Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Back on Venus, Janet is ready for adventure, Megablaster in hand. Although she's a fictional
character in a story, the world she lives in is a simulation. In the computer that's running the
simulation, Jane exists as a bunch of numbers: her horizontal and vertical position on the
screen, which direction she's facing, and the speed at which she's moving. The laser bolts she
fires from her gun are just signals: they have a speed and a direction. When the computer
detects that one of these signals is overlapping an appropriate recipient—a robot, another x
and y position with a direction and a speed—the simulation resolves the collision by removing
both objects. In the abstraction of the rules, the math of the game, this is all we see.
We explain these rules to the player by giving them a context that she's familiar with, one that
helps her understand them. The context of a game is composed of many pieces: the images
that represent Janet and her Megablaster, the words that appear to describe these things, the
way the images animate, the sound effects that accompany play, and even the timing that
brings them all together. We're used to thinking of these elements as parts of the narrative of a
game—the story of Janet Jumpjet rescuing hostages in the mines of Venus—and they do arise
from that story and help tell it. But in a game, contextual elements do something more: they
illustrate and help make sense of what's happening in the
other
story, where our rules are the
main characters.
Janet has a gun, so she can fire laser bolts. This is a robot; laser bolts explode it into pieces.
These are metaphors that serve to help the player grasp the rules, and we communicate them
to her with images, sound, animation, and feedback. If we tell the player the Megablaster
needs to cool down after discharging a mega-hot laser, we're selling her a justification for the
half-second reload time. If the player can see her Megablaster heat up white for a half-second
before fading to normal, we've made a visual metaphor to reinforce the rule.
The more cohesive a game's context is—the more things behave according to the metaphors
we've assigned them—the more easily the player can build expectations and anticipate and
understand the rules of the game.
In the sub-Venus darkness, Janet is stepping through the blasted remains of robots, keeping
her eyes peeled for human hostages. We, the game's creators, have decided that to avoid intro-
ducing a new, underdeveloped verb, we want the player to rescue hostages using her “shoot”
verb—as an extension of a verb she's already familiar with.
When Janet has a hostage in her sights, staring down the barrel of her Megablaster at a har-
rowed human captive, will she be able to pull the trigger? Is the player likely to shoot someone
she's been tasked with rescuing, now that she's observed how shooting robots wrecks them?
Most likely, she'll hesitate, confused.
Maybe once she's done it once, and she understands that shooting a hostage teleports the
hostage to safety instead of splattering her on the cave walls, she'll be able to shoot hostages.
But that initial doubt is a serious hurdle to the player's process of learning the game. This is the
