I am also especially grateful to MobyGames (www.mobygames.com), whose vast database of PC and console games I reviewed daily, and sometimes hourly, in my research. Welcome to Fundamentals of Game Design, Second Edition - an updated version of the original Fundamentals of Game Design, itself based on an earlier book by Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on game design.
Who Is This Book For?
How Is This Book Organized?
The game consists of the challenges the player faces and the actions he takes to overcome them. The second half of the chapter addresses the special problems of persistent worlds such as World of Warcraft.
Companion Web Site
It also describes several aspects of design in a commercial environment, including the documents used and work applications. The remaining chapters of Part 1 are devoted to specific aspects of video games that you will encounter when you design them.
PART ONE
Defining any term that refers to a broad class of human behavior is a difficult matter, because if one can find a single counterexample, the definition is imprecise. The alternative is to recognize that a definition is not rigorous but serves as a convenient description to cover most cases.
OTHER VIEWS
There may be exceptions—activities that someone would immediately recognize as play, but that do not fit this definition. In the next few sections, we'll take a closer look at each of these elements and their meaning in the definition.
PLAY
The definition covers each of these elements and also includes some additional conditions.
PRETENDING
THE MAGIC CIRCLE
If the events in the game are also significant in the real world, the magic circle becomes blurred. If so, the game was literally a matter of life and death—a matter of great importance in the real world.
A GOAL
The process of gambling may or may not be an intrinsic part of the game itself. The goal of the game is defined by the rules and is arbitrary because the game designers can define it any way they want.
THE RULES
For example, rules of the game (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003, p. 80) describe a game as an "artificial conflict." Although this concept is essential to game theory, it is too restrictive a definition for our purposes because it excludes creative games and purely cooperative games. In this context, the definition of play gets a bit vague, because your boss might require you to "play" a game as part of your "work" (and if you're getting paid to design games, you definitely should) .
CHALLENGES
ACTIONS
THE DEFINITION OF GAMEPLAY
Players sometimes spontaneously decide to change the rules of a game while playing if they notice that the rules are unfair or that the rules allow unfair behavior. In order for all players to enjoy a game, they must all agree on what fair play means.
CHANGING THE RULES
WHO GOES FIRST?
I AM MY OWN TYPICAL PLAYER
You might also find that you'll love a game you never thought you would as you work to design it!). Insisting that you have to be passionate about your game or you can't do a good job at it is a very selfish approach – the opposite of player-centered design.
THE PLAYER IS MY OPPONENT
The core mechanics also determine the effect of the player's actions on the game world. The user interface mediates between the core mechanics of the game and the player (see Figure 2.1).
INTERACTION MODELS
CAMERA MODELS
If a game doesn't have a virtual space (for example, if it's a business simulation that's mainly about money), the term camera model doesn't apply and you'll need to explain your screen layout in more detail in your design documents. detail. The most commonly used camera models are first person and third person for presenting 3D game worlds and top-down, side-scrolling and isometric for presenting 2D worlds.
GAMES WITHOUT GRAPHICS
Because the game only offers a subset of all its challenges and actions in a given gameplay mode, the player is focused on a limited number of objectives. When either the gameplay available to the player or the user interface (or both) changes significantly, the game has left one state and entered another.
GAMEPLAY MODES IN AMERICAN FOOTBALL
The game's gameplay modes and shell menus and the relationships between them together make up the game's structure. To document the structure, you can start by making a list of all modes and menus in the game.
CONCEPT VERSUS PREPRODUCTION
GETTING A CONCEPT
DEFINING AN AUDIENCE
DETERMINING THE PLAYER’S ROLE
FULFILLING THE DREAM
THE DANGER OF IRRESOLUTION
DEFINING THE PRIMARY GAMEPLAY MODE
DESIGNING THE PROTAGONIST
DEFINING THE GAME WORLD
DESIGNING THE CORE MECHANICS
CREATING ADDITIONAL MODES
DESIGNING LEVELS
WRITING THE STORY
BUILD, TEST, AND ITERATE
When the development moves from pre-production to production, the team starts working on the material that will go to the customer, and it must be manufactured with special care. However, you still can't just design something, hand your design over to the programmers, and forget about it.
GAME DEVELOPMENT/SCRUM MANAGEMENT PROCESS
This person oversees the overall design of the game and is responsible for ensuring that it is complete and consistent. The art director also plays an important role in creating and enforcing the game's visual style.
