Oh Yes, It Was Supposed to Be a Game, Wasn t It?

Oh Yes, It Was Supposed to Be a Game, Wasn't It?

Having botched the design strategy and perpetrated a crappy input structure, I was now ready for the finishing touch of incompetent design: I was going to make a game out of it!

I have already pointed out that good game design requires you to design the play experience first and build the design outward from there. My bungled design was so far gone that there is no need for further preaching on this matter. I shall merely observe that, having already built a simulation, a display, and an input structure, I had zero design flexibility to actually make the software fun. All the player could do was operate the power plant, turning pumps on and off and opening and closing valves. Whoop-de-doo! Of course, I was too young and eager to engage in the type of navel-gazing that allows one to notice outrages against common sense and decency, so I blithely cobbled together the following lame-brained scheme.

The player's nuclear power plant would be visited by occasional earthquakes, which would shake the plant (here I employed a clever graphics effect, amazing myself even more with my brilliance, and failing utterly to recognize the true nature of the problem). Each earthquake would break some component of the power plant, but the screen would not show the damage directly. The only valid data the player would have was the temperature data; an analysis of the rate of change of temperatures in various parts of the plant would permit the player to deduce the nature of the problem. Dispatching repair teams to the damaged component would effect a repair, but the supply of repair teams was limited, so a faulty analysis could be disastrous. The player scored points for keeping the reactor running at full power for the longest possible time.

LESSON 38

Sometimes the most brilliant design stroke is to kill the idea.