Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
DESIGN RULE
Allow the Player to
Save and Reload the Game
Unless your game is extremely short or your device has no data storage, allow the player
to save and reload the game. His right to exit the game without losing the benefit of his
achievements supersedes all other considerations.
It's the player's machine; it's not fair to penalize him just because he has to go to
the bathroom or because it's now his little brother's turn to play. Choose which
mechanism works best for your game, weighing the advantages and disadvantages
of each, but do let the player save the game, and preferably, whenever and wherever
he wants to. It does no harm to your game to give the player the freedom to choose
when he wants to save—or whether he wants to save at all. The player has a funda-
mental right to be able to stop playing without losing what he has accomplished.
Summary
Gameplay is the heart of a game's entertainment, the reason players buy and play
games. This chapter began with some principles to keep in mind in order to make
gameplay fun. Next we examined the
hierarchy of challenges
, the fact that a player
experiences several challenges at once, and defined the concept of atomic chal-
lenges. We noted the difference between the
intrinsic skill
required by a challenge
and the
stress
that time pressure puts on a player and how these two elements com-
bine to create
difficulty
.
Gameplay itself took up most of the chapter, with definitions and discussions of
the many types of challenges that video games employ and various ways of adjust-
ing their difficulty level. From challenges, we turned to the actions that you can
offer the player, which include actions not directly related to gameplay. Finally we
looked at the pros and cons of different ways of saving the game, an important fea-
ture for any game more than a few minutes long.
Armed with this information and with a little research, you should be able to ana-
lyze the gameplay of most of the video games currently for sale and to design
others using similar kinds of challenges and actions.
