Design Questions from Chapter 9

Design Practice QUESTIONS

HOMEWORK THIS WEEK:

ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS FOR YOUR GAME DESIGN (ITEM 2) AND POST
THESE ON YOUR CLASS BLOG BY 4/22/11

1. What types of challenges do you want to include in your game? Do you want to 
challenge the player’s physical abilities, his mental abilities, or both?

2. Game genres are defi ned in part by the nature of the challenges they offer. What 
does your choice of genre imply for the gameplay? Do you intend to include any 
cross-genre elements, challenges that are not normally found in your chosen genre?
 
3. What is your game’s hierarchy of challenges? How many levels do you expect it 
to have? What challenges are typical of each level?
 
4. What are your game’s atomic challenges? Do you plan to make the player face 
more than one atomic challenge at a time? Are they all independent, like battling 
enemies one at a time, or are they interrelated, like balancing an economy? If they 
are interrelated, how?
 
5. Does the player have a choice of approaches to victory? Can he decide on one 
strategy over another? Can he ignore some challenges, face others, and still achieve 
a higher-level goal? Or must he simply face all the game’s challenges in sequence?
 
6. Does the game include implicit challenges (those that emerge from the design), 
as well as explicit challenges (those that you specify)?
 
7. Do you intend to offer settable diffi culty levels for your game? What levels of 
intrinsic skill and stress will each challenge require?
 
8. What actions will you implement to meet your challenges? Can the player surmount a large number of challenges with a small number of actions? What is the 
mapping of actions to challenges?
 
9. What other actions will you implement for other purposes? What are those purposes—unstructured play, creativity and self-expression, socialization, story 
participation, or controlling the game software?
 
10. What save mechanism do you plan to implement?