After defining the theme, making winning and losing conditions, and drawing our general flow diagram, now is the time to create the core part of our game design: game mechanics.
Game mechanics define what the players do inside the main gameplay screen, which is shown in the preceding diagram. This is where the players spend most of their time and have fun in your game, and because of this, it is the most important part of game design.
In LeBlanc's MDA design method, mechanics refers to the individual actions the player can take, such as jumping, shooting, dragging puzzle pieces, picking up objects, placing objects, and more (there are hundreds of game mechanics that can be combined in any number of ways to make the next component, dynamics).
The first step in making game mechanics is to make game rules. Game rules are special rules in your game that might or might not be written in other games. Game rules tell your players what they can or can't do in the game and what the results of their actions are. The following are small examples of game rules along with their game genre:
- Platformers (for example, Super Mario or Rayman):
- Players have a set number of lives at the beginning of each level
- Picking up coins gives players a set amount of points
- Touching enemies from the side will deduct player's lives
- If the player's lives are zero, the player loses
- Touching enemies from the upper side will kill the enemy
- If players collide with a floating brick platform from below, the players will bounce back down
- If players collide with a floating green platform from below, the players will jump through this platform
- Pressing down and jump while on top of a floating green platform will make the player jump down from this platform
- Match 3 games (for example, Candy Crush Saga or Puzzle & Dragons):
- Dragging an object will move it
- If the object doesn't match the neighboring objects, it is automatically returned to its original position
- If the object matches the neighboring objects, then they're all destroyed
- Players can move and match as many objects as they want as long as the remaining time isn't zero
- Tower defense (for example, Kingdom Rush or Plants vs Zombies):
- There are places where towers can be placed and where towers can't be placed.
- There are predefined paths for enemies to walk on
- In each level, enemies come in a few groups called "waves"
- Towers can be upgraded or destroyed
These rules have been created for the sake of examples; you can write as many or as little game rules as you want. You need to always add at least one rule that's unique to your game to make it different from other games. In the tower-defense example, you can add an element system to add elements to the tower's attacks (such as a fire-based attack or a wind-based attack), and there are enemies who are strong against certain elements. Alternatively, if you only want to make a clone of your favorite game, you could just make slight changes to the existing game mechanics.
This is what happens inside the main gameplay screen in our game-screen flow diagram, from the time the level started until it ended, whether players meet the winning condition or the losing condition. Taking an example from the tower-defense game, the flow will look as follows:
- The preparation phase: This is when players are able to place their towers. There will be an information box that tells the players what type of enemies to expect in the next wave. This phase lasts for a few seconds before changing to the battle phase.
- The battle phase: When waves of enemies start their attack, players can still place new towers in this phase. This phase ends after the current wave of enemies ends.
If the level still has any more enemy waves, it returns to the preparation phase; if not, then the player wins.
Depending on what happens to the player during the entire level, certain things can take place:
- If the player was defeated during the battle phase, then the player loses.
- If the player wins, then calculate the rewards to be given to them (this can be from the remaining health, number of towers used, the time it took to defeat all the enemies, and so on).
- If the player loses all their lives, then they receive a small reward for their effort. This small reward can be gold points that players can use to buy new towers that might help them win the level next time.
To create your main game phases, there are a few questions you need to ask yourself regarding the challenges and rewards that you make for your game:
- How do the challenges force your players' skills?
- What can the players do in your game to overcome these challenges? Do the players have a lot of options to use?
- What happens when the player fails to clear the challenges? Can they retry that level? Do they have a better chance the second time?
- Is the reward really worth the trouble it took the players to overcome the challenges?
To make it easier to understand, I have a small diagram that shows what the main game phases in general should look like. You can make this diagram more detailed depending on your answer to the questions posed earlier.
Now, we are nearing the completion of our game design, but before we can call it complete, there's one more thing that needs to be covered: the fun factor. This is one of the reasons why people play your game, to have fun. Other reasons are to kill some time or as an escape from the everyday routine. I will describe this feeling of fun into two broad meanings: entertaining fun and challenging fun. A game can use one of the two or combine them in a certain way to create their own experiences.
- Entertaining fun: This is the feeling we get when we're relaxed and amused; we don't need to try too hard to get this kind of feeling. Games that gives this kind of fun don't give too many hard challenges and are often made with simple rules that are given many variances to each level. These games also want to make the players experience some core feeling such as the cool feeling you get after completing a level.
- Challenging fun: This is the opposite of entertaining fun. Games that aim to give this kind of fun use all the game rules they have to push the players to the limit of their skills in order to try to beat the game. Players will get their own enjoyment after they beat the challenges and clear the level rather than from the experience of something fun/cool.
This definition of fun that the game is trying to give to the players is usually not written as a section or a bullet point in the game design, but it is incorporated in the whole design. It determines the kind of visual the game presents and defines how hard the level is. If the game has dialogues, it will set whether there will be comedic lines or not.
This fun factor is meant to be felt by the players, whether they feel joy, excitement, or maybe, the drama in the narrative of the game. Every game tries to give its own experience to the players.