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Casual Game Design
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Designing games everyone can enjoy
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Worthwhile experience
In my article on rewards, I write that a game must offer a worthwhile experience. I deliberately chose this phrasing over the more ubiquitous ‘games should be fun’. Fun isn’t necessarily the name of the game.
A worthwhile experience can mean that you are having fun, but that’s just one way of being worthwhile. Challenging your [...]
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Manuals, not tutorials
It’s quite obvious that a player can’t enjoy your game, if she doesn’t know how to play it. Most game designers recognize this problem and take steps to remedy it, but in my opinion, they often go too far.
Civilization is quite a complex game, but it’s still not hard to pick it up and play, [...]
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A bad start is a bad start
This weekend I picked up a copy of Aquanox 2 from the bargain bin. The game is set under water and you captain a small vessel and the main gameplay involves shooting at various enemies. The first mission in the game has what I consider a significant design flaw.
No matter what you do, you can’t [...]
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Replay
In light of the game design contest over at Jay Is Games, I thought I’d write something about the competition’s theme: replay. Since my skills with Flash are close to non-existent, I won’t be entering the contest myself, but hopefully this article will help some of you who do have a go at the prizes.
Replayability
Some [...]
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Game Design Competition
There’s a Flash Game Design competition over at Jay Is Games, so if you’re skilled in Flash and you like to show the world what you are capable of: this is your chance.
Here’s the scoop: you, casual gamer / game designer / Flash whiz, design a game in Flash (version 8, AS 2.0 or version [...]
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Exploring the game
You’ve created a game full of levels, exciting game modes and whatnot. It would be a shame if the player only got to see a part of it, wouldn’t it? Fortunately, there are some things you can do to encourage the player to explore your game. Basically, you want to reward the player for playing [...]
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Fun takes time
In a post on the Indiegamer forum, Chris Tolworthy writes the following:
The real problem, the one that I didn’t factor into my schedule, is that FUN takes time. It’s not enough to just make game that technically gets from A to B. I allowed for that, plus extra for the unexpected. But I did not [...]
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Designing Play with Fire: an interview with Chris Bateman
Where does fire go when it dreams? Any game that allows you to not only be a ball of fire, but also to experience its dreams, must be worth checking out. Chris Bateman talks about the design of his most recent game, Play with Fire.
Originality
Playing a ball of fire is quite a novel concept. [...]
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Mile markers
A couple of friends of mine are preparing to run half a marathon in April. They ran that same distance a couple of months ago, but in another city (another country, in fact), so they had some expectations about the organisation of the event. One thing they were disappointed about in the upcoming marathon, is [...]
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Travel woes
Quite a few games have the protagonist travel around on a map of some kind. More often than not, this results in some boring moments later on in the game. At first, the travelling is fresh and interesting, because every place is new, but when the player has discovered a significant amount of the territory, [...]
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