Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
An even easier solution involves generating a log of the player's activities in text
form. She can then edit this log any way she likes, turning her raw game actions
and dialog into narrative form.
To give your players the utmost creative freedom w ith your game, you can permit
them to modify the game itself—to redesign it themselves. Game modifications, or
mods
, are extremely popular with the hardcore gamer community and almost an
obligatory feature of any large multiplayer networked game (apart from server-
based games such as
World of Warcraf t
).
Providing the player with mod-building tools also makes good business sense. Your
game's original content can keep people interested for only a certain amount of
time, but if people can build mods that use your game engine (as they can with the
Unreal
and
Half-Life 2
engines), people will continue to buy your game just to be
able to play the mods.
Allowing for mods is more of a programmer's problem than a designer's problem,
so this topic does not discuss them in much detail.
Level Editors
A level editor allows players to construct their own levels for a game. Some level
editors permit players only to define a new landscape; others allow them to define
new characters as well; and a few go so far as to permit rebuilding the entire game.
Generally, however, a good level editor lets the player construct a completely new
landscape, place challenges in it, and write scripts that the game engine can oper-
ate. If you work on a large game for commercial sale, your team will almost
certainly include tools programmers who will build a level editor for the level
designers to use. To make the level editor available to the players, rather than useful
only as an in-house tool, you must make sure it is as robust and well designed as
the game software itself. Two superb level editors that you should study are the 2D
StarCraft
Campaign Editor, which is included with
StarCraft
, and the
Hammer
3D
editor that comes with
Half-Life 2
. For further reading about level editors and other
design tools, see Richard Rouse's article “Designing Design Tools” in the
Gamasutra
developers' webzine (Rouse, 2000).
Bots
A
bot
is an artificially intelligent opponent that the player can program for himself.
(
Bot
also has a secondary meaning: a program that help players cheat at multiplayer
networked games. This section is about the other kind.) By building bots, players
can create tougher and smarter opponents than those that normally ship with the
game (usually a first-person shooter). Some players use bots as sparring partners for
