Transcript Gameplay - McMaster University

Or, Where The Fun Comes From
What Is Gameplay?
Defined as consisting of the challenges
and actions that a game offers
 Challenges for the player to overcome
 Actions that let the player overcome
challenges

Ideas Related to Gameplay
Hierarchy of challenges
 Skill
 Stress
 Difficulty

Making Games Fun
Gameplay is the primary means with
which a game provides entertainment
 Solid execution is more important that
innovation
 If gameplay is boring or frustrating, or
just ugly and awkward, it can easily
detract from the fun of a game


Rather than adding new ideas to
enhance fun, most of the work on the
gameplay of a game involves avoiding
things that reduce fun
Things That Increase Fun (In Order):
1.
2.
3.
4.
Avoiding basic errors like bugs, bad
interfaces, bad graphics and sound,
etc.
Tuning and polishing the game to
perfection
Imaginative variations on the game’s
basic premise (i.e. good level design)
True design innovation (this begins with
the original idea for the game)
Bugs
Even with bugs, however, games can be
fun
 Games like Skyrim and Fallout, while
being bug-ridden, provide vast amounts
of entertainment
 Sometime bugs actually create better
gameplay and new game features, but
this seldom happens
 An example of this is combos in Street
Fighter 2

Finding The Fun
There’s no formula to instantly create
fun
 There are, however, a set of principles
that one can follow to reduce the
chances of producing a flop

Gameplay Comes First
Above all, create fun things to do within
your game world
 Even with an interesting story and
gorgeous graphics, a game can fall flat
on it’s face without the supporting
backbone of good gameplay
 i.e. Final Fantasy XIII

Get It Right Or Leave It Out
Much worse to ship a game with broken
features than to leave a feature out
entirely
 Broken features ruin fun for gamers, and
make your team look incompetent

Design Around The Player
If you don’t design with a specific
audience in mind, there’s a decent
chance most people won’t like your
game
 Every design decision should be
examined from your intended player’s
point of view
 i.e. Will twelve year old girls generally
enjoy playing as a grizzled space
marine?

Abstract Parts That Aren’t Fun
Leave out parts of your game that may
increase realism at the cost of reducing
fun
 This is dependant on your audience
 i.e. For a racing game, casual fans of
the genre may not car about changing
tires midrace

Be True To Your Vision
Keep your original design in mind at all
times
 i.e. If your game starts out as an actionadventure title, don’t switch to real time
strategy gameplay half way through
(Brutal Legend)

Strive For Harmony
Even with subpar graphics and sound, a
game can be fun
 Poor graphics and sound can reduce
immersion and fun
 Good graphics and sound add to and
work together with good gameplay to
increase the overall quality of a game

The Hierarchy Of Challenges
In most games, the players face off
against several challenges at once
 These challenges can be organized into
a hierarchy of increasingly small subchallenges
 The smallest “unit” of challenge is the
atomic challenge
 i.e. Enemy, locked door, etc.

The highest challenge in the hierarchy is
the win condition for the game
 To win the game, the player must
complete several missions, or quests, or
levels, or whatever other way the game
designer chose to organize progression
 These missions consist of sub missions
and the sub missions consist of atomic
challenges

Figure 9.1
During the design process, laying out
the hierarchy of challenges can help to
create continuity and harmony within
your gameplay
 As the player completes the various
atomic challenges, the sub missions and
main mission will be in mind as well

Informing the player

Two types of challenges:
 Explicit
 Implicit
Explicit challenges are clearly stated within
the game and usually involve either the
topmost or bottommost levels of the
hierarchy
 Implicit challenges are left for the player to
discover and usually involve the
intermediate levels of the hierarchy

Explicit Challenges
Explicit challenges tend to be along the
lines of win conditions for specific levels, or
the win condition for the game
 Explicit challenges are also found in tutorial
levels, where players are told exactly how
to meet the presented atomic challenges
 As a side note, unless game controls are
completely self-explanatory, your game
should include some form of tutorial

Victory Condition
The win condition for your game should
always be given to the player
 Without an explicit win condition, it may
seem like there’s no point to the game
 You don’t necessarily have to tell the
truth about the main objective
 In story intensive games, changing the
final objective in a twist of the plot can
deepen and give complexity to your
story

