Tag: Randomness

Game Design: Working With Randomness, Balance, and Narrative

One of the greatest things that I hear people complaining about in games is the random element of them. And, truth be told, many games with random elements handle them wrong; the random number generator may be faulty or the randomness only serves to force repetition. However, randomness is also a great tool in a game designer’s toolkit; it turns a simple challenge of execution into a risk and reward analysis, and can add great amounts of depth and replayability to games.

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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”