Hello my humble overlords.
The teams just finished our second week of production, our team are coming into the position and mindset of the development. There been endless discussions about mindset and vision for our game, there is a lot that needs to be said in order to create a shared vision for a game, to find what’s best for the project and not the individual and personal preference.
So my Question and challenge for the design this week have been:
How do i design a level to teach you our mechanics and ways to interact with the game?
the first interactions with a game is really important in order too present the games aesthetics and mechanics. The game wants to establish and introduce how you play the game without breaking or annoying the player. As a designer i want to trust you to understand the mechanics right from the introduction of the mechanic, the player wont be bother with several hints and tips on how to play the game. As we’re going to introduce jump within a safe space to introduce it to the player, from there on we assume that the player knows how to utilize jump throughout the game. It wont need a 2nd introduction.
Early iteration of the start
So the question is then, How do we introduce a mechanic as easy as possible to make you understand the game?
The obvious answer to this is forever testing. trough hypothesis and discovery on how the composition works we’ll understand what works within introducing mechanics, but testing costs time and money. So what methods are known to work in order to create a lean learning curve for the player?
so the understand these methods i looked at other games and how they tutor the basic mechanics of the game, and something i as a designer are afraid of is to tell the player what to do, i want the game world to convey what needs to be done within the world, not windows that break the immersion and tells you how to do things.
The thing within this is that games today may utilize small parts of “this buttons does that” and then the game trusts the player with showing the rest of the mechanics.
For this i’ve been looking at games like Journey and Half-life 2 and how they “tell” the player what to do, and the thing is, like i’ve mention earlier, Is that these games tells the player that “This button does this verb”.
for example; when the player reaches the boxes in half-life 2 the game tells the player: “F to pickup an object” and then the game trusts the player on figuring out the right decision and understanding of that mechanics
Picture taken from half-life 2 “tutorial”
this proves that games won’t require extensive tutorials in order to communicate what it wants you to do and how you do it within game.
(Picture taken from Half-life 2 )
So how is this applicable on our game?
Using these methods that Journey and Half-life 2 suggest in order to introduce mechanics to the game, where i intend the game to tell the player what button does what and then show them in a safe environment one at the time. The first 10 seconds of the game is designed to introduce the narrative structure of the game as well as it’s two basic movement mechanics in a safe environment, where a player may fail and learn it’s structure.
During the coming week i’ll focus on more the deeper level design in order the challenge the player with your new found skills.
Next subject I’ll discuss flow and it’s interpretation within level design from my perspective.
Until next time, Overlords.
Adam Out.
AdamWrange 