Before I guide you through game-development topics in this book, I must first teach you about game design. For those starting out with developing games, this is usually the stage where they say something like "I want to make a game like Flappy Bird, Angry Birds, or Candy Crush", which might not be entirely wrong here, but this doesn't make it exactly right either. This way of thinking doesn't define the kind of gameplay they're aiming for and won't do anything, except reskinning other games that are already published.
In this chapter, you're going to learn:
- What makes a game
- The elements of game design and drawing your game flow
- Game mechanics
So, let's start with a simple question: what is a game? You might have your own definition, or you might have read other people's description of it. There are a lot of definitions of what a game is by some popular figures; a few of them are listed next.
Greg Costikyan defines a game as follows:
"A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal."
According to Raph Koster, a game is defined as follows:
"Playing a game is the act of solving statistically varied challenge situations presented by an opponent who may or may not be algorithmic within a framework that is a defined systemic model."
Sid Meier defines a game as follows:
"A game is a series of interesting choices."
However, in this book, we'll use my definition of what a game is.
"A game is a continuous loop of challenges and rewards."
While the loop continues, the game will keep on giving rewards to the player. The game can have the same challenges or the difficulty can increase, as seen often. Instead of just changing the difficulty, a variety of challenges can always be supplied as you progress in the game.
Let me give you an example: Angry Birds. The challenge here is to eliminate all the pigs using a limited number of birds; the rewards are scores and stars at the end of a level, progression to the next level, and new birds in new stages. The challenge is always the same in the entire game, only more variation is added to the boxes in the level, the number of pigs you need to eliminate, and the type of birds available to you. When Rovio wants to provide you with a new mechanic, they make a new game, for example, Angry Birds Space. In this game, in addition to planetary gravity, you also need to think about your movement in space, which doesn't have any gravity at all. Alternatively, in Angry Birds Rio, they added bird cages.
Thus, to define a game is to define its challenges and rewards, so how are you going to do this? At first you need to come up with a theme for your game. What is your game about? Can you define it in one sentence or even one word? In various parts of the world, even in the Internet, there are events called game jams where people compete to make a game in a limited amount of time. If you participate in a game jam, you will force yourself to come up with a clear and concise idea for a game.
After you come up with a theme, the next part is to come up with a genre around this theme. In games, a genre refers to what the player does, for example, in a racing genre, the player races; in a fighting genre, the player fights; and so on. Let me take an example from a game jam that I recently participated in. The jam's theme was "burning". After I knew the theme, I started making a list of what I can do with fire, such as illuminating something, burning something, or blasting something. I ignored the first one; it is a different property of fire compared to burning or blasting, because burning and blasting destroy, and illuminating is just lighting something. Thus, I ended up with a game that burns and blasts something.
After that, I decide on a core that includes the mechanics that make up the player's goals, challenges, and rewards. In this context, burning something means that there is some kind of a track for the fire to burn, while blasting something means that there are targets to destroy. I then created roads for the fire track and monsters as enemies to destroy at various points in the track; this is how I came up with my initial design for a puzzle game. For a puzzle game, what's left is just to make variations in how the track is laid out in each level and how many enemies are there.
Now that you've made a challenge, how do you design your reward?
If you made a level-based game, then the more difficult level must produce higher scores after the player completes the challenges in this level, or you can reward players with an in-game item after they complete something. A good way to measure rewards is to keep a record of your result when playing that level. How long does it take you to complete the level? How much of the player's health is left? Is it reasonable? Try changing some aspect of your level a bit and see how it turns out.
In designing your rewards, ask yourself these questions:
- Do players care about your rewards?
- Are your rewards appropriate for the level of difficulty it takes to acquire them?
- Can you give players a choice of what rewards they're going to get?
Game rewards can be in the form of tougher enemies, additional obstacles, new kinds of enemies, and so on. Rewards can come in the form of:
- Something that the player automatically receives in that level (the distance they have traversed in an endless runner game, for instance)
- Something the player has to try to collect to get the score (in platformers, there are floating coins or other things that the player must collect)
- New items after the player has done something (getting a new item after combining some materials in a crafting system)
- Progression after reaching a certain threshold (in RPGs, also known as role playing games, you level up your characters after getting enough EXP, or experience points)
- Giving the player a means to continue playing (clearing a row in Tetris allows you to play longer)
Rewards don't have to come in the form of a score. Different rewards appeal to different people. Sometimes, new tools or items can give a strong motivation to other players.
I defined a game as a continuous loop, but this loop can't go on forever; otherwise, we're going to end up with a game that has no end. There are two ways to end a game loop: either the player wins or the player loses. To do this, we have to design two more things: a winning condition and a losing condition.
- The winning condition is the player's target. It is the goal they're trying to achieve in each level. This winning condition can be to destroy all enemies, destroy the boss at the end of each level, or move a character to a safe point without being defeated by enemies.
- On the other hand, the losing condition is the player's threat. It's something they always try to avoid while trying to achieve the winning condition. The losing condition can be when your character is defeated by an enemy, when an enemy reaches a certain point in the game, or when the player fails to fulfill the winning condition in a set amount of time.
When making the winning condition for your game, you can choose to design a game, called an endless game, that doesn't have a winning condition. This type of game continues to play as long as the player hasn't met the losing condition.
An endless game must still have a losing condition and a reward; if not, then the player would have no purpose of continuing to play the game. This reward can either be a score that they accumulate in the game, a new item or upgrades to help players complete a level, or a clock that shows how long they will survive in a level. For instance, consider two well-known examples of this type of game, namely Jetpack Joyride and Temple Run.
Now let me give you an example of what you can make with Construct 2. As one of the best 2D game-creation tools on the market, there are a lot of genre examples of what you can make with it, such as the following ones:
- Platformer
- Infinite running
- Racing
- Tower defense
- Shooting
- Puzzle
There are also game genres that are hard or impossible to create with Construct 2; some examples are:
- Visual novel
- First-person shooter
- Simulation games
- Massive multiplayer online games