Focus (Game Design: Theory and Practice)

Game Design: Theory and Practice (Book's Summary: Part 5)

Book’s Author: Richard Rouse III

Summarized by Samuel Coelho

4. Focus

Developing a game for two years with a team of twenty people typically more resembles war than the creation of art. A stronger game may arise from the ashes of team members arguing over the best way to implement some aspect of gameplay. If the game merely becomes unfocused as a result of these squabbles, then a good game is not likely to emerge.

With conflicts potentially arising with other team members or from within yourself, it is far too easy to lose track of just why you were creating the game in the first place. You must be able to overcome the difficulties that will come and stay on track by remembering your focus.

4.1 Establishing Focus

A game’s focus is the designer’s idea of what is most important about a game. Designers should be able to write down their focus in a short paragraph. Writing can often clarify and solidify a designer’s thoughts.

As a game designer you should start concerning yourself with your game’s focus from the very beginning of the project. You should ask yourself a series of questions about the game you are envisioning:

• What is it about this game that is most compellin?

• What is this game trying to accomplish?

• What type of experience will the player have?

• What sort of emotions is the game trying to evoke in the player?

• What should the player take away from the game?

• How is this game unique? What differentiates it from other games?

• What sort of control will the player have over the game-world?
  

Keep as part of the focus only what is most important to your vision of the game, only those points which, if you took them away, would irreparably weaken the game.

Your game may be similar to another game, but in your focus you want to describe the game on its own terms and avoid making vague comparissons to other games. If you want to copy some aspects of other game, you must first determine what you think its focus may have been. Then take that focus, remove whatever parts are not necessary for your game, and add in whatever new ideas your game will incorporate. Thus, if your focus need to refer another game, it’s important to make sure everyone involved with the project understands the focus of that other game as well.

When choosing your goal you have the oportunity to express yourself; choose a goal in which you believe, a goal that expresses your sense of aesthetic, you world view. It matters not what your goal is, so long as it is congruent with your own interests, beliefs, and passions.” If you do not believe in your game, it is not going to be the best game you can make.

You want your focus to be something you will fight intensely until the game finally ships.

Ask the lead designer, even if he’s you :), what the project is trying to do, not in a confrontational way, but just so you get a good idea of where the project is going, and how your contribution to the game can properly aligned with that direction.

You do not need to be in a lead position in order to keep your project on track. Try to figure out where the project seems to be heading, and start talking with people about it. Chat with other designers, artists, programmers, and producers.

Do not self-censor your ideas until it’s absolutely necessary. Try to include in your focus a few more sentences that serve to illustrate the feeling of your game.

Do not include aspects of your game that are more about getting the project funded and published than making the game you want to make. You can worry about commercial considerations later.

Avoid using generic descriptions that do not actually provide the reader with any useful information.

When doing a remake or a sequel, it makes sense to take a look at the original game you are working from, and get a clear understanding, for yourself, of what its focus was. This is necessary so you will have a good idea of what exactly you are remaking.

Assemble the pieces of your focus into one paragraph, and try to write it cleanly and succinctly. Refer to your game in the present tense, as though your game already exists.

Giving your game a name makes it real instead of just an idea, as ridiculous as that may seem. You want other members of your team , the marketing department, and the business people to start liking your game as soon as possible. Try your very best to come up with a name that you like and that you could end up being the final name for the game. Often whatever name is given to a game early on will end up sticking with the game forever.

4.1.1 The Function of the Focus

Since the focus is designed to guide your team members as well as yourself, it needs to communicate the same ideas to everyone who reads it. You need to have a properly streamlined focus that can stand on its own, without demanding that the person who is reading the focus understand any other particular games.

Without a strong focus to guide their actions, programmers and artists may have a misunderstanding of what the game is supposed to accomplish, and may be thinking of some other type of game as they work on yours.

If your game is to have multiple separate modes. Your focus should apply to all of the different sub-games within your project.

4.2 Maintaining Focus

If no one on your team thinks your focus is very captivating, and despite your best efforts to campaign for it no one can get excited about it, you can come to one of two conclusions. First, perhaps your game idea is no all that good. If the idea in your head is still exciting you, maybe you did not capture the correct focus properly on paper.

