How to make players feel small in a game
How big development studios incorporate immersion with the player’s control of the game
** Note: immersion is subjective, this topic shows how games create environments and how to implement similar features to your own games. Use this as a guide only **
It may sound silly, but making player-to-world size feel realistic is actually a big but subtle component to immersing a player into your game’s atmosphere. Think of games like Those Who Remain, Centaura, Criminality, or even Rise of Nations.
In this topic, I’ll explain how you can make your game more immersive. Today you should hopefully leave knowing how to make players feel small as they play your games.
What makes these games feel the way they are?
It’s all about how the players feel about their role. You see, the atmospheres in Centaura, TWR, and Criminality are all forlorn and cold. Players don’t feel like they can control much besides what they do.
The world around them is too big for them to control, but they still have a small say in what happens during gameplay.
Those Who Remain is an infamous example of this; each map isn’t too large, yet it still feels like there’s such a huge world around you, suffering through the apocalypse as well. You can’t exactly influence what zombies do, but you still can manipulate them to walk into barbed wire or bombs.
Balance of Control
Centaura is a great example of atmospheric immersion. Players practically cannot change the tide of the battle alone, but teamwork shifts the power balance. Centaura, gameplay-wise, can only be changed through teamwork. It’s quite hard to single-handedly take a barn while there’s enemies and MGs shooting you, with explosions around you on top of that.
But charging with teammates gives you a higher chance of taking the barn. This is how players may feel that their role is inferior to the world around them, it subconsciously convinces them that they cannot control the game. This is how balance of control works.
Creating barriers in your game that restrict players from single-handedly changing the gameplay loop is how you keep retention and build a deeper world.
Player Environment
Criminality is more bound to subjectivity, as players can unlock powerful weapons and have more say in what occurs during gameplay. The normal game modes of Casual and Standard give players more control than normal, yet the environment around them gives them the illusion of feeling small. In reality, the Criminality map is not very big.
From an older devforum post from the creator, the map is somewhere around 1500x1500 to 3000x3000 in size (may be inaccurate, as post was published during the release), but in my personal experience, the map feels vast and open. The walls bordering the map allow the player to ponder about what is beyond the walls, and this is my second point, allowing wonder to exist within your world can make it feel bigger.
This is how you make a player feel small through modelling and building. Creating large background objects can complement the gameplay and pushes your game to a more immerisve state.
Player Constraints
I often find games with amazing immersion tactics, but they tend to lessen their impacts because of player walkspeed, jumping, and other movement systems. If you aim for a realistic game, camera sway, jump cooldowns, and limited jump height and walkspeed are good starting points for immersion.
Lowering the walkspeed to 6-10 for walking, setting jump height to ~1-2 studs for realistic jumping, and adding camera sway are all the easiest steps to achieving realism. Restricting a player’s movement creates the illusion that the player can’t control events in-game; it also has the tendency to make them think of the gameplay loop/grind as longer.
Simple and small details such as jump cooldown also complements all of these constraints, that way they don’t feel like they entirely restrict the player from having ANY control of their own gameplay.
Other details follow:
First Person
Accelerating running (you speed up before reaching full speed)
FOV changes (jumping, running, etc.)
Crouching/Crawling (complements small spaces)
CONCLUSION
So, now that we understand how these games create immersive environments, how can we implement these strategies into our OWN games?
Well, take time to notice small details that make you feel smaller while playing immersive games. Searching for WHY you feel a certain way when performing certain actions reveals to you how the developer managed to make you feel that emotion.
I tend to do this mid-game sesh, often wondering how a developer creates my attitude towards the game through the environment; I recommend doing this to further understand how devs make amazing games environmentally.
Thank you for taking the time to read, please respond with any questions below ^^ (this is my first written guide, and i wrote this to share my ideas and help as much as i can with everyone else’s games, so please also give me any feedback, thanks!)