What Feelings Does Your Game Deliver?
Small decisions can influence player’s emotions and behaviors.
Hello from the second issue of GameDev’s Journey! Thank you for those who subscribed the newsletter since the last issue. You should receive a Notion template as a thank you when you subscribe. Let me know if you didn’t. I’m planning to create more templates that might help you in the future.
In this is issue, we’ll be looking at why the same gameplay mechanic works in one game while it doesn’t in another, what makes Expeditions: Rome good, few tutorials, and couple of other things that might be useful for you.
LET’S GO.
Game Design
In his recent video in Game Maker’s Toolkit, Mark Brown talks about why the same mechanic works in one game while it doesn’t in another. He offers valuable insights about getting influenced by other games.
Here are some key points from the video:
Small decisions can influence player’s emotions and behaviors
If you set the ammo limit high, for instance, the player will spend less time exploring the environment to find ammo. Or if you make the enemies strong, players will think twice before using their resources.
How do you want your player to feel?
One thing you might consider when implementing a gameplay mechanic is the emotions you want to evoke in the player. Ask yourself “Does this mechanic help me evoke the feeling I want to deliver?” If you want players to be afraid of making mistakes, maybe you shouldn’t allow them to save their progress whenever they want.
Fun doesn’t always mean good
Just because it’s fun, it doesn’t mean it’s fitting for the game. Yes, shooting a zombie horde is fun. But is it cohesive with the overall experience you are trying to forge?
What is the vision of your game?
Is it creating a motivational hero’s journey? Or putting the player in the boots of a crime lord? Whatever it is, you should always keep that vision in mind when making decisions.
These are just a few points from the video. Make sure to watch it!
Game Analysis
Expeditions: Rome
Sure life is full of pain and misery. But it’s also full of beauty and wonder. You should endure the former and live for the latter. There is so much to experience still. - Caeso Quinctius Aquilinus
Developed by Logic Artists, Expeditions: Rome is a tactical role-playing game that takes you to Rome, Egypt and Gallia. As a fan of TRPGs, I enjoyed the game very much although the game did its best to stop that time to time.
Let’s look at what we can learn from the game.
The importance of voice acting
The game has a solid voice acting. I hardly skipped any dialogues because even the boring parts were really enjoyable to listen to.
Well-executed voice acting allows NPCs to be better characterized and makes them more memorable. It also helps us as players to connect with them more. (I love you, Calida.)
If this game didn't have voice acting, which is either absent or partial in this genre of games, I'm sure the game would have left a smaller impression in my mind.
Historical support
Throughout our adventure, we meet historical figures like Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, and get the chance to visit historical places. This contributes significantly to the game's immersion. Of course, this is not something that can be applied to every game, but drawing from history can make games much more interesting.
Made simple
There is no complex combat system in Expeditions: Rome, like in Pillars of Eternity or Pathfinder: Kingmaker. As far as I can tell, the development team has tried to make the combat system easy to learn as much as possible. You learn almost everything you need to know in just one or two battles, and this knowledge is enough for the rest of the game.
Long game, multiple acts
The game consists of three acts. I think dividing relatively long games into acts makes them easier to consume. Every time I finish an act, I feel a small sense of achievement, and I learn that I am making progress and getting one step closer to the end of the game. This encourages me to continue playing the game instead of moving on to another one.
What if we remove…
The game has a weird legion battle mechanic. You watch icons move around the screen, then choose which strategy you want to apply from cards.
And that’s it. The game has plenty of this and it’s neither fun nor challenging. Yes, it makes sense logically to have a legion battle mechanic, but if we removed it, the game would lose nothing. That made me think which mechanics would not change anything if I removed them from my game.
There are many other game design details in the game that can be analyzed. These are just the ones that stayed in my mind a month after finishing it.
Tutorials
Trying to implement stealth mechanics to my game, I found this short series by Sebastian Lague. It’s not something advanced, but it gives you a pretty good start that you can build upon.
We run three checks in the script we attached to the enemy object:
First we check whether the player is in the view distance of the enemy
We check if the angle between the enemy's forward direction and direction to the player is within the view angle
Then we check whether the enemy's line of sight is blocked by an obstacle
If the enemy passes all these check, we return true.
Inspiration
In Other Waters, an adventure game where you assist a xenobiologist find his way through a foreign ocean, has been sitting in my Steam library for months and I’ve finally picked it up. Its visuals, ideas, mechanics are all inspiring.
Other
Here is a free asset library called The Base Mesh. It has 800+ base meshes.
Showcase
Me
Reading: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. It talks about how to re-imagine your life with a designer’s mindset. It’s full of idea-generating exercises and useful insights. Some exercises can be useful for game development, I’ll talk about them in the future.
Watching: Years & Years. A show my girlfriend discovered. Only watched two episodes so far, but I enjoyed them very much. Far too relatable…
Playing: In Other Waters.
Listening:
And that’s it from this issue. I hope you enjoyed it and find it useful. If you did, please like and leave a comment. Let me know your thoughts, suggestions, objections, etc. Let’s turn this into something that every developer can take advantage of.
But regardless, thank you so much for reading, and have a great game dev journey!