Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
progress in terms of a number of points earned by performing particular actions.
Again, most of these games could be finished without scoring all the points, and
players would replay them with a goal of completing the game with all possible points.
In games in which progress comes through performing tasks, you must offer players
enough variety to keep them engaged; you can't simply string together a sequence
of identical tasks. You must also pace them correctly and create a suitable difficulty
curve to keep the player both interested and challenged.
the aesthetics oF shiFtinG perspectiVes
most people find sudden shifts in views or perspectives a pleasant and aesthetic experi-
ence. You might recognize the feeling from hiking through mountains. as you make your
way up through a forested hillside, your view is quite limited. Trees prevent you from
seeing far, and you are probably focused on a rocky trail. When you get closer to the
top, the landscape suddenly opens up. Trees are replaced by open meadows, and all of
a sudden you can see for miles around. For many, this sudden shift is one of the rewards
for going hiking in the first place. Well-paced changes in gameplay and environment can
have a similar result in games. it is one of the reasons it is always a good idea to have
different styles of landscapes or backgrounds in different sections of your game.
PrOGress as disTance TO TarGeT
In games of emergence, progress is more difficult to measure in terms of numbers of
completed tasks, because the tasks in such games are seldom discrete subgoals on
the way to the main goal. Yet, because these games often have a victory condition
that is stated in numeric terms, we can measure completion on that basis rather
than in terms of tasks. For example, in
Caesar III
(see the discussion in Chapter 9,
“Building Economies”), the goal of a certain level might be to build a city's popula-
tion up to a certain size. No specific sequence of actions leads to that target, but we
can still tell players how close they are to the goal. However, in these cases, the com-
pletion percentage doesn't always guarantee that the player will achieve the victory
condition in a fixed amount of time. A player might have built a city that hosts 90%
of the target population, but if she also ran out of building space or has no access to
the food supplies needed to grow the city any further, she might still be a long way
from obtaining the remaining 10%.
A crucial difference between this type of progress toward goals through emergent
gameplay and more classical progress through completing tasks is that the player
can experience setbacks. In the
Caesar III
example, players might lose citizens and
buildings to invading barbarians, thus increasing the distance between their current
achievements and the target. By contrast, once a task is finished in an adventure
game, it can never be undone; the player never loses the benefit of achievements
already obtained.
