Risk & Reward

Risk and reward are part of the balance that makes your Experience exciting to play. Players feel tempted to test their limits, challenged by temporary failure and thrilled with victory and discovery.

Player Focused Design

The player base for your Experiences will likely be very broad. Design gameplay to provide content that will keep most players interested, avoid frustration, and drive them to attempt challenges.

Base risks & rewards on what your target audience needs and wants.

Ramp of Difficulty

• Gradually introduce your game’s unique mechanics, offer quick incremental rewards

• Consider jump height and length, control complexity, puzzle difficulty, enemy strength and number, timing, etc

• Engage players with a variety of interactions, reward with collectibles, equipment, and visual FX as feedback

Consequences for Player Death

By default, players respawn without consequences and resume with enemies at the same health and the same status of logic and object presence (doors unlocked, obstacles destroyed, etc).

Player death shouldn't always be inconsequential. There are many more exciting options for such an important gameplay event - get creative!

• Heal or respawn enemies

• Spawn more difficult enemies

• Respawn obstacles

• Remove opportunities to get better equipment

• Block pathways to make players recalculate

• Restore enemy health to add urgency (once or constant)

Rewards for Risk-Taking

Highly skilled players want a higher risk to reward ratio, but even casual players will still want to take moderate risks with a decent reward.

• Tempt players with quality equipment or collectibles in hard to reach places where death is possible in the journey

• Make alternative challenging paths that can reduce completion time (a metric that may be tracked for leaderboards) or bypass simpler areas to differentiate play options

Provide rewards for extra effort, like reaching high places (Shown: The Smurfs Crystal Cave Expedition)