Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The shape of a scene, accordingly, might look a little like a “floor plan” or a map of the choices
available to the player. In the game
Mr. Do!
(1982), the player digs tunnels to get to patches of
buried cherries. Monsters then escape into the tunnels and navigate them to catch the player.
The tunnels become areas the player must defend, staging areas for booby traps. This pursuit is
resolved either by the player collecting all the cherries or by the monsters catching the player
( s e e F i g u r e 3 . 1 2 ) .
Figure 3.12
Mr. Do!
is played in a back-and-forth tunnel pattern.
Each of these moments—digging to the cherries and eluding the monsters—has a number of
small choices embedded into them that branch into many more choices. Do I dig up? Down?
Left or right? Do I build my tunnel in a back-and-forth pattern to ensure that pursuers have to
take the slowest path possible to reach me? When they chase me, will I dig under one of the
heavy apples in the scene, hoping it will crush them when it drops? When do I drop the apple?
Will I wait under it until the perfect moment? Will I dig a vertical tunnel
long and straight to
maximize the chances of a bunch of monsters being in it when I drop the crushing apple on all
of them?
Mapping out the networks of possible player choices in a scene like this would be an impos-
sible task, a combinatorial explosion. But as creators, we can think of the shape of the scene and
perceive the relationships between different parts of that shape. We know that the player will
dig tunnels and that the monsters will enter those tunnels. Having that shape in mind, we can
place objects in such a way as to encourage particular interactions.
Figure
You can see that every patch
of cherries has one or two apples somewhere in relation to it. Apples fall downward if there's
nothing under them, crushing monsters and potentially the protagonist, Mr. Do. The lower-left
patch is the safest for a starting player to pursue, as Mr. Do starts at the bottom center of the
screen. There's space between that patch and the apple above so that the player has room to
construct a trap for pursuing monsters after she collects the cherries. In the patch immediately
above
3.13
shows the starting position for the first scene of
Mr. Do!
that one, the apple is directly over the cherries. The player has to take its presence into
account
while
she collects those cherries. In designing the rules of
Mr. Do!
, its creators made it
