Crafting Fun Gameplay

Hey devs,

I've begun design production on a new project and where it's currently headed has me worried that the gameplay experience isn't going to be an engaging, challenging or fun gameplay experience. How do you guys and girls find fun gameplay? What am I missing and/or what should I be looking for to make sure the gameplay is as fun as possible?

Thanks

 

That's a hard question because everyone finds fun in different things. I haven't published but our group project in class was shot down because the panel said they couldn't see the fun. The main criticisms we got were:

• What does the player do when they are stunned? I'd get pissed off if I couldn't do anything
• There's to many options, the player will get confused
• What's the 1 core mechanic
• What's the 1 core thing the player is doing/has to do

We went back, stripped everything back to one aim, 1 side aim & 2 attacks (1 Melee, 1 ranged). The prototype was fun using the attacks & we forgot about the main aim. Keeping it simple & focused worked for us in the end.

 

cool so simplicity is important I'll keep that in mind thanks

 

Have you listened to the Game Design Zen podcasts (link in sig)? There are several episodes that address your question. In summary, fun is ambiguous - it's also subjective from person to person. So, instead, I focus on Flow, which has 4 ingredients:

1. Clear Goals
2. Immediate Feedback
3. No Distractions
4. Balanced Difficulty

Simplicity becomes important, because it assists with #3 and #4. It also helps the player understand #1. Finally, simplicity helps players connect their actions to outcomes, which hits #2. So, simplicity helps with all 4 of the ingredients needed for deep engagement.

Fun is a much broader topic.

Gigi

 

Yes and no. Simplicity makes it easier to explain, i.e. the jumping and navigation of Mario, which makes it a better pitch. From a development standpoint, it's safer. It's safer to start with a core set of mechanics and expand on that by adding variance, going from introducing a mechanic to mastering it.

It's not the be all, end all though. The polar opposite is giving the player a box of random mechanics and leaving the player to their own devices. It's just hard to explain how this random box will actually create a good time. Try to explain Minecraft without bringing up legos or building blocks, which would allow you to draw parallels in terms of experience.

 

1. You do a prototype.
2. if sux goto 1
3. convert prototype to game

 

The first thing is to narrow your prototype to the core feature of the game. Then you play it, and if it isn´t fun, you figure out why. A lot of people spend a ton of time adding fluff to unfun games, which will not help. You need to start with the protoype core feature already feeling like a fun game.

The second thing is to determine who you want to have fun playing your game and target them. There are a LOT of players who are more than happy playing very boring games as long as there is incremental achievements/upgrades. There is nothing wrong with developing a game that those type of players find fun. Conversely there are twitch type players who love nothing more than a split second decision to achieve victory, and then there are the chess players... and of course a wide blending in the middle. Be true to your target audience. If you want to build a deep thinking strategy game, adding brain-dead time-limited achievement elements to it will make your game less fun. Don´t try to be everything for everyone in a single game.

1. Progress
2. Overcoming a Challenge / Winning
3. Adrenaline

 

Overly-designing something can make it not fun... too much control... sometimes its fun to break the rules, or go against what the game intended and add your own fun. Can you build that in? Not really.

 

Not to go off on a tangent, but I think a good example of this is WOW the last few years. They are so obsessed with balance and micro-managing the progression players can make that they took all the fun out of it and every task feels like a daily chore where you are walking lock-step with 90% of other players.

 

Daily quests etc aren't balance or fun, they're pure time sink mechanics for developer purposes to retain subscriptions longer.

 

Not to go off on a tangent, but I think a good example of this is WOW the last few years. They are so obsessed with balance and micro-managing the progression players can make that they took all the fun out of it and every task feels like a daily chore where you are walking lock-step with 90% of other players.

 

Thanks for all the advice guys. I'll be sure to keep it all in mind and try and make the best game possible.

 

I have this idea in my head of "fun". Someone created a graphic showing the theory of fun some time ago and I still remember it.

Basically what makes something fun is a balance between a challenge and skill. To most, its not fun to play a game where its either too easy, or impossible to complete a game task. You have to find the right balance.

I've not actually gotten to the combat mechanics in my game development adventures, so I can't comment too accurately but my assumption regarding things like action games: when you create the game, you want the player to be able to survive with skills. If a bullet travels so slowly he can easily dodge it, that's not fun. That's a cake walk! At the same time you want your bullets to travel quick enough to hit the player if lead or aimed directly at them; but set the level of AI difficulty at whatever difficulty the player is at. If the easiest difficulty has the bots shooting the player 25% of the time, and the player can sort of mitigate that by "dodging" then you might have good "easy" gameplay. If on easy the bullet misses by a mile regardless it may not be fun because there is no challenge.

Fun is a balance between "Do I have to try hard to win?" and "Do I have to try at all to win?". Of course learning new thing is fun too and that is part of the process. Shooter games are hard to invent new stuff with because well, a bullet can only travel so many ways and a character/ship/car can only dodge in so many different ways.

 

But some people find it a lot of fun dressing up in latex while wearing a suffocating gimp mask. They may further squeal with pleasure when chased by a pink feather duster.

What I mean is: fun doesn't always make sense and you can't get it from graphs. Graphs only show one aspect among probably, millions.

 

That game sounds a bit like youtuber bait though

 

Hahaha, I love you guys!

 

What is fun? There are many descriptions out there. I love Ian Bogost's interpretation of fun as the feeling of operating interactive bits, when faced with a system, be it a game, or an app, any system with a set of rules. In his opinion, fun is that engagement that keeps us moving pieces about, seeing what interacts with each other, discovering what actions you can perform.

You can check out his talk on fun here.

This really changed my perspective on fun and now when I'm building mechanics I focus on how they interact with each other, and what cool emergent actions the players can perform. When observing players engage with the game, it's always great feedback to hear them have fun with those actions, affecting the world in various ways.