GAME IDEA VERSUS DESIGN DECISION
An important part of game design is communicating the design to other members of the team. As long as you can keep the website secure, this is a good way to document a game design so that all members of the team can access it and you can update it easily.
HIGH CONCEPT DOCUMENT
GAME TREATMENT DOCUMENT
CHARACTER DESIGN DOCUMENT
WORLD DESIGN DOCUMENT
The world design document must also document the "feel" of the world, is aesthetic style and emotional tone.
FLOWBOARD
STORY AND LEVEL PROGRESSION DOCUMENT
THE GAME SCRIPT
The player's role(s) in the game, if the game is representative enough to have roles. Defining the player's role in the game world is an important part of defining your game's concept.
THE PLAYER-CENTRIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE TARGET AUDIENCE
One of the first questions a publisher will ask you is, "Who will buy this game?" Think carefully about the answer. You can't make a game for everyone, so your target audience is necessarily a subset of all possible players, a subset determined by your answers to the question "Who will enjoy this game?" and "What kinds of challenges do they like?" When answering these questions, you may be tempted to assume that people in one category (adult men, for example) are a special audience that has nothing in common with people in other categories (adult women, children, teenagers, etc.). ).
REASONING STATISTICALLY ABOUT PLAYER GROUPS
Furthermore, the number of women who report an interest level of 6 is about two-thirds of the number of men who report the same interest level. In other words, two-fifths of all people who report an interest level of 6 are women—far too many to simply ignore.
STRIVE FOR INCLUSIVENESS, NOT UNIVERSALITY
In other genres, such as role-playing games and adventure games, the story is a large part of the game's entertainment. Once the game is ready, you should also submit it to the manufacturer for extensive testing before releasing it.
STAND-ALONE GAMES
The great blessing of computer development is that anyone can program one; you don't need to get a license from the manufacturer or buy an expensive development station. Fortunately, the Windows and Macintosh operating systems solved many of these problems by isolating the programs from the hardware.
BROWSER-BASED GAMES
What is the game’s setting? Where does it take place?
Will the game be broken into levels? What might be the victory condition for a typical level?
Does the game have a narrative or story as it goes along? Summarize the plot in a sentence or two
In fact, the gameplay in most single-player video games appears to the player as interactions between himself and the game world. A game world is an artificial universe, an imaginary place where the events of the game take place.
ART IS NOT ENOUGH
When the player enters the magic circle and pretends to be somewhere else, the game world is the place they pretend to be. As a general rule, the more a player understands the essential game mechanics, the less important the game world is.
SPATIAL DIMENSIONALITY
For example, the Legacy of Kain series presents two versions of the same 3D world, the spectral world and the material world, with different gameplay modes for each. As with anything else you design, the dimensionality of your physical space must serve the entertainment value of the game.
SCALE
To solve this problem, the game simply does not include tall buildings or hills and exaggerates the height of people. The extent of the city should be small enough that it only takes a few minutes for the character to get from one end to the other, unless the game is about exploring a richly detailed urban environment.
BOUNDARIES
Everything in the world stands still or runs in a continuous loop until the player interacts with the game in some way. In some games, time is implemented as part of the game world, but not as part of the gameplay.
VARIABLE TIME
Occasionally the player is pressured by being given a limited amount of real time to accomplish something, but this usually only applies to a single challenge and is not part of a larger concept of time in the game. At night, shops close and the game's characters are at increased risk of being attacked by wandering monsters.
ANOMALOUS TIME
However, once all the characters fall asleep, the game speeds up quite a bit, letting the hours pass in seconds. The game runs about 48 times faster than real life, so it takes about 20 minutes of real time to play through the 16 hours of a day in the game world.
LETTING THE PLAYER ADJUST TIME
You have seen that the physical dimension defines the properties of the game space; The environmental features of the game world form the basis for creating art and audio.
CULTURAL CONTEXT
We will look at two specific features: the cultural context of the world and the physical environment. The backstory of a game is the imaginary history, large-scale (nations, wars, natural disasters) or small-scale (personal events and interactions), that preceded the time when the game took place.
PHYSICAL SURROUNDINGS
The physical environment plays a large role in setting the tone and mood of the game as it is played, whether it is the light-hearted hilarity of Mario or the gritty realities of the Godfather series (see Figure 4.10). Stanley Kubrick listened to hundreds of records to choose the music for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and he surprised the world with his choice of "The Blue Danube" for the shuttle docking sequence.
