Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Am I making progress?
Show indicators for the score, the percentage of a task
completed, or the fact that a player passed a checkpoint.
What should I do next?
Unless your game provides only a sandbox-type game
world in which the player can run around and do anything she likes in any order,
players need guidance about what to do. You don't need to hold their hands every
step of the way, but you do need to make sure they always have an idea of what the
next action could or should be. Adventure games sometimes maintain a list of peo-
ple for the avatar to talk to or subjects to ask NPCs about. Road races over unfamiliar
territory often include signs warning of curves ahead.
How did I do?
Give the player emotional rewards for success and (to a lesser
extent) disincentives for failure through text messages, animations, and sounds.
Tell her clearly when she's doing well or badly and when she has won or lost. W hen
she completes a level, give her a debriefing: a score screen, a summary of her activi-
ties, or some narrative.
DESIGN RULE
Do
Not
Taunt the Player
A few designers think it's funny to taunt or insult the player for losing. This is mean-spirited
and violates a central principle of player-centric game design
—
the duty to empathize.
The player will feel bad about losing anyway. Don't make it worse.
What the Player Wants to Do
Just as the player needs to know things, the player wants to do things. You can
offer him many things to do depending upon the game's genre and the current
state of the game, but some actions crop up so commonly as to seem almost univer-
sal. Here are some extremely common actions.
Move.
The vast majority of video games include travel through the game world
as a basic player action. How you implement movement depends on your chosen
camera and interaction models. You have so many different options that a whole
section, “Navigation Mechanisms,” addresses movement later in this chapter.
Look around.
In most games, the player cannot see the whole game world at
one time. In addition to moving through the world, he needs a way of adjusting his
view of the world. In avatar-based games, he can do this through the navigation
mechanism (see “Navigation Mechanisms”). In games using multipresent and other
interaction models that provide aerial perspectives, give him a set of controls that
allow him to move the virtual camera to see different parts of the world.
Interact physically with nonplayer characters.
In games involving combat,
this usually means attacking nonplayer characters, but interaction can also mean
giving them items from the inventory, carrying or healing them, and many other
kinds of interactions.