When working in a team environment, it is important to include people from many sections of the development team in early brainstorming sessions. The designer may take ideas from all sources and mold them to fit into a single, unified vision.

It may be that the focus you have come up with is quite strong and will produce a great game, but selling people on it will be trickier if they feel like they were needelessly excluded from its creation.

Not every team can develop every type of game. A team that has been making sports games for years, likes working on sports games, and a team that knows how to make a sports game fun is probably not the best team to enlist to create your nineteenth-century economics simulation.

4.2.1 Fleshing Out the Focus

The design document should take the game suggested by your focus and expand on it, detailing how the goals in your focus will be accomplished by gameplay and precisely how that gameplay will function. You will also be sketching out the flow of the game, what the game-world will be like, and what sort of entities the player will encounter.

A properly designed focus will allow you to refer back to it to answer many of the questions you encounter during the design process. Through the focus, you can carefully consider if you are adding gameplay that takes the game in a new direction. It is important to identify which additions to your game cause it to deviate from the focus, and then change or eliminate those erroneous elements.

Many of the ideas you or members of your team have may be fine concepts, but if they not fit the game you are currently working on, they are not worth exploring or implementing. Do not throw these incompatible ideas away, however. Write them down in your notebook for the next time you are working on a game design.

Once the design document is finished and other elements of preproduction are completed, full production can start on your game. Questions will come up about how to implement a feature, in addition to new ideas about how to improve the game. For each of these, again, you should refer back to your focus to clarify your team’s direction.

Very often, players play and enjoy a focused game and will quickly cast aside one that is unfocused.

4.2.2 Changing Focus

You should expect your focus to change several times while you’re working on the design document. This is particular painless if you’re in preproduction phase and the design document is not yet complete. Thus, it’s good to detect problems in the game and in your focus as early as possible if you don’t want to develop an inferior or over-budgeted game.

If too many assets need to be reworked, or if it’s too close to the ship date to change them, of if there’ not enough funding available to get them changed, you may need to rethink changing your direction.

Your focus can change for variety of reasons. You may come to see shortcomings or failings in your original focus or you may recognize a more compelling experience that the game can provide that is outside of the scope of your original focus.

Of course that if you change your focus radically, you will need to tell the team about the change and make sure they all agree with it. If your team do not agree with your new focus, you may want to rethink that change or rethink your team.

Avoid changing things just because you are tired of them.

The usually worst decision you can make is to create whatever new assets the game needs following a new focus, while the old assets still follow the inferior focus you had embraced previously.

4.3 Sub-Focuses

You can see a sub-focus as a concept that supports your main focus, and one that will help your game attain that central focus. Through it we can break apart other objectives of your game to accomplish the central focus.

Now might be a time to explore what type of player you are thinking will want to play your game. Are you appealing more to the hard-core gaming crowd, or to people who maybe do not play computer games quite often? This will have a direct effect on many aspects of the game, including what level of simulation will need to be created, as well as the control system the game will use.

It might make sense to talk about what type of engine and graphics your game will have in one of the sub-focuses.

Sub-focuses are set off by separate headings from the primary focus. This way, readers of the focus can easily see the primary and most important focus and how the sub-focuses go into detail about specific parts of the game.

As you are working on your sub-focuses, it is important to always make sure that they jibe with your primary focus, as well as any other sub-focuses you may have.

4.4 Using Focus

It’s important to realize that your focus is not a marketing tool. It is not created to sell your game to the executives, It is written as a development tool for your team. Neverthless, you may be able to take your focus and change it into something to get your marketing department excited about your game. You may want to come up with some direct comparisons that place your game within the context of know popular games. Of course that you can use the content of your focus to back up such superficial comparisons and to make the marketing folk understand why your game is unique and will appeal to gamers.

Using a focus is one tool that will help you to create a solid, entertaining, and compelling game.

Game Analysis: Centipede (Game Design: Thory and Practice )

Game Design – Theory and Practice (Book's Summary: Part 4)

Book’s Author: Richard Rouse III

Summarized by Samuel Coelho

3. Game Analysis: Centipede

By analysing arcade game’s traits, modern game designers can learn a lot about how they can make their own games more compelling experiences for players.

As with any media, the old arcade games that are remembered and talked about decades after their release tend to be the best ones, thus creating the false impression of a “gold age.” The bad arcade games have fallen between the cracks of history.

