Fundamentals of Game Design Quotes

“For a more detailed discussion of the subject, read Neal and Jana Hallford’s Swords and Circuitry (Hallford and Hallford, 2001).”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“If the available power grows at exactly the same rate as the absolute difficulty goes up, the relative difficulty will be a flat line, as illustrated in Figure 11.4 (next page). In that case, a level 5 knight would find it exactly as hard to kill a level 5 troll in the middle of the game as a level 1 knight would find it to kill a level 1 troll at the beginning of the game. But relative difficulty should not be a flat line because when you factor in the player’s increasing in-game experience, the perceived difficulty actually goes down—the game gets easier. Aim to increase the absolute difficulty of the challenges somewhat faster than you increase the available power to meet them. The gap between absolute and relative difficulty widens only slowly.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“To keep the absolute difficulty level constant, whenever you increase the time pressure on a player, you should also reduce the amount of intrinsic skill required.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Unless your game is a just-for-fun simulation such as Super Mario Kart or Beetle Adventure Racing!, vehicle simulation is the most technologically oriented of games, so the core mechanics of the game are almost entirely about physics.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Fundamental AI Technologies” in Core Techniques and Algorithms in Game Programming by Daniel Sánchez-Crespo Dalmau (Dalmau, 2004).”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“What Are Action Games? Action game An action game is one in which the majority of challenges presented are tests of the player’s physical skills and coordination. Puzzle-solving, tactical conflict, and exploration challenges are often present as well.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“A longstanding tradition in action games, and many other genres as well, calls for the inclusion of a boss to defeat at the end of the level: a particularly difficult challenge. Victory, and the end of the level, reward the player for defeating the boss, and this sometimes includes a cache of resources or treasure as well.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“You should also make fresh supplies available to him immediately after he surmounts a challenge that costs him a lot of resources, as Chapter 11 explained. In shooter games, these traditionally take the form of boxes of ammunition and medical kits for restoring health, stored in an area immediately beyond a large group of enemies.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“As a general principle, the pacing of a level in any game, especially a game with physical challenges, should alternate between fast and slow periods, just as the tempo of movements in a symphony or the levels of excitement in an action movie vary. Players need moments to rest, both physically and mentally, and on the whole, the faster the pace of the level, the more important rest becomes.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“The perceived difficulty of a challenge—the difficulty that the player actually senses, and the type we are most concerned with—consists of the relative difficulty minus the player’s experience at meeting such challenges. Remembering that relative difficulty is absolute difficulty minus power provided, we can put all these factors together into a single equation such that perceived difficulty = absolute difficulty - (power provided + in-game experience)”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“The level designers have to know, for example, that by the time the player reaches the fourth level, he will have earned three major weapon upgrades and a faster vehicle, so they set the difficulty of the fourth level’s challenges relative to that level of power provided.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“The relative difficulty is the difficulty of a challenge relative to the player’s power to meet that challenge.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Relative Difficulty and Power Provided You cannot determine how the player perceives the difficulty of a challenge through absolute difficulty alone. You must also take into account two more factors. The first is the amount of power that the game gives to the player to meet the challenge. Power provided measures, by means appropriate to the situation, the player’s strength: the health and powers of his avatar, the size and makeup of his army, the performance characteristics of his racing car, or whatever factors apply. In the simple example described in the previous section, power provided would refer to the amount of damage the avatar can do when hitting the enemy and the avatar’s resistance to damage: the number of health points that he has to lose before dying.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“In the most general sense, a balanced game is fair to the player (or players), is neither too easy nor too hard, and makes the skill of the player the most important factor in determining his success. In”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Never forget that your ultimate goal is to create entertainment for the player—”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Designing the core mechanics consists of identifying the key entities and mechanics in the game and writing specifications to document the nature of the entities and the functioning of the mechanics. This is the very heart of the game designer’s job, and the more complex the game, the longer it takes—”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“In designing your game’s internal economy, you need to watch out for deadlocks, which can occur whenever there’s a loop in the production process. To avoid deadlocks, either avoid such loops or provide an alternative source for one of the resources.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Production Mechanisms Production mechanism describes a class of mechanics that make a resource conveniently available to a player. These include sources that bring the resource directly into the player’s hands, but they can also include special buildings, characters, or other facilities that gather resources from the landscape and make them available to the player.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Players don’t mind getting money for free, but when they have to spend it, they want to know why. Explain your drains.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Drains A drain is a mechanic that determines the consumption of resources—that is, a rule specifying how resources permanently drop out of the game (not to be confused with a converter, which we’ll look at next). In a shooter game, the player firing his weapon drains ammunition—that’s what makes ammunition, a resource, disappear. Being”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Sources If a resource or entity can come into the game world having not been there before, the mechanic by which it arrives is called a source.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Core Mechanics The core mechanics consist of the data and the algorithms that precisely define the game’s rules and internal operations.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Meretzky suggests that you consider the following:”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Concept Art and Model Sheets Concept art consists of drawings made early in the design process to give people an idea of what something in the game will look like—most often, a character. Many people involved in the game design, development, and production process will need such pictures. This includes everyone from the programmers (who might need to see a vehicle before they can correctly model its performance characteristics in software) to the marketing department (who will want to know what images they can use to help sell the game). By creating a number of different versions of a character, you can compare their different qualities and choose the one you like the best to be implemented by the game’s modeling and animation teams.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Ultimately, the violence in a game should serve the gameplay. If it doesn’t, then it’s gratuitous and you should consider doing without it. Realism”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Overused Settings All too often, games borrow settings from one another or from common settings found in the movies, books, or television. A huge number of games are set in science fiction and fantasy worlds, especially the quasi-medieval, sword-and-sorcery fantasy inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons, popular with the young people who used to be the primary—indeed, almost the only—market for computer games. But a more diverse audience plays games nowadays, and they want new worlds to play in. You should look beyond these hoary old staples of gaming.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“To someone who’s playing a game for the first time, the world is vital to creating and sustaining her interest. The other purpose of a game’s world is to sell the game in the first place. It’s not the game’s mechanics that make a customer pick up a box in a store but the fantasy it offers: who she’ll be, where she’ll be, and what she’ll be doing there if she plays that game. The”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“One of the purposes of a game world is simply to entertain in its own right: to offer the player a place to explore and an environment to interact with. As”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Game worlds are much more than the sum of the pictures and sounds that portray them. A game world can have a culture, an aesthetic, a set of moral values,”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Design Rule The Story Comes Later Do not spend a lot of time devising a story at the concept stage. This is a cardinal error frequently made by people who are more used to presentational media such as books and film. You must concentrate most of your efforts on the gameplay at this point. Types”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design