Dynamics game design

Chat in the GameDev. Back to Game Design and Theory. Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics Game Design. Game Design and Theory. Do you see issues with this article?

Let us know. It was one of the earliest attempts to formalize game design. It's fundamental to how we look at game genres, and it teaches some very helpful lessons to new game designers. This article will help you to begin looking at games differently; not by the rules they use or the things you do while playing them, but by the underlying reasons one might find the game interesting or appealing.

For designers, deciding those reasons early when designing your game will help to focus you on the things that you find truly important for your game, which will result in an altogether more organized and powerful game experience. For game players, knowledge about these reasons will help to tighten your grip on what you truly enjoy in your games, which can help you better decide which games to buy in the future.

And if a player spends even more time with that game, they may eventually have a strong enough grasp of the Mechanics to see how the Dynamics are emerging from them. If a game is a sphere that is designed from the inside out, it is played from the outside in.

This is one of the key points of MDA. The designer creates the Mechanics and everything flows outward from that. The player experiences the Aesthetics and then their experience flows inward. As designers, we must be aware of both of these ways of interacting with a game.

Otherwise, we are liable to create games that are fun for designers but not players. Spawn points are a mechanic. This leads to the dynamic where a player may sit next to a spawn point and immediately kill anyone as soon as they respawn. And lastly, the aesthetics would likely be frustration at the prospect of coming back into play only to be killed again immediately. Suppose you are designing a new FPS and you notice this frustration aesthetic in your game, and you want to fix this so that the game is not as frustrating.

You cannot even change the dynamics of spawn camping directly; you cannot tell the players how to interact with your game, except through the mechanics. So instead, you must change the mechanics of the game — maybe you try making players respawn in random locations rather than designated areas — and then you hope that the desired aesthetics emerge from your mechanics change.

How do you know what change to make, if the effects of mechanics changes are so unpredictable? We will get into some basic tips and tricks later. For now, the most obvious way is designer intuition. The more you practice, the more you design games, the more you make rules changes and then playtest and see the effects of your changes, the better you will get at making the right changes when you notice problems… and occasionally, even creating the right mechanics in the first place.

There are few substitutes for experience… which, incidentally, is why so much of this course involves getting you off your butt and making games :. Generally, adding additional mechanics, new systems, additional game objects, and new ways for objects to interact with one another or for players to interact with the game will lead to a greater complexity in the dynamics of the game.

For example, compare Chess and Checkers. Chess has six kinds of pieces instead of two and a greater number of actions that each piece can take, so it ends up having more strategic depth. Is more complexity good, or bad? It depends. Tetris is a very simple but still very successful game. Some games are so simple that they are not fun beyond a certain age, like Tic-Tac-Toe.

Other games are too complex for their own good, and would be better if their systems were a bit more simplified and streamlined. Do more complex mechanics always lead to more complex dynamics? No — there are some cases where very simple mechanics create extreme complexity as is the case with Chess.

The best way to gauge complexity, as you may have guessed, is to play the game. One kind of dynamic that is often seen in games and deserves special attention is known as the feedback loop. There are two types, positive feedback loops and negative feedback loops. These terms are borrowed from other fields such as control systems and biology, and they mean the same thing in games that they mean elsewhere. A positive feedback loop can be thought of as a reinforcing relationship.

Something happens that causes the same thing to happen again, which causes it to happen yet again, getting stronger in each iteration — like a snowball that starts out small at the top of the hill and gets larger and faster as it rolls and collects more snow. Once you beat the game, you got access to a special extra gameplay mode.

In this mode, you got rewarded with power-ups at the end of each level based on your score: the higher your score, the more power-ups you got for the next level. This is a positive feedback loop: if you get a high score, it gives you more power-ups, which make it easier to get an even higher score in the next level, which gives you even more power-ups, and so on. Note that in this case, the reverse is also true. Suppose you get a low score.

Then you get fewer power-ups at the end of that level, which makes it harder for you to do well on the next level, which means you will probably get an even lower score, and so on until you are so far behind that it is nearly impossible for you to proceed at all. The thing that is often confusing to people is that both of these scenarios are positive feedback loops.

There are three properties of positive feedback loops that game designers should be aware of:. Feedback loops usually have two steps as in my The Guardian Legend example but they can have more. For example, some Real-Time Strategy games have a positive feedback loop with four steps: players explore the map, which gives them access to more resources, which let them buy better technology, which let them build better units, which let them explore more effectively which gives them access to more resources… and the cycle repeats.

As such, detecting a positive feedback loop is not always easy. Game designers are unable to directly construct gameplay but have to use other tools, such as rules, narrative and art, to influence the play. This knowledge will be essential when constructing and designing games in the future.

Hocking, C. Dynamics: The State of the Art [Video]. Hunicke, R. LeBlanc, M. Jun 15 I could tote the obvious example of such a game: But I want to use this opportunity to examine this idea more deeply in terms of my favourite game, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. These separate abilities will work together to produce an incredibility interesting combination that will influence how I attack and fight monsters: This might not seem that interesting — maybe the author really intended that combination and style of play.

Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Create a free website or blog at WordPress. Follow Following. Erika's Uni Blog. Sign me up. Already have a WordPress. Log in now. Loading Comments