The thought, when creating an arcade game, was to get players to easily understand a game, so that by the end of their very first game they had a good sense of how the game worked and what was necessary for success. Also, the player’s game could not last very long, since any one player had only paid a quarter, and if the game only earned a single quarter in half hour, it would not be profitable enough to operate.

Features such as scoring and high-score tables served to increase the arcade game’s addictive nature and encourage players to keep spending money.

The technical restrictions of the day limited what games could do, and thereby influenced what the game could accomplish in terms of gameplay.

Often, a series of constraints forces artists to focus their creativity in a fashion that leads to better work than if they could do anything they wanted.

The gameplay variations that were designed for arcade games are far more radical than the tiny amount of variation one will find in modern games, which are more content to endlessly clone already-proven gaming genres.

3.1 Classic Arcade Game Traits

Single Screen Play: players, at any time, are able to see the entire game-world, and can make their decisions with a full knowledge of the state of that game-world. Empowering players with that kind of information seriously impacts the gameplay.

Infinite Play: constitutes an unwinnable game. A game like that makes every game a defeat for players. Having an unwinnable game also necessitates making a game that continuously becomes more challenging, hence a game design with a continuous, infinite ramping up of difficulty.

Multiple Lives: provides an adequate number of tries for novice players try to grasp the game’s mechanics before the game was over. The ability to earn extra lives provides another reward incentive for players and also sets up a game where dying once is not necessarily the end of the game, which in turn encourages players to take risks they might not otherwise.

Scoring/High Scores: with the scoring feature, players are able to acummulate points for accomplishing different objectives in the game, and the high-score table was introduced in order to allow players to enter their initials next to their score so players could point out their name in the high-score table to their friends as a way of proving their mettle.

Easy-to-Learn, Simple Gameplay: classic arcade games were easy for players to learn and impossible for players to master.Of course, simple does not always mean “limited” or “bad” gameplay; it can also “elegant” and “refined.”

No Story: the classic arcade game designers did not feel required to flesh out their game-worlds, to concoct explanations for why players were shooting at a given target or eating a certain type of dot, and the games did not suffer for it.

Centipede, though not a very complex game by today’s standards, have all of the different gameplay elements working together to create a uniquelly challenging game.

3.2 Input

One of the great advantages to working on a game for the arcades is beeing able to pick the best type of control for the game and provide players with that control system. The designer can then create the game around those controls, precisely balancing the game to work perfectly with that input method.

For many fans of Centipede, the excellent controller is one of the first things they could remember about the game. Centipede provides players with an analog control device in the form of a trackball. Aside from the trackball, the only other control players have is a button for firing the shooter's laser-type weapon. The game allows an infinitely fast rate of fire, but only one shot can be on the screen at a time. As the critters gets closer, players can kill the bugs more easily, but their chance of dying goes up. This keeps the game perfectly balanced, and requires players to plan their shots carefully, a design element that adds more depth to the game’s mechanics.

The player’s shooter can come up and down on a six-row vertival space in addition to moving sideways.

3.3 Interconnectedness

One of the great strenghts of Centipede is how well all the different elements of the gameplay fit together. Once the players have played the game just a few times, they have a completely reliable set of expectations about how these enemies will attack them.

• The centipede appears as either a lone twelve-segment centipede or as a shorter centipede accompanied by a number of single heads. It winds its way down from the top of the screen to the player’s area at the bottom, moving horizontally. Once at the bottom of the screen, the centipede moves back and forth inside the player’s area, posing a great danger to players.
  
  
• The spider moves in a diagonal, bouncing pattern across the bottom of the screen, passing in and out of the player’s area.
  
  
• The flea plummets vertically, straight down.
  
  
• The scorpion travels horizontally across the top half of the screen and hence can never collide with and kill players. But it poisons the mushrooms it passes under.
  
  
• Fighting against any of the creatures by itself would provide very little challenge for players. Yet, when they function together they combine to create uniquely challenging situations for players. With any one of these adversaries missing, the game’s challenge would be significantly diminished, if not removed altogether.

The insects also have a unique relationship to the mushrooms, which fill the game’s play-field.

• Every time a centipede bumps into a mushroom, it turns down to the next row below, as if it had run into the edge of the play-field. Each segment of the centipede destroyed leaves a mushroom where the segment was destroyed.
  
