Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
first time she's encountered this rule, and as creators, we want her to grasp the rule with as little
prodding as possible. If we need a commanding Sargent Tutorial to radio Janet and instruct
her that shooting hostages tags them for teleportation, we've failed to communicate the rule.
Resist Sargent Tutorial.
Shooting a hostage with a deadly weapon to rescue her introduces a dissonance between the
player's expectations and the rules of the game that will haunt the rest of her experience and
make her doubt her understanding of the game.
What if, instead of shooting the hostage to rescue her, the hostage is in a cage—a robot cage,
made of and obviously resembling the same metal as the robots Janet's been blasting. When
the player shoots the hostage now, she's blowing open the cage and freeing the hostage. Freed
from the robot cage's teleport dampening field, the hostage can now beam to safety. Thank
you, Janet! My hero!
This is a lot easier to buy than having to shoot a hostage with a deadly weapon. If the player
sees something she can identity visually as a hostage trapped in a cage, she can put two and
two together—the other “two” being her knowledge that her Megablaster destroys robot-
looking things—and figure out that maybe she should shoot the cage. When she does, the
game reacts by communicating that she's freed the hostage. Good job!
The easier we make the rules of our game to understand, the more easily and effectively the
player can internalize those rules and begin anticipating them.
I'm not referring to “objects” in the simple sense—nouns, detritus, inanimate objects. I mean
objects for our verbs: the objects that complete their sentences. “Jane digs through a block
of green clay.” “Jane tries to dig through a metal block but is repelled.” We will draw from our
palette of objects to set up choices for our player and to tell a story.
The right selection of objects goes a long way. The downward path that Jane navigates in
To mb ed
is made up of those four objects: clay blocks in three different colors that connect to
blocks of the same color, and metal blocks. As with verbs, we get a lot of utility over choosing
the right ones and should try to avoid introducing ones that will be underdeveloped because
their uses overlap too much with that of other objects.
One color of clay blocks would be too little. I could use them as pacing, but not to set up inter-
esting choices about where to dig. Two would let me set up choices, but not ones that link into
each other very well. Because there are only two colors, two diverging paths can't touch. Four
colors—at least in the limited space that I've given the game, for the sake of it being fast—
don't give me very many options that I can't achieve with the three colors I already have. See
Figure 2.6 for an example.
