Designerfromhell

Introduction This is a follow-up post to Forgetting the gimmick . In the last post I ended by saying I had 2 options; Remove the original gimmick and lean into the new one. Go all in on clarity and keep the original gimmick. But this was wrong. There are more options, there always are.  Instead I decided on the "chasing the fun" principle. Where you allow your original idea to transform based on new discoveries during prototyping. This does not mean you have to remove the original gimmick, but instead you adapt it. This post is about why I chased the fun and how that changed the mechanic. The Original Mechanic I started with a jump that the players controlled using their camera angle, looking up meant jumping higher and looking down was jumping lower. However there was a single action that I really enjoyed doing; running around and flicking your mouse right before jumping. This made the experience feel powerful, like there was a real power behind your jump. And this feeling i...

Introduction For the past couple of weeks I have been working on a mechanic, with the focus of making this single mechanic stand out without the need for a full game around it. As I continued designing I ended up losing sight of the original gimmick, I got carried away. How do you end up losing sight that badly, and more importantly, what do you do once it happens? The Mechanic I started out from a previous idea called " The Impossible Jump ", in which you had to jump across a gap and it was nearly impossible, the player required a specific angle and speed to cross the gap. This inspired a mechanic around camera angle based jumping , the mechanic allowed the player to jump higher or lower depending on if they were looking up or down. Losing Sight That's where the trouble began, that lunge, that damned lunge... I added a lunge mechanic while in the air. I wanted to create a way for the jumping to feel more fun, and it was, the dashing around in the air, the jumping power y...

  Challenge Substitution Principle Replace unwanted challenge with wanted challenge. Introduction Recently I ran into an interesting situation. I was designing ways to guide players through a maze without ruining the core experience of a maze and ended up designing secondary systems that would create an invisible path for players (Enemies, Wisps). During this development I realized I could replace part of the maze with another challenge, like combat, and make it a choice the player can make. In this way the player who does not enjoy a maze can replace the mindless searching with active combat to find the exit, and the player who enjoys exploration can stay enjoying their maze. This led me to look up related design principles I could use to improve my own designs, except I could not find other people talking about challenge for challenge substitution using this framing. The closest related media I could find is APX(Accessible Player Experiences) from ‘The AbleGamers Charity’ , where...