Emotional Limits of Avatar-Based Games
An avatar-based game is analogous to a story written in the first person. Reading a first-person story, the audience knows that regardless of what happens in the story, the narrator …
Sound Effects
The most common use of sound in a game is for sound effects. These sounds correspond to the actions and events of the game world—for example, a burst of gunfire …
. Actions for Gameplay
Most of the actions that a player takes in a game are intended to meet the challenges that she faces. This book cannot possibly provide a list of all the …
Incorporating the Element of Chance
The role of chance varies enormously from game to game. Some games, such as checkers, make no use of chance at all; in others, such as craps, chance is all-important. …
First Art and Rigging Pass
The project now enters the first art and rigging pass, during which the art team builds the real artwork and rigging. You may be working on other levels at the …
Hierarchical Finite State Machines
In the absence of orders, go find something and kill it. —Erwin Rommel Hierarchical finite state machines have proven to be the most successful mechanism for creating artificially intelligent opponents …
Monte Carlo Simulation
If you have a simple deterministic mechanic that simulates some real-world effect, then it doesn't take long to see if it works correctly. For example, the gears in a car's …
Integrating for Entertainment
When one particular motivation drives the development of a game, the result is often a substandard product. A good designer seeks not to maximize one characteristic at the expense of …
Home Game Consoles
A home game console is usually set up in the living room or a bedroom. The player sits or stands holding a dedicated controller 3 to 6 feet away from …
Character Archetypes
In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell, 1972), folklore scholar Joseph Campbell identified a pattern that many stories follow, which he called the Hero's Journey. Stories that …
What the Player Needs to Know
Players naturally need to know what's happening in the game world, but they also need to know what they should do next, and most critically, they need information about whether …
Flying
Flying presents a further complication because it involves moving through three dimensions whereas a two-dimensional input device such as a joystick offers control in only two. Control over movement in …
Real-Time Games Versus Turn-Based Games
Your specification of the core mechanics will read somewhat differently depending on whether your game is turn-based or takes place in real time. Most video games operate in real time, …
Positive Feedback in Action
The set of graphs in Figure 11.7 illustrates the effects of positive feedback, or its absence, in a variety of circumstances. Each graph shows the state of a hypothetical game …
Music, Dance, and Rhythm Games
Dance Dance Revolution, PaRappa the Rapper, and similar games belong to a comparatively new subgenre of action games, those that challenge the player's sense of rhythm. They typically show an …
Things That a Game Is Not
Note that the definition of a game does not mention competition or conflict. Formal game theory (a branch of mathematics) requires that there be a conflict of interest among the …
Types of Design Documents
This section is a short introduction to the various types of documents a game designer might create: the high concept, game treatment, character design, world design, and story or level …
The Ethical Dimension
The ethical dimension of a game world defines what right and wrong mean within the context of that world. At first glance, this might seem kind of silly—it's only a …
Nonlinear Stories
If you allow the player to influence future events and change the direction of the story, then the story is nonlinear. This chapter examines two of the most common structures …
Camera Models
Old video games, especially those for personal computers, used to treat the game screen as if it were a game board in a tabletop game. Today we use a cinematic …
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 …
Core Mechanics Design
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. (Do not create more entities than necessary.) —Attributed to William of Occam Designing the core mechanics consists of identifying the key entities and mechanics …
Expanding on the Principles of Level Design
This section looks at a few particularly important issues in the list of universal design principles: atmosphere, pacing, and tutorial levels. Atmosphere The art director and lead game designer decide …
Health, Morale, and Fighting Efficiency
As with almost all other genres, units in war games fight at full efficiency until their health points are gone even though that's obviously unrealistic. Making wounded or damaged units …
Risks and Rewards
Risks and rewards as sources of entertainment are most familiar to us from gambling. You risk money by placing a bet, and you are rewarded with more money if you …
Defining the Role
Playing a game, especially board games and computer games, often involves playing a role of some sort. In Monopoly, the role is real estate tycoon. In From Russia with Love, …
The Effects of Different Control Mechanisms
The way a player feels about an avatar depends somewhat on how the player controls the avatar in the game. In the case of Nancy Drew and the avatars in …
Scripted Conversations and Dialog Trees
Natural language refers to ordinary language as spoken or written by human beings. Computer scientists devised the term to contrast ordinary human language with computer (or programming) languages. The extremely …
Ambient Sounds
Just as the main view gives the player visual feedback about where she is, ambient sounds give her aural feedback. Traffic sounds tell her that she's in an urban street; …
Actions That Serve Other Functions
Games include many actions that allow the player to interact with the game world but not engage in gameplay. Games also offer actions that aren't specifically play activities but give …
Making PvP Games Fair
Part of your job includes making sure that your game is fair and that players perceive it to be fair. Fairness means something different in PvP games than it does …
Pitfalls of Level Design
This chapter ends with a discussion of some important mistakes to avoid—classic errors of level design that, unfortunately, some designers continue to make. Get the Scope Right The single most …
A Final Note on Artificial Opponents
Don't expect to be able to create an artificial opponent that can routinely beat a human fair and square unless your game is a simple one—so simple that it can …
Game Balancing
To be enjoyable, a game must be balanced well—it must be neither too easy nor too hard, and it must feel fair, both to players competing against each other and …
The Key Components of Video Games
Chapter 1 looked at what a game is and what gameplay is. But where does gameplay come from, and how does the player interact with it? In order to create …