  
• As the flea falls to the bottom of the play-field, it leaves a trail of new mushrooms behind itself, and the only way for players to stop it is to kill it.
  
  
• The flea comes on to the playfield if less than a certain number of mushroom are on the bottom half of the screen.
  
  
• The spider eats mushrooms.
  
  
• The scorpion poisons the mushrooms. When the centipede hits a poisoned mushroom, it will move vertically straight down to the bottom of the screen.

Therefore, Centipede becomes something of a hybrid between an arcade shooter and a real-time puzzle game.

3.3 Escalating Tension

Centipede creates peaks and valleys in which tension escalates to an apex and, with the killing of the last centipede segment, relaxes for a moment as the game switches over the next wave.

The flea, the only enemy that must be shoot twice in order to be destroyed, also escalate tension over a few seconds. When it is shot just once, its speed increases dramatically and players must quickly shoot it again to avoid being hit.

If players shoot the middle segment of an eleven-segment centipede, it will split into two five-segment centipedes that head in opposite directions. As a result, skilled players will end up going for the head or tail of the centipede to avoid splitting it.

Over the course of a game of Centipede, mushrooms become more and more tightly packed on the play-field.

Centipede also balances its monsters to become harder and harder as player’s scores increase.

The game cycles around once twelve individual heads are spawned, and then becomes harder by only spawning fast centipedes.

The player’s death also provides a brief respite from the tension. When the player’s ship is destroyed, the wave starts over and hence the centipede returns to the top of the screen, and all of the mushrooms on the screen are reset.

Centipede is marvelous at creating and maintaining a tense situation for players, while still providing brief “breathing periods” within the action. Designers of modern games, who are always concerned with ramping up difficuly for players, could learn much by analysing how Centipede keeps players constantly on their toes without ever unfairly overwhelming them.

Brainstorming a Game Idea (Game Design: Theory & Practice)

Game Design – Theory and Practice (Book's Summary: Part 3)

Book’s Author: Richard Rouse III

Summarized by Samuel Coelho

2. Brainstorming a Game Idea: Gameplay, Technology, and Story

Almost all of the challenge in game development is not coming up with a good idea, but in following through and being able to craft a compelling game around that idea.

The process of coming up with a game idea that will work is complicated by a number of factors fiction authors do not need to worry about. In part this is because computer game ideas can come from three distinct, unrelated areas of the form: gameplay, technology, and story. These different origins are interconnected in interesting ways, with the origin of the game’s idea limiting what one will be able to accomplish in the other two areas.

2.1 Starting Points

For each decision the designer makes about the game she is hoping to create, she needs to understand how that limits what the game will be. If the parts do not work together, it does not matter how many markets the concept covers – no gamers will be interested in playing the final game.

2.1.1 Starting with Gameplay

With a more specific idea of what type of gameplay she wants to create, the designer should start thinking about how that will impact the technology the game will require and what sort of story, if any, the game will be able to have.

Technological feasibility may end up limiting the scope of your gameplay. If you find that you need to adapt your gameplay to match the engine, you really are not starting out with gameplay as the origin of your idea, but instead with technology.

The type of gameplay your game will employ similarly limits what type of story can be told. Certain types of story just will not fit with certain types of gameplay, such as the Greek mythology in a flight simulator gameplay.

2.1.2 Starting with Technology

Sometimes the designer is presented with a new technology and tasked with coming up with a game story and gameplay that will exploit the sophisticated technology to full effect. Of course, the designer does not need to use every piece of technology that a programmer feels compelled to create, but it’s always better to have your gameplay work with the engine instead of fighting against it.

Other times its predetermined that the project will be using an engine licensed from some source, either another game developer or a technology-only company, and many lincensed engines are still developed with one game genre in mind.

When technology is handed to a game designer who is told to make a game out of it, it makes the most sense for the designer to embrace the limitations of that technology and turn them into strengths in her game.

For the greater good of the game, the story and the technology must be compatible with each other.

As a game designer, it is possible to get stuck in a rut of how a game “needs to be done” and forget the potential implementations that may be a better fit for the technology.

2.1.3 Starting with Story

The story can be the jumping-off point, the central vision from which all other aspects of the game are determined.

