Determinance screenshot

Death is positive

death-is-positive

I’m designing Synapse’s single player right now.  The core gameplay is there, and it’s exciting.  I’ve now got to wrap it in a structure which is accessible, compulsive, and lasting.  While designing, I often think of mistakes other games make which I want to react to.  I think it’ll be useful to note down a couple here, and hopefully learn a bit both through the process of writing, and what you guys have to say on the subject.

A lot has been made of how bad death is in games, and “modern” design often points in the direction of trying to remove death.  I believe that this does not apply for heavily generative and score-based games.  In a heavily architectured game, death is bad because it means you have to repeat things you have done successfully before – this is not fun.  In a heavily generative game, death is a clean slate – another world is created for you to play in, you see new things straight away, and you have a new opportunity to succeed.  We don’t want games of pinball or Spelunky to routinely go on for hours – that would almost imply that the first wedge of time you spend on each game is not meaningful.  This leads to one of my core tenets as a designer:

In a highscore-based game, the risks and rewards at game start should not be exponentially smaller than those x minutes in.

This is violated all the time.  Look at Tetris’ classic mode, where blocks start off falling slowly and gradually speed up.  At the start the game is basically easy, but you can’t score many points.  This is not interesting for the experienced player – why go through a period where your play effectively doesn’t matter to get to the real thing?  As for the inexperienced players, that’s what easy mode is for.

You should be able to die in the first thirty seconds, and your likelyhood of dying shouldn’t be that much lower than it is ten minutes in.   We can look at this mathematically.  In games which violate the above tennet, a “great” playing time is not that much longer than the average – because most of the playing time is comparitavely meaningless.

Average Tetris playing time: 10 minutes.  “Great” Tetris playing time: 13 minutes.

Average Theatre Of Magic (Pinball) playing time: 3 minutes:  “Great” Time: 15 minutes.

This leads up to another tenet of mine:

In a highscore-based game, the average playing time should be low – 3 minutes is a good start.

When you start playing a highscore-based game, you want to know you could be having a “great” game soon.  You want to be saying “wow I’m on FIRE today” after a minute or two, you don’t want to have to grind for ten minutes before you can even hope to sniff a good performance.  I had this particular problem with Lumines, where an average game seemed to take about half an hour.  A three-minute game is an easy thing to get into.  A half hour game seems daunting to even start.

It seems ingrained into games designers that difficulty should ramp up over time.  I call this as being outmoded in a generative context.   A game should give skilled players the opportunity to do riskier things, not treat them with kid-gloves for the first x levels.  If a game is different every time you play it, death is good-frustrating: it compels you to play again.

Finally:

You should only have one life in a score-based game.


Let’s look at Spelunky as a bit of a criminal of this.  In Spelunky, you have health.  Health is difficult to find and if you lose even one heart on the first couple of levels you’ll want to restart the game.  This is bad.  Pinball is also a culprit – if you lose your first ball without getting many points, you may be less motivated to play the game through.  (I recently turned the number of balls per game on my pinball table down to one).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 1:10 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Death is positive”

  1. Steve D:

    § May 28th, 2009 at 9:15 pm

    I planned to comment on this the other day, but didn’t have a lot of time. Anyway, I think you have some good points. A particular game that came to mind was Geo Wars. That being one of the last High Score based games that I played to compete with friends and their scores. One thing which would annoy me was when I died and had to start over. The initial slug at the start of the game, when I just wanted to get straight back into the challenge, and compete against their scores.

    I never really thought about the aspect of how many lives you get in these types of games, but it would make a lot of sense to only have one life when going for a High Score. It’s true, when you lose a life early on in the game, there is really no point in playing on, and most of the time I will restart the game in that situation.

    The whole subject certainly is interesting. Some of the points you made, I have tended to just accept and not really thought about before as issues. I think it would be a great idea for High Score games to start with just the one life, and eliminating the slow pointless start of games bringing average playing times and great playing times a lot closer together, would certainly be much more appealing to me.

  2. Ian:

    § May 28th, 2009 at 10:27 pm

    Hey Steve. Nice to have someone agree with me – I also posted this on GarageGames.com because I thought they might be interested over there, and got a litany of disagrements… this is obviously an emotive issue. http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/17335

  3. Steve D:

    § May 28th, 2009 at 11:28 pm

    Reading everyone’s comments over there. Certainly many differing opinions on those matters. Will keep an eye out for your posts on garagegames in the future.

  4. LK:

    § June 4th, 2009 at 11:36 am

    Alright. I read the first part of the post and then started skim reading before my mind started wondeirng to my tea cup. So forgive me if I’ve missed bits, but I’m pretty sure you haven’t as then you’d be contradicting yourself.

    I think its fun, in certain cases, where the first few minutes of a score based game are worthless. Now this isn’t always true, but neither is it always false.
    Take Geometry Wars 2 for example, the first few minutes of a game are easy and used purely as racking up your multiplier. But they are also serve well as a warm up, gradually increasing the difficulty. And as it gets harder and harder the precious seconds and points you score further on can bounce you into a lead position quickly and then lose it as quickly.
    If it started out difficult and stayed at the same level forever there wouldn’t be a frantic climatic ending where player furiously dodge bullets for an extra second of life.
    Another good point about increasing difficulty is that players of different capabilities can compete together easily. Lets say you have two friends who are new to the game and two who are experts. They can easily play a four player game where the two new guys are competing and and the two experts compete without requiring people to take turns and such.

    By the way, I’m basing all this on my life at uni where we played the hell out of that game (tip, drinking geometry wars is amazing!)

    Thats my two cents about that matter. Best of luck with frozen synapse, at the moment I’d preorder it, don’t screw it up! :P

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