Gameplay - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 269

SPATIAL AWARENESS CHALLENGES
The most basic form of exploration challenge simply requires the player to learn
her way around an unfamiliar and complicated space. In the old text adventure
games, this was particularly difficult because the games lacked visual cues, but even
modern 3D environments can be made so tangled that they're hard to navigate.
Unfamiliar architecture also challenges the player; navigation is easier when things
look the way she expects them to look. Descent required the player to move around
a warren of similar corridors inside an asteroid and complicated matters further by
setting the environment in zero gravity, so the player perceived no obvious up or
down to help her orient herself.

To make spatial awareness challenges easier, give the player a map that always
shows his location precisely within the game world. If you want to give the player a
map but also make it slightly more difficult, give him a map of the game world that
doesn't include his location, so he has to determine his location from landmarks.

LOCKED DOORS
Locked door is a generic term for any obstacle that prevents the player from proceed-
ing through the game until he learns the trick for disabling it. A sheet of ice covering
a cave entrance that melts if you build a fire constitutes a locked door for game
design purposes. Assuming, for discussion only, you want an actual door, you can
require that the player find a key elsewhere and bring it back, find and manipulate
a hidden control that opens the door, solve a puzzle built into the door, discover a
magic word that opens the door, defeat the doorkeeper in a test of skill, or perform
some other task—just make sure you offer an interesting and fresh challenge.

Avoid using an unmarked switch far from the door. Doom featured these, and they
weren't much fun. Arriving at a locked door and seeing no means of opening it or
any clue, the player had to search the entire world pressing unmarked switches at
random, returning to see whether one of the switches had opened the door. Worse
yet, in a few cases, the switch did open the door, but only for a little while. If the
player didn't get back to the door in time, he found it locked again and assumed
that switch must not be the right one.

TRAPS
A trap is a device that harms the player's avatar when triggered—possibly killing
her or causing damage—and, in any case, discourages her from going that way or
using that move again. Similar to a locked door with higher stakes, a trap poses an
actual threat. Traps can take a variety of forms:

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Some fire once and then are harmless.

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Others fire and require a certain rearming time before they can fire again.