Casual Game DesignDesigning