General Principles of Level Design - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 363

■ Reward the player for skill, imagination, intelligence, and dedication. These
four qualities distinguish a good player, and good players deserve to be rewarded.
You may create rewards in many forms: power ups and other resources, shortcuts
through the level, secret levels, minigames, cut-scenes and other narrative material,
or simple praise. Players like to be told when they've done a good job.
■ Reward in a large way, punish in a small way, or to use an old adage, you
catch more flies with honey than vinegar. The hope of success motivates players
more than the fear of failure does. If a game repeatedly smacks them down hard,
players will become discouraged and abandon the game with a feeling that they're
being abused. Don't forget that the duty to empathize is one of the obligations of
player-centric game design: Your primary objective is to give players an enjoyable
experience. Build more rewards into your level than punishments.
■ The foreground takes precedence over the background. Design the visual
appearance of your level so that the player's attention is naturally drawn to his
immediate surroundings. Don't make the background so complex that it distracts
the player. Spend more of your machine's limited resources (polygons, memory,
CPU time) on foreground objects than on background ones.
■ The purpose of an artificial opponent is to put up a good fight and then
lose. Design your level so that the player will get better and better at overcoming
the challenges until he succeeds at all of them. In a multiplayer competitive game,
the skill and luck of the players decide who wins, but in a single-player game, you
always want the player to win eventually, and it's up to you to make sure that hap-
pens. An unbeatable level is a badly designed level.
■ Implement multiple difficulty settings if possible. Make your game accessible
to a wider audience by allowing them to switch the difficulty of your game to easy,
normal, or hard settings. In games with an internal economy, you should be able to
tweak the numbers to adjust the difficulty to accommodate the player's preference;
Chapter 11, “Game Balancing,” addresses this in more detail.
THE 400 PROJECT
In 2001, veteran game designers Hal Barwood and Noah Falstein began assembling a list
of design rules for video games, hoping eventually to compile a list of as many as 400 of
them. So far, Barwood and Falstein's 400 Project has gathered more than 100 rules from
fellow designers; these represent the combined wisdom of many people. Rather than
outright commandments, these are tools to guide your own creative work, as a ruler
guides a pencil. Some of the rules conflict with others, and it will be up to you to decide
when one rule is more important than another. You should download the rules and take
them to heart as you design your game and the levels within it. You can find The 400
Project at www.finitearts.com/400P/400project.htm.