Game Design: Feedback and Separability
Let’s give all the personal development stuff a rest and talk about game design a bit. One principle that I use when making by games is: “The player’s choices must be punchy.” What do I mean by that?
Feedback
The options available to the player must have tangible weight. You don’t want the game feel like waving your hands through fog. For example, take the siege cannon in the zombie game. It costs a lot, but it also makes a big difference in the game. This is great, because the player get clear feedback on their choice to build one.
Let’s imagine an opposite scenario – Let’s say the cannon was 8 times cheaper, but also 8 times weaker. In theory, that’s better right? You could still build it 8 times, get the same result and get more flexibility too boot. The problem is that in this scenario there wouldn’t be too much feedback to the player. One cannon would make practically no difference and it would be hard to appreciate the effect of the choice. Players would try the cannon and think that it’s kind of flat. If the cannon is big, powerful and expensive, you know right away if you used it properly. Either you wasted 8 build points, or you are blowing everything away.
The effects of the player’s choices should be easy to appreciate. The long-term implications may be hard to deduce, but the short-term feedback should be clear.
Separability
Another factor in punchiness is how close the choice is to other choices. I like there to be clear separation between different things that the player can do. This is why I put in a lot of work to have the marine weapons be different. This way the players aren’t wasting their time deciding between fundamentally similar things. I want each choice to have a different flavour – not to have everything blurred together into a fine mush.
The real reason for this is to prevent a feeling of decision paralysis. When there are too many similar choices, people tend to freeze. Since that’s not what I want the player to feel, I want the levers that the player pulls to feel very different. Once the player decides what needs to happen, the choice should come easily.
For this reason, I’m very suspicious of using slider-based game mechanics. For example, I could make a game where there was a slider that controlled the balance between speed and attack power – that could be an interesting mechanic. The problem is, people wouldn’t use the whole spectrum of choices available to them. I predict that there would be at most 5 points on the slider that people pick and they would feel a bit fuzzy each time they picked a point. In this case, I would redesign the slider as three or five “forms” that the player can take. That would make each choice different from the others.
The only situation where continuous choices and feedback work are spacial mechanics. Take zombies, for example – you can send the marine anywhere on the map in fine gradations. People are naturally wired to understand space, so this is not a problem.
Paradox
So, unique choices with clear feedback are what we always should aim for, right? Not so fast.
There’s a bit of problem in applying the rule absolutely. The most interesting systems are continuous and fuzzy, but people aren’t wired to understand fuzzy and continuous systems. What do we do about this? I don’t have a good solution to this yet, but there’s an idea. What if under the hood the game is fuzzy, but it has a crystallization layer that presents the player with clear and unambiguous choices. That way we could get the best of both worlds.
Until something like that is made, I think that it’s a good idea to stick to punchy choices. It might set an upper limit on how complex your game system is, but the player’s experience is more important than how cool your math is under the hood.
Attack of the Paper Zombies
