VERBS AND OBJECTS - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 30

a position where their left and right feet are opposite each other. It's important here that DDR 's
giant d-pad is made up of binary buttons rather than a single piece of molded plastic (which is
designed for a single thumb, not two feet).
This may seem obvious—it seems impractical that someone would build a physical input
device that size out of a single piece of plastic—but the hidden pitfall here is that, used to the
properties of a single type of input, you fail to recognize and design for the less obvious proper-
ties of another mode of input—like the developers who tried to re-create Nintendo pads on
touchscreens.
Character Development
In the Robot Mines of Venus, Janet Jumpjet stalks the catacombs, her Megablaster 3000 held
in front of her, trained at the unseen hordes of deranged robots no doubt lurking somewhere
in the darkness ahead of her. Then she sees it—the glint of metal up ahead, the unmistakable
gleam of a robot! She stops dead in her tracks, finger tensing on the trigger. But the metal form
doesn't move. She takes a tentative step forward and sees that it's not a robot—it's another
robot cage! Has she found another prisoner? Peering through the viewscreen in the cage, Janet
sees the face not of a human prisoner, but a robot in storage! This is a cage Janet wisely decided
to leave unopened.
Suddenly a robot, taking advantage of Janet's momentary distraction, lunges out of the
darkness. Taken by surprise, she fires wildly—blasting open the cage and freeing its robot
inhabitant, who immediately blinks to life and begins clambering toward Janet, alongside its
compatriot. Cursing, Janet blasts the robots to smithereens. She wonders if she'll be seeing
more of these robot containers and reminds herself that she'll have to be way more careful with
her shots.
Not long after, Janet emerges into a room patrolled by two robots. Janet raises her Megablaster,
but the hairs on the back of her neck are trying to tell her something. Taking a breath, she
looks around. The walls of the room are covered in caged robots, waiting to be released (see
F i g u r e 2 . 1 2 ) .
She'd better aim carefully, all right.
Janet is the main character of the narrative that unfolds in this game, but don't forget: the main
character of the game itself is still the verb “shoot”—a verb the player has to understand how to
use wisely. If verbs are the main characters of our game stories, we develop them as we would
characters in any other form: we challenge them, we give them new responsibilities or burdens,
we let them show new sides of themselves, we let them grow—or force them to.