Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
develop Janet's “aim” and “shoot” verbs. The cage room forces the player to shoot more
accurately; the tunnel gives her a better understanding of the Megablaster's rate of fire: a half-
second, remember? She chooses when to let out the robot at one end of the tunnel; she has to
time it so she won't be overwhelmed by enemies from both sides.
These sorts of arrangements are what we call “level design,” and we talk more about that in
Chapter 3, “Scenes.” It's important to develop the skill of recognizing objects that will support
a verb rather than merely add clutter to a game. It's also good to choose ones that have a lot of
utility—ones that can be developed themselves, rather than jumping on the stage with a shout
and then standing there awkwardly, having nothing more to say.
We've been discussing an approach to elegant design through a careful cultivation of verbs,
objects, and rules: the idea being that rules that are too specific or narrow to add much to the
game will nonetheless occupy a portion of the player's headspace and thus dilute her focus and
understanding of the game. We've been discussing the value of being concise.
There are some traditions of games, though, that emphasize having as vast a population of
verbs as possible. These kinds of games have their root in text adventure games—games where
the player engages with the rules of the game by typing in commands at a text prompt. These
games are in turn inspired by role-playing games between human players, where a player in
a “Game Master” role narrates an adventure for the other players and responds to the choices
they make.
Most digital adventure games don't have a human overseer—the computer responds to the
player's input based on a list of permissible verbs defined earlier by the human creator. In
practice, this means that a vocabulary of frequently available verbs develop—“north,” “south,”
“get,” “examine.” The challenge to the player comes in recognizing those moments in which an
unusual verb is called for, and figuring out which of those verbs is appropriate.
Many graphical adventure games, inspired by those text adventures, did away with the text
prompt but still challenge the player by hiding the solution to any given obstacle in a forest of
possible verbs. 1990's
Secret of Monkey Island
, for example, gives the player 12 verbs at outset—
“open,” “close,” “push”—and then gives her steadily more as the game goes on. (See Figure
2.13 for an example.) The protagonist accumulates objects—a mug, a banana, an inkwell—that
unlock even more verbs. You can “drink” from the mug, “eat” the banana, “use” the inkwell,
adding to the list of options available to the player. This doesn't really make the puzzles more
challenging as brain-teasers or riddles—it just makes the solution more tedious to find as the
player sifts through all the possible options and combinations, trying to intuit which of them
might be correct.
