FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN
GAME PLAY
Just E.T.C for Business, Education, and Technology Solutions
Sayed Ahmed
1
BSc. Eng. in CSc. & Eng. (BUET)
MSc. in CSc. (U of Manitoba)
http://sayed.justetc.net
http://www.justETC.net
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Presented at the University of Winnipeg, Canada
TOPICS
Definition of Gameplay
 How we make games fun
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Some things that you need to be aware of
 Principles you need to observe
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Important ideas related to gameplay
Hierarchy of challenges
 The concepts of skill, stress, and difficulty
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Types of challenges that games offer
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How you might present them
Mistakes you should avoid
How to adjust their difficulty
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TOPICS
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Actions
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Common types of actions found in games
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When and how to save a game
 Summary
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MAKING GAME FUN
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Through gameplay
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Execution matters more than innovation
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Through story
Avoid things that reduces fun
Aspects of game development that contribute to
fun
Avoiding elementary errors
 Tuning & polishing
 Imaginative variations on the Game’s Premise
 True design innovation
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ASPECTS CONTRIBUTING TO FUN
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Avoiding elementary errors
 Avoid bad programming, bad music and sound, bad
art, bad user interfaces, and bad game design
Tuning & polishing
Pay attention to details, get everything perfect
Imaginative variations on the Game’s Premise
 Take basic elements of the game and construct
enjoyable experience
 Level designers may help
True design innovation
 5% of fun, game’s original idea and subsequent
decisions
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FINDING THE FUN FACTOR
Game play comes first
 Get a feature right or leave it out
 Design around the player
 Know your target audience
 Abstract or automate parts of the simulation that
are not fun
 Be true to your vision
 Strive for harmony, elegance, and beauty

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FINDING THE FUN FACTOR
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Game play comes first
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Get a feature right or leave it out
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Fun things to do
Don’t ship games with broken feature
 Better leave that feature
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Design around the player
Examine every decision from the player’s point of
view
 If you lose sight of the player, you lose fun
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Know your target audience
Hard to make games that appeal to mass market
 Find a niche, and know what they want, and what
they think is fun
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FINDING THE FUN FACTOR

Abstract or automate parts of the simulation that
are not fun
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Racing games – casual gamer -Changing a tire is not
fun (provide abstraction)
 Hardcore racing fan – may be changing tire is fun
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Be true to your vision
Be stick to your original idea and goal
 If you are making sailing simulation – don’t add
power boats
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Strive for harmony, elegance, and beauty
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Absence of Aesthetic qualities diminish the fun to
some extent
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HANDLING AND PRESENTING CHALLENGES
 Hierarchy
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How the hierarchy affects the players’
experience
and what that means for game design
 Informing the player about challenges
 Atomic, highest level, and the intermediate
challenges
 Simultaneous atomic challenges
 Skill, stress, and absolute difficulty
 Intrinsic skill, Stress, Absolute Difficulty
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
of challenges
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HIERARCHY OF CHALLENGES
Atomic challenges
 Sub missions
 Missions
 Ultimate goal
 Lowest level challenges are called atomic
challenges
 Atomic challenges make up sub-missions, submissions make up missions and missions make
up the ultimate goal
 Design your game

