Design Space: Dimensions of Game Design

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Design Space is tricky to define, because it’s the water we swim in. Mark Rosewater (who probably coined the term) says that design space is roughly how many new cards can be made from a new mechanic. A mechanic that affords a large design space interacts well with the rest of the game and allows them to create a wide variety of new cards. In other words, Design Space defines how many differentiated game elements (cards, weapons, characters, moves, enemies, obstacles, projectiles, etc.) you can create from the base mechanics of your game.

Relative to my 3-filters theory of Depth, Design Space acts almost like a 4th filter, above Possibility Space. Design Space defines which possibility spaces can even be made with the mechanics and attributes you have available to you. Possibility space is all the things that can happen in your games. Design space is all the possible games (or content) that you can make with the mechanics and systems you have chosen. In this way, game designers strive not only to create possibility spaces that are rich with possible game States, but design spaces that will allow them to create elements that enable those possibility spaces to contain a multitude of game states. A more richly detailed character allows for a more richly detailed environment for that character to interact with.

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10 Years of Critpoints

Celia Wagar2 Comments

10 years ago (and 2 months, but who’s gonna nitpick that?) I started this blog, Critpoints. Before that, I had been writing for Gather Your Party, a modest blog that aimed to challenge the establishment of professional games journalism with a staff of volunteers, no advertising, some of the early crop of gaming video essayists, and the tagline, “Honest Gaming Journalism”. For a lot of fairly predictable reasons, we burned out and eventually the site shuttered.

While I wrote there, I authored a column called, “More Than Mashing”, which showcased and explained different advanced video game techniques and play. This translated into a few YouTube Videos, most of which have been lost to time. I later ended up reviving this concept as a Facebook page, which did great until I got bored of it, and ran out of clips. Currently, that idea survives as a channel in my Discord Server, and as the banner in this site’s layout.

Since GYP, I’ve been involved in a few different projects, including Design Oriented, a group of game designers who were interested in exploring a more mechanical angle to video game design. I ended up leaving due to differences in point of view, but one thing I held onto was the name, “Crit Points”, which I had suggested as a potential name for the DO project. I tried combining the different ideas of “critique,” “hit points,” and “critical hit” into one short name. The tagline under the website name is intended to reflect the triple entendre. (Similarities to ActionPts, someone I used to work with, and ContraPoints are coincidental (I didn’t hear about ContraPoints until 2018) ).

Critpoints became my new brand, and I started this blog in March 2015!

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Building Counterplay for PvP Games

Celia Wagar3 Comments

I have a 4 factor model for move/option design in PvP games:

  • Stake (how much you stand to lose by choosing this option, either in costs or penalties)
  • Reward (how much you stand to gain if this option succeeds and stand to gain regardless)
  • Difficulty/Chance (the likelihood that the option will be successfully executed)
  • Counterplay (what range of options this move beats, and how hard/soft a counter)

The purpose of dividing across these 4 factors is to help illustrate to designers the different levers they can pull, instead of focusing purely on a linear risk/reward relationship.

It’s common for a lot of designers to get stuck thinking that everything risky has to have a proportionate amount of reward, and everything rewarding has to have a proportionate amount at stake. Having lopsided stake/reward relationships is possible and healthy when the difficulty and counterplay are considered.

A subtle factor of this model is that cost is a type of risk, and therefore something you put at Stake. When you pay a cost, you’re risking that that investment won’t pay off. Therefore An upside of this model is that it separates Risk from Difficulty/Chance of Success, which are often conflated. “This move is risky, because you’re likely to mess it up.” By separating Risk out into Stake, Difficulty, and Counterplay, we can think more carefully about how each of these different factors play into an option’s design, and we have a wider design space for option design.

Within counterplay there is a lot of nuance to how counters can be designed. I’m going to identify 2 spectrums:

  • Hard vs Soft
  • Wide vs Narrow

A hard counter is one that is guaranteed to always shut down the option that it counters. A soft counter is one with more wiggle room.

