Creative Play
Many games offer the player the chance to design or build something. In the Caesar series, it's a Roman city; in Spore, it's a creature. People enjoy designing and building …
Emergent Narrative
Emergent narrative, a term introduced by designer Marc LeBlanc in his lecture "Formal Design Tools" at the 2000 Game Developers' Conference, refers to storytelling produced entirely by player actions and …
First-Person Perspective
In the first-person perspective, used only in avatar-based gameplay modes, the camera takes the position of the avatar's own eyes, and is fixed with respect to the avatar. Therefore, the …
Logic and Mathematical Challenges
Logical and mathematical reasoning has been part of gameplay since the dawn of human history. Logic provides the basis for strategic thinking in any turn-based game of perfect information and …
List Your Entities and Resources
Once you have your list of nouns, decide whether each represents a resource, an independent entity, an attribute of another entity—or perhaps none of the above, in which case, you …
PACING IN THE LORD OF THE RINGS
For a wonderful example of varied pacing from literature, read The Lord of the Rings. Almost every major adventure or threat the Fellowship experiences in the first two volumes is …
ABSTRACTING THE DISTRIBUTION PROCESS
To reduce these problems—yet still require the players to create the resources that units need—you can make the production process concrete, but abstract the distribution process. For example, the troops …
Creative and Expressive Play
People love to design and create things, whether clothing, creatures, buildings, cities, or planets. They also love to customize a basic template of some kind to reflect their own choices. …
The Classic Game Genres
As you flesh out your concept, consider whether or not it falls into one of the classic video game genre descriptions that follow. Later chapters look at these genres in …
Visual Appearances
In modern video games, almost all the characters have a visible manifestation in the game. The exceptions are nonspecific avatars who view the world only in the first-person perspective (like …
Design Issues for Dialog Trees
When you create a dialog tree, you must be sure that every possible pathway through the tree produces a credible conversation. If the tree is large, verifying this can be …
Input Devices
So far, this book has placed little emphasis on the game machine's hardware, because the variety of processors, display screens, data storage, and audio devices makes it impossible to address …
Reasons for Saving a Game
Reasons for saving a player's game or allowing him to save it include these: ■ Allowing the player to leave the game and return to it later. This is the …
Balance Issues for Persistent Worlds
Persistent worlds are multiplayer online games that run continuously, offering a game world that persists even if a player is not logged in. Chapter 21, "Online Games," discusses persistent worlds …
Make Atypical Levels Optional
Level designers naturally like to vary the content of their levels, and it is good design practice to make creative use of the game's features or to set your levels …
War Games
CRPGs and war games both include combat and a set of rules for determining how it takes place. However, CRPGs differ from war games in that CRPGs are about a …
The Structure of a Video Game
You now know how the core mechanics of a game work with the user interface to create gameplay for the player. A game seldom presents all its challenges at one …
Mobile Phones and Wireless Devices
Mobile phones now have enough computing power to play decent games. Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to find a reliably profitable business model. The public is reluctant to pay much …
Storytelling and Narrative
Storytelling is a feature of daily experience. We do it without thinking about it when we recount some experience we have had, whether it is the story of how the …
Choosing a Screen Layout
Once you have a clear understanding of what the player does in the primary (or any) mode and you've chosen an interaction model and a camera model, you must then …
Execution Matters More Than Innovation
Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. —Thomas Edison (attributed) For games, the proportions are a little different from Edison's proportions for genius, but the idea is the same. …
Numeric and Symbolic Relationships
This section discusses the differences between the numeric and symbolic relationships and how you may combine them to achieve your design goals for the core mechanics. NUMERIC RELATIONSHIPS Numeric relationship …
General Principles of Level Design
If you have ever found yourself admiring the environment of a game or enjoying the way the game's challenges keep you guessing, you are appreciating the work of that game's …
Challenges
Action games have more different kinds of challenges than just about any other genre, although almost all of these challenges test physical skills—speed and reaction time, steering and shooting, timing …
Conventional Games Versus Video Games
A game designer should be able to design all kinds of games, not just video games. A game designer must have a thorough understanding of the essential elements— play, rules, …
General Knowledge and the Ability to Research
The most imaginative game designers are those who have been broadly educated and are interested in a wide variety of things. It helps to be well versed in such topics …
Freeform Creative Play and Sandbox Mode
If a game lets the player use all the facilities that it offers without any restrictions on the amount of time or resources available (other than those imposed by technological …
CHARACTER-AGNOSTIC PLOTS AND KING OF DRAGON PASS
In most role-playing games (RPGs), the player gets to design her avatar from scratch at the beginning of the game-to choose the avatar's race, sex, profession, and many other details. …
Third-Person Perspective
Games with avatar-based interaction models can also use the third-person perspective. The most common camera model in modern 3D action and action-adventure games with strongly characterized avatars, it has the …
Races and Time Pressure
In a race, the player attempts to accomplish something before someone else does, whether that involves a physical race through space or a race to create a structure, to accumulate …
Add the Mechanics
With your list of entities and list of verbs, you're ready to start defining the mechanics. Again reread your earlier design work. If any sentence includes or implies the word …
The Level Design Process
Now that you have learned the general principles of level design, let's turn to the process. Level design takes place during the elaboration stage of game design and,like the overall …
The Game World
The choice of setting for your strategy game is a vital consideration because different players prefer different fantasies. Dress up the underlying gameplay in a different setting and it can …
Summary
In this chapter, you have learned that play, pretending, a goal, and rules are the essential elements of a game, and you've learned how they work together to create the …
Hybrid Games
Some games cross genres, combining features not typically found together. This occasionally happens when two people on the design team want the game to belong to different genres, and they …
