In any, and every game, gameplay is king. But what exactly is gameplay? Simply put it's the player's experience of a game, the idea that a player can pick up a game and no matter what they do they're gonna have fun doing it. Games range from co-operative to competitive to micromanaging and their ease of play does too, going from learning to social and to core, these ultimately affect the player base of the game and the target market they're sold to. Now it's not to be confused with game mechanics both are very similar to each other and depending on who you talk to the difference between them varies, for many gameplay and game mechanics are the same. For this blog I'll be treating them separately. Game mechanics are the rules of the world the player is interacting with and experiencing while these rules change from genre to genre and game to game, it still remains crucial in creating a great and successful game. This is especially apparent in older or smaller, simpler games such as indie or mobile games but a trend we can in see in newer larger, games is that the mechanics are beginning to almost take a step back as graphics, art, story, characters, levels, etc have more attention paid to them.
So who deals with gameplay and mechanics in a development team?
At the top of the pile you have the lead designer and as you can probably imagine their role is to manage the rest of the designers, Everyone from level designers to game mechanic designers. They're expected to have experience in both artistic areas and more technical ones. Communication is also a vital skill required as they pass on information to one group of designers to the next. Outside of the studio they may also have to deal with publishers or other clients if that is where the game's concept originates from. Part in parcel with these responsibilities s keeping documentation of ideas and concepts for presenting to a variety of groups both inside and out of the development team such as publishers or journalists.
Below the lead designer game mechanics fall into the systems designers jurisdiction. This is the group of people that come up with the ideas about how the game is gonna work, although the lead designer is main visionary in the team which they have to follow. The designers have to deal with issues such as balance of elements sch as a weapons sandbox, this is crucial in many competitive games such as Halo or DOTA. While the majority of a systems designer's job is done during pre-production but balancing may extended into post release during the life span of the game or their next project. Many developers have dedicated live teams dealing with issues such as balance.
Like I said right at the start for me gameplay is king, it's essentially the player's experience of your game. To put it simply you've got to do it good. But what is gameplay for me? How do I personally define it? It's the combination of mechanics, art style, narrative and music and audio, the way I see it is like a pyramid at it's peak is gameplay, below this sit the other three and to have a good structure you need to have a strong foundation. This is where the four from above come in, there's your foundation. So for me you need to have solid mechanics, an immersive narrative, an excellent art style and fantastic audio design and musical score to go alongside to have fantastic gameplay, to have a fantastic experience. Now within this foundation I do slightly value ones over the others, most important being the mechanics but what this system allows for is that if one aspect out of the four is weaker than the other three, if the three are good enough, they're able to support the weaker aspect. While that doesn't describe it greatly hopefully this example will. Mass Effect is a great game, but it's mechanics aren't exactly the best the controls are clunky, many of the mechanics are convoluted or take too long to get used to ultimately making the combat feel rather slow. Other aspects such as conversing though were well done, but a large part of the game is spent shooting things so the combat mechanics are a big deal. So what we have is a weak part of the foundation but with Mass Effect everything else about it, the art direction, the music, the story are fantastic come together so well they almost make you forget about the combat, or at least grind through it. So it's gameplay, the experience is still for the most of the game, fantastic.
Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_design
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_development
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gameplay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_mechanics
http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/Coverpage.html http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20041101/rouse_01.shtml
http://algorithmancy.8kindsoffun.com/GDC2004http://www.randomterrain.com/game-design.html http://www.gamedev.net/columns/gameengineering/gup/
http://www.paranoidproductions.com/gamedesign/
No comments:
Post a Comment