Arcade Berg aka. "Learning Game Design with Arcade Berg"

Make It A Bonus

There's a short article at Gamasutra about some of Blizzard's Design Concepts that I think is definately worth a read.

Blizzard

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27640/GDC_Blizzards_Core_Game_Design_Concepts_.php (18/3/2010)

Many of the things they talk about are "common stuff" and maybe even quite obvious, but as noted:

Some may seem obvious, but often it is the obvious advice that we tend to forget about first.

- Frank Cifaldi, Gamasutra

But the main reason I wanted all of you to see this was because of the very last of them, which i think is brilliant in its simplicity. It refers to reward and punishment as I'm a big fan of exploring.

Make It A Bonus

As designers, say Pardo, there is a natural tendency to worry about punishing the player rather than rewarding them, but a clever designer can play with a player's psychology and turn it into a bonus.

Pardo related an example of World of Warcraft's rest system: when the game launched, players were punished for playing too long by having their experience gain percentage drop from 100 to 50 percent after a couple hours of play.

Beta players universally hated this idea and were screaming bloody murder," said Pardo.

The fix? Turning this into a bonus scenario instead. Players now start at 200 percent experience and drop down to 100 percent. It's the exact same mechanic, but now it's a bonus instead of a punishment.

It's nothing new that the guys over at Blizzard often makes the right design decisions but this is easily amongst my favorites!

Sucker Punch

And while I'm linking to Gamasutra articles and trying to sound clever anyway, I might as well give you this one too:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27638/GDC_Infamous_Open_World_Trickery.php (18/3/2010)

It's about how a small team managed to create the huge environment you see in Infamous (Sucker Punch). They're using a hexagon-system and making sure to limit the line of sight.

In Infamous, all of the street intersections are "Y" shaped -- this is a natural effect of the hex-based layout, but it also means players can't look straight down a long street. "If we provide really long sightlines, you get bored running down the street," Fox said.

Not only does it help with the gameplay, it's a lifesaver performance-wise as well. It's common to do it like that. We (GRIN) did it for Terminator Salvation as well.

Happy reading! Now I gotta finish the "Hitting and Getting Hit"-chapter in the Iskall GDD.