Continuing from my previous article where I gave starting 5 tips on great game design, continuing on 10 Steps to great game design part1. Here are the next five!!!. Give a fair chance to win.
Everyone loves a winner, and everybody loves to win a game. That’s why you play it. Some people might think that an extremely difficult game will make it more exciting, but if you do and people cannot solve it, will they play again? Games are played to relax them, to diver minds,s and to make them happy when they win. Too difficult games can make them irritated results; you lose the player. Make them happy, give them powers and points.
7. Never go overboard with rewards
Don’t just keep giving them points and make them so powerful that they feel, “hah, who made this game? It’s so easy. Let me find another difficult game”. Make it a fair decision, give them points and take away when necessary so they keep up with the game.
8. Never ignore the story.
If you can have a story of the game you are designing, it will create an image in the mind of gamers. This not only will help them to get more understanding of the game but also find clues. Just make sure your story fits the game. I remember playing warcraft. It has such an awesome introduction of the 4 tribes it had. It was easy to understand some of the typical nature of those tribes and gave a strong image of how the AI was designed.
9. Give them some secret doors and mysteries.
In some games, the author purposely makes some secret things. Like a secret path, some hidden doors can trap the user or give them a key to the next stage. Make them a little difficult and keep them more invisible, but give users a hint somewhere that makes them feel “Something is there; I had seen it flashing once.”
10. Long Live the game:
Many talented adventure games become dust collections after players have solved them. Often this can be prevented or at least delayed by a little extra effort on the author’s part. Give some of your puzzles multiple solutions. Think of imaginative ways of dying and humorous tricks for the player to try. Some adventures have multiple endings depending on various things the player has done during the course of time.
You might consider what I said above if you see yourself making mistakes like that. Designing a good text adventure is long and frustrating, but the end can be rewarding. Good interactive fiction is always in demand. I Am not a designer, but that’s what I felt when I played games. So I thought, why not make it into points?