Game Design: Week 4

When you play a new game the first thing you need to do is understand how to play it, or else you can't play it, no brainier huh. So I priority of a designer should be for them to create a product that can be understood rather quickly and preferably intuitively. Having a large manual or long tutorial accompanying a game isn't out right the wrong thing to do, especially when the game has many complex mechanics in it, but many simpler smaller details should be as intuitive as possible.

This can be achieved through association with other games and habits, for example thanks to Legend of Zelda whenever I see one section of discoloured wall I am tempted to blow it up, and quite a few other games have used that logic and thus have never needed to teach me what areas of the environment are destructible. How often does a video game outline that red barrels are destructible? Not many, do you shoot it anyway expecting it to explode? Of course. Sometimes it's just building mechanics that just make reasonable sense or just creating an obvious path, such as throwing a barrel of water onto fire puts out the fire which in Divinity Original Sin 2 is never explained, and in the Uncharted series when you can always tell what rocks and walls are climbable. The Assassin's Creed series even has some of it's own internal cues that repeatedly make appearances, such as where ever there is a white cloth or sheet draped over an object then that object is the beginning of a movement path, and even the locations of pigeons indicate you can jump to a hay bail from there.

Sometimes it is difficult to account for this, I can't even think of my own examples right now from board games that aren't just factors borrowed from other games, so it is not a cardinal sin to include manuals and tutorials, but the faster players can learn how to play the faster they can get into the game and the less frustrated they will be with the rules. There is also something satisfying of seeing  something in a game and thinking "what would happen if I did this?..." and discovering new interesting ways to play with clues that have been laid out for them. Honestly though, if someone isn't really willing to learn how to play a game whether it's through a manual or trial and error, they don't really deserve to play it.