Max Nichols' Game Design blog
Every game has what I call a “surface area” for its gameplay systems. At a fundamental level, what we are doing when we design progression systems is deciding how we want to dole out access to that surface area as rewards.
So today I want to talk about the concept of a game’s surface area, and how that interacts with or enables progression systems!
I hooked up my 360 and Guitar Hero 2 and was shockedpikachu.jpg that my skills had decayed enough that I had to play Medium, hahah.
There’s a lot of great stuff about the game, but I think it is really an absolute masterclass in difficulty ramp design, and teaching players mastery. It’s worth study.
For years I’ve thought about how games about exploration or immersion in a place work.
This is one of my five most important pillars:
“Player attention is on the game world”
The most beautiful, luscious worlds are squandered by games with systems and mechanics that draw attention away from them.
The reason crafting is in every game now: It’s like money laundering for game designers
Let me explain.
Let’s first look at Zelda 1.
Unicorn Overlord and Metaphor have me musing–
Combining these makes me feel TRANSPORTED to a big new game world:
– Maximalist ui
– Maximalist music
– En media res opening
– Multiscan environments
– Complex systems (slowly ramped)
– Unfamiliar controls
– Culture Shock
– Novelty
After 9 years–fully half of my adult life–I was let go from Bungie this morning, along with MANY other amazing folks.
Getting to work on a game like this, where I made and helped make experiences that are enjoyed by millions of people, was a huge privilege.
But I don’t want to leave this off with a simple “it was a privilege, thank you Bungie”.
If you’re reading this you have already heard about The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and likely seen the trailer. The series has finally hit a major milestone: we get to play as the titular Princess Zelda herself. So why did this happen now? I think we can trace a direct line from a design philosophy called “multiplicative design”, first seen in Breath of the Wild, to a playable Zelda now.
Let’s dig in.
Unicorn Overlord’s Tactics (unit AI) system is a masterstroke of systems design.
It elevates the game far beyond just being the spiritual successor to Ogre Battle that it seemed at first, and catapults every element to greater heights.
I was asked to provide a blurb for this GamesRadar piece, which I was more than happy to do! I wrote about how impressed I was at the Zelda team’s success attempt to find ways for players to see consistent and predictable results from physics gameplay.
Occasionally I post some mostly coherent Twitter threads on game design. Some of them are worth saving here. – Max As a player, I often…
The core question is: how do you make sure that the player sees what they need to see?
Lots of strategies. “Detective vision” is one that works in some cases that are otherwise hard to solve for.
GameDesign rambles-
I love moments of “recontextualization” in game worlds.
This is part of why exploring in Zelda or Metroidvania games feels good, why you keep coming back to stages in Pokemon Snap… and why live-service games can struggle to give those feelings.
I gave a presentation on the Technical Game Design role via Twitch at the Indy Summer Showcase in July 2020. In it I include my definition of tech design, some examples of what tech design work is like in a AAA studio, and some detail on how one can become a Tech Designer.
Let’s talk about high vs low granularity in game design, which has always been one of my favorite topics. From Wikipedia: “Granularity refers to the extent to which a material or system is composed of distinguishable pieces”.
In the context of game design, many things can be either high or low granularity, such as:
Let’s talk about a problem that plagues live service games.
If your game relies on releasing MORE content in pre-existing categories –
characters in League of Legends or Overwatch, exotics in Destiny, new cards in Magic: The Gathering – then there are
two fundamental design problems you need to solve:
– Diminishing Returns: How do you make content that is as exciting on the Nth update as it was on the first update? How can your 50th piece of content compete with all 49 previous pieces?
– Narrowing Design Space: How do you leave room for each new thing to feel unique and different over time?
Fifteen years after Ocarina of Time, the Zelda team finally retired its time-worn solutions to the problems of 3D. They shifted their philosophy, drew from the inspiration for the first Legend of Zelda, and rebuilt the beating heart of the franchise from first principles.
Previously we examined the challenges of building the first 3D Zelda, and the tradeoffs that Ocarina made to maintain approachability. These compromises attempted to balance two unsolved problems: decreased readability, and greatly increased complexity. In this final article, we’ll see how Breath of the Wild found new solutions to those problems.
Tyson Green is an experienced designer at Bungie. I rarely work with him myself, but other designers who have will often quote this rule of his:…
Preface (3/24/2015): In 2011 I was tasked with designing an achievement system for one of the games I was working on. That system never saw…