Implicit/Intermediate Challenges
Most game designers tend to leave
intermediate challenges implicit
 Fun is created by allowing the player to
figure out things for themselves
 It can create a sense of accomplishment
and satisfaction

Armed with the explicit knowledge of the
final objective, and the ability to meet
the atomic objectives of a game, the
player should have all the necessary
tools to figure out the intermediate
challenges
 This only applies if your intermediate
goals have been constructed coherently

Reward Victory
An important design guideline to
remember is to always reward victory to
the player, regardless of how they
accomplish the objective
 i.e. Sequence breaking in the Metroid
series

In most games, overcoming an
intermediate challenge involves
completing all lower level challenges
 This is clearly seen in action games,
where defeating all enemies and getting
past all the obstacles allows the player
to complete the level

In more complex games, the player has
multiple paths to victory
 In RTSs like Star Craft, there are many
ways to win over your opponent

 Interrupt resource collection
 Defend base and build huge army
 Sneak in troops for a surprise attack
 Etc.
Players may face multiple challenges at
once
 Many of these challenges, higher up on
the hierarchy, don’t draw the player’s full
attention like the atomic challenge at
hand does
 Presenting multiple atomic challenges at
once, however, splits the players
attention

By splitting the players attention
between multiple atomic challenges at
once, the player is forced to deal with
multiple challenges in a limited amount
of time
 This can increase the stress felt by the
player, potentially creating more
interesting gameplay

An example of this is in the game Dark
Souls
 Multiple undead creatures attack you at
once, some from melee range, and
some from afar with firebombs
 This creates a feeling of extreme stress
and completing the sequence brings a
great sense of accomplishment

As the designer, it is your job to design
the hierarchy
 This means deciding how many
challenges the player must at once, both
vertically up through the hierarchy and
horizontally at the bottom
 The more simultaneous challenges the
player experiences, the greater the
stress created

Skill, Stress, and Absolute Difficulty

Two factors determine the absolute
difficulty of a challenge
 Intrinsic skill required
 Stress
Intrinsic Skill
Intrinsic skill by a challenge is defined as
the level of skill required to complete the
objective given an unlimited amount of time
 Intrinsic skill can be seen in trivia shows

 If you don’t know the answer, having more time
won’t let you answer the question

Intrinsic skill can also be seen in Sudoku
puzzles
 Having unlimited time won’t make the puzzle
any easier
Stress
If a challenge includes time pressure,
stress comes into play
 Stress measures how a player perceives
the effect of time pressure on his or her
ability to meet a challenge
 The shorter the time period in which to
complete the objective, the higher the
stress

Succeeding in a stressful game requires
quick reflexes and a quick mind
 Chess requires large amounts of skill to
be good at, but imposes no real stress
created by time pressure
 Add in a turn time limit however, and the
stress experienced by the player would
be extreme

Absolute Difficulty
Refers to intrinsic skill required and
stress put together
 Easy modes in games require less skill
and cause less stress than hard modes
 Hard modes, while upping the skill
requirement, also often reduce the time
you are allotted to complete the
challenges in the game

Your target audience factors into the
difficulty level you should implement in
your game
 Teenagers and young adults tend to
handle stress better, due to having
better vision and motor skills
 Try to have an inverse relationship
between skill and stress
 The more skill required the more time
you should allow, and vice versa

Commonly Used Challenges
There are virtually unlimited possibilities
when it comes to ways games can
challenge players
 Not all of them are good
 The next section is comprised of various
challenges, most of which could be
considered atomic, that are commonly
used and are tried and true

Physical Coordination Challenges

Comprised of:
 Speed and reaction time
 Accuracy and precision
 Intuitive understanding of physics
 Timing and rhythm
 Combination moves
Speed And Reaction Time
Speed challenges test the player’s
ability to make rapid inputs on the
controls
 Reaction challenges test the player’s
ability to react quickly to events
 i.e. Modern “twitch” shooters, fighting
games, etc.

