Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
the fox while moving in configurations that prevent the fox from jumping over
them (preventing the enemy from acting).
Create interesting conflict challenges by varying such factors as these:
The scale of the action (from individuals to whole armies)
The speed at which the conflict takes place (from turn-based, allowing the play-
ers all the time they want, to frenetic activity as in action games)
The complexity of the victory conditions (from simple survival to complex mis-
sions with goals and subgoals)
Many action games focus on the immediate, visceral excitement of personal con-
flict. The player generally controls an avatar that battles directly against one or
more opponents, often at high speeds.
Conflict challenges can be broken down into strategy, tactics, logistics, and other
components.
STRATEGY
Strategy
means planning, including taking advantage of your situation and
resources, anticipating your opponent's moves, and knowing and minimizing your
weaknesses. A strategic challenge requires the player to carefully consider the game
(a process called situational analysis) and devise a plan of action. In a turn-based
game of
perfect information
(one that contains no element of chance or hidden
information), players may use
pure strategy
to choose their moves by analyzing pos-
sible future states of the game. Chess is a classic game of perfect information. (In
formal game theory,
pure strategy
has a special meaning, but we'll use the term in
an informal sense to distinguish it from
applied strategy
.)
Succeeding in a game of pure strategy requires a talent for systematic reasoning
that relatively few people possess in a high degree. Computer game developers usu-
ally aim to attract a broad audience, so few of them offer these kinds of challenges.
Instead, they hide information from the player and include elements of chance,
making situational analysis to some extent a matter of guesswork and of weighing
probabilities rather than a matter of logic. Such games call for applied strategy.
Real-time strategy (RTS) games normally require applied strategy and offer eco-
nomic and exploration challenges as well, making RTS games accessible to players
with less skill at logic and providing other ways to win besides strategy alone.
TACT ICS
Tac t ics
involve executing a plan, accomplishing the goals that strategy calls for.
Tactics also require responding to unexpected events or conditions: new informa -
tion or bad luck. A player might have a strategy for defeating his opponents in
poker, but he uses tactics to decide how to play each particular hand.
