Games have the power to transport us to fantastical worlds through immersive storytelling and gameplay. Want to know what it takes to create enjoyable and captivating video games? This post will define the principles of game design and explain how they enhance player engagement, giving you an inside look at the decision-making process that goes on behind the scenes of your favorite games.
What are game design principles?
Game design is the process of developing the rules, mechanics, objectives, and overall experience of a video game. This involves crafting levels, designing characters, player rewards, balancing difficulty and fairness, and integrating visuals and storytelling to create an engaging player experience.
Part of a game designer’s job is to ensure that all aspects of the game work together to provide a fun, challenging, and immersive experience. They must determine how the game is played, the challenges and obstacles players will encounter, and how players will engage with the world they create, which are defined by game design principles. Game design principles are foundational guidelines that help designers create engaging, balanced, and immersive games. Some key principles include:
- Game Mechanics
- Balance and Fairness
- Player Motivation and Feedback
- Immersion and Storytelling
Video game design principles are fundamental to a player's engagement, shaping how players interact with a game and ensuring they stay invested. Well-designed gameplay mechanics, well-balanced difficulty, a sense of accomplishment, and immersion are key to making the experience enjoyable, rewarding, and compelling for players. These game principles help shape everything from mechanics and level design to narrative design and user experience.
Core Game Mechanics
Game mechanics are the rules and systems that determine how a game works, what players can do, and the outcomes of their actions. The challenges created with these rules and systems drive gameplay, giving the player a clear objective, which increases engagement.
Core mechanics can include a player's movements, resource management, the environment, levels, achievements, and interactions. For example, Call of Duty is a first-person shooter, where the core mechanics involve aiming and shooting.
While core game mechanics define the fundamental interactions that drive gameplay, non-core mechanics don’t directly affect a player’s ability to interact with a game. Instead, they serve as supplementary, non-essential elements that enhance the overall gaming experience. For example, collectible items in Little Nightmares 2 allow players to find hats that they can wear, but these aren't essential to completing the game.
Building Around Core Mechanics
Once core mechanics are established, a game designer can build upon these, making them more interesting to players and enhancing player interaction. They will then craft the other elements of the game to complement and elevate the core game mechanics. These include:
- Level design: Level design brings together all elements in a game that the player interacts with, such as events, maps, enemies, layout, and environment, to enhance player experience within each level of the game. For example, if jumping is a core mechanic, game designers might add platforms, obstacles, and timing challenges that make use of these jumping mechanics.
- Focal point: It needs to be clear where and what the player should focus on so that they don’t miss necessary information. Providing a secondary subject can increase engagement as it encourages players to pay attention to multiple elements within a game.
- Objects and environment: If a core mechanic includes picking up objects, game designers can create challenges that support this within the game. In It Takes Two, players may need to find and move objects to successfully move onto the next level, which encourages them to interact with their environment to complete a task. These challenges keep players engaged and interested in a game's environment.
- Progression systems: Shape how the game will evolve as players interact with the mechanics over time. This could involve unlocking new abilities or powers. In Skyrim, players can get spell books to learn a particular spell. Having access to these spells allows for different powers to be learned and equipped at different times, which helps reduce repetitive mechanics and avoid boredom.
- Feedback loop: A good game will build a feedback loop where the core mechanics are engaging and rewarding. For example, a combat system can create a satisfying loop of defeating an enemy, gaining experience, upgrading abilities, facing stronger enemies, and repeating the loop.
Adding variety in how the core mechanics function prevents gameplay from feeling repetitive or predictable.
Enhancing Player Interaction
Player interaction encompasses interactions with the game's environment, other players, and the decisions a player can make.
- Environment: Rewarding exploration can encourage a player to interact with a game's environment. In Little Nightmares 2, players can search their environment to find hidden pathways and hats that the player can equip, allowing for a break from the action as players search their environments.
- Cooperative games: Working with a team can encourage players to communicate and coordinate their actions to solve puzzles or overcome obstacles. Rocket League encourages players to aid in their team's objective of scoring goals, motivating players to overcome obstacles by working together.
- RPGs: Role-Playing Games (RPGs) are games where players assume the role of a fictional character and make decisions based on that character’s persona. These games allow players to interact with the world and other characters, with their choices influencing the storyline and shaping both the characters' actions and the game’s progression. Baldur's Gate 3 offers a deeply immersive experience that lets players engage fully with the narrative, environments, and gameplay mechanics.
Still from Baldur's Gate 3. This game offers a deeply immersive experience that allows players to fully engage with the narrative, environments, and gameplay mechanics. [Image Credit: Larian Studios]
Balance and Fairness
Balance and fairness in game design ensure that players are presented with challenges that feel achievable and rewarding without being unfairly difficult or too easy, which can make it boring.
Fair Challenge vs. Frustration
Creating fair challenges that engage players is a key component of good game design. It’s important to strike a balance where the player feels challenged but also supported enough to succeed and continue enjoying the game without becoming frustrated. Frustration leads to players giving up or completely abandoning a game. Players should feel that the challenge is possible to complete so that they keep wanting to play.
A game known for its difficulty is Cuphead. Cuphead is a run-and-gun game that requires exact timing and memorization of enemy patterns. Precision is required when using the game's mechanics, which can be challenging, leading to frustration for some players.
By keeping basic design principles in mind throughout the video game decision-making process, game developers can create experiences that challenge players in a way that feels fair, rewarding, and ultimately keeps them engaged, fostering a sense of accomplishment and mastery, which encourages players to invest in a game long term.
Maintaining Balance in Game Mechanics
Maintaining balance in game mechanics is crucial to ensuring a fair and engaging experience for players. This involves ensuring that no single mechanic or strategy is overpowered or underwhelming, keeping the gameplay challenging but not frustrating.
This can be achieved in the following ways:
- Clear goals: Help players understand the mechanics and objectives of the game. Providing clear instructions or visual cues helps avoid confusion and frustration among players.
- Balanced difficulty curve: Start with easier challenges to introduce core mechanics, then slowly increase the complexity, allowing players to learn and master harder mechanics with time. This will prevent boredom as the game changes in difficulty as the player improves. In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the first few enemies and puzzles are simple, but as the player progresses, the difficulty ramps up with more complex puzzles.
- Fairness and predictability: Ensure challenges are winnable and that failure feels like a learning opportunity. Players should have control of their successes, and randomness should be limited. In Dark Souls, the difficulty is high, but it’s always fair. Enemies and bosses have predictable patterns, and players can learn and improve with each attempt. The challenge is designed in a way that rewards persistence and mastery, not randomness.
- Instant and fair checkpoints: Avoid long restarts to prevent frustration from repeated failure.
- Dynamic scaling: Tailor the challenge to the player’s ability. In Resident Evil 4, the game dynamically adjusts the number and strength of enemies based on the player's performance, ensuring the challenge is balanced without feeling overwhelming.
- Exploration rewards: Encourage curiosity with secrets and alternate paths. In Rayman Legends, players can find secret doors that lead to puzzles where they need to save “Teensies”. This motivates players to interact with the game's environment and to replay levels to find all the prizes.
A well-balanced game offers players meaningful choices, where different strategies and skills can help players succeed based on their preference or the context of the game. It is important for game designers to balance core mechanics to create a satisfying experience.
Saving the "Teensies" in Rayman Legends [Image credit: Ubisoft]
Player Motivation and Feedback Loops
Player motivation is what drives players to engage with and continue playing a game. When creating video games, a feedback loop refers to a system where a player's actions and outcomes influence their future actions, creating a cycle that either reinforces or diminishes certain behaviors. Understanding player motivation helps developers create experiences that keep players engaged, offering the right balance of rewards and challenges that means they'll continue to hit that 'start game' button.
Reward The Player
Players want to feel rewarded for the work they put in. Player motivation can be influenced by a variety of factors, which are usually centered around a player being rewarded.
- Achievements: Players can gain digital badges or awards for completing specific actions or tasks. In TowerFall Ascension, players earn the achievement "Most Twitchy" by catching multiple arrows in quick succession. Achievements encourage players to replay the game to unlock them all.
- Levels: Game levels provide a structured path that encourages players to progress through the game. As they move from one level to the next, they encounter new challenges and opportunities for growth, which boosts their motivation to keep playing.
- Special items: Items, loot, skins, characters. Fortnite frequently releases new character skins, items, and dance poses players can either buy or earn points for. In Minecraft, enchanted items can be found in chests in dangerous structures or by roaming around the overworld. Encouraging players to search for items increases the time players spend playing a game.
- Recognition: Players might have a desire to compete against one another, either in multiplayer games or in leaderboards, to gain recognition of their skill and achievements. Recognition can allow players to feel rewarded for their commitment.
Feedback Loops in Game Play
Positive and negative feedback loops are central to maintaining player engagement, shaping how players experience the game, and guiding their progression. A positive feedback loop in video games is a system where a player's success leads to rewards or advantages that make it easier to achieve further success, encouraging continued engagement and progression. While a negative feedback loop adjusts the game to prevent any player from becoming too dominant, often by increasing difficulty or providing advantages to the losing side, maintaining balance and challenge.
Examples of positive feedback loops:
- Reinforcement loop: A reinforcement loop in video games refers to a feedback system where a player's actions lead to rewards or positive outcomes, which in turn encourage the player to continue engaging in the same behavior or action. The player’s success and progression are continuously reinforced by the game, driving further involvement and motivation to keep playing. In Candy Crush, when a player successfully clears a level, they earn rewards like extra moves or boosters, which help them tackle the next level. The addition of rewards after each level motivates players to continue playing, pushing them forward through increasingly difficult levels. Reinforcement loops help maintain player engagement by providing frequent, tangible rewards for progress, keeping the gameplay experience rewarding for players.
Examples of negative feedback loops:
- Balancing Loop: A balancing loop is designed to maintain fairness and challenge by adjusting the game’s difficulty in response to a player's actions. This prevents the game from becoming too easy or too difficult, ensuring a consistent level of challenge throughout the experience. This can be done when a player gains an advantage or performs well, and the game introduces mechanisms to counterbalance this. In Super Mario Kart, players can equip the ‘blue shell,’ which automatically strikes the current game leader. This lets players compete against the current winners. Balancing loops help to maintain player engagement by ensuring the game remains challenging and fair, adapting to the player’s progress to keep the experience enjoyable without becoming frustrating or too easy.
Feedback loops, whether positive or negative, are crucial in maintaining player engagement and balancing challenge with reward. They create a dynamic experience that motivates and challenges players, keeping them invested in progressing, improving, and achieving their goals. Well-designed feedback loops ensure that players feel rewarded for their progress while maintaining an appropriate challenge level. By rewarding success and adjusting difficulty when needed, these loops ensure that players remain immersed, competitive, and excited to continue playing.
Immersion and Storytelling
Video games are an amazing way to immerse players in a story, with the help of dialogue, characters, and visual cues.
Creating Engaging Narratives
To craft a compelling narrative, information should be delivered organically and only when it becomes relevant to the player. Writers and narrative designers aim to avoid heavy exposition, as overloading the player with too much detail at once can break immersion. Given that video games are a visual medium, storytelling can be conveyed more effectively, and often more subtly, through actions, environments, and visual cues rather than direct explanation.
- Dialogue: Skyrim features NPCs (non-playable characters) that aid players in learning about the game's lore and characters, while also allowing them to shape the narrative through their choices and interactions, ultimately immersing themselves in the game's world and progressing through storylines.
- Characters: Characters are crucial for engaging a player, as they provide something to invest in or root for. This character can be the one the player is playing, one they have created, or even NPCs that drive the story. Characters that are multidimensional with good and bad qualities that evolve throughout a game are relatable to players and can increase engagement as they become invested in a character's arc.
- Show, don't tell: Storytelling in video games can be diverse in their depth and detail. In Fallout, the story is told through objects and characters players meet in the ‘vaults’. Throughout the game, players discover that the vaults were created for a number of reasons, rather than having all the information available from the beginning.
Designing Immersive Environments
Environments in video games can tell a story within themselves; tone, clues, and subtle storytelling, like showing and not telling, can aid in creating a believable and engaging world.
- Color: Color can influence the tone of a game. Lots of bright, earthy colors in Stardew Valley contribute to the 'cosy' feeling the game offers. Minecraft is a sandbox game, meaning players can choose when and how they play, opting for a relaxed or action-packed experience. There are many diverse blocks, colors, and textures in Minecraft, allowing players to create their own game aesthetic. This game also offers texture packs that allow players to create themed worlds, such as those inspired by ancient Greece and even Skyrim.
- Objects: Depending on a game's mechanics, a player might need to search for objects to complete a storyline, objective, or level. Allowing players to interact with objects by picking them up or knocking them over can aid in feeling immersed in their environment.
- Character design: Character design plays a crucial role in immersing players in a video game by creating cohesive, memorable, and visually appealing characters that players can connect with emotionally and psychologically. A visually distinctive character design that fits the game’s art style and environment helps create a cohesive experience. The look, costume, and features of a character can convey their role, personality, and cultural background, making the world feel more believable and engaging.
- Natural environments: Natural environments can convey stories or moods without direct exposition, using visual cues and the setting to deepen the narrative. For example, abandoned villages, dilapidated ruins, or peaceful forests can hint at past events or provide context for the world’s lore. In The Last of Us, the natural environment and overgrown cities, reclaimed by nature, tell the story of a post-apocalyptic world where nature has taken over after the collapse of civilization. This adds emotional depth to the setting and enhances immersion in the world’s backstory.
- Buildings and Architecture: The architectural style and design of buildings can immediately communicate the setting and cultural context of the game world. Whether it's medieval castles, futuristic skyscrapers, or ancient ruins, the design of buildings helps to establish the tone and identity of the world, making the player feel like they are truly part of that universe. In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the architecture of Nordic stone castles and villages reinforces the game's Viking-inspired setting, immersing players in the ancient, cold landscapes and the culture of the Nords.
The environment in The Last of Us helps to tell the story of a post-apocalyptic world where nature has taken over after the collapse of civilization[Image Credit: Naughty Dog]
The Impact of Core Principles on Player Engagement
The core principles of game design—game mechanics, balance and fairness, player motivation, immersion, and storytelling—play a pivotal role in shaping player engagement. These elements work together to create an immersive and rewarding experience that keeps players invested. By thoughtfully combining these elements, game developers craft worlds that not only challenge and entertain but also absorb players into the narratives and settings.
When executed effectively, these principles work together to maintain player engagement, ensuring a balanced and dynamic experience. Whether through intricate gameplay loops, compelling storylines, or meticulously designed environments, a well-designed game can captivate and resonate with players, making their journey both enjoyable and memorable.
Future Directions in Video Game Design
As technology continues to evolve, the future of video game design holds exciting possibilities that will enhance player experiences and push the boundaries of interactive entertainment.
Examples of the future of video game design:
- Virtual Reality: Virtual Reality (VR) is an immersive technology that uses computer-generated simulations to create a completely artificial 3D environment through the use of VR headsets and gloves. A recent advancement in VR includes a small 4K Micro-OLED screen with lenses to enhance the image with improved graphics. In the future, we may see eye tracking so that the headset tracks where players are looking, allowing for other players and characters to know whether a player is looking at them.
- Augmented Reality: Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that overlays digital content onto the real world, enhancing the user’s perception of their environment. For example, Pokémon Go uses AR to navigate players to Pokémon characters that they can catch. As VR headsets and AR devices become more affordable and powerful, games will be able to directly place players into the action, allowing deeper interaction and immersion.
- The use of AI: Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used for NPC dialogue and actions. In the future, we may see more generative storytelling, which uses AI to adapt a story based on a player's choices, making for a unique gameplay. For example, AI Realm offers players an AI dungeon master as their guide. Players can shape the world how they want to as they play through their actions, and the AI automatically takes notes so that nothing is forgotten.
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