Game Development Reference
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Haymaker Squat Punch (Ruby Level)
ABC
Figure 9 . Here's how to do the Haymaker Squat Punch move—the game doesn't
exist, but I'm sad to say it certainly could.
for awhile, but it will probably melt away soon as the player gains enough
skill to at least attempt the optimal choice every time.
Many games that have a large element of execution are really con-
tests. You can “choose� all you want in bowling, but if your opponent is
capable of executing strikes 100% of the time, he or she is going to win.
That is the clear optimal strategy in bowling. Execution has a habit of
taking games over and stepping them closer to contests. If you're design-
ing a game with an execution element, you have to be extremely careful
with it and make sure that the optimal decision is always at least a little
bit ambiguous.
Certain genres (I'm looking at you, fighting games!) have a very bad
habit of incorporating crazy execution (and memorization) require-
ments into their gameplay. The thinking goes along the lines of, if a
move is otherwise too powerful, balance it out by making it harder to
input (see Figure 9) . The problem with this thinking is that no mat-
ter how crazy the input is, eventually players will master it (see 1080
Snowboarding or Killer Instinct for incredible examples of this) and
your game will be thrown out of balance. Further, you're just making it
harder for new players to learn it.
Randomness
Computers can't produce truly random numbers, and dice and cards
cannot produce truly random results. However, their results are not pre-
dictable by humans, and so for us they're effectively random—and that's
good enough.
hroughout this topic I point out that a single-player game must
have randomness in order to remain a game. Games without any ran-
domness quickly break down and become memorization puzzles ( Cas-
tlevania , Super Mario Brothers ) or contests ( Guitar Hero , Dance Dance
Revolution ) . Without another human mind in play to try to throw you
of, some kind of random information is required to preserve ambiguity.
Someone reading this topic may get the idea that I'm very pro ran-
domness in general, but this is not the case. In multiplayer games, I ac-
tually think randomness tends to be easily overused. At one end of the
 
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