Discrete Element Game Design
Despite the fact that I'm primarily a programmer, in doing independent game development I need to be able to do design as well, and having a good design sense is always helpful in all areas of game development. As such, I figured I would write down some of my most important or interesting game design thoughts, and get feedback on them.
Types of Gameplay
Most computer games involve some mix of two different types of gameplay: tactical gameplay and action gameplay. Tactical gameplay revolves around making intelligent decisions, whereas action gameplay revolves around reacting quickly and precisely. A turn-based strategy game is a purely tactical game (your reaction time is completely immaterial, all that matters is your decisions), whereas a music game is purely action (you are not asked to make any decisions at all, merely to react quickly and precisely), but most games are somewhere in the middle.
Right now, I would like to explore what makes good tactical gameplay. I believe there are two primary elements here, one obvious and heavily acknowledged, and one less so.
Interesting Choices
The obvious element is balanced and interesting choices. The decisions available to you need to have a set of pros and cons which balance each other out, such that there are always multiple viable options. As Sid Meier famously puts it, "A game is a series of interesting choices." This aspect is well understood and acknowledged, and virtually every game design at least attempts to build a set of interesting choices, so I don't see the need to expand on it much further.
Informed Choices
The less obvious element is comprehensibility. The systems need to function in intuitive ways and all relevant and available information needs to be presented cleanly and understandably, such that the player, at a glance, has sufficient understanding of the situation, and of the implications of all his choices. If the player ever feels that they need to look up an equation, or pull out a calculator, in order to make an informed decision, then the game has likely failed. Many tactically-oriented games fail quite badly in this area, and this is one of the major elements that separates the tactical games I enjoy from the ones I don't. The frequency of games that don't seem to even realize that this is an issue leads me to think that this area could benefit from a lot more exploration.
There are a number of approaches to this. The simulationist approach strives to make the game so realistic that the results are intuitively obvious to anybody who lives in the real world. The action approach keeps things moving fast enough, and is forgiving enough, that the player doesn't have the time, or the need, to make perfectly informed choices. The approach I want to explore, however, is the discrete element approach.
Discrete Element Game Design
The idea with the discrete element approach is to build the gameplay out of a small set of discrete, easy to comprehend elements, increments and mechanics. Whenever possible, mechanics are used whose effects can be fully comprehended without the use of numbers. When numbers are used, they're restricted to whole integers, and kept small, and the arithmetic is, as much as possible, limited to simple addition and subtraction. This way, the player can usually take in the full situation, and the full implications of a given action, at a glance.
This is a much more difficult design principle than it sounds. When working on computer games, the call of complex equations and advanced, simulationist mechanics is hard to resist. The computer is capable of juggling so many factors and special cases, of effortlessly managing such complicated jumbles of equations and running so many numbers, it's tempting to just go crazy with all the wild and detailed mechanics which were never feasible in a board game or tabletop RPG. However, if you're not careful, the result will seem like an incomprehensible mess to the players. They won't really understand what's going on, or what the implications of their decisions are. In fact, whether a given mechanic would be feasible for a board game or tabletop RPG is a good guideline for whether it's consistent with the principles of discrete element design.
Within this design approach, the advantage of computer games over board games is not that you can have significantly more complicated mechanics, but primarily that you can build bigger, more involved games out of those mechanics. Where a small unit tactics board game might involve one map which takes four or five hours to complete, a small unit tactics computer game, using almost the same rules, could involve a 20 maps, which are each ten times larger, and the full game could take 80 hours to complete. Thanks to the computer's ability to keep track of larger environments, and save and restore games, whole new worlds open up, without having to resort to overly complicated rules.
I'd like to dig into more concrete examples, but I think I've already spent enough time writing this. I can try and get into some examples if people are interested in discussing it further.
(Note: I'm not actually recommending that discrete element design should be used in all circumstances, but just exploring it as one potent approach to the "informed choice" problem with tactical gameplay.)
Types of Gameplay
Most computer games involve some mix of two different types of gameplay: tactical gameplay and action gameplay. Tactical gameplay revolves around making intelligent decisions, whereas action gameplay revolves around reacting quickly and precisely. A turn-based strategy game is a purely tactical game (your reaction time is completely immaterial, all that matters is your decisions), whereas a music game is purely action (you are not asked to make any decisions at all, merely to react quickly and precisely), but most games are somewhere in the middle.
Right now, I would like to explore what makes good tactical gameplay. I believe there are two primary elements here, one obvious and heavily acknowledged, and one less so.
Interesting Choices
The obvious element is balanced and interesting choices. The decisions available to you need to have a set of pros and cons which balance each other out, such that there are always multiple viable options. As Sid Meier famously puts it, "A game is a series of interesting choices." This aspect is well understood and acknowledged, and virtually every game design at least attempts to build a set of interesting choices, so I don't see the need to expand on it much further.
Informed Choices
The less obvious element is comprehensibility. The systems need to function in intuitive ways and all relevant and available information needs to be presented cleanly and understandably, such that the player, at a glance, has sufficient understanding of the situation, and of the implications of all his choices. If the player ever feels that they need to look up an equation, or pull out a calculator, in order to make an informed decision, then the game has likely failed. Many tactically-oriented games fail quite badly in this area, and this is one of the major elements that separates the tactical games I enjoy from the ones I don't. The frequency of games that don't seem to even realize that this is an issue leads me to think that this area could benefit from a lot more exploration.
There are a number of approaches to this. The simulationist approach strives to make the game so realistic that the results are intuitively obvious to anybody who lives in the real world. The action approach keeps things moving fast enough, and is forgiving enough, that the player doesn't have the time, or the need, to make perfectly informed choices. The approach I want to explore, however, is the discrete element approach.
Discrete Element Game Design
The idea with the discrete element approach is to build the gameplay out of a small set of discrete, easy to comprehend elements, increments and mechanics. Whenever possible, mechanics are used whose effects can be fully comprehended without the use of numbers. When numbers are used, they're restricted to whole integers, and kept small, and the arithmetic is, as much as possible, limited to simple addition and subtraction. This way, the player can usually take in the full situation, and the full implications of a given action, at a glance.
This is a much more difficult design principle than it sounds. When working on computer games, the call of complex equations and advanced, simulationist mechanics is hard to resist. The computer is capable of juggling so many factors and special cases, of effortlessly managing such complicated jumbles of equations and running so many numbers, it's tempting to just go crazy with all the wild and detailed mechanics which were never feasible in a board game or tabletop RPG. However, if you're not careful, the result will seem like an incomprehensible mess to the players. They won't really understand what's going on, or what the implications of their decisions are. In fact, whether a given mechanic would be feasible for a board game or tabletop RPG is a good guideline for whether it's consistent with the principles of discrete element design.
Within this design approach, the advantage of computer games over board games is not that you can have significantly more complicated mechanics, but primarily that you can build bigger, more involved games out of those mechanics. Where a small unit tactics board game might involve one map which takes four or five hours to complete, a small unit tactics computer game, using almost the same rules, could involve a 20 maps, which are each ten times larger, and the full game could take 80 hours to complete. Thanks to the computer's ability to keep track of larger environments, and save and restore games, whole new worlds open up, without having to resort to overly complicated rules.
I'd like to dig into more concrete examples, but I think I've already spent enough time writing this. I can try and get into some examples if people are interested in discussing it further.
(Note: I'm not actually recommending that discrete element design should be used in all circumstances, but just exploring it as one potent approach to the "informed choice" problem with tactical gameplay.)