Not too long ago, I talked about padding in games, and how it’s not always beneficial to stretch out experiences for players just so that you can say that your game has “100 hours of content”. This week, I’ll examine one of the core reasons why; pacing. Pacing is crucial to any gaming experience, tabletop or digital, and it’s really one of the things that is heavily dependent on the designer of a game’s careful and deliberate design. Continue reading “Game Design: Consistent Pacing”
Category: Game Design
Game Design: Eliminating Padding
One of the goals of a game designer is to create an engaging, challenging, and immersive experience that leaves the player filled with awe, wonder, and excitement. However, often that’s not what our games actually do; genres have fallen out of favor over this and it’s the sort of issue that becomes more and more relevant as our games are being targeted at an increasingly mainstream audience that doesn’t want to sit through fifteen hours of gathering materials for a MMORPG by killing the same monster ten thousand times. Continue reading “Game Design: Eliminating Padding”
Game Design: Creating Immersive Antagonists
AI. NPC’s. Enemies. The majority of games do not put players into a truly solitary environment, rather favoring interaction between the player’s character and characters, and this usually involves interpersonal conflict. It’s important for designers to figure out ways to engage the player when working against these foes, because otherwise a main source of conflict would be moot. The creation of a solid antagonist really requires three main considerations; narrative, mechanics, and presentation. Continue reading “Game Design: Creating Immersive Antagonists”
Game Design: Challenging Multiple Players
One of the core parts of being a game designer is presenting challenges to players within the environment of a game; few games are designed without any challenging elements, because they are what adds a lot of the feeling of interactivity to games, allowing players the chance to change the story in which their character will fail into one in which they succeed. However, special concerns must be made in order to facilitate a challenging experience in multiplayer games. Continue reading “Game Design: Challenging Multiple Players”
Game Design: Creating Discoverable Experiences
Nonlinear and emergent gameplay is a goal that generally benefits game design, should the developers have the necessary resources. Making an open, vivacious world presents players with a lot of options and opportunities to find ways to enjoy the game, as well as letting them experience the joy of discovery without needing constant guidance. Continue reading “Game Design: Creating Discoverable Experiences”
Game Design: Utilizing Randomness
One of the largest issues I’ve seen with games is when they come down to a formula. Sometimes, this is important, like in competitive play, but other times this is actually detrimental to the experience; a single-player game, for instance, in which every foe is exactly the same whenever the player walks a “dangerous” road between two major areas. This is the sort of thing that can be changed easily to make a more engaging experience through adding randomness. Continue reading “Game Design: Utilizing Randomness”
Game Design: Avoiding Frustration
One of the biggest issues that I see with games’ inherent designs is that many of them are unintentionally annoying, and it really ruins the value of the game. Sometimes these games are trying for a Dark Souls type approach and just fail to pull off the work to make the consequences part of engaging gameplay, but sometimes there’s just poor design to blame. Continue reading “Game Design: Avoiding Frustration”
Game Design: 7 Core Tenets (Market)
I saved this part of game design for last, because the truth is that choosing a market is not something that every game must do; and some games are made entirely without a care to marketability or sales. However, there are some things that must be considered when making a game on the designer’s side in order to ensure that the game is constructed in such a way that it is capable of being sold. Continue reading “Game Design: 7 Core Tenets (Market)”
Game Design: 7 Core Tenets (Player Role)
When designing a game, it is important to come up with the player’s control and agency; there are three main factors to this: flexibility, characterization, and impact. By building upon the role of the player, a clever designer can cater to players by providing experiences that are designed to appeal to them in ways that certain roles will not; careful consideration can turn the player into a conqueror or epic hero, while just as many games fail to provide any real satisfaction for players. Continue reading “Game Design: 7 Core Tenets (Player Role)”
Game Design: 7 Core Tenets (Player Inaccessible Mechanics)
Player inaccessible mechanics are a major part of any game; the things that players have no control over regardless of what they do are defining elements of only a few titles, but there are a few things that must be considered whenever a game is being made, because although these things may seem to be inherent to the game, creating a game in which emergent gameplay is extended by the use of background activities will result in a much more immersive experience. Continue reading “Game Design: 7 Core Tenets (Player Inaccessible Mechanics)”