Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
throughout the entirety of gameplay. Death is a learning experience,
not because we wait until players have died to give them hints, but
because the methods of their demise are indicators of bad performance.
When players begin the game in
Escape from Skull Island
, they are
presented with a short in-game scene of the chosen party members
opening the cryptic chest of existential woe at the center of the island
where the treasure was rumored to have been stored. Instead, they
are greeted by the holographic visage of
Dr. Horrordoom
, telling them
that they are prey in his grand scheme, and he has unleashed a horde
of monsters, traps, and other deadly things to do them in. His inten-
tion, of course, is to use their lifeless, mangled bodies in a bizarre
marionette show to entertain his mutant pet lemur,
Hans
. In order
to prevent this Lovecraftian nightmare, the heroes must escape, and
they must do so by using the WASD keys to navigate—gaining levels,
getting more powerful, equipping better items, and getting off the
island in one piece. Unfortunately for them, an explosion goes off at
the very moment the recording ends, with
Dr. Horrordoom
cackling
maniacally in the background.
The first thing players are greeted with after the smoke settles is
the shouting of one of their party members. The shouting uses three-
dimensional sound
to indicate the direction from which the sound is
emanating. Consider the following dialog:
Hey! (Player's chosen character's name)! I'm over here! *hack… cough*…
Some of the rubble fell on top of me and I can't move… can you walk?
If you thought that this is where we are going to put a pop-up that
says “OMG PRESS WASD TO MOVE,” you thought wrong. We
already have almost all of our cognitive resources for visual stuff used
up; look at the screenshot in Figure 7.5.
Let's do some math. There is a compass in the top right corner that
orients the player in 3D space; we will call this one unit of cognitive
resource. On top of that is the layout of the dungeon itself, demar-
cated with things like rubble, doors, spatial dimensions, and so on.
For the sake of brevity, we will call those two additional units of cog-
nitive load. The player is unharmed, so his or her health bar is not yet
visible. There is an enemy on screen; we will call that one more. There
is also an NPC ally, which is one more. Assuming the player notices
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