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Actually Learning to Play: Why There Should Be Easy and Hard Modes for Game UI
Why don’t games have hard and easy modes for the UI? Different players have different needs, and one-size-fits-all solutions shrink a game’s audience.
In a blog post titled The Importance of the New Player’s Experience, Josh Bycer catalogs several types of “new” players for a given game:
- Players who are new to this specific game, but familiar with other similar games or the conventions of the genre.
- Players who are new to this game’s genre and conventions, but familiar with gaming in general.
- Players who are completely new to gaming.
- Players who have played this specific game, but have put it down for an extended period and are returning - especially if it is a live-service game which may have changed considerably in the meantime.
All of these players need some amount of guidance (or at least reminders) to understand how to play the game, but the amount and nature of guidance needed varies considerably between them. One might expect games to thus present a few different levels of optional guidance to cater to each group, but it’s typical for games to design their tutorials and onboarding for only the first group, providing little help for the “new” players of other kinds.
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0 CommentsI desperately want a Bill & Ted Face the Music...
I desperately want a Bill & Ted Face the Music tie-in game that plays like Harmonix’s Amplitude.
Just change the frame story to be about repairing the space-time continuum with your band from across time. It’d be perfect.
0 CommentsCapsule Review: Death and Taxes
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0 CommentsGamasutra - Boss Battle Design and Structure
In his latest design feature, Activision and former Insomniac designer Mike Stout breaks down the boss battle into eight different beats, and runs two notable ones -- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's Ganon and Portal's GladOS -- through a thorough analysis to illuminate their designs.
Game designer Mike Stout discusses how to build effective boss battles: make them mastery tests and structured stories in their own right.
Gamasutra - Evaluating Game Mechanics For Depth
Former Insomniac designer Mike Stout takes shares a useful rubric for judging the depth of play mechanics, including checks for redundant ones, in this in-depth design article, which contains examples from the Ratchet & Clank series.
Game designer Mike Stout discusses how to build game mechanics with enough depth to stay interesting: tie them to varied and meaningful use of skills.
New Games, New Players
I’ve seen a lot of different breakdowns of the different kinds of players and what they look for in games, but only now has it occurred to me that the reason the breakdowns keep changing is because games themselves keep changing. This analysis by Nick Yee presents nine different “player segments” - and two of them (Skirmisher and Gladiator) are described as looking for “team arenas” for different reasons.
“Team arenas” haven’t always been available as a gaming experience and only rose to prominence in the past decade or so. Before then, the sort of people who would seek out team arenas were around, but there were fewer games (if any at all) to scratch that itch, and these people were less likely to get into games. Thus these personality types were less represented in the overall subculture of “gamers.” Once these experiences became more feasible, these people became gamers and emerged as distinct player segments.
This is why I’m saddened by loss of variety of game experiences. It’s also why I like seeing game experiences outside the mainstream narrative find success. And as games continue to grow, I can’t help but wonder at the as-yet-uninvented types of game experience on the way that will create brand new player segments by giving even more people what they’ve been looking for.
0 CommentsHow System Era overcame creative paralysis to fix Astroneer's crafting system
System Era designer Aaron Biddlecom and gameplay programmer Elijah O'Rear explain how they mined their own game design to invigorate Astroneer's "flat" crafting system.
A short but interesting look at a change to Astroneer’s crafting system, illustrating the value of having multiple perspectives and challenging your assumptions when making design decisions (as well as the importance of ensuring that the complexity in a design is coming from the right place).