Accuracy And Precision
Comprised mainly of steering and
shooting in modern games, though
many other challenges exist
 Steering includes navigating the
character, as well as driving
 Accuracy and precision are also found in
combat situations in action adventure
games

Intuitive Understanding Of Physics
Often found in vehicle simulations,
player’s need to gain a “feel” for the
vehicle they choose in order to be
successful
 Includes things like learning the
breaking distance of a car in a racing
game, or the right amount of force to put
behind a bowling ball
 Requires a consistent physics engine to
be successful in a game

Timing And Rhythm
Timing is featured heavily in side
scrolling action games
 i.e. when to jump, when to block, when
to attack, etc.
 Rhythm challenges are found in games
like Guitar Hero

Combination Moves
Combos are most often found in fighting
games
 Also found in action games
 Involve pressing the right buttons in
order
 Sometimes also involve timing
 When practised for an extended period
of time, combos can become muscle
memory

Logic And Mathematical Challenges

Comprised of:
 Formal logic puzzles
 Mathematical challenges

Refers to logic puzzles, rather than
logical or strategic thinking
Formal Logic Puzzles
A puzzle is a mental challenge with at
least one specific solution
 Formal logic puzzles should be solvable
through deductive reasoning alone
 Often found in adventure games
 i.e. Moving the right sequence of levers
in Myst

Design Guideline
Avoid trial and error solutions
 Requiring experimentation to come up
with the end result is fine as long as the
player can deduce the answer
 Having the correct answer only be
solvable through trial and error is a
grave mistake
 Causes intense frustration

Mathematical Challenges
Most games do not explicitly test
mathematical abilities
 Some games, like Microsoft Hearts,
provide imperfect information to the
player
 Using this information, the player can
make educated guesses as the what
cards the other players have

Races And Time Pressure
A challenge in which the player attempts
to complete their objective before
someone/something else
 Clearly seen in racing games
 Also seen in games like Trauma Center
for the DS
 Adding in time pressure arbitrarily can
be frustrating

Factual Knowledge Challenges
A challenge that involves a direct test of
the players knowledge of factual
information
 Found in Yakuza series, but only in the
Japanese version
 Found in trivia and quiz games

Design Guideline

If your game requires factual knowledge
from outside of the game to succeed,
you should make this clear to the player
in advance
Memory Challenges
Challenges that test the players ability to
recall things previously seen in game
 Often found in adventure games or roleplaying games, where the player must
recall secret pass codes, or a sequence
of inputs

Pattern Recognition Challenges
These challenges test the player’s ability
to spot visible and audible patterns or
patterns of change and behaviour
 In action games, the player can learn a
specific strategy that works on a specific
enemy, then proceed to use that
strategy on all other enemies of that
type


To make things more interesting, adding
in bosses that change up their patterns
or attack, or have very complex pattern
is a good idea
Exploration Challenges

These consist of:
 Spatial awareness challenges
 Locked doors
 Traps
 Mazes and illogical spaces
 Teleporters
 Finding hidden objects
Spatial Awareness Challenges
The most basic form of exploration
challenge, spatial awareness challenges
just require the player to learn their way
around an environment
 Modern games often provide a map to
allow the player to navigate more easily
 Certain games, like Dark Souls, have
large, interconnected worlds, but no
maps

Locked Doors
Locked door is a generic term for any
obstacle that prevents the player from
moving forward, until they find a key of
sorts to continue
 Literally seen in the Zelda series
 Also seen in the Metroid series, where
the player required new upgraded
weaponry to continue

Traps
A trap is a device that harms the player
character when triggered
 These are often seen in action
adventure games
 Sometimes they are one off traps that
only activate once, other times they can
re-enable themselves after a certain
period of time

Mazes And Illogical Spaces
A maze is an area where everywhere
looks similar to everywhere else
 The Lost Woods in Ocarina of Time is a
good example of this
 If you don’t know the trick, you can’t find
your way through
 In a sense, mazes often overlap with
logic puzzles

Illogical spaces are areas that do not
relate to each other in a reasonable way
 This is also seen in the lost woods,
where going the wrong way somehow
sends you back to the entrance of the
woods

Teleporters
A teleporter is a mechanism that
suddenly transports the player to
another area
 They overlap with illogical spaces
 Can be used as either a feature that
allows the player to travel through areas
they’ve previously been through, or as a
trap of sorts
 Can be used to confuse the player, or
only work in one direction

Finding Hidden Objects
Hidden object challenges require the
player to find a hidden item or area
within the game world
 Sometimes, clues point to hidden areas
 i.e. Off-colour walls in Golden Eye
 Other times there are no clues at all
 Easter eggs are a special form of hidden
object that are little bonuses unrelated to
the win condition of the game
