Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Actions for socialization.
Players in multiplayer games, especially online
games, need ways to talk to each other, to form groups, to compare scores, and
to take part in other community activities. (See Chapter 21, “Online Games.”)
Actions to participate in the story.
Participating in interactive dialog, interact-
ing with NPCs, or making decisions that affect the plot all constitute actions that
allow the player to participate in a story even if those actions don't directly address
a challenge. The more of them you offer, the more your player feels she is taking
part in a story.
Actions to control the game software.
The player takes many actions to con-
trol the game software, such as adjusting the virtual camera, pausing and saving
the game, choosing a difficulty level, and setting the audio volume. Some such
actions may affect the game's challenges (setting the difficulty level certainly
does), but the player doesn't take them specifically to
address
a challenge.
Saving the Game
Saving a game takes a snapshot of a game world and all its particulars at a given
instant and stores them away so that the player can later load the same data, return
to that instant, and play the game from that point. Saving and restoring a game is
technologically easy, and it's essential for testing and debugging, so it's often
slapped in as a feature without much thought about its effect on gameplay. As
designers, though, it's our job to think about anything that affects gameplay or the
player's experience of the game.
Saving a game stores not only the player's location in the game but also any cus-
tomizations she might have made along the way. In
Michelle Kwan Figure Skating,
for
example, the player could customize the body type, skin tone, hair color and style,
and costume of the skater. The player could even load in a picture of her own face.
The more freedom you give the player to customize the game or the avatar, the
more data must be saved. Until recently, this limited the richness of games for con-
sole machines, but now console machines routinely come with enough storage to
save a lot of customization data.
Reasons for Saving a Game
Reasons for saving a player's game or allowing him to save it include these:
Allowing the player to leave the game and return to it later.
This is the most
important reason for saving the game. In a large game, it's an essential feature. It's
not realistic and not fair to the player to expect him to dedicate the computer or
console machine to a 40-hour game from start to finish with no break.
Letting the player recover from disastrous mistakes.
In practice, this usually
means the death of the avatar. Arcade games, which offer no save-game feature,
