Gameplay - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 286

Design Practice QUESTIONS
1. What types of challenges do you want to include in your game? Do you want to
challenge the player's physical abilities, his mental abilities, or both?
2. Game genres are defined in part by the nature of the challenges they offer. What
does your choice of genre imply for the gameplay? Do you intend to include any
cross-genre elements, challenges that are not normally found in your chosen genre?
3. What is your game's hierarchy of challenges? How many levels do you expect it
to have? What challenges are typical of each level?
4. What are your game's atomic challenges? Do you plan to make the player face
more than one atomic challenge at a time? Are they all independent, like battling
enemies one at a time, or are they interrelated, like balancing an economy? If they
are interrelated, how?
5. Does the player have a choice of approaches to victory? Can he decide on one
strategy over another? Can he ignore some challenges, face others, and still achieve
a higher-level goal? Or must he simply face all the game's challenges in sequence?
6. Does the game include implicit challenges (those that emerge from the design),
as well as explicit challenges (those that you specify)?
7. Do you intend to offer settable difficulty levels for your game? What levels of
intrinsic skill and stress will each challenge require?
8. What actions will you implement to meet your challenges? Can the player sur-
mount a large number of challenges with a small number of actions? What is the
mapping of actions to challenges?
9. What other actions will you implement for other purposes? What are those pur-
poses—unstructured play, creativity and self-expression, socialization, story
participation, or controlling the game software?
10. What save mechanism do you plan to implement?