Learning Game Design with Arcade Berg

My horrible mini-map

Every now and then I bash other games' design choices, making it sound like I'm so much better (which of course, I am). And it's not like I each and every time give some examples of how to do it in a better way.

Anyway I thought it would be fun (for you, not me) to see some of my bad designs as well.

Back in the summer 2006 I wrote a game design document for a game I was thinking about trying to have developed as a spare time project. I called it Agumented as a project name and it was a top down shooter with some strategic elements in a Sci-Fi setting. I might have been a fun game indeed, but not earth shaking in it's innovations. In the end, I never tried to develop it.

Looking back at it, the "worst" part about it must be my mini-map.

How it works:

• It's in full 3D, formed as a cube, where each side represent a perspective of the level.
• The player wouldn't start with 100% of the map discovered, unless it's been acquired somehow in advance.
• The cube could be rotated by being controlled by the player.
• It would show your location as well as enemies within your line of sight or otherwise detected with various equipment.
• It would be placed in a corner of the screen meanwhile playing, so keep in mind that it's a mini-map and not a map reached from the Pause screen.

Have a looksie at the picture.

The different sides on the cube are "cameras" looking in XYZ.

Why it's bad:

If I were to see this design in a game today, it would probably drive me crazy. I can really understand how I thought back then and in theory it works, but the problem is that I don't think it's easy to read at all. To actually understand my surrounding and what's going on, I would have to look at all three sides individually and then combine the gathered data into one piece of information.

Heck, I don't know. Maybe that's easy for a person to do, but if there's a complex environment with walls, stairs and the player's position along with five enemies, I think it would be hard to get an instant overview.

When using a simple top-down map like in most games, we can process the information instantaneously.

Any piece of on-screen-information like this should require an absolute minimum of time and effort to compute, if you ask me. Clearly, that's not the case here.

The mistake I made:

Unfortunately, I think the main reason for why "this happened" was because I wanted to make something new and interesting, instead of using something old that's proved to work. I'm not against innovative thinking at all, but I don't think it should be forced like I did here. I did it "because" even though the results were worse, which I didn't see at the time.

There you have it. One of my bad designs over the years. I hope enjoyed it, because I didn't...