Thoughts on game design
Wed Jul 7 10:18:50 2021
Decisions
To be a good game, you need decisions. These need to be real decisions, not illusory decisions. An illusory decision can be of two types:
- the decision doesn't matter, as all choices lead to the same outcome
- the decision is trivial, as one choice dominates the others.
Thus, in tic-tac-toe, as any child quickly discovers, the choice of which square to mark is illusory, as each square either leads to a loss or a tie, and there's no particular reason to prefer one tie-square over another.
Wide or tall?
Quantity or quality?
Some games give a choice between going "wide", that is, a large expansion, or "tall", that is, a small expansion, but make what you have better.
In wargames, this is known as quantity or quality, lots of crappy units, or fewer better units.
It's hard to get the balance here right. Most space type 4X games don't really allow for a "tall" strategy, because there's a limit to how good a planet can get, and you eventually need to grow bigger, not just better.
Another problem with high quality is that in many games, the number of units is so few, that you can't afford to lose any of them at all.
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