A Record-Setting Blunder

I had just committed one of the worst and most common mistakes in game design: I had built a technology and then went in search of a game. "Let's get some code up and running, then we'll get to designing the game!" I can smile indulgently at my younger self, as I was probably the first game designer in history to make that mistake. With all the experience we've developed in the 25 years since that day, you can't justify such self-indulgence.

I didn't realize the error of my ways at the time; indeed, my evil twin insists that everything came out fine in the end, and so there's no reason to dwell on it. But I'm not so confident that Legionnaire was a solid design; I'll explain some of those design problems later. For now, though, here's the lesson (Lesson 29).

The first problem bit me in the butt almost immediately: The units couldn't move at a perceptible rate. If they did move at, say, one hex per second, then the game would be over in less than a minute. Moreover, the player wouldn't have any time to plot a strategy; the game would play like an arcade game without any of the nice graphics. I needed to slow down the pace of the game. But this in turn meant that a unit might take five or ten seconds to make its move. How would a player know which of his units he had already ordered to move? They looked the same moving as just standing around with their hands in their pockets. I had no additional screen resources to expend on the problem.

After much design agony, I stumbled on the idea of internal animation. While waiting for the player's input, the computer would sweep through all the units, briefly replacing each one with a symbol indicating which way it was preparing to move. If it wasn't going anywhere, it didn't animate. Of course, given the slow execution speeds of computers back then, this animation taxed the machine to its limits; it took a perceptible fraction of a second to execute the loop. Remember, the computer was not redrawing the entire screen; it merely redrew one character for each unit! We were a long way from full-screen, full-motion, first-person graphics displays. The result of this scheme was a frenetic display that was hard to read. There was plenty of on-screen activity to distract your eye, but it normally wasn't important. When you did want to find information about a unit, you'd have to wait a second or so before it animated to show you its intentions.

All in all, it was a completely unsatisfactory solution. Given the primitive state of game design back then, I could get away with it, but Legionnaire could have been a much better game had I designed it as a game first and a program second.

LESSON 30

Play non-electronic games, too.



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

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