A wide counter can beat a wide variety of options. And a narrow counter can only deal with a very specific one.

By dividing counterplay across these two axes, we can see the relative strengths and weaknesses of different moves and intentionally alter the counterplay of moves relative to our needs.

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I Don’t Really Like Deus Ex

Celia Wagar1 Comment

Deus Ex is THE game that popularized the Immersive Sim genre. It lived as a cult classic for decades until it was picked up again for Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, then dropped like a sack of potatoes when Square Enix tried to split the plot of Mankind Divided across 2 games in order to get twice the money and the audience decided they didn’t like that.

So what is an Immersive Sim? I think Imsim is a specific design lineage among the developers of Looking Glass Studios and Ion Storm, much like the modern Souls-like subgenre. Many people credit the first imsim as Ultima Underworld, and it was succeeded by System Shock 2, Thief, and Deus Ex, going on to produce later examples such as Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Bioshock 1 & 2, and the Prey reboot.

Immersive Sims are typically set in the first person perspective, have fairly linear story progression through a series of “mission” levels played in a specific sequence, but many routes that can be taken through each level, and access to these routes is modulated by the RPG skills or upgrades that the player has chosen to invest into. When dialogue with NPCs is possible, there are frequently many different options available, and NPCs and notes found scattered around the world provide a large amount of exposition about the events of the game setting

In addition to this, imsims tend to place a strong focus on systemic interactions between different objects and entities, outside of the player. This can be through physics (stacking boxes), NPC interactions, or other environmental features (Thief’s water and moss arrows). This has the stated goal of provoking “emergent gameplay”, which is something I typically hold in high esteem.

So why don’t I like Deus Ex? I don’t think the game’s various systems add up to all that much.

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How to Code Fighting Game Motion Inputs

Celia Wagar2 Comments

So previously I’ve taught you How To Perform Fighting Game Motions, now lets learn how developers coded them. As far as I know, nobody has documented how to do this before, and it’s essential for anyone making a fighting game, or anything like a fighting game.

There is a website called SFVSim that catalogues change differences between versions for moves in Street Fighter V. This includes a lot of data on each move, including the input requirements.

Quarter-Circle Forward: Hadouken
Dragon Punch
Half-Circle Back
Double Quarter-Circle Forward: Super

This is extremely helpful for determining the logic involved for these motion inputs. The buffer on each direction determines how much time in frames is allowed to elapse before the next input is provided, or the motion becomes invalid. In other words, it determines how quickly you need to do the motion, and how much time you have to press the button after you’ve completed it.

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VR is Focusing on the Wrong Things

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Disclaimer: This has been on the backburner for a very long time. I’m sorry if some information is out of date, or if I’m missing something.

My original attitude towards VR was skeptical to dismissive. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m skeptical about anything promising “immersion” and pretty much the concept of immersion in general. I got to try a prerelease Oculus VR headset at a showcase in New York City and it was pretty much what I expected, a screen strapped to my face, while I controlled an FPS game like I’ve always done. To me, VR was another type of screen, I didn’t expect it to fundamentally change anything about video games.

First Gen VR devices changed my mind, they brought on motion controls, like the Wii and PS Move. I eventually got to try a Vive headset, with Valve’s The Lab, SuperHot VR, and a couple others, and I saw what the device could do, and it was pretty obvious that there was untapped potential there. VR seems like a way to make motion controls work much more feasibly than they ever had before, and that could lead to some legitimately new game genres!

The Shortcomings of Current VR Games

My trouble is that VR is also couched in this “immersive promise”. People want the holodeck and full-dive like SAO or Ready Player 1. VR Companies promise that VR is the future of immersion into a virtual world, where we can finally enter The Matrix, The Metaverse, Ready Player 1; You get the picture, right? Except, VR as it currently exists is horrible at all of those things. VR isn’t suited for you to walk around virtual worlds at all.

