Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
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Tutorials.
To build a good tutorial, the game must be in its later stage of devel-
opment. After all, nobody wants to waste time and resources to build a tutorial for
game mechanics that still might change. When testing a tutorial, it is important
your test players have not seen your game before. In many ways, developing a game
is like a long and detailed tutorial: Developers spend many hours tweaking mechan-
ics, and during this time, they play a lot. It is easy to forget how skilled you have
become at your own game. Therefore, you cannot trust your own judgment of the
game's initial difficulty and learning curve. You really need new players for that, and
while they play, do not interfere with their learning process. The most important
question for a tutorial prototype is this: Do my players understand the game and
how it should be played?
reFerence Games: Free prototypes
sometimes the most efficient way to prototype your game is to look at existing games
and use them as a model for your project. This way, you can take advantage of a lot of
work done by others. This is especially true of user interface design, controls, and basic
physics, in which players want consistency from game to game. There's no point in
changing the traditional Wasd control scheme for first-person Pc games to esdF instead,
just for the sake of innovation.
Obviously, you should not steal designs, but there is no harm in learning from others or
avoiding mistakes they made. When picking reference games for your project, pay atten-
tion to the project scope. if you have only a couple of months to develop your game, don't
pick a reference game that was created by a large professional team over a period of
years. Try to choose reference games that are similar in size and quality to the game you
plan to make, unless you are using the reference only to study a particular detail in the
game interface or mechanics.
Game mechanics are the precisely specified rules of a game, including not only
the entities and processes at the heart of the game but also the data necessary to
execute those processes. Mechanics may be categorized as continuous or discrete.
Continuous mechanics are usually implemented in real time, with many floating-
point calculations every second, and are most often used to implement physics in a
game. Discrete mechanics may or may not operate in real time, and they use integer
values to implement a game's internal economy. It is imperative to begin designing
game mechanics early, so you can create prototypes to playtest.
