Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
but you still want them to be able to get there eventually. Again,
think about games you
ve played before where you got stuck on a
level and you came back again and again to try to get past the part
that was holding you back. Something you might notice is that a
lot of those probably had certain steps you had to follow to get
past the point where you were stuck. At some point, your persis-
tence paid off and you moved to the next level, and you may have
felt some sense of accomplishment (if even just a little bit). The
goal is to make the levels get harder, but not so hard that they can
never be defeated by anyone. If players stop feeling like they can
advance further into your game or that they don
'
t stand a chance
of beating it altogether, a large number of them will stop trying
and move on to something else. Brand interaction fail! One more
important aspect I should point out here is the ability for a player
to save their progress in your game or, at the very least, have pre-
determined codes that will allow access to levels as they progress.
Level two has its own code; level three has its own and so on.
Giving a user the option to jump straight back to the level they last
played alleviates the frustration of having to play the same levels
over and over. And we all know that can be especially tedious the
further you are in a game when you stop playing.
So let
'
s discuss a little about another reason users would want to
come back to play a game with your client
'
'
sbrandalloverit.How
about a little payoff? Or a big payoff if that
smoresuitableforyour
client. If players know that they are actually playing toward some-
thing, it can be an incredible incentive for them to come back to
play again. This is especially true if they are big fan of your client
'
s
brand or even just the product for which the game was designed
and built. And the payoff doesn
'
t always have to hold a monetary
value because there are plenty of players out there who consider
simple recognition to be the best prize you could offer them. For
example, we
'
ve all seen the contests or other challenges where the
prize is something along the lines of
'
A chance to have your name
and photograph featured in/on _______!
“
On the other end of the
spectrum, your client may be willing to offer up a more elaborate
grand prize like a television, a game console, a new car, or an
all-expense-paid trip to anywhere the winner would like to visit. The
extent of the prizes is really up to what the client is willing to do.
Also, it doesn
”
t have to be just a single prize at the end of some
specified time period. Something else to consider is that your client
could do something like giving out smaller prizes to players during
thecourseofthegames.Maybethegamewillberunningforthe
duration of a 6-month campaign and at the end, the top scoring
person wins the grand prize, but the smaller prizes are given out at
regular intervals to active players. Or maybe a tournament-style
game is the way to go where prizes are given to something like the
top 10 players. Tenth place gets a small prize, and the prizes get
'