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Scrubs & Johns: A Defense Against Bad Sportsmanship

Celia Wagar4 Comments

Competition gets personal. Competition gets people riled up and sometimes people get angry. Being a gracious loser and a humble winner is tough. Being a bad sportsman is a common and easy pattern of behavior to fall into, and the Fighting Game and Smash communities have created different types of defenses against salty players who can’t hold their Ls.

No Johns

In the Smash Bros community, legend says there was once a guy named John who had an excuse for everything. “I didn’t sleep well last night!” “The CRT was tilted away from me!” “The sun was in my eyes!” “My dog ate my inputs!” Naturally this wasn’t very polite to his opponents.

This eponymous John was so infamous that eventually, when people would make excuses for why they lost, people started to say, “No Johns!” It became such a big meme that over a decade later, Reggie Fils-Aime would quote it in a promotion for Smash 4.

No Johns helped to promote an environment where, rather than complaining, people would focus on the game and improve. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a funny and certainly helpful.

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The Secret History of Zelda

Celia Wagar4 Comments

A lot of people who know me know that I don’t especially like 3d Zelda games before Breath of the Wild, but explaining why, and who is responsible for those design decisions is a long long story.

The Arcade Roots of Zelda

Zelda 1 had intense arcade-y action with a diverse array of enemies.

The Legend of Zelda (hereafter, Zelda 1) was an Open World Action game. In retrospect, it’s been called an action-adventure game, but understanding it as an open world action game is probably more fitting to the context in which it originally arrived. It was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, who was inspired by childhood adventures, where he would travel on foot across the countryside and try to map out the places he’d been to. He also was attempting to distinguish it from Super Mario Bros by making it nonlinear, top-down, and a number of other ideas.

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The Big Catch: Tacklebox Review

Celia Wagar2 Comments

The Big Catch: Tacklebox is a demo for an upcoming 3d platformer game, The Big Catch. Despite being only a demo, Tacklebox is closer to a prologue chapter, featuring a different protagonist and entirely distinct areas from the upcoming game! This free “demo” has so much content, that it’s practically an entire game in its own right.

In The Big Catch: Tacklebox, you are tasked with catching fish, who run around on tiny legs around ancient ruins scattered across a desert plateau. You can also collect coins/tokens, which unlock the final dungeon if you collect all 696 of them. Naturally, this is a bit like 3d platformer collectathons of the past, but part of what helps distinguish Tacklebox is that rather than scattering coins and fish around everywhere, they’re in deliberately chosen locations that are difficult to get to. While cleaning up some of the better hidden coins at the end of the game can be a bit of a pain, for the most part, the game focuses on only putting coins in locations that are a challenge to get to, so that they’re closer to optional challenges scattered across the game, rather than simply collectables for the sake of being collectible.

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Building Skill Tests @ Game Design Skills

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I’ve been writing with GameDesignSkills.com for a while now. I’m a moderator on their discord, Funsmith Club, and I’ve been working with Alexander Brazie on a game design course for the past 4 years, and we’re currently teaching test lessons with a live audience and doing workshops with them!

I’ve also been writing articles for Game Design Skills. You might have noticed that some of the Depth articles on my site have gone missing. I’ve combined multiple of them into one article which is now hosted here on Game Design Skills. I’ve also published an article on game design pillars with them.

Today, I published an article on level design, or more broadly, skill tests and dynamic skill challenges, with Game Design Skills, which you can find here: https://gamedesignskills.com/game-design/player-skill-test/

I am still going to be writing and publishing content to this blog, but I’m also going to be linking articles I get posted over there when they go up.

If anyone’s curious, I’ve still been developing Charmed Chains. I have a card database now, and I’ve created a process to automatically data merge the cards into a template for easy printing. I’ve changed the direction of the game fairly dramatically from where it was during the last playtest, switching to a focus on pump spells (“combat tricks”) and I’ve incorporated colors and color identity into the game. I hope to run a playtest at Evo when I go there next month!