Screw the rules I have money!

If you boil it down to the core, video games involve nothing more than holding a cheap piece of plastic, hitting buttons and watching shapes on your TV react. Even the most artistic, breathtaking, expensive games boil down to the same principles. The actions on screen only become a game when they are given context and context in video games is all about rules. So by definition there is nothing that separates indie or retail games other than their budgets and production values. They are both a collection of rules the player must abide by.

From my experience all games have two types on rules, generic or game specific. Generic rules are the rules that we don’t even think about. For example, in the majority of games the player and the game world abide by the laws of gravity. The player sticks to the ground and falls if they step off a ledge. These are rules that go without saying, the rules that we live by in our real everyday life.  Occasionally a game may change generic rules for the sake of gameplay but generally speaking they are rules commonly found in all games.

Game specific rules are the rules which make up the game itself; these rules are the constraints put on the player and the rules on how beat or lose the game. The game mechanics are the tools for the player to operate within these rules. Take any FPS for example, the rules of the game state if you are shot by an enemy a certain amount of times you will die. The weapons and abilities for you to defend yourself with are the mechanics.

Good game design should be efficient, making the most of the limitations and tools the designers have to work with. Efficient game design is using few game mechanics and using those mechanics in surprising ways, coming up with bizarre obstacles that use the mechanics in more than one way. Take for example, some classic multiplayer FPS’ (I’ll use Halo Reach as my example as I’ve played that recently).

The rules/mechanics are pretty straight forward, you point gun at bad guy and press button till it dies and the enemy does the same to you. You can pick up certain items/weapons, you can jump and crouch. These are the mechanics of the game; in most FPS’s there are different rules for different game types. Capture the flag adds no new mechanics to the game but instead changes the rules of play entirely. The game is no longer about killing for points but instead stealing and escaping. Similarly Halo Reach’s ‘Infection’ mode is another great example of this. The rules of the game split the players into Infected or Regular players. The infected players are forced to use the Sword weapon only capable of killing the regular players up close. Once killed by an infected player regular players become infected. No mechanics are added to Halo Reach for these game modes. Instead it is a simple adjustment of the game rules to make the game almost, entirely new.

Oddball, Infection and Capture the Flag are just a few of the game modes in Halo Reach.

There are some great games which bend the rules of their world, fully utilizing all the game’s resources and mechanics. It might just be a personal preference but these are often the sort of games that impress me the most, there’s nothing less fun then having the same dreary challenge again and again for 8 hours till the credits roll.

I recently purchased Limbo, from Playdead Studios an indie game studio based in Denmark. Limbo is a great example of coming up with creative obstacles in an otherwise restricted game. The game has a surprisingly small amount of inputs, the player can move left or right, they can jump and they can grab objects. That’s it. Despite this the game rarely ever slacks, it consistently throws unique and clever traps at you without having to add any extra moves. For indie developers this seems like the  most efficient way to design a good game. Other indie games which use minimal game mechanics in place of sophisticated obstacles and level designs are Splosion Man, Critter Crunch and Angry Birds.

Giant spiders, serious business.

This isn’t to say that games with plenty of mechanics aren’t good, they are very different types of games. Metal Gear Solid 4 has heaps of gadgets, weapons and mechanics so much in fact I didn’t even discover some on the moves until my second or third playthrough. MGS4 was great in alot of ways because it allowed the player to play the how THEY wanted, the players was given an objective, some tools to complete those objectives and that was it. It’s admirable in alot of ways as this much freedom gives the player a sense of accomplishment when they beat the game in their own way. 

Having said that, sometimes too many mechanics can make the game feel like a mess. With MGS4 it was warranted due to the ambiguity of the gameplay. In Darksiders, the game had almost an overwhelming amount of features and equipment to the point some of the button inputs became absurd. 

Anyway wrapping up, last year I made alot of effort to make sure I made the most of the mechanics and features I designed in my games. Different rules, and mechanics have different requirements depending on the game. Whilst a huge amount of skill, time and money goes into making open world games it’s a bit of cop out in a way to just let the player decide what to do and not present any interesting obstacles for them to overcome. My work this year will revolve around making efficient level designs based around a few good simple mechanics.