Learning How to Engineer Experiences

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Reflecting on This Week in Game Development

I’m still working on The Last Humble-Bee.

I worked mostly on implementing controller input for my game! What a world of difference! It was fun leveraging some of Steve Swink’s game-feel principles (link below) to ensure the controller input felt good. Here are a few lessons learned about controller input:

• Utilize natural mappings - The buttons linked to character movement should be intuitive. For example:

  • Players are used to pressing “X” on a Playstation controller or “A” on an Xbox controller to jump.

  • When players use the analog stick to move a character, they have innate assumptions about how it will affect the character. It’s my job as a designer to leverage those assumptions to ensure the character moves in a way that THE PLAYER EXPECTS. This involves a lot of tweaking (eg, changing controller deadzones and processing input data).

• Different inputs have different input sensitivity. For example

  • Keyboards have an “on/off” system where they are either pressed, released, or held. This is similar to NES controllers and other controller button schemes.

  • Controllers (depending on generation and style) have a mixture of “on/off” buttons, analog sticks that measure how far from the center (on a scale of -1 to 1), and triggers that have varying sensitivity levels.

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing a lot of reading, including “Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences” by Tynan Sylvester. A few broad lessons learned from this lovely read:

• You can’t target players of all different skills, you need to target a specific “skill range”, defined as, “The range of skill levels at which a game presents a meaningful challenge.”

• “A game is an artificial system for generating experiences”. This statement really made me think twice about the power of games to not only make the player feel emotions, but experience them first-hand.

Next, level design and reading An Architectural Approach to Level Design by Christopher W. Totten! Till next week!

Links:

Controller Dead Zones Done Right

• Doing Thumbstick Dead Zones Right by Third Helix LLC

Game Feel

• Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation by Steve Swink

Level Design

• An Architectural Approach to Level Design by Christopher W. Totten

• The Level Design Book

MasterClass

• Will Wright Teaches Game Design and Theory