DETAIL
Here's a good rule of thumb for determining the level of detail your game will include: Include as much detail as possible to help the game's immersion, until the point where it starts to hurt the gameplay. If the player has to struggle to take care of everything you've given them, the game probably has too many details.
DEFINING A STYLE
The player in a war game cannot delegate tasks to intelligent subordinates, so numbers must be kept to a size he can reasonably handle.)
OVERUSED SETTINGS
SOURCES OF INSPIRATION
It's tempting to borrow from our closest visual neighbor, movies, because filmmakers have already done the visual design work for us. In terms of the richness of their emotional content, games are now right where movies were when they moved from nickelodeon to the screen.
INFLUENCING THE PLAYER’S FEELINGS
There is no need for the fate of the world to be at stake; it is the fate of Rick, Ilsa and Victor that tugs at our hearts. Don't make your game about the fate of the world if you're serious about creating emotional resonance with your audience; the fate of the world is too great to comprehend.
THE LIMITATIONS OF FUN
Many games take the danger to hyperbolic levels with extreme claims like "The fate of the universe rests in your hands!" This kind of hyperbole appeals to young people, who often feel powerless and have fantasies about being powerful. And, in fact, that's the key: That media doesn't just provide fun; they provide entertainment.
YOU CAN’T PAINT EMOTION BY NUMBERS
Games allow you to do things you can't do in the real world. The range of actions allowed in the game world is typically narrower than in the real world (you can fly your F-15 fighter all you want, but you can't get out of the plane), but often allowed actions are quite extreme: killing people, stealing things, and so on.
MORAL DECISION-MAKING
In some ways, the morality of a game world is part of its culture and history, which is part of the environmental dimension, but because the ethical dimension poses special design problems, it requires a separate discussion. The ethics of most game worlds deviate somewhat from those of the real world - sometimes it's completely the other way around.
THE PECULIAR MORALITY OF AMERICA’S ARMY
A WORD ABOUT GAME VIOLENCE
As you design game elements, you'll need to ask yourself how much realism you want to include. Again, every design decision you make must serve the entertainment value of the game.
PHYSICAL DIMENSION
If you've done it perfectly, your game world will be one that a player can immerse themselves in, a lasting fantasy that they can believe in and enjoy being a part of. Choose one of the game genres below and then choose a famous painter, photographer or filmmaker and a famous composer or musician whose work you want to use to create the right emotional tone for your game.
TEMPORAL DIMENSION
ENVIRONMENTAL DIMENSION
If there are no people in the game, what is there instead and what do they look like and how do they act.
EMOTIONAL DIMENSION
ETHICAL DIMENSION
Since the avatar represents the player in the game world, these activities are called self-determining play. Avatar selection allows the player to choose from a number of predefined avatars, usually at the start of the game.
FUNCTIONAL ATTRIBUTES
Customization can occur both at the start of the game and through upgrades awarded or purchased as the game progresses. These strengths and weaknesses in turn determine how the player should play with the character to be successful in the game: to take advantage of the strengths and to avoid situations in which the weaknesses make the player vulnerable.
COSMETIC ATTRIBUTES
You can also explicitly offer this right as a cheat feature of the game, so players know they are getting an unusual advantage. Dungeons & Dragons offers one of the most well-known examples of player-customizable functional features, but many games make use of them.
SHOULD SEX BE A FUNCTIONAL
Allow players to earn the right to set their character's functional attributes as they wish by first completing the game with limited attributes. First-person shooters typically give the player a choice of weapons, and when a player chooses a sniper rifle over a machine gun, she says something important about her character and the way she wants to play the game.
ATTRIBUTE OR A COSMETIC ATTRIBUTE?
If a player can create only within the artificial constraints imposed by the rules, her activity is called limited creative play. Limiting creativity may sound undesirable, but it really just provides a structure for the player's creativity.
PLAY LIMITED BY AN ECONOMY
CREATING TO PHYSICAL STANDARDS
Each element of the theme park costs money and the player must stay within the budget. RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 includes a feature that shows the player how tall and how steep different coaster segments are, so they can figure this out with a little experimentation.
CREATING TO AESTHETIC STANDARDS
These games allowed the player to build games that he or someone else could play. In general, however, a good level editor allows the player to build an entirely new landscape, set challenges in it, and write scripts that the game engine can run.
DANGERS OF ALLOWING MODS
The nature of the player's relationship with their avatar varies considerably from game to game. How the player feels about the avatar depends somewhat on how the player controls the avatar in the game.
