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