Maximum Cooldown Time: 6-12 seconds Purple hippos. Green puppies. Red monkeys. Short term memory is an interesting thing. Yellow birds. Blue horses. It can only hold around seven items (give or take a few, depending on your level of concentration.) Which means for some of you “Orange lizards” is going to drive the first animal … Continue reading
The final fundamental question that needs to be answered when designing enemies for an action game is: 3. How will the enemy overreact and expose their fatal weakness? Every enemy needs a flaw, a chink in their armor that can be exploited by the player. A massive enemy with an equally massive health bar that virtually ignores … Continue reading
The second fundamental question crucial to designing enemies for an action game is: 2. How will this enemy counter the player’s first-tier tactics? Action games give the player a hammer. It looks like a broadsword or an assault rifle, but it’s still a hammer. And when you have a hammer, every enemy looks like a … Continue reading
There are three fundamental questions at the heart of designing enemies for an action game. The first is: 1. How will this enemy force the player to react? Any enemy can be tuned to be deadly. In fact, overly lethal enemies are often a symptom of a poorly balanced game; nobody enjoys being flattened by … Continue reading
Statistical Design I suggested that a good way of improving one’s design sense is by staring at Rorschach Tests, and here is a practical example of the importance of practicing pattern-avoidance. This image is a heatmap showing where people most often die on Assembly, a Halo multiplayer map. These heatmaps were first used by the Halo design team … Continue reading
If you want to learn something, read about it. If you want to understand something, write about it. If you want to master something, teach it. – Yogi Bhajan Successful designers are those that have the discipline to edit their work. Generating gameplay ideas is exciting and easy; discerning those with potential and removing the … Continue reading
Role The features, mechanics, situation and purpose which define an element’s function in a game According to Aristotle, we can claim to have knowledge of something only when we have understood its causes. These causes come in four types: the material cause – the matter of which the thing is made, the formal cause – … Continue reading
Verisimilitude The quality of seeming to be true, of resembling reality Why is Wii Bowling like a Hemingway novel? (Beside the fact that they are each made better by adding alcohol.) They both benefit from the effects of verisimilitude. Authentic characters and believable dialog enhance the reader’s engagement in a story; they do not call … Continue reading
Most of the time involved in playing any game is spent waiting. In a turn based board game each player waits for the others in sequence. Even in a timed chess game the actual portion of the game spent moving a piece from one square to another is much less than the time spent waiting for … Continue reading
Push on the wall. This is not a metaphorical encouragement to seek innovative solutions. Literally, place your hands against a wall and give it a shove. Now, assuming that you are not working in a cubicle, you have just experienced what physicists call a normal force. The wall pushed back against your hands with the … Continue reading
This is one of my favorite screenshots of all time: In one frame, this screenshot tells an epic tragedy worthy of Sophocles himself. Red Sniper, furious at Blue Man for stealing the attentions of his bride, Grenadina, confronts him in an alley behind the cathedral. After a heated exchange, the jilted lover fires a single shot … Continue reading
Game Mechanic A single constraint on the possible gameplay actions that determine a part of the player’s experience. According to our working definition of gameplay, the purpose of a game mechanic is to constrain a game’s interactivity so that it guides the player toward a fun experience. Tuning these contraints is one of the most important game design processes. However, in … Continue reading
Affordance (Also: Usability, Discoverability, Intuitiveness) The quality of an object or environment that allows a Player to intuitively discern and perform the gameplay action associated with that object or environment. In his most profound philosophical work Being and Time, Martin Heidegger makes a distinction between two types of attitudes that we can have toward an object. First, an object can … Continue reading
