Delving Into The Design

So today, while listening to my 2 hour lecture I had a great idea...I think it’s a great idea anyway! Which lead me to a question! *hi5 self*

Can I create a game where the player learns by doing, rather than being told how to do it?

By this I mean, if I was to chuck the player into a game world, with no hints ATALL...meaning no tutorial level, no controls given etc. would they play the game and learn the controls themselves. One game that does this, and it is a very very big hit, is Minecraft. Now I'm not saying the game is going to be a sandbox game like Minecraft, I just mean it will be similar in the sense the player is dropped in the world with a pickaxe and they go and explore. This is why Minecraft does so well, because it appeals to our imagination and lets us do whatever we like. If I can throw a player in, and let them explore this world on their own I think that would appeal to their imagination more than us telling them where to go and what to do. With the setting for our game, and the genre for our game, this will be a difficult task in terms of level design but will deffinately test my skills!

I like this idea mainly because the sense of achievement would be a lot greater due to the player figuring things out themselves. Of course this would require a lot of testing to see if this works! Which leads me to my next point as found by talking to Josh, how important would feedback be? For example - 

- If you were put in a room with no objective and a multitude of objects around you, if you tried to pick one up, is it important that it appears on the HUD, or that a noise would play to tell you it has been picked up? or does that not matter?

- Would the player also do anything with the objects they picked up?

To test this I think I’m going to create a small level, and have a few people play it to see what happens.

Meanwhile, I did a bit more research into some games that are using a similar level layout to mine, Borderlands.
one in particular -
Borderlands 2 is a great game, but it does one thing wrong and thanks to an article on Kotaku I found out what it does wrong. It says that the enemies within the world are nothing more than - 'Concepts with legs, bipedal ideas with malicious form' (GB Burford, Kotaku.com) - and the more I think on that, the more I realise it's true. He later explains that the player would just pick the right 'Build' which is generally using an Acid based weapon, getting into cover when you're low on health, then pointing and clicking on a guy to shoot, then moving onto the next guy. This is something I want to totally avoid, mainly because I think making a truly difficult game, the enemies you face should always have a different tactic to beat them. The enemies in borderlands will just notice the player and attack them, moving to cover every now and then but nothing more. I want the enemies to use the environment to their advantage and surprise the player in different ways, similar to some enemies on other first person shooters (although our game will be an over the shoulder view, these are still good examples) such as Halo or Farcry 2 where enemies react differently to how they are attacked. The main thing I'd like for the enemies in our game is for the player to think how to defeat them, which is connected the question I have at the start of this post. If a player is faced with an enemy they have not been told how to defeat (like they are in most games now) if they then figured it out themselves they would feel great...I know I would anyway...but until they defeat them, they'd be running scared and confused yelling 'WHY WONT YOU DIE?!'.

Batman:Arkham City is another game with a similar layout, except this does things right. Thanks to an article on Postdesk.com, I found that the open world of Batman is actually one of the only open worlds that does it right. When playing games like Oblivion, GTA and all the other big open world games, they all have one thing in common when it comes to design. A lot of the quests are repeats of other quests you've done previously; therefore their worlds are over diluted. With so many quests to do and such a big world, a player would lose interest after doing the same quest 3-4 times. Some people might disagree with this, but to me I lost interest with Skyrim, because there were soooo many quests. So taking this into account, our game will have side missions...just not a lot and will be more thought out rather than repeats of previous ones.

This next week I'm going to create the small level mentioned above to see how people react, and hopefully the next posts will show the results!

Laters taters!