Hi, I’m Sensei_Developer. I created the game Dummies vs Noobs as well as other games. In this brief tutorial, you will learn what makes a game fun, enjoyable and replayable.
quick notice i am not a professional game designer, i just took notes on valve games lolololo
What is ‘fun’?
The definition of fun is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “Light-hearted pleasure , enjoyment”. So, how do we create fun?
There are three main pillars to what makes our brains release dopamine, when doing any activity.
Impact
Humans love the feeling when they feel as they are in control, and have their mark on their environment. An example of impact would be environment destruction, manipulation of surrounding objects and problem solving.
When we, as humans, succeed in a task that has a significant and noticable influence on others or things around us, it makes us happy.
Feedback
Clicking a button is quite mundane. It’s boring, tedious and repetitive. This category is for making the more mundane, short-term tasks into something more enjoyable. Feedback is when something you do creates a feedback to you, whether that’d be auditory or visually.
Let’s take an example; the 2019 video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. When you fire the weapon, by manipulating your fingers into pressing buttons, you hear the gun violently recoil and create a strong and impactful gunshot sound. Upon the shot successfully hitting an enemy, it creates a satisfying feedback by creating a visual and auditory hit-mark, letting you know that you’ve hit them.
A bad example would be creating a gun that feels weak and uneventful, with no confirmation of a hit or any power to the firearm. It’s O.K to make first-person-shooters not have hitmarkers, whether you’re going for a realistic shooter or not.
Challenge
Obviously, when humans are given too much dopamine too easily, our brains build a resistance to the ‘new’ dopamine levels. That’s when we feel like it gets boring.
To compensate, many game designers create challenge in their games, whether that’d be the skill of other players, or the puzzle requiring critical thinking. The challenge helps reset the dopamine levels to normal levels, and makes the game more enjoyable.
Pacing
Pacing is when game designers control how the game feels and moves at different points of time. The act of pacing is very important when creating games, because like I mentioned earlier, our brains tend to build resistances to new dopamine levels. Giving the player a constant, non-stop flow of action and intensity would make them get bored of it, and it ends up making the player feel burnt out.
Instead, game designers choose to have certain points of the game to slow down (metaphorically, not literally) and give players a small break to reset the dopamine levels in their brains. The timing of these moments are absolutely critical, as doing too much or too little of these can result in the player quitting.
Multiplayer games can be quite a challenge for designers, especially because you can’t just pause the game in the middle of a round just so that 1 guy gets a brief break from all of it. Instead, multiplayer game designers often resort to using either subtle map design or respawn times. For one, the map design can help players take time off walking back to the action after respawning. Respawn queues and times also assist in forcing the player to take a break, so their dopamine levels get reset.
Discovery & Learning
Humans crave that feeling of discovery, whether it’d be learning a game mechanic by themselves, or discovering a new pre-historic cave 200,000 years ago. It gets into our natural instinct of curiosity and learning, because our ancestors evolved to constantly seek new information.
Many, MANY games fall into the pitfall of having a tutorial that’s far too extensive or too wordy for the player. Telling the player what to do outright is not fun, as humans don’t enjoy the feeling of being told what to do or where to go.
Instead, information should be flowed in at a controlled pace. Players will progressively seek more and more information as they grow more accustomed to the game.
An example of this is when you join a game for the first time. You’re quite confused, and the game tells you the bare-bones instructions. You’re willing to learn that, compared to when the game just dumps the entire internet’s worth of information on you. As you grow more accustomed to the game, you’ll naturally seek out how to ‘play better’.
Now, obviously you shouldn’t just completely withhold all the information from a player. In fact, it’s sometimes good to give players hints as to where they should go or what they should do.
Intuitive design
Intuitive level/environment design helps players lead themselves to where they should be, without them noticing consciously. A good example is when the game wants you to… say, blow up some barrels. If the barrels were seamlessly blended into the environment, the player would have a hard time figuring out what to do to pass the level. If the barrels were bright in color or the surrounding environment of the barrels hinted towards their importance, the players would naturally try experimenting on ‘what would this do?’
A quick note is to NEVER underestimate a player’s critical thinking skills. People aren’t that dumb y’know?
Alright cool, what about replayability?
This one is a bit of a tricky topic for me. Usually, to keep players coming back, developers add incentives like daily login streaks, quests, daily challenges etc. Those methods are fine, and have proven themselves to work quite effectively. Other games simply don’t even try, and focus most of their effort in making each playthrough feel unique and different from the last.
A good example of what I just said is Left 4 Dead 2’s ingenious “Director” AI. The Director dynamically changes the map layout, adjusts the enemy count and difficulty, and gives players breaks after an intense fight. It also dynamically spawns in health kits, weapons, tools, etc. That way, the AI will automatically adjust the game’s difficulty to hit the sweet spot, making the game feel quite replayable and fun.
TL;DR on the last segment: You don’t really need to have complicated incentives to get players coming back. Sometimes, pure fun and enjoyment is enough.
Lastly: TEST YOUR GAME!!!
Not ‘test your game’ as in “oh yeah this and this bug blah blah blah” No. By ‘testing’, I mean getting genuine and honest feedback in test sessions meant to replicate what players would do in the game. This is the job of Triple-A QA testers, or Quality Assurance testers do. They play the game like any other player would, and the designers get feedback from the tests. Using this information, designers change the game to fit their vision of what they want it to become.
Please, for the love of god, don’t pursue other game’s mechanics and designs into your own game (unless if they incorporate quite well, then that’s fine). Don’t add stuff purely for the sake of adding stuff. Think about its impact, how players would use it, how the game’s feel and vibe would shift!
Anyways thanks for reading. Goodbye