Personal Computers
A personal computer (PC) can be set up away from the communal living space, on a computer desk. In this case, the player has a keyboard, a mouse, possibly a …
Audio Design
Audio design, both sound effects and language, is also a part of character design. You will need to work with your team's audio director—and sometimes defer to her experience—to find …
What the Player Wants to Do
Just as the player needs to know things, the player wants to do things. You can offer him many things to do depending upon the game's genre and the current …
Point-and-Click Navigation
Aerial or context-sensitive camera models in which the player can clearly see his avatar, party, or units as well as a good deal of the surrounding environment can use point-and-click …
Core Mechanics and Level Design
Most video games for consoles and personal computers present gameplay in separate levels (also called chapters, missions, or scenarios, depending on the genre), each with its own set of initial …
Other Balance Considerations
This section addresses two undesirable qualities of unbalanced games, stagnation and triviality, that you should seek to avoid. Avoiding Stagnation Stagnation occurs in a PvE game when the game leaves …
Other Action Games
A great many action games don't fit neatly into any of the preceding subgenres, and the variety among them is enormous. They are difficult to categorize except in negative terms: …
Symmetry and Asymmetry
In a symmetric game, all the players play by the same rules and try to achieve the same victory condition. Basketball is a symmetric game. The initial conditions, the actions …
The Anatomy of a Game Designer
Like all crafts, game design requires both talent and skill. Talent is innate, but skill is learned. Effective game designers require a wide base of skills. The following sections discuss …
Understanding Attributes
The qualities that a player modifies when constructing or customizing an avatar are called attributes. Chapter 10, "Core Mechanics," discusses attributes in more detail, but for now, it's enough to …
Foldback Stories
Foldback stories represent a compromise between branching stories and linear ones. In a foldback story, the plot branches a number of times but eventually folds back to a single, inevitable …
The 3D Versus 2D Question
A question you must decide early on is whether your game should use a 3D graphics display engine or stick to 2D graphics technology. If a game uses 2D graphics, …
Physical Coordination Challenges
Physical coordination challenges test a player's physical abilities, most commonly hand-eye coordination. One of the earliest coin-op video games, Pong, required only this one skill to win. Physical coordination challenges …
Revisit Your Earlier Design Work
To begin designing the core mechanics, go back to your earlier design work and reread it to identify entities and mechanics. Make a list of the nouns and verbs that …
Progression and Pacing
A large video game—one designed to be played for more than an hour, say— is almost always divided into a number of levels. If you want the player to experience …
Upgrades and Technology Trees
In a game with a limited number of unit types, the players can sometimes exhaust the interesting battle combinations too quickly. For example, the knights, archers, and barbarians of The …
Novelty
People enjoy novelty: new things to see, to hear, and to do. Early video games were extremely repetitive and developed an unfortunate reputation for being monotonous. Nowadays, however, video games …
Choosing a Genre
In describing movies or books, the term genre refers to the content of the work. Historical fiction, romance fiction, spy fiction, and so on are genres of popular fiction. With …
Designing Your Avatar Character
As you design the avatar for your game, think about how you want the player to relate to him. Do you want an entirely nonspecific avatar, really no more than …
Structure of a Dialog Tree
Scripted conversations may be designed using a dialog tree, a branching data structure a little like the branching story tree. In a branching story tree, each branch point, or node, …
Dialog and Voiceover Narration
Just about any kind of game can use spoken material to provide information, whether it's narration, dialog, commentary in sports games, units responding to orders in strategy games, and so …
Saving the Game
Saving a game takes a snapshot of a game world and all its particulars at a given instant and stores them away so that the player can later load the …
Balancing Asymmetric Games
Asymmetric PvP games run a greater risk of suffering from dominant strategies because the players effectively play by different rules. In Fox and Geese, which Chapter 1 describes, one player …
Avoid Conceptual Non Sequiturs
At the beginning of the first level of James Bond: Tomorrow Never Dies, the player, in the persona of James Bond, sneaks into an enemy military outpost armed only with …
Role-Playing Games
Role-playing games allow players to interact with a game world in a wider variety of ways than most other genres do, and to play a richer role than many games …
User Interface
The concept of a user interface should be familiar to you from computer software generally, but in a game the user interface has a more complex role. Most computer programs …
Handheld Game Machines
Handheld game machines are a hugely popular and very inexpensive form of entertainment, used in the West mainly by children. (In Japan, significant numbers of adults use them too.) Handhelds …
Voice and Language
The way a character speaks conveys an enormous amount of information. This breaks down into various elements: ■ Vocabulary indicates the age, social class, and level of education of the …
The Design Process
You will recall from Chapter 2, "Design Components and Processes," that the game design process takes place in three stages: concept, elaboration, and tuning. Designing the user interface takes place …
Allowing for Customization
One of the most useful, and at the same time easiest to design, features you can offer your player is to allow him to customize his input devices to suit …
Mechanics
Mechanics document how the game world and everything in it behave. Mechanics state the relationships among entities, the events and processes that take place among the resources and entities of …
Design to Make Tuning Easy
In the later stages of game development, you will spend a great deal of time tweaking and tuning your game to improve its balance and remove any dominant strategies or …
. Game Features
Action games provide a good field in which to study many features also found in other genres because the simplicity of action games means that the issues aren't obscured by …
Competition and Cooperation
Competition occurs when players have conflicting interests; that is, when the players try to accomplish mutually exclusive goals. Cooperation occurs when the players try to achieve the same or related …
Mathematical Competence
Designers must have basic math skills, including trigonometry and the simpler principles of probability. Balancing games that feature complex internal economies, such as business simulations or real-time strategy games, can …
