Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games by Tracy Fullerton

Author:Tracy Fullerton [Fullerton, Tracy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

226

Chapter 8: Digital Prototyping

Context

Returning to Mario 64, imagine Mario

standing in a fi eld of blank whiteness,

with no objects around him. With

nothing but a fi eld of blankness, does

it ma er that Mario can do a long

jump, a triple jump, or a wall kick?

If Mario has nothing to interact

with, the fact that he has these acro-

batic abilities is meaningless. Without

a wall, there can be no wall kick. At Figure 2

Comparison of character motion in Donkey

the most pragmatic level, the place-

Kong and Super Mario Bros.

ment of objects in the world is just

another set of variables against which to balance movement speed, jump height, and the other parameters

that defi ne motion. In game feel terms, constraints defi ne sensation. If objects are packed in, spaced tightly

relative to the avatar’s motion, the game will feel clumsy and oppressive, causing anxiety and frustration. As

objects get spaced farther apart, the feel becomes increasingly trivialized, making tuning unimportant and

numbing thoughtless joy into thoughtless boredom.

Concurrently to the implementation of your system, you should be developing some kind of spatial con-

text for your motion. You should put in some kind of platforms, enemies, some kind of topology that will give

the motion meaning. If Mario is running along with an endless fi eld of blank whiteness beneath him, it will be

very diffi

cult to judge how high he should be able to jump. So you need to start pu ing platforms in there to

get a sense of what it will be like to traverse a populated level.

Constraint is also the mother of skill and challenge. Think of a football fi eld: There are these arbitrary

constraints around the sides of the football fi eld that limit it to a certain size. If those constraints weren’t

there, the game of football would have a very diff erent skill set and would arguably be a lot less interesting

because you could run as far as you want in one direction before bringing the football back. The skills of

football are defi ned by the constraints that bound it.

Conclusion

There is an aesthetic beauty possible with game feel. That is, something beautiful is created at the inter-

section of player and game. The act of play can create something aesthetically beautiful, aurally, visually,

and/or tactilely.

Before you dive in and start coding, consider the overall sensitivity of the system, the aff ordances of the

input device, and the sensitivity of the response from the game. Concurrently, develop some kind of spatial

context for your motion. The idea is to create a “possibility space” that will, through tweaking the variables

you’ve exposed, give rise to the game feel you want, the thoughtless joy that will hook players, engage them,

and keep them playing.

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