Thursday, January 27, 2011

Video Game Design Thoughts, part 1: Accessibility and Feedback.

Game design thought of the day *** break-it-in versus one-size-fits-most.

Having played video games since the NES days, I've noticed that games often fall into one of two camps: simple to get into and feel your way around, or something where you have to learn the nuances of what the game expects you to learn. Or, to over-simplify, easy to learn or hard to learn.

Let's do a comparison here. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Secret of Mana, the latter being the inspiration behind this post. They're both very respected games, one being considered one of the best games of its era, while the other is a less-known title beloved by those few who stumbled upon it. Both games utilize similar perspective, movement, and even gameplay... except that this is where I start using quotation marks.

Legend of Zelda is a simple game for the most part, with combat being straightforward, the menus being quite simple, and overall being very accessible; something that strong enough for a hardcore gamer but made for a casual. Its only real drawback in terms of accessibility is some rather bizarre puzzles that probably shouldn't have been included in the first place.

Secret of Mana, on the other hand, is quite a bit more complex. The beginning highlights this quite notably, as the first moment you're thrust into combat can be a confusing ordeal depending on your background. Being someone that's played plenty of RPGs in the past, particularly from this game's developer, I figured out rather quickly what was going on: the game was programmed such that the player had to wait a certain amount of time between weapon swings for full effect (which is pretty much required), had to time attacks based on how recently the enemy had been hit (more critical for later enemies), and had to realize that actual hits to an enemy weren't shown on an enemy until roughly once every two seconds. I actually had a friend who was a Legend of Zelda fan, but couldn't get into Secret of Mana because of how complex and inaccessible it was in his eyes. Beyond that, the menu system likely didn't help matters much either.

So with this comparison out of the way, here's the design thought for today: How easy is it for a player to get into your game? Is the game giving player cues and feedback as to how he/she is doing? Or does the game has a bit of an invisible learning curve, where the player is expected to learn certain rules and nuances?

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