Blog - Design Tips: Don't be Afraid to Give your Players the Big Guns
Monday, March 10, 2008So I've decided to turn my last entry into the first of a series.
I'll talk about entries I'm adding to my Design Tips, Tricks, and Techniques list I'm building for my own use as well as for teaching at Emagination.
For the record, they even have their own tag/label: "design tips"
So if you want to find the whole series, you know where to look. You're welcome.
So, onto business:
Next tip: "Don't be Afraid to Give your Players the Big Guns"
It is often the temptation to make the player have to work up to their most powerful abilities.
Alternatively, a designer might never implement a "big gun" powerful ability in order to help keep a game balanced.
But players love the big guns.
We want to not just kill things; we want to do it with style. We don't want just a little control over game tokens; we want as much as the designer will feed us.
We want to be able to do cool and hilarious things. We love overkill.
And we love completely dominating our friends.
One interesting example is Valve's games.
They are very good at creating "big guns", but I always find it very frustrating upon repeat play how long it takes you to play through the game to get them.
The gravity gun in Half Life 2, for example, is by far the best toy in that game, but it's quite far into the game before you get to play with it.
Portal takes you a much shorter, but still somewhat irritating span of time to get your portal gun fully functional final form as well.
Of course, both of those examples are because they are victims of Valve's technique of how they build up the game for the player, showing them how to play. Their technique is a very effective and welcome system in my book, so I don't want to fault it.
It just sucks somehow that in order to cover all the groundwork the player needs to know, their best toys get pushed back into later parts of the game.
Now, a recent moment where this "big guns" tip has come up within my design work was within another board game I'm doing with a group of students.
Our earliest board iterations were done with a grid based system.
We scrapped the grid-based board, as it was found to be too slow, predictable and tedious.
But in doing so, we did have to get rid of our biggest "gun".
We had a mechanic where you could convert one of your units into an explosive of sorts: use up 3 cards of a specific resource on him and he'd be converted into the explosive unit, with a blast radius of one square in every direction around him.
However, we also suggested players could put in MORE of that resource to increase their blast radius at one extra square per extra card.
We had one play test where one guy threw down 9 of the resource cards at once and ended the game with an apocalyptic explosion that took out half the board. It was quite the grand finale.
A few things about this:
1.) That epic explosion at the end there was pretty much the only fun thing about that particular play test of that iteration of the game. The ONE THING fun about our game at the time was this "big gun" attack. The situation where you'd have enough cards to create a huge blast wasn't that likely, but if you did, you could cash it in for quite the reward: the ability to nuke the hell out of the playing field.
Even better, it created a kind of feedback loop as even if you had enough cards, you could consider saving them until you collected even more cards for an even more massive blast at perhaps an even more strategic moment.
2.)
Because of the way we changed our board, new versions of the game can't benefit from quite as big a blast, as the game map now featured territories rather than a grid-based map, and therefore makes it impractical to have measured blasts of a certain size.
Our game is overall more polished now, but I think everyone on the team has admitted: We lament the loss of the potential of the gigantic blast attack.
Labels: design tips
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 9:48 AM
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