Game Design

but you will need to make sure players actually prefer them to more traditional meth- ods. And as you gather their feedback, lon ...

RPG where each member of the players’ party needs to be fed regularly, but the game does not provide any clear way of easily com ...

very strongly that any sort of GUI would distance players from the game-world. As a result, Abe’s health is communicated to play ...

contains a lot of numbers or words. This explains the superiority of the health bar over a health number or percentage. The arti ...

the tone of the participants’ voices. InCommand & Conquer, players know that a unit has received a particular order by an au ...

Chapter 8 Game Analysis:Tetris .................. Chapter 8 Game Analysis:Tetris .................... Designed by Alexey Pajitno ...

gaming professionals, press and developers alike, resent the game for its sales? It would appear so. But this is not the case wi ...

presents a series of static puzzles to players, puzzles that never change and never react to the players’ actions. They argue th ...

slot with only two blocks from an upside-down “L”-shaped piece? Or should they hold out, waiting for that desperately needed “I” ...

Infinite Play:Tetrisallows players to keep playing until, through their own bad decisions, the blocks reach the top of the box. ...

The Technology............................... Another similarity betweenTetrisand classic arcade games is that none of those gam ...

Artificial Intelligence ............................ All the game has in terms of AI is the random number generator that picks t ...

becoming predictable while still making one player’s game comparable to another’s. Over the course of a game, players will get a ...

screen, they have less and less space in which to manipulate their pieces. When players accidentally drop a piece in the wrong l ...

find a perfect fit for a given piece. Certainly a game using five-square pieces could have been challenging in its own way, and ...

Chapter 9 Artificial Intelligence................... Chapter 9 Artificial Intelligence..................... “I’d basically watch ...

One could apply a similar test to computer games. If one is playing a game ofUnreal Tournamentand cannot tell if the opponent on ...

determining what the AI will do and actually programming that behavior are two fairly distinct tasks. The first primarily involv ...

characters move around in a town more or less “realistically.” In a game likeThe Sims, the AI more or less is the game; with wea ...

players by being more powerful and numerous than the player character. Creating a challenging AI for a real-time strategy game l ...