Game design with Noah Falstein, part 2: Fundamentals
Ok, continuing with my notes on game design, here you have the fundamentals that Noah Falstein teach us:
Identify your constrains:
- Creative: expectations and goals
- Technical (including platform)
- Bussiness, marketing, sales, distribution
- People: skills and personalities
- Internal politics
- Serious games – add teaching/training and real world content constraints
Game design fundamentals:
- Creative plagiarization: Take only what is appropiate, make it your own
- Sid Meier’s rule: Fun for the player, not for computer or designer
- Albert Einstein: Make it as simple as possible, and no simpler
- Make it familiar, yet new
- Easy to learn, hard to master
- Easy, clean, deep
- Emphasize exploration and discovery
- Have a clear short, medium and long term goals
- Natural funativity: hunting and gathering
A great game:
- A series of interactive choises in the persuit of a series of well stablished and compelling goals
- Must be a series of choises or it’s too simple to be a game
- Must have a goal or it’s a software toy
- With Sim City and The Sims players may bring heir own goals
- Choises need to be meaningful
- If choises are dull could be that:
- Easy to code that way
- Lazy designer
- Meaningful choises are perceived by the player as having significant consequences
- May not have actual consequences
Goals:
- Clear goals: it’s not fun to flounder aimlessly
- Avoid “the protagonist with amnesia” cliché
- Compelling goals are goals that follow the concepts in natural funativity
- Surival is always a compellin goal
Flow:
- Combine intense learning with practical gameplay
- Start with a relatively low stress level
- Combine rapid difficulty increase with slower increase. That maximizes fun.
- High difficulty increase: Boss battles, climatic battles, quest resolutions
- Low difficulty increase: Bonus levels, new resource ad tresure-rich areas, series of easy minion enemies
- Overlap introduction of new skills, areas to explore, tools, enemies