Hi! This is an article on the importance of game design within roblox. But first, who am I?
I’m Judash399, I’ve been on the platform as a developer for four years, I have lots of knowledge in game design beyond roblox and want to bring some of it over to Roblox. A lot of this knowledge comes from ‘Game maker’s toolkit’ and I would highly suggest watching some of their videos, (they’re really good)
Each section of this article goes into 1 section of game design. This article will be updated in the future with even more topics.
Imersivly tutorializing players
One of the most important parts of a game is teaching players. Ask yourself: if a player doesn’t know how to play your game, why would they want to play it in the first place?
One example of a Roblox game that does tutorials well is DOORS, the horror game where yoprogress by walking through doors. DOORS teaches players it’s mechanics immersively without interrupting gameplay.
What Doors does
In the first room of Doors players naturaly learn some core mechanics of the game while in a safe enviornment, these include:
- Players being prompted to crouch when necessacary (teaches the player about crouching) *Players being required to grab and use the key to progress (teaches the player about locked doors)
As this shows, the only time DOORS provides a true “tutorial” is through button prompts that tell the player which keys to press. This is the only time you need to directly instruct the player—otherwise, you should aim to let them learn by doing. Of course, not all games can implement this approach effectively, but many can, including platformers, puzzle games, strategy games, and some combat games (depending on their mechanics), and more! Doors also shows how players should be taught in safe envornemnts to allow them to experiment, and although this is a pretty simple mechanic to unederstand, certain more complicated mechanics have to be taught safely to encourage experimentation.
Difficulty curves
This section is going to go into dificulty curves but becuase this topic is so broad I’m going to use many examples. So first what is a diffuculty curve?
A diffuculty curve is a way to display the difficulty of a game at a certain time. An average graph would look something like this
yes I drew this in paint thank me later
your target audiance should be somewhere near this line, not too high or they would be borred, or too low where there struggiling, idealy the player should be somewhere near the games difficulty so there not borred or struggling to badly.
Not all curves have to be liniar though sometimes its good to have it go down to teach players how to do a mechanic (like the last paragraph stated) in a safe envornment.