Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
I'd say that by the time a good quality game is finished, there isn't a single
design aspect of the final game that the designer wasn't wrong about at
some point in development.
What this means is you're probably going to make those you're work-
ing with mad. Programmers will spend hours working on some special
spell or world-generation algorithm, only for you to tell them a week
later that these things have been cut. Or an artist will spend hours me-
ticulously placing pixels in a character sprite for a character that has to
be eliminated due to a balance issue.
With good project planning that includes a long, thorough design
process up front and a lot of prototyping you can minimize this type
of thing—and you absolutely should—but you will never eliminate the
problem. Tell your team you're sorry in advance.
Continuous and Discrete Space
Every game designer needs to understand the distinction between a con-
tinuous and a discrete possibility space. A strong understanding of these
concepts will allow you to make better judgments about your own game
designs, and also are important for understanding some of the terminol-
ogy in the rest of the topic.
It's easiest to speak first about discrete spaces in games, because they
are the more abstract (and perhaps more artificial) of the two types of
space. Discrete space is a space in a game (usually a tiled or divided area)
wherein the entirety of the space means the same thing to the game ( Fig-
ure 8 , left). The basket in basketball is an example of a discrete space:
putting the ball through that ring—a discrete space—awards that team
two points. It doesn't matter if the ball hits the back of the ring, the front
of the ring, or directly in the center (making that nice whoosh sound!):
for the purpose of getting points, all that matters is that the ball pass-
es somewhere through that ring. Chess and most other abstract board
games are composed entirely of discrete spaces; indeed, a grid is pre-
cisely the dividing up of a playing field into discrete spaces.
On the other hand, continuous space is found on a soccer field or
in a real-time digital game such as Quake ( Figure 8 , right). When you
fire your rocket launcher at opponents in Quake it's wise to fire at their
feet, so that even if you miss, your opponents will take splash damage
(damage from the explosion of the rocket). In this case each tiny pixel (or
inch, or whatever in-engine unit of distance is used in Quake ) matters.
If your rocket explodes just one inch from an opponent, it will deliver
more damage than if the rocket explodes two or three inches away (and
after all, damage is the object of the game, at least in a head-to-head
deathmatch situation).
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