Frequently, a particular setting may inspire a game designer. Any good game designer who thinks up a story or a setting will have a tendency to think of it in therms of how it would translate into a game, how the player can interact with that story, and how the story may unfold in different ways depending on the player’s actions in the game-world.

Not all stories will translate very well into games, mainly if we consider today’s genres, and thinking of gameplay possibilities early can help you rule out settings that simply will not work out for today’s possible gameplay styles.

The designer MUST find the gameplay that will allow the player to experience the most important elements of whatever story she is trying to tell. Of course, the technology will have to match up the story as well, primarily in order to support the gameplay the designer decides is best suited to telling that story.

2.2 Working with Limitations

Experienced game designers already understand the limitations placed on the creation of games by technology, gameplay, and story. When they take part in brainstorming sessions, these game designers have a gut sense of how making certain choices about the game in question will limit its creation further down the road.

2.3 Embrace Your Limitations

In many ways, developing a game is all about understanding your limitations and then turning those limitations into advantages. It’s the designer’s job to establish what constraints the project has, find the perfect parts that fit within those limitations, and finally make all the pieces fit together in a compeling game.

2.3.1 Established Technology

Often a designer at a larger company is required to work with whatever technology that company has, and even if the designer is fortunate enough to be able to seek out a technology to license for a project, that designer will still be limited by the quality of the engines that are available for licensing and the amount of money she has to spend.

Working solo as both designer and programmer no a project, one might think the designer could make whatever she wants. It’s not always like that. Functioning as the sole programmer and designer on a project has many benefits, but it certainly limits what one will be able to accomplish.

Sometimes it is better to shelve an idea that is incompatible with your technology and come up with a design better suited to the tools you have. Once you have identified the limitations that the engine saddles you with, it’s best to embrace those limitations instead of fighting them. This is not to suggest that a designer should always design the simplest game that she can think of or that sophisticated, experimental designs should not be attempted.

Therefore, a designer should consider what the technology lends itself to and use that as the basis for the game she designs and the story she sets ouy to tell.

2.3.2 The Time Alloted

Though time, and consequently budget, are primarily the concern and responsibility of the project’s producer, the game designer needs to know how these factors will limit the project just as the technology, gameplay, or story may.

For example, if development is running six months late with no end in sight and as a result the publisher pulls the plug, it does not matter how brilliant your game design may have been in theory. No one will get to play your game because you failed to fully consider the logistics of implementing it.

2.4 If You Choose Not to Decide, You Still Have Made a Choice

Without a consistent and unified vision, no game will have a fighting chance. Though each member of the team may have a valid case for pursuing her idea, if the ideas do not work together, at some point the group will need to pick one and go with it.

In the end, you do not want your game to consist only of an excellent technology or a compelling story or a brilliant game design. If none of these components support each other and you lack unified vision, your game will be just as bad as if you were working with a hackneyed story, a thin game design, and an incomplete technology.

What Players Want? (Game Design: Theory & Practice )

Game Design: Theory and Practice (Book's Summary: Part 2)

Book’s Author: Richard Rouse III

Summarized by Samuel Coelho

1. What Players Want

Determining what players want out of a game is something that all designers must contemplate if they want to make great games.

Designers must have the ability to assess whether something is fun for themselves, combined with the ability to listen to the opinions of others.

We cannot look at the problem of “what players want” purely from a market-driven standpoint and declare, “I don’t understand it, but if they want it, I’m going to give it to them.” In order to make a great game, you must first find it fun yourself, and hopefully this can be used to build something that appeals to others as well. But in the end, the spark must come from within.

Often game designers are so bereft of an idea of what will be fun and what gamers want that they instead only include gameplay ideas that have been tried before, rehashing what was popular with game players last year.

Gamers generally don’t want to buy a game that is only a clone of another game; a “new” game that only offers old ideas and brings nothing original to the table. Nonetheless, successful games can be useful, not for cloning, but for analysis.

1.2 Why do Players Play?

1.2.1 Players Want a Challenge

The challenge is one of the primary motivating factors for single-player home games.

Games can entertain players over time, differently each time they play, while engaging their minds in an entirely different way than a book, movie, or other form of art.

Games force players to think actively, to try different solutions to problems, to understand a given mechanism.

1.2.2 Players Want to Socialize

Computer game designers need to remember that the origin of games is tied to a social experience, and that this communal component is central to their appeal.

The fact that players still try to chat with each other in high-velocity games like Halo and Doom is testament to they player’s desire to socialize.

As multi-player games have become more and more common, many game developers have been quick to point out their advantages in terms of competitive AI. Human opponents are much more unpredictable and challenging than any AI that could be reasonably created for games. This, they suggested is why people are drawn to multi-player games. Though this may be true, the biggest advantage of these multiplayer games is that they transform computer games into truly social experiences, which is one of the largest motivating factors for people to play games.

1.2.3 Players Want a Dynamic Solitary Experience

Sometimes friends are not available to play, or players are tired of their friends, or simply are tired of having to talk to other people all the time. Similar to the differences between going to a movie theater with an audience versus renting a video to watch alone at home, the antisocial nature of single-player games attracts a lot of people who had enough of the other members of the human race.

1.2.4 Players Want to Bragging Rights

If one looks at arcade games both old and new, the high-score table and the ability to enter one’s name into the game, even if only three letters, provides a tremendous incentive for people to play a game repeatedly. Players who may not have much to brag about in their ordinary lives, who may not be terribly physically coordinated at sports or bookish enough to do well in school, can go down to the arcade and point out to all their friends their initials in the Centipede game. Even without telling to anyone, players can feel tremendous satisfaction when they beat a particular game.

1.2.5 Players Want an Emotional Experience

The emotions that games are able to evoke in players are much stronger than what can be experienced in other media where the experience is less immersive and considerably less personally involving.

Unfortunately, many games emotional ranges are limited to excitement/tension during a conflict, despair at repeated failure at a given task, and then elation and a sense of accomplishment when the players finally succeed. Game designers would be wise to concentrate on expanding the emotional experience in games beyond excitement and accomplishment, into more unexplored and uncharted emotional territory.

1.2.6 Players Want to Explore

Exploration is not limited to spatial exploration. There is the exploration of different strategic choices, different types of resources and the exploration of personalities of the characters you meet.

1.2.7 Players Want to Fantasize

Computer games have the potential to be a fantastically immersive form of escapism providing a good medium for players to explore sides of their personality that they keep submerged in their daily lives.

1.2.8 Players Want to Interact

Games provide better than any other art form an interactive experience. No other art form allows audience to be the guiding force in the experience they are having. Games have fond their greatest successes when they have played up the interactive nature of the experience and provided our audience with something that they cannot get anywhere else.

1.3 What do Players Expect?

Players have certain gameplay expectations, and if these are not met, they will soon become frustrated and find another game to play. It’s the game designer’s job to make sure the game meets these expectations.

1.3.1 Players Expect a Consistent World

The consistency of the player’s actions must be maintained. Having no expectation of what will happen if a certain maneuver is attempted will only frustrate and confuse players.

Players also do not want a maneuver to work sometimes and fail other times, without a readily apparent reason for the different outcome. Also, if only expert players are able to identify why their action failed, many novices will become frustrated of they are defeated for no reason they can understand.

1.3.2 Players Expect to Understand the Game-World’s Bounds

When playing a game, players must be able to understand which actions are possible and which are outside of the scope of the game’s play space.

1.3.3 Players Expect Reasonable Solutions to Work

If the player finds himself with a given solution for a puzzle that logically, along with the gameplay provided, should work in the game and it doesn’t, he will feel cheated by the game. Therefore, there may be a lot of equally reasonable solutions, and unless the designer makes sure that those solutions work as well, players will discover and attempt these non-functionality solutions and will be irritate when they do not work.

1.3.3 Players Expect Direction

Players need to have some idea of what they are supposed to accomplish in the game and how they might achieve this specific goal. Not having direction is a bit too much like real life, and players already have a real life, also most of the players play games to fantasize.

If players do not know what their goal is, the goal might as well not exist. The classic example of the goal-less game is SimCity. SimCity is like a toy with which players can do whatever they want, without ever explicitly being told that they have failed or succeeded. In it the players will strive to make their idea of perfect city. Therefore, though SimCity does not explicitly have a goal, the very nature of the game and its grounding in a widely understood reality encourages players to come up with their own goals.

1.3.4 Players Expect to Accomplish a Task Incrementally

Once players understand what their goal in the game-world is, they like to know that they are on the right track toward accomplishing that goal. The best way to do this is to provide numerous sub-goals and sub-sub-goals along the way. Players are rewarded for accomplishing these sub-goals just as they are for the main goal.

Without providing feedback of some sort, like rewards, especially if the steps necessary to obtain a goal are particularly long and involved, players may well be on the right track and do not realize it.

1.3.4 Players Expect to Be Immersed

In order for players to become truly immersed, they must come to see themselves as their game-world surrogate.

Once players get into the game they often forget that they are playing a game, just as film audience may forget they’re in a theater or a book’s reader may become completely swept up in the lives of the story’s characters. Commonly known as the “suspension of disbelief,” this is the point when a piece of art can be its most affecting on its audience.

Things that may snap out the player from the gaming experience:

• Game crashing;

• Physics outside of the game’s context;

• A reasonable solution for a puzzle not woking;

• Bad correlation between GUI and game-world;

• Main character featuring an annoying behavior;

1.3.5 Players Expect Some Setbacks

A victory that is too easily achieved is a hollow victory.

It must be kept clear that when players fails, they should see what they should have done instead and they should instantly recognize why what they are attempting failed to work out.

It’s also a good idea to let players win a bit at the beginning of the game. This will suck players into the game, they will know that success is possible and enjoyable and will try extra hard to overcome what has bested them.

1.3.6 Players Expect Fair Chance

Players do not want to be presented with an obstacle that can only be surmounted through trial and error, where an error results in their character’s death or the end of their game. Players may be able to figure out the proper way to overcome the obstacle through trial and error, but there should be some way to figure out a successful path on their first try.

If players keep dying from each shot-in-the-dark attempt around an obstacle they will curse your game!!

1.3.7 Players Expect to Not Need to Repeat Themselves

Once players have accomplished a difficult goal in a game, they do not want to have to repeat their accomplishment.

Game player’s lack of desire to repeat themselves is why save-games were created. Also, if the game designers recognize that a specific obstacle is a difficult one to pass, they can make the game automatically save the player’s position.

It’s also important to note that automatic saves should not be used as a replacement for player-requested saves, but should instead work in conjunction with them.

1.3.8 Players Expect to Not Get Hopelessly Stuck

Under no circumstances should the players be left alive, stuck in a situation from which they cannot continue on with their game.

We also must consider the implementation of an AI that figures out when it has been hopelessly overpowered and surrender, just as players who are hopelessly far behind will do the same thing by quitting and starting a new game.

Introduction (Game Design: Theory & Practice)

Game Design: Theory & Practice (Book's Summary: Part 1)

Book’s Author: Richard Rouse III

Summarized by Samuel Coelho

0. Introduction

The book Game Design Theory and Practice, from Richard Rouse III, deals with the game development process from the viewpoint of the game designer.

0.1 What is Gameplay?

The gameplay is the component of computer games that is found in no other art form: interactivity. A game’s gameplay is the degree and nature of the interactivity that the game includes, i.e., how players are able to interact with the game-world and how that game-world reacts to the choices players make.

Accordingly to the book’s author, the gameplay concept does not include how the game-world is represented graphically or what game engine is used to render that world. Nor does it include the setting or story line of that game-world.

0.2 What is Game Design?

The game design determines the form of gameplay. The game design determines what choices players will be able to make in the game-world and what ramifications those choices will have on the rest of the game. The game design might determine what win or loss criteria the game may include, how the user will be able to control the game, and what information the game will communicate to him, and it establishes how hard the game will be. In short, the game design determines every detail of how the gameplay will function.

0.3 Who is the Game Designer?

The game designer is the person who designs the game, who thereby establishes the shape and nature of the gameplay. Many game designers perform a wide variety of tasks on a project, but their central concern should always be the game design and the gameplay.

Knowing how to program can be a great asset to game design. However, it is not necessary component of designing a game; many fine designers do not know how to program at all.

Note: Projects are often led not by the people with the most seniority or who have the right title on their business card; projects are led by the people who “show up” to the task, who care about their projects and are committed to them, and who are willing to put in the time and effort to make the game the best it can be.

First Post!

Hi, my name is Samuel Coelho, I will try to post a good variety of materials related to game design in this blog, ranging from summaries to design documents.

That's it for the first post! :)