Gameplay

 

 

 

A good game has to have a fun core, which is a one-sentence description of why it's fun.

Paul Reiche III

Compute Magazine, January 1992

 

 

What is gameplay? Gameplay is simply the actions a player is allowed to perform in a game. If those actions are enjoyable and the controls are intuitive, you have the most important ingredients of a great game.

Duane Alan Hahn

 

 

The most common mistake of modern games is that they mistake setting for game design. A great plot does not make a great game. Nor does a great player model or animation engine. These merely provide contextual support for the game's reward system. If the rest of the game design is broken, a multi-million dollar investment in setting will still fail to produce an enjoyable game.

Daniel Cook from Evolutionary Design

 

 

'Interactive' shouldn't mean that you get to do something whenever the game designer decides you've sat there long enough twiddling your thumbs.

Duane Alan Hahn

 

 

 

 

Though balancing an original game is a hideous amount of work, cloning a game has its own pitfalls.

When an original game is created in an iterative fashion, each iteration builds upon the past iterations. The rules begin to support each other in subtle unexpected ways. It's almost like you are building a pyramid, with each additional level supported intimately the rules below.

When you clone a game, you look at the obvious rules of the game and implement them. However, the subtle interactions of the rules are not immediately obvious and are therefore not implemented. These interactions are lost, and the emergent gameplay is destroyed. It's as if you made a plaster cast of a digital watch, painted it exactly the same, and then wondered why it didn't tell time.

Daniel Cook

 

 

We used to spend so much of our time on game play and today's games seem to put too much emphasis on graphics and sound. It's the game play that makes a game fun, sometimes they forget that.

Larry Kaplan

 

 

I personally object to episodic games where you play one screen of Space Invaders and one screen of Breakout and one screen of Galaxian and one screen of this and one of that. To me, that's not a game. It's just taking five bad games, putting them together, and calling them one good game. I'm philosophically against that.

Eugene Jarvis

Joystick Magazine, September 1982

 

 

I'm constantly amazed at how many games are developed—even at some of the biggest and most established game companies—by teams that have no one responsible for the actual game. There are artists, programmers, musicians, and a producer to coordinate them all, but no one actually concentrating on the business of making sure that the interactive experience is as rewarding as it can possibly be. No one thinking about how it will actually feel to play the game. Instead, the actual "gameplay" will be added at the last minute, when all the graphics are ready. Almost as an afterthought.

It's like these developers are trying to invent chess and have created a superb, glossy-looking board and a whole new set of exciting pieces and then sit back and say, "Look! Look at his new board game we've made! Look at these shiny pieces and this state-of-the art board! What a great game this is!" But they haven't thought about how the game is played. They haven't thought about what pieces can move in what directions. They haven't thought about how these pieces then interact with each other. They haven't developed a set of rules. In short, they haven't thought about the actual game itself.

Neil West from The Way Games Ought to be...

Next Generation Magazine, October 1997

 

 

 

 

Many people in the business today seem to be more interested in making movies than in making games.

Tim Skelly from a Halcyon Days interview

 

 

Re: "Myst"

I'm sorry, but I just don't get it. Non-interactive graphical wallpaper can be very beautiful, but after a few seconds I get bored. I want action. Contrived challenges like puzzles make me feel very puny and stupid. I don't play games to be anally retentive, I want conflict and action.

Re: "Wing Commander"

Mind-numbing sequences of pre-rendered storyline which have nothing to do with the game action are bogus. First you watch a bad movie, then you play a game that's even worse. You should play the story, not watch it! It's obvious that the FMV sequences had ten times the budget than the game did. Why didn't they put the money into the interactive game design? The whole thing reeks of a cheap bait and switch.

Eugene Jarvis from a Halcyon Days interview

 

 

How to make a successful (fun) game

1. Multiple paths to victory. Whether it's a strategy game or a platform game, you want players to be able to have multiple ways to win. In Civilization, you could win by conquering the world or sending your people to another planet. In Baldur's Gate II, you can play as both good and evil and most puzzles had multiple ways to complete it.

2. Provide new things to discover over the course of the game. Don't put all your game elements up front. Have things you strive to get or see that makes it worthwhile to keep playing. Strategy games tend to do this by having new technologies and new units you can build. Role playing games keep you looking for that +5 armor.

3. Keep the interface simple. Seems obvious but many game developers are more into the technology than the game. A good game's interface shouldn't even be noticeable. If the player is losing due to not being able to navigate the interface, that will harm the game. I loved Total Annihilation but loathed TA: Kingdoms because of how much work it was to micro manage the units that you had to do to succeed.

4. Avoid helpless defeat scenarios. You don't want players losing the game because of something they consider cheesy. In Starcraft, it could be frustrating having a mass of cloaked ships wipe someone out because their otherwise impressive army didn't have enough cloak detection units. Total Annihilation had the Big Bertha which could be abused. Similarly, in role playing games, you have to keep players from getting too far too fast to where they can't defeat the bad guys. Believe me, this is not a trivial thing to design in. Cheese tactics are very hard to design against but the games that stay popular over time are the ones that successfully design against it.

5. Design for the proper target hardware platform. Yea, I might have a dual 850 setup but I suspect most people don't. We design games for P2-233 systems. Unless you're making a totally cutting edge game (like a first person shooter) you better make sure that most people can play it optimally. Strategy games for instance, aren't 3D because people want them, they're that way because game developers want to make 3D stuff. There's no excuse to double the hardware requirements for your strategy or RPG to make it a 3D engine. There is market research out there and believe me, people don't care whether the engine is 3D or 2D when they make purchasing decisions.

From a Quarter To Three article by Brad Wardell (Stardock)

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