Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
n
You want to
introduce subtle, indirect strategic interaction by allowing players to
influence the cycle's period or amplitude.
Combining Design Patterns
Games rarely implement just one design pattern. Most of the time, you'll find that a
game combines a few of these patterns in a clever construction. For example,
Tetris
combines escalating complexity (the game gets more difficult as the tetrominoes
build up and more and more holes—unfilled spaces—appear at the bottom) and
escalating challenge (the tetrominoes start falling more quickly as the player clears
more lines). As you can tell from their descriptions, many patterns in the library
complement each other, but you'll find that even more unlikely combinations of
patterns can have some interesting consequences.
Certain patterns combine so well that they drive entire game genres. For example,
the core of most real-time strategy games is formed by a combination of a dynamic
engine with attrition. The players build up their base with a dynamic engine for
production to fuel a war of attrition. Larger real-time strategy games complement
this combination with an arms race pattern or (less commonly) an engine-building
pattern to provide more strategic options and create longer gameplay. Most role-play-
ing games combine playing-style-reinforcement (character building) with escalating
challenge (harder challenges as the player progresses).
The descriptions of the patterns in Appendix B include many suggestions on how
patterns might be combined, but we encourage you to explore and experiment with
different combinations yourself.
elaboration and Nesting Patterns
Reading through the pattern descriptions in this chapter and in Appendix B, you
might have noticed that some of the patterns seem similar. For example, a dynamic
engine allows the player to make changes to the production rate of a resource, while
the engine building pattern does something very similar, except that it doesn't
