Tools for learning
If you’re not telling players answers, how do they get to them?
The perfect example here is great environmental design. There is a huge range of ways to give little or big clues. Do I find the source of corruption by following the trail of dead fauna?
Plan for good failures
There’s trial and error in the process so think about the failures
Low stakes enemies like minions are great for trying out spells and doing the wrong for a while
If you’re searching for clues better to be inside a house rather than a whole continent
Focus on game strengths
Areas where the game is most fully fleshed out are great for challenging the player to figure it out
An action game like dark souls with awesome animations doesn’t need big red indicators in the world for every attack
Match player intuition
Of course you want to make the answers make sense for the problem
To cheer up your dog rover you’d expect to feed her or pet her not give her a tattoo
Similarly if I see a bomb ticking down I expect it to hurt me not heal me
Four things I’ve found most helpful in finding the sweet spot -match player intuition -focus on game strengths -plan for good failures -tools for learning not answers
In high polish AAA dev, you have the time and money to iterate which is an enormous benefit.
But ironically in this particular area it can hurt you. There is a pull where every time a playtester runs into a problem or gets stuck to fix it with more guidance or restrictions.
This problem applies in so many places as well -how much guidance do you put on a players map in an RPG? -how much info do you put in the spell tooltip? -how much do you show to the player when an enemy attack is incoming?
Discovering things on your own, mastering the game by doing, and solving the “what to do next” puzzle is one of the core satisfactions when playing.
This most frequently is related to how you present information and guidance to the player.
Ultimately you don’t want the player to get hard stuck but if you spoon feed them everything you remove a TON of the best parts.
A design value I’ve been chasing a lot is to “respect player’s intelligence.”
It’s a challenging one and big polished AAA game dev process struggles with it in particular.
(Thread)
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