Playing a game with unclear mechanics is like peering through a dirty, smudged window. This calls for some Windex!
Ever played one of those games where you have no clue what any of the mechanics actually do and you just kind of muddle through? Playing this kind of game is like peering through a dirty, smudged window. What a game like this needs is some Windex.*
*Windex is ammonia-based glass cleaner fluid, for those unfamiliar with American brands.
Image credit: Crystal de Passillé-Chabot
I’ve already talked about adding « Juice » and « Oil » to your game designs; Windex is a third metaphorical game design fluid to add to your chemistry set.
To recap, Juice is all about making each individual input explode with ostentaious flavor and delight, whereas Oil is about quietly removing frustration and pain from the act of performing inputs in the first place.
Windex is about making it abundantly clear what the heck your game mechanics are actually doing, and removing as much obfuscating dirt and grime that gets in the way of that.
After all, what’s the point in driving a juicy, well-oiled car if you can’t even see through the windshield?
To be clear, « add some Windex » isn’t fully general advice — there are some games that benefit from intentionally obscuring information from the player. Examples are games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne where uncertainty about how certain things actually work heightens the sense of mystery, magic, and horror. The key word here is intentional. By all means, smudge that glass — or even board the windows up — if it helps you achieve your design goals. But if you’re not going for that sort of thing, consider whether the player actually understands your mechanics, because it greatly affects how they’re going to play.
Perhaps the simplest way to tell the player how your game works is to print a number whenever they do something that makes that number go up or down, particularly if it’s an important number. A simple and early example is scoring points in early arcade games. The most important number is your score, so any action that increases it is signalled with a notification that pops up right where the event occured. If not for this, it’d be easy to misunderstand (or miss entirely) what actions actually makes your score go up.
Gobbling a ghost in Pac-Man:
Jumping over a barrel in Donkey Kong:
These are both actions that you might normally do just to survive, but the game goes out of its way to let you know that it also increases your score, and by exactly how much. It gives you all the information you need to maximize your score, right when you need it, in the place you’re most likely to notice (where you’re already looking). Games like these also printed instructions with point values to help players:
But that’s an external reference that takes you out of the game — nothing beats the steady reinforcement of well-designed, properly timed visual feedback.
Lesson:
Give important visual feedback right where the player is looking
By the time the home console revolution was under way, these little white score numbers slowly changed from clarifying agents to irrelevant bits of noise. Nobody really cares about their high score in Super Mario Bros., for most people the point of the game is to get to the end. Here little white numbers started to smudge the windows instead of cleaning them.
Granted, we’re still in a transitional period here, so it’s not like the numbers don’t serve any purpose — each subsequent hop doubles the bonus points, eventually terminating in a 1-up if you can keep it going, so there’s that. It also tells players used to arcade mechanics, « hey, you did a good thing! Keep doing that! » A minimally invasive bouncy number like this isn’t too big a deal — but by the time we roll around to, say, Super Mario World on the SNES, it would have been fine to just let the high score tick up silently in the corner.
Still, Mario games are great examples of games with transparent and clear mechanics. Stomping a koopa causes it to immediately change visual state (it ducks into its shell). The creature stops moving and adopts a submissive pose, implying that it is less dangerous (for now) — if it had simply frozen in place, it would be unclear whether touching it would still kill you or not.
Little white numbers persist to this day, most prominently in RPG’s where they are used to indicate damage, and colored variants communicate a variety of effects such as healing, poison, etc.
Next, let’s look at unclear mechanics.
Final Fantasy I on the NES is a great example of a good game with smudgy windows.
When buying and equipping weapons, you receive no information other than its name. There’s no indication of what stats it changes, its elemental strengths, whether it has special powers, or even who can equip it. The only way to discover any of those things is trial and error, or read a guide.
FF1 gets a pass because it came out such a long time ago, but I routinely see modern games that lack some of these essential bits of information!
Now let’s look at the stats screen:
The experience section is very clear — you have this much XP and need this for your next level up. The lower right panel seems straightforward: okay I do this much damage, I have this % chance to hit, I’ll absorb this much damage from incoming attacks, and I have this much chance to evade attacks. But the numbers seem strange — do I really only have a 10% chance to hit an enemy? Will I really dodge attacks more than half the time?
And what about all this stuff on the left? We’ve got what I assume is Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Vitality, and Luck, but I only have a vague idea what those are supposed to do.
Turns out it’s all really complicated, and there’s even a few bugs in the implementation that foil the original intent of the designers!
As I surmised, I don’t really have a mere 10% chance to hit an enemy, it’s just an input into a hidden derived stat (base chance to hit) that then feeds into a calculation.