HUMANOIDS, NONHUMANOIDS, AND HYBRIDS
The exceptions are non-specific avatars who view the world only from a first-person perspective (such as Gordon Freeman) and disembodied characters who sometimes talk to the character (via headphones, telepathy, or other means) but are never seen. Story-driven character design, an alternative to art-driven, is defined in the section that follows.
CARTOONLIKE QUALITIES
Davros, creator of the Daleks, has a humanoid torso and head, but a mechanical lower half. Animations for a silly character in a game sometimes include silliness, as long as it doesn't affect the player's gameplay experience.
COOL WITHOUT ATTITUDE
HYPERSEXUALIZED CHARACTERS
Kratos, from the God of War games, typifies the hyper-sexualized male character, much like most male characters in fighting games. You could get away with it if it was done deliberately for laughs; Putting Cate Archer in a retro '60s catsuit worked well for the designers of No One Lives Forever because of the game's humorous context.
CONCEPT ART AND MODEL SHEETS
What sorts of sounds will each character in your game make? What sorts of music are appropriate for them? How will your choices of sounds and music sup-
How a character's grammar, vocabulary, tone of voice, and speech patterns contribute to the player's understanding of the character.
How do the character’s grammar, vocabulary, tone of voice, and speech patterns contribute to the player’s understanding of the character?
Game designers add stories to increase the entertainment value of the game, to keep the player interested for a long game, and to help sell the game to potential customers. But your publisher's marketing department can feature characters and situations from your game's story, and even print part of the story itself in their promotional materials.
THE GREAT DEBATE
Based on this, some people would say that every game contains a story because the action of the game can be described after the fact. The description of the game Tetris would be an extremely uninteresting story due to the endless repetition of the game and the lack of emotional content other than the player's own feelings.
REQUIREMENTS OF GOOD STORIES
To be dramatically meaningful, the events of the story must involve something, or preferably someone, that the listener cares about. The story should be constructed in such a way as to encourage the listener to become interested in and possibly identify with one or more characters in the story.
INTERACTIVE STORIES
The story can be interactive even if the player's actions cannot change the direction of the plot. When the player defeats the challenge, the game responds with the next event in the story.
THE ROLE OF NARRATIVE
In an interactive story, the story is the part of the story that you, the designer, tell to your player, as opposed to the actions the player takes or the events created by the core mechanics. N A R R AT I V E The term narrative refers to story events that are narrated (that is, told or shown) to the player by the game.
COMMONLY USED NARRATIVE BLOCKS
For example, the game Half-Life begins with a movie in which Gordon Freeman, the player's avatar, takes a tram ride through the Black Mesa research complex while a voice explains why he is there. Cutscenes during gameplay, on the other hand, should be shorter because they interrupt the flow and rhythm of the player's actions.
BALANCING NARRATIVE AND GAMEPLAY
DRAMATIC TENSION
GAMEPLAY TENSION
THE FALSE ANALOGY
Note that a double-headed arrow labeled Triggers connects the story engine to the core mechanics in Figure 7.1. If, for example, the player makes a key decision that will affect the story later, the core mechanics inform the story engine of the decision.
IMMEDIATE, DEFERRED, AND CUMULATIVE INFLUENCE
Branch points associated with player decisions have one branch for each option you offer the player. If a trivial decision has a profound consequence, the player will feel cheated: He didn't know the decision mattered, and he had no reason to expect it to matter.
THE BRANCHING STORY STRUCTURE
Attributing significant consequences to insignificant decisions violates the requirement that stories be credible and dramatically significant. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a text-based adventure, did this for comedic and ironic purposes, but most players and critics found it to be an unreasonably difficult game for precisely this reason: the player could not predict what the consequences of his actions would be. would be.
START
END 1
The storytelling engine keeps track of the player's position in the story at any given moment. The player can choose one of several different characters for their avatar, and that choice can determine where the story begins.
DISADVANTAGES OF THE BRANCHING STORY
The player has to play the game repeatedly if he wants to see all the content. However, the player can only control the events of the story to the extent that he can control the core mechanics through his gameplay.
CHARACTER-AGNOSTIC PLOTS AND KING OF DRAGON PASS
King of Dragon Pass is different because instead of the player finding adventure, the adventures come to her. However, the player's desire for an outcome that reflects their actions varies somewhat depending on what those actions were.
PREMATURE ENDINGS DON’T COUNT!
CHALLENGES AND CHOICES
WHEN TO USE MULTIPLE ENDINGS
