FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
To Save or Not to Save
A few designers don't allow players to save their games within certain regions of the game or even to save at all. If the player can save and reload where he wants and without limit, he can solve puzzles or overcome other obstacles by trial and error rather than by skill, or he can use the saving system to avoid undesirable random events; if something bad happens by chance, the player can reload the game repeatedly until the undesirable event doesn't occur. This reduces the game's difficulty, and some designers argue against allowing players to save on that basis.
That, however, is lazy game design. Preventing the player from saving adds difficulty without adding fun. If you really want to make the game harder, devise harder challenges. Forcing the player to replay an entire level because he made a mistake near the end wastes his time and condemns him to frustration and bore - dom—and that certainly is not player-centric game design.
You may not like it if a player repeatedly reloads a game to avoid a random event or to solve some problem by trial and error rather than skill, but the player doesn't play (or buy) the game to make you feel good. He might need to save the game for perfectly legitimate reasons. The notion that saving makes a game too easy assumes that the player is your opponent, a violation of the player-centric principle. Most games now recognize that players want—and sometimes need—to cheat by offering cheat codes anyway.
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DESIGN RULE Allow the Player to __________________________ Save and Reload the Game
Unless your game is extremely short or your device has no data storage, allow the player to save and reload the game. His right to exit the game without losing the benefit of his achievements supersedes all other considerations.
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It's the player's machine; it's not fair to penalize him just because he has to go to the bathroom or because it's now his little brother's turn to play. Choose which mechanism works best for your game, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each, but do let the player save the game, and preferably, whenever and wherever he wants to. It does no harm to your game to give the player the freedom to choose when he wants to save—or whether he wants to save at all. The player has a fundamental right to be able to stop playing without losing what he has accomplished.
Gameplay is the heart of a game's entertainment, the reason players buy and play games. This chapter began with some principles to keep in mind in order to make gameplay fun. Next we examined the hierarchy of challenges, the fact that a player experiences several challenges at once, and defined the concept of atomic challenges. We noted the difference between the intrinsic skill required by a challenge and the stress that time pressure puts on a player and how these two elements combine to create difficulty.
Gameplay itself took up most of the chapter, with definitions and discussions of the many types of challenges that video games employ and various ways of adjusting their difficulty level. From challenges, we turned to the actions that you can offer the player, which include actions not directly related to gameplay. Finally we looked at the pros and cons of different ways of saving the game, an important feature for any game more than a few minutes long.
Armed with this information and with a little research, you should be able to analyze the gameplay of most of the video games currently for sale and to design others using similar kinds of challenges and actions.
