Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Benefits of Positive Feedback
Positive feedback can benefit your game in two ways:
■
Positive feedback discourages stalemate.
A well-balanced PvP game should
only rarely result in a stalemate, and PvE games should never end in stalemate.
Positive feedback tends to bring games to an end because a player who takes a
decided lead becomes unstoppable.
■
Positive feedback rewards success
and provides that reward in a useful form
rather than a purely cosmetic form, such as a higher score. Even though the per-
ceived difficulty of challenges may increase, thus requiring the player to work
harder nearer the end of the game, she still feels rewarded by a sense of power and
growth at being able to do things she could not do at the beginning of the game.
Because avatar growth is one of the key goals in role-playing games, the positive
feedback cycle serves as the central design feature of the internal economy of com-
puter role-playing games.
Controlling Positive Feedback
Although positive feedback generally benefits by helping bring a game to an appro-
priately timed end, especially in PvP games that involve direct conflict between the
players, you must not allow positive feedback to operate so quickly that the game
ends too soon or a player who falls behind never has any chance to catch up. Part
of balancing your game will consist of adjusting your positive feedback cycle to pre-
vent these problems.
Here are six different ways of controlling the rate of positive feedback:
■
Don't provide too much power as a reward for success.
In chess, taking one
of the opponent's pieces gives the player an added measure of power. In shogi
(Japanese chess), the player can then add that piece to his own side, acquiring even
more power. Introducing the piece directly would give the player too great an
advantage; instead, it comes in as a weaker piece, which somewhat reduces the size
of the reward. Similarly, in many war games, such as
Warcraf t
, a player can destroy
enemy factories, but he cannot capture them and use them to produce weapons for
his own side. If he could do that, he would become unstoppable too quickly. (In
real wars, armies often destroy their own production facilities and materiel to pre-
vent them falling into enemy hands for precisely this reason.)
■
Introduce negative feedback.
Negative feedback associates a cost with achieve-
ment to counteract the benefit—a negative reward, in other words. You may do this
explicitly or allow it to happen automatically as a function of the gameplay. In
Dungeon Keeper,
the player can convert enemy creatures to fight for her own side,
but once she does so, she has to provide food, money, and living space for them—
explicit costs associated with adding them to her army. In the pool game eight ball,
the greater the lead a player has on his opponent, the more difficult it becomes to
