Empowerment: Sliding Ninjas - The Game Maker's Companion: Game Development - page 71

C H A P T E R 4
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Empowerment: Sliding Ninjas
Games like Zool and Sonic are at their most enjoyable when they empower the player with a feeling
of control over a fluid gameplay experience. In other words, the player is able to execute very cool
moves without too much effort. The player feels in control, but somehow their normal abilities
seem to be enhanced beyond what they should realistically be able to achieve. Sonic routinely flies
about the landscape at incredible speeds, grabbing rings mid-flight and narrowly avoiding perilous-
looking hazards—and that makes the player feel powerful. Naturally, some of this is just good level
design, but the levels wouldn't work if Sonic didn't have a beautifully fluid movement mechanic in
the first place.
In contrast, our own movement mechanic is currently very unresponsive and actually makes
Zool awkward and frustrating to control. In this chapter, we add Zool's full range of movement
abilities and develop a control system that actively assists the player to move fluidly around the
landscape in order to boost their feeling of empowerment.
Balance of Power
In practice, there is a balance to be struck between making the player feel powerful on the one
hand, while remaining in control on the other. We can illustrate this by looking at extreme
examples. Foddy Athletics (see Figure 4-1) is a popular online Flash demo that gives the player
separate control over a sprinter's calves and thighs in order to try and make him run along a
track. Basically, you are asked to learn how to walk all over again in a new medium! There is an
enormous amount of control in this concept, but it doesn't make you feel powerful . Running is
not typically considered to be something that is hard to do, but this game makes it feel that way.
It is more of a “running simulation” than a game.
Dragon's Lair was released in 1983 with visuals to rival any modern video game (see Figure 4-2). The
stunning graphics were possible because the game was basically an interactive movie running on a
forerunner to the DVD. The hero, Dirk, could do seemingly anything that a cartoon knight might do
in a Disney animation, and so the feeling of power was potentially huge—especially compared to
the pixel-based games of the day. As a result it became an enormously popular and financially
successful format. However, the control the player had over Dirk's powerful actions were generally
limited to a single button press in each scene, which often stopped the player from feeling
empowered by the experience.
These games illustrate that players only feel empowered by a game when there is both power
and control . However, sometimes one comes at the expense of the other; at their best, modern
Prince of Persia titles are enormously empowering, allowing the player to achieve incredible
acrobatic moves with no effort at all. The game provides a lot of help to make sure your moves
work out for you, and the results are often breathtaking. Yet, sometimes this can also make the
player feel as if they are not actually in control at all, again dispelling the feeling of empowerment
and reducing the challenge offered by the game.