Talk Title: Rules of the Game: Five Tricks of Highly Effective Designers

Effective talk: Tricks for design

Year of Talk: 2015

Video Link: Rules of the Game: Five Tricks of Highly Effective Designers

• It's important to remember that many design rules people make can be highly personal. Changes over time and how each person sees and enjoys them.

• Start off with other designers' rules, but can adapt them to better suit your mindset.

• By designing a game not only around character emotions but also affecting the players' emotions, it can help connect with the player on a deeper level.

• Having more money in an MMO or a branching storyline.

• The best way of doing so is by determining how the system affects human needs, interactions, and rewards.

• Needs include: Relationship, Skill, Progress, Escapism, and others.

• Interactions include: NPCs, Enemies, and Other Players.

• Rewards include: Mission Advances, Story Advances, Expertise.

• When designing a system, it might be best to find how you can implement features from each section to help make the connection to the player.

• Going over games/media you don't normally enjoy and trying to analyze what makes it good. Or why other people enjoy it.

• This allows you to consider more unique perspectives and how to incorporate designs you previously hadn't considered.

• Might even give you unique game ideas.

• It's important to understand the psychology of players. For example, it was noted by some directors/analysts that the average person can only have 5-9 objects in their current memory.

• The 5-9 objects get subdivided into 3 groups, which the player will remember while doing various tasks.

• This is useful when deciding UI placement. Dividing button options between gameplay and settings, or groupings of setting information.

• By taking this into account, the attack patterns for enemies and allies can be set to numbers divisible by 3 so that players can time their actions with the enemies better.

• Adding quirky or unique things that will make people want to talk about the game.

• The quirky feature might make them want to share a video or photo or just talk about it with friends, but it will give you word of mouth.

• Though it's important to take note of scope creep. The development team might try to add too many quirky things and greatly bloat development time.

• When designing your game, it's extremely hard to properly analyze it and evaluate the game. As you already have an idea of how everything is meant to work together.

• The only real solution is to have a lot of playtesting done by other parts of the company and people.

• Make sure not to pay attention to the problems and solutions that playtesters give. Understand the root problem that is occurring.

• There can be a lot of reasons why the players might be feeling that something is happening and not realize it, because of poor planning or missing information.

• Problems encountered by playtesters might mean that the team finds unintended ways that they can go towards or away from their intended design goals.