Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Next, look at the challenges you designed for the primary gameplay mode. Begin
with the atomic challenges you plan to offer; for each atomic challenge, write down
how you expect the player to overcome it. Your answers will probably consist of
individual actions or small combinations of actions. Ben Cousins has argued that
game designers should spend most of their effort defining and refining the way
that actions overcome atomic challenges because the player spends most of his
time performing those actions (Cousins, 2004); this is excellent advice.
After you define the actions that will meet the atomic challenges, consider the
intermediate and higher-level challenges in the gameplay mode. Can they all be
met with the actions you've defined, or will they require additional ones? Add
those to the list.
Finally, consider actions unrelated to gameplay that you may want to make avail-
able to the player. You may already have some that come with the player's role, but
you may want to include others for other reasons. See the list in the next section
for some ideas.
Once you have been through this process for the primary gameplay mode, do it all
again for each of the other modes. When you believe you have comprehensive lists
of all the actions that you want to include in each mode, you're ready to start defin-
ing the user interfaces for the different modes: assigning actions to control
mechanisms. (See Chapter 8.)
Actions That Serve Other Functions
Games include many actions that allow the player to interact with the game world
but not engage in gameplay. Games also offer actions that aren't specifically play
activities but give the player control over various aspects of the game. The follow-
ing list describes a number of types of non-challenge-related actions.
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Unstructured play
. You will almost certainly want to include some fun-to-
perform actions that don't address any challenge. Players often move their avatars
around the game world for the sheer fun of movement or to see a new area even if
it offers no challenges; this is referred to as sightseeing. You may want to include
actions just because they're part of the role. In most driving games, honking the
horn accomplishes nothing, but if you couldn't honk the horn, the game would
feel incomplete.
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Actions for creation and self-expression.
See Chapter 5, “Creative and
Expressive Play,” for a discussion of actions allowing players to create and custom-
ize things, including avatars. Much of the activity in construction and management
simulations consists of creative play rather than gameplay, although the player's
actions are often constrained by limitations imposed by the game's internal
economy.
