Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
creativity tools; the growth in the number of actions available to a player as games
progress; and the fact that players must overcome challenges in order to succeed.
These may be combined in various ways, as the next two sections discuss.
PLAY LIMITED BY AN ECONOMY
In SimCity , the player can't build a whole city immediately; it costs money to zone
each empty plot of land, and he can use only the money he has available. As his
city prospers, he earns more money and so can establish new neighborhoods. Once
he gets enough money, new features such as stadiums and airports, which were too
expensive in the early stages of the game, become available to him. So long as the
player continues to produce economic growth, he can make his city ever larger and
add more and more facilities.
Construction and management simulations routinely implement this system of
structuring the player's creativity. The player must successfully manage an econ-
omy to construct larger creations and also to get additional creative power. This is
a system closely related to that found in role-playing games, in which players must
gain experience to learn new magic spells, and to that found in strategy games, in
which players must harvest resources to perform the research necessary to get bet-
ter weapons. In those genres, the economy of the game limits the player's ability to
have adventures and fight wars; in creativity games, the economy limits the play-
er's ability to create. The primary challenge in such games is successful economic
management, with creative power serving as the reward for success.
This system rewards skill, granting players more exciting and powerful tools once
they master the tools they already have. Educational software also uses this
mechanism.
CREATING TO PHYSICAL STANDARDS
Another approach to constrained creative play gives players all the tools and
resources they would like but requires them to construct an object that meets cer-
tain requirements, usually having to do with making the object perform a
function. For example, Spore from Maxis lets players design and build virtual crea-
tures that then interact with creatures created by other players. The player gets a set
of standard parts including arms and legs, eyes and ears, and weapons such as
claws. Once the player constructs a creature, she turns it loose in the game world to
fight or socialize with other creatures, and she can add additional features as she
earns “DNA points.” Although Spore can animate almost anything no matter how
odd-looking, it does impose some physical standards: every creature must have a
backbone and be a land animal. The game offers no way to create a creature with
an exoskeleton, like an insect, or no skeleton at all, like an octopus.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search