Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Still others respond to particular conditions but not to others, like a metal detec-
tor at an airport, and the player must learn what triggers the trap and how to avoid
triggering it.
A player may simply withstand some traps that don't do too much damage; he may
disarm or circumvent other traps. A trap the player can find only by falling into it
is really just the designer's way of slowing the player down; if you make these, don't
make many of them because the player can only find them by trial and error and
they become frustrating after a while. For players, the real fun comes in outwitting
traps: finding and disabling them without getting caught. This gives players a plea-
surable feeling of having outfoxed the game.
MAZES AND ILLOGICAL SPACES
A maze is an area in which every place looks alike, or mostly alike; to get out, the
player must discover how the rooms or passages relate to each other, usually by
wandering around. Good designers implement mazes as logic or pattern-
recognition puzzles in which the player can deduce the organization of the mazes
from clues found in the rooms. Poor mazes offer no clues and make the player find
the way out by trial and error. Mazes are now considered rather old-fashioned and
difficult to justify in the context of a story, but they can still be fun to solve if you
make them truly clever and attractive.
In illogical spaces, areas do not relate to each other in a way that the player might
reasonably expect. In text adventures, a player sometimes finds that going north
from area A takes him to area B, but going south from area B does not take him
back to area A. Illogical spaces require the player to keep a map, because he can't
rely on his common sense to learn his way around. Now also considered outdated,
and more difficult to implement with today's 3D engines, illogical space challenges
still crop up from time to time. If you use them, do so sparingly, and only if you
can explain their presence: “Beware! There is a rip in the fabric of space-time!”
TELEPORTERS
Teleporters superseded illogical spaces in the game designer's toolk it. A
teleporter
is
any mechanism that suddenly transports the player from where she is to someplace
else, often without warning if the designer created no visual representation for the
teleporter device. Several hidden teleporters in an area can make exploration diffi-
cult. Teleporters can further complicate matters by not always working the same
way, teleporting the player to one place the first time they are used but to some
other place the second time, and so on. You can also use one-way teleporters if you
want to leave the player with no way to get back.
To make the exploration challenge created by teleporters easier, make the teleporter
predictable and reversible, so the player can return at will to where she came from.
(A good many games include teleporters not as a challenge but as a visible and optional
feature to let the player jump across large distances that she has already explored.)
