FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

Commonly Used Challenges

This section presents categories of commonly used challenges you should under­stand. Because games can set a top-of-the-hierarchy challenge of just about anything—take on the role of Jason and win the golden fleece, use your zombie army to drive the werewolves out of your ancestral home, capture a giant squid from the ocean depths, win a rodeo competition—this book can't discuss all the possible top-of-the-hierarchy goals. The discussion here focuses on lower-level chal­lenges, many of which could be classified as atomic challenges.

These categories may help you to think about the kinds of traditional challenges you'd like to include in your game, but you're free to design any type of challenge you can imagine if you can make it workable. Players always appreciate innovative challenges; a beautiful setting or interesting overall concept only gets you so far. Gameplay is in the challenges.

This section includes observations from time to time about ways to make a particu­lar type of challenge easier or harder. Most of these comments concentrate on making them easier because novice game developers frequently make their games too hard without realizing it.