Teaching the Player

Running for Speed

The Speed Running community is a fantastic example of people who take every opportunity to transition all games from a Reaction to Planned Gameplay. They approach every game with its predefined rules and regardless of how well a game teaches you a mechanic, the speed runners put in the time to perfect the most opportune route and routine in getting from the start to the end of the game. They epitomize the idea of “Reaction Gameplay + Time = Planned Gameplay” by learning all of the inadequacies of the player’s abilities and the gamespace’s rules and manipulating them to get a more optimized path for faster completion, and shaving frames, seconds or even minutes off of runtimes by understanding what can be done by the player and what will happen in the gamespace when the player performs the action.

Past Articles in the series can be found here

Old Man: It’s dangerous to go it alone. Here, take this.

Link: But, what am I supposed to do with it?

Old Man: <shrugs>

Some of the more thrilling parts of life are the times that you’re anxious, you don’t know what’s coming up, but it’s approaching fast and all you can do is traverse yourself through it. You’re given something new and unexpected and you are forced to adapt with the goal of thriving in a new environment. This can also be a source of fear and concern because you aren’t in the normal comfort zone that you once thrived in when getting to this point, yet you’re expected to perform at the high quality that got you to this point? You don’t even know if the rules have changed at this point, the tools being the same, or the uses of any new tools that you may come across.

Of course I’m referring to game design and not my previous post, silly person. But why can’t these causes for frustration and anxiety translate between gaming and real life? If the tools you’re given aren’t explained to you and the tasks that are presented to you require a certain level of proficiency using those tools, how are you supposed to operate at a level of high proficiency?

Continue reading “Teaching the Player p2: Reactive vs Planned Game Design” →

You know what sucks in a game? Being force fed how you are supposed to interact with the world. You know what also sucks? Not knowing what to do, or knowing exactly what to do and making it nearly impossible to accomplish. There are a myriad of ways this can be done correctly or incorrectly and I’m sure there were active decisions as to why certain designs were chosen, but they all contribute to or take away from the player experience in one form or another and it’s left to a good level designer to understand what works best for their game and how to design the level around making the most out of the player experience.

Continue reading “Teaching the player: Prelude and First Screens” →

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