Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
objects they act on. Here she can experiment, observe, and make connections. But the solu-
tions nevertheless have the potential to be eurekas—real moments of breakthrough develop-
ment for a verb, like an unexpected “plot twist” where the player has found out something
exciting and new about the potential of our main character.
You don't have to avoid moments where solutions come from unexpected directions—but you
shouldn't build a game out of them. The player's verbs are the means by which she comes to
understand the rules of the game—give her too many verbs that don't interact with each other,
and you give her a weak understanding of the rules of the game.
Concurrently with writing this topic, I am working on a game with Loren Schmidt. In this game,
the player guides a succession of expendable slave miners harvesting precious crystals from
the caverns of strange planets for unseen alien overlords. We're only now beginning to design
levels—the caverns that the player will explore. Most of the time we've spent on the game thus
far has gone toward designing our verbs and choosing objects that reinforce those verbs and
each other.
The player digs up the crystals by using radium bombs. She starts every cavern with a limited
stock of them, and more can usually be gathered from within the cavern. Pressing the spacebar
causes the miner to drop a bomb. After pulsing for a few moments, the bomb goes off, explod-
ing in a small circle that eats through adjacent ground and kills any creature within the radius of
the explosion—including the miner. So there's already a tension between planting bombs and
giving oneself enough space to avoid them, one that becomes exacerbated by the presence of
hostile creatures and other threats.
The player can also dig with her hands. When the player steers the miner into a wall, she starts
to slowly carve a path for herself through it. This is slow and inefficient but serves a couple pur-
poses. First, because the walls the player's blowing up are made of tiny grains, and the player
plants her bombs wherever she chooses, it's possible to leave thin shells and obstacles between
otherwise-open spaces. These really aren't worth eating up an extra stock of the player's
bombs, so the player can “clear out” that debris simply by digging through it by hand.
The other purpose is tactical bomb conservation. In some circumstances, with few bombs
remaining, she might be willing to trade time for the ability to hang on to one of her precious
bombs. The player has a limited amount of oxygen, represented by a meter at the top of the
screen, that slowly drains, so trading time for bombs can be a critical choice. There are also
situations in which the player runs out of bombs and is forced to rely on digging. If digging by
hand wasn't an option, the player might be left with a half-completed level she has no means to
finish, which is a situation we want to avoid. Figure 2.14 illustrates bombing versus digging.
