Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Test against a fixed set of r ules that you establish. A game about clothing
design could include well-known rules about color combinations, not mixing
stripes with polka dots, and using fabric textures that harmonize and complement
each other. This system rewards players who know the rules and conform to them.
It's good for teaching the basics, but it doesn't encourage brilliant but unconven-
tional combinations. Ubisoft's Imagine: Fashion Designer does something similar by
requiring the player to design clothing for an AI “client.” Unfortunately, the game
offers no way for the player to find out exactly what the client wants. If the client
refuses to accept a design, he doesn't say why, so the player has to find out by trial
and error—a serious design flaw. If you plan to test the player's creations against
fixed rules, you must provide a way for the player to find out what the rules are by
some better means than trial and error.
Create a system of trends that the player can research. If you want to make a
game in which creative challenges change over time, the way fashion trends
change from year to year, design a system in which the standard against which you
measure the player's work fluctuates. Each attribute of the player's product could be
tested against a trend with its own rate of variation, so using the clothing exam-
ple again—hemlines might move up and down over a 10-year period, and preferred
fabrics might change from synthetics to natural fibers over a 20-year period. The
periodicity should never be completely regular or predictable, however. The trend
information should be hidden from the player but partially accessible via a research
process. When I ran a series of game design workshops on this theme, participants
suggested several options for doing this research. The player, in the role of a fashion
designer, could attend parties within the game and listen to computer-generated
gossip, some of which would include clues about current trends; he could read auto-
matically created fashion magazines and newspapers for clues; or he could even
break into other fashion designers' workshops to find out about their works in
progress.
Allow the public to vote online. You can let the players upload their creations
to a web site and let the community vote on them. For example, The Sims 2: H&M
Fashion Runway allows players to vote on clothing created in The Sims 2 .This sys-
tem relieves the computer of the responsibility for determining the aesthetic
quality of the player's creations, but it significantly lengthens the time scale of the
game—the player may have to wait hours or days until the votes come in unless
the game has a large player base. You will also have to build a secure system that
rewards players for voting and prevents vote rigging.
Freeform Creative Play and Sandbox Mode
If a game lets the player use all the facilities that it offers without any restrictions
on the amount of time or resources available (other than those imposed by techno-
logical limitations), then it supports freeform creative play . Many games that normally
offer constrained creative play also include a special mode that removes ordinary
constraints. This mode is called the sandbox mode . Sandbox mode lets the player do
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