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Create the hierarchy
 Decide what challenges the player will face
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INFORMING THE PLAYER ABOUT CHALLENGES
Explicit challenges
 Implicit challenges
 In general, games give explicit instructions on
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Tutorial levels
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How to meet those atomic challenges
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Topmost level : victory condition, may be for each
level
 Bottommost level
 Leave intermediate levels for her discovery
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In story telling games
You may want to keep the outcome a surprise
 Detective stories
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INTERMEDIATE CHALLENGES
Keep these to be explored by the player
 Provide multiple ways of victory
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SIMULTANEOUS ATOMIC CHALLENGES
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As a designer, you should
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Vertically up
 Bottom
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More simultaneous atomic challenges with time
pressure
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The more different levels of challenge, he will
have to think at once
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The more stressful will be the game
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Design the hierarchy of challenges
Decide how many of them the player will face at once
The game becomes more complex and mentally
challenging
Example: Simcity, action games
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SKILL, STRESS, ABSOLUTE DIFFICULTY
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Intrinsic skills
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Stress
When the challenge includes time pressure
 Quick reflex, quick mind
 Tetris – stressful
 Physical stress
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Moderate them
 Time to rest
 Some player like this
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Absolute Difficulty
Complex skills required
 Tremendous time pressure
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Unlimited amount of time
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COMMONLY USED CHALLENGES
Physical coordination challenges
 Speed and reaction time
 Accuracy and precision
 Intuitive understanding of Physics
 Timing and rhythm
 Combination moves
 Logic and Mathematical Challenges
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Races and time pressure
 Factual knowledge challenges
 Memory challenges
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Formal logic puzzles
 Mathematical Challenges
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COMMONLY USED CHALLENGES
Pattern recognition challenges
 Exploration challenges
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Spatial awareness challenges
Locked doors
Traps
Mazes and illogical spaces
Teleporters
Finding hidden objects
Conflict
 Strategy
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Tactics
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COMMONLY USED CHALLENGES
Logistics
 Survival and reduction of enemy forces
 Defending vulnerable items or units
 Stealth
 Economic challenges
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Accumulating resources
 Achieving Balance
 Caring for living things
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COMMONLY USED CHALLENGES
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Conceptual Reasoning and Lateral Thinking
Puzzles
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Conceptual reasoning
 Lateral thinking
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ACTIONS
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Actions for Gameplay
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Give Limited number of actions
Defining your actions
 Actions that Serve other functions
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Unstructured play
Actions for creation & self expression
Actions for socialization
Actions to participate in the story
Actions to control the game software
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To reduce UI
 To reduce large number of animations
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DEFINING YOUR ACTIONS
Define the actions that you will implement
 Think about what the player will do in the game
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The challenges he will face
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Think about intermediate and higher level
challenges
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Start with atomic challenges
Allowed actions to overcome those challenges for each
atomic challenge
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Drive a car
 Finer details: press accelerator, shift gears
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Can those be over comed with the challenges that you
have defined
Consider actions unrelated to games
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ACTIONS THAT SERVE OTHER FUNCTIONS
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Unstructured Play
Include some fun to perform actions that don’t address any
challenges
 Move around, horn beep for car racing
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Actions for creation and self-expression
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Actions for socialization
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Players of the multiplayer games need to chat
Actions to participate in the story
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Customizing the avatar
Construction games – creative play than game play
Interactive dialogs – take part in the story
May not address any challenge
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
Actions to control the game software
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Adjust the virtual camera
Pause and save the game
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SAVING THE GAME
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Save the Game
Snapshot of the game world and all the particulars
 Even customizations made by the player
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Reasons for Saving a Game
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Allowing the player to leave the game and return to it later
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Letting the player recover from disastrous mistakes
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Most important reason
For example, death of the avatar
Arcade games – multiple life (sometimes console action games)
Role playing and adventure – just reload the game (one life)
Encourage the player to explore alternate strategies
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Strategic games, save, try a different strategy, come back if the
strategy does not work
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IMMERSION AND STORYTELLING
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Consequences for Immersion & storytelling
Saving games is not always beneficial to the player’s
experience
 The saving act takes him out of the game world

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Harms the player’s immersion
 Harms the illusion that the player inhabits a fantasy world
 When you allow the player to repeat the past
 You acknowledge the unreality of the game world
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WAYS OF SAVING A GAME
Passwords
 Save to a file or Save slot
 Quick-Save
 Automatic Save & checkpoints

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WAYS OF SAVING A GAME
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Passwords
At the end of a level, give the user a password to start next
level
 He can decide to play the next level at a later time
 No saving in the middle
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Save to a file or Save slot
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Allow saving using the file system
Prevents immersion
Salvage the immersion by referring the file system as
journals and provide appropriate UI – kept in a book
Quick-Save
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Fast games offer quick save
Press a button and save – does not harm immersion a lot
Single button press to reload as well
Disadvantages
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One slot, can be overcomed by numbered slots
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WAYS OF SAVING A GAME
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Automatic Save & checkpoints
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Automatically save the player when the player exits
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Does not harm the immersion
 But no way to recover from a recent or past disaster
Games save when the player passed a checkpoint
May or may not be visible to the player
 Less disruptive than quick-saving
 The player may be able to recover a disaster provide that
the disaster happened after the most recent checkpoint
 Worse than quick save: considering player centric [though
provides better immersion]
 You may offer optional checkpoints
 Saving at will is preferable

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TO SAVE OR NOT TO SAVE
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Some designers don’t allow to save the game
At certain region/point
 Or don’t allow saving a lot
 The logic behind this is:
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The player is winning the game not because of his/her skills
but with trial and error
It allows the user to avoid undesirable random events
It prevents the immersion of the game
Other designers argue that
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Preventing to save adds difficulty not fun
To make games harder, you can make the challenges harder
The player should not be forced to play the entire game just
because he has made a mistake near the end
 Wastes players’ time and [not good for fun]
 Causes frustration and boredom
 Not a player centric game design
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TO SAVE OR NOT TO SAVE
You may not like the saving and reloading
 But the player does not play (or buy) to make you
feel good
 He may have legitimate reasons to save the game
 The notion that allowing saving the game makes
the game easy – make the player your opponent
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Players want and sometimes need
 To cheat by offering cheat codes anyway
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Not a player centric design
 If the players’ want, you should allow saving
 Most players want this
 Most games now recognize that
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TO SAVE OR NOT TO SAVE
You should not penalize the player just because
he has to go the washroom
 You may think about advantages and
disadvantages and decide
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But the player has the fundamental right to stop
playing without losing whatever he has
accomplished
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But do let the player save the game, and preferably
whenever and wherever he want
 Now to save or not to save – leave it to the player
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SUMMARY
Gameplay is the heart of the game’s
entertainment
 With the information that we discussed
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You will be able to analyze the gameplay of most of
the games in the market
 You will also be able to design games offering similar
kinds of challenges and actions
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