🎲Experience Design Techniques
Contents
Plan your Experience and Assets thoroughly
Build your world's concept, design characters, and track dialogue
Curate concept art and planned assets; "dress" Experiences attractively
Create a more polished Experience with logic that flows more naturally
Plan a rough base map and blockout 3D spaces suitable for player actions
Consider player motivation in your Experience design
General Recommendations
Documentation
For a more successful Experience, take essential steps to design and document a detailed plan before creating anything. Your documentation will include concept design notes and visual references, storyboards, asset and dialogue tracking, build progress, and detailed notes during the testing phase to fix errors and improve gameplay. Documentation is not only helpful for the planning phase, but also to remind yourself of the many details you intend to put into your game and communicate design intentions to others if you're working on a team.
Use spreadsheets, slides, online tools, and anything else that helps develop your game idea, enhance your game vision, and track its progress. Use a Game Design Document to link all of these resources together in one place. Preparing and tracking this information may feel like a lot of work, but it will have a big impact on your Experience's overall quality and save you from a lot of revisions as you build it. In some cases, it may even save you from starting over!
A “Hook”
The “hook” is the thing that attracts players to try your Experience and keeps players interested and focused throughout the gameplay. Consider creating an interesting story, fascinating characters, unique art, or engaging mechanics to keep your player wanting more. It takes planning and trial-and-error before you can get all these working together harmoniously, but even just one of these areas being fleshed out well will make your Experience stand out to many players!
Feedback
Sound, Light, environmental settings (Weather), and Visual FX can help tell your story, build excitement, enhance the feel of players' actions, reward players for their achievements, lead players to or away from areas or through progression, and more.
Sound can be applied to the whole Experience, to an area, or to objects when players perform certain actions, such as collecting an object.
Light can be a point or spotlight, and includes negative light for dark spaces.
Weather can include the custom settings related to the sky and the apparent time of day, but can also include the light and shadows covering your Experience.
Visual VX can cover large areas or focus on a single object, and can be rewarded through Crowd Events to follow players' Avatars.
Fun
Players want to feel a sense of accomplishment, but they also want to be challenged. This makes it tricky to design gameplay that will not be too easy or too difficult. They also want some familiarity so they will feel confident in what to do next, but variety so it doesn't feel stale or too predictable. Teach players how your game works through a progression of challenges that increases in difficulty or complexity, and your players will find it more enjoyable and repayable.
Quality
Your game's logic and assets need to be tested to ensure they work properly, but there are other factors to look at carefully, too. There may be unintended results in your game's design, such as exploits where players may be able to gain something you've designed as a valuable resource over and over again and make it too easy to succeed. Players may also get physically stuck depending on block or object placement. Unfortunately, sometimes even perfectly functioning gameplay just doesn't feel fun.
Creators tend to test their Experiences mainly for functionality, with all the assumptions of how the player is "supposed" to play it in mind. However, players will make many different choices you cannot fully predict. These choices could break the game flow you intended, but even if they're forced to play it as intended, they may not enjoy it. This is why getting feedback from others is incredibly valuable. Share your Experience in the Gallery and ask the community in Discord for their feedback, or ask people who can play it in person to give feedback if you don't want the community to see it yet.
Thoroughly testing your experience will help guide you to make it not only more functional, but also much more enjoyable for more players.
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