Avoiding Obscurity
A user interface can function correctly and be pretty to look at, but when the player can't actually tell what the buttons and menus do, it is obscure. Several factors …
Skill, Stress, and Absolute Difficulty
Chapter 11, "Game Balancing," addresses gameplay difficulty in detail, but this chapter introduces some important concepts because the terms involved come up in a discussion of different types of gameplay …
Core Mechanics and Gameplay
Figure 10.1 shows that, during play, the core mechanics present challenges to the player and accept actions from the player, both mediated by the user interface. So far, our discussion …
Hub-and-Spoke Layouts
In the hub-and-spoke layout, the player begins in a central hub that ordinarily doesn't present significant challenges or dangers. As such, it serves as a place of comfort or safety, …
Strategy Games
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be …
Aesthetics
Video games are an art form, so aesthetics are a part of their design. This doesn't mean a game has to be beautiful, any more than a film or a …
From Idea to Game Concept
Chapter 2 described a game concept as "a general idea of how you intend to entertain someone through gameplay." That description was accurate enough for an overview, but to discuss …
Player-Designed Avatar Characters
While most games have an established character as the player's avatar, role-playing games, especially multiplayer online ones, almost always give players considerable freedom to design an avatar to their own …
Emotional Limits of Interactive Stories
Video games that don't include a story, that is, games that primarily entertain via the challenge and achievement of gameplay, don't try to arouse complex emotions in their audiences. They …
Audio Elements
This chapter has already mentioned sound briefly, but this section presents more detail, addressing several topics: sound effects, ambient sounds, music, dialog, and voiceover narration. Keep music, sound effects, and …
Conceptual Reasoning and Lateral Thinking Puzzles
Conceptual reasoning puzzles and lateral thinking puzzles are in the same section because they both require extrinsic knowledge, that is, knowledge from outside the domain of the challenge itself. This …
Dominant Strategies in PvE Games
As Chapter 9 explained, most games offer a large number of different types of challenges but a somewhat smaller number of actions with which to overcome them. One action may …
Level Design to Art Handoff
With the level locked, it's time to hand off your prototype and all your design work to the artists who will use it as a blueprint to build the geometry, …
Neural Nets
A neural net is a program that simulates, in a simplified form, the behavior of brain cells, or neurons. The details are too complex to discuss here, but put simply, …
Part Two: The Genres of Games
Chapter 13 is about the earliest, and still most popular, genre of interactive entertainment: action games. This genre may be divided into numerous subgenres such as shooter games, fighting games, …
Other Motivations That Influence Design
In the commercial game industry, video games are always built for entertainment, but even so, several factors can influence the way a game is designed. This section examines some of …
Types of Game Machines
When you first start fleshing out your game concept, you should concentrate on the dream, the player's role, and the target audience. However, a game concept is not complete without …
Character Growth
If a game aspires to be more than a simple adventure, if it seeks to have a meaningful story and not just a series of exciting episodes, then it must …
Some General Principles
The following general principles for user interface design apply to all games regardless of genre: ■ Be consistent. This applies to both aesthetic and functional issues; your game should be …
Avatar-Oriented Steering
In avatar-oriented steering, the only suitable model for first-person games, pushing the joystick up causes the avatar to move forward in whatever direction she currently faces, regardless of her orientation …
Functions of the Core Mechanics in Operation
During play, the core mechanics (as implemented by the game engine) operate behind the scenes to create and manage gameplay for the player, keep track of everything that happens in …
Benefits of Positive Feedback
Positive feedback can benefit your game in two ways: ■ Positive feedback discourages stalemate. A well-balanced PvP game should only rarely result in a stalemate, and PvE games should never …
Fast Puzzle Games
Most computerized puzzle games, such as Sokoban, move slowly and allow the player to think about his next move for as long as he wants, so they're not action games. …
The Essential Elements of a Game
The essential elements of a game are play, pretending, a goal, and rules. The definition refers to each of these elements and includes some additional conditions as well. In the …
. The Game Design Documents
As part of their job, game designers produce a series of documents to tell others about their game design. Exactly what documents they produce and what the documents are for …
The Emotional Dimension
The emotional dimension of a game world defines not only the emotions of the people in the world but, more important, the emotions that you, as a designer, hope to …
Linear Stories
From the earliest days of computer gaming, designers have been intrigued by the idea of agency: letting the player influence the plot and change the outcome. Game developers refer to …
Interaction Models
Chapter 2 defined the interaction model as the relationship between the player's inputs via the input devices and the resulting actions in the game world. You create the game's interaction …
Absolute Difficulty
Absolute difficulty refers to intrinsic skill required and stressfulness put together. When a game offers multiple difficulty levels, the easy mode both demands less skill and exerts less stress than …
Actions and the Core Mechanics
The challenges in a game vary from level to level in type, frequency, sequence, and other respects, but the actions available to the player normally do not change from level …
Combinations of Layouts
Many layouts combine aspects of each type of layout, providing, for instance, networked spaces to accomplish tasks within a larger linear framework. The layout in Figure 12.6 corresponds to the …
Game Features
Strategy games fall into two main subgenres: classical turn-based games and realtime strategy games. Pure strategy games (those that contain only conflict challenges, with no economic or physical challenges) tend …
Storytelling
Many games incorporate some kind of story as part of the entertainment. In conventional games, players can find it difficult to become immersed in a story because the players must …
The Player’s Role
To understand your own game and to explain it to others, you must know what the player will do, and in a sense, what the player will be in the …
Specific and Nonspecific Avatars
In games in which the player does not get to design or choose an avatar but must use one supplied by the game, the relationship between the player and the …
