed to do. Armed with the knowledge of both the victory condition at the top and the right way to meet the atomic challenges at the bottom, he has the tools to figure out the intermediate challenges—if you have constructed them coherently. (See the section "Avoid Conceptual Non Sequiturs" in Chapter 12 for an example of how not to construct an intermediate-level challenge.)

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DESIGN RULE Reward Victory No Matter How the Player Achieves It

Players will think of things to try that you might not have anticipated; even if you've given them multiple ways to win, they may find another way entirely. If the player achieves the victory condition, even in a completely unexpected way, he deserves credit for it. Don't test to see if he got there in one of the ways that you intended; just test to see if he got there. Of course, the game should prevent any form of cheating that it can reasonably control—but finding an unusual way to win is not cheating so long as it is equally avail­able to all players.

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For a good many games, overcoming the intermediate-level challenges requires only that the player meet all the lowest-level ones in sequence. That's how most action games work, and what Figure 9.1 illustrates. If the player beats all the ene­mies and gets past all the obstacles, he finishes the level. If he finishes all the levels, he wins the game.

In more complex games, the player may have a choice of ways to approach an inter­mediate-level challenge. Suppose the explicit top-level challenge—the victory condition—in a war game consists of defeating all the enemy units, and the atomic challenge consists of destroying one enemy unit. The simple and obvious strategy is apparently to destroy all the enemy units one by one, but the player isn't likely to get that chance. Most war games include a production system for generating new units, so even if the player can kill off enemy units one by one, his opponent can probably produce new ones faster than he can destroy them. Disrupting the ene­my's production system is often an effective strategy, while protecting his own production system ensures that he can eventually overwhelm the enemy with superior numbers. Neither the specification of the victory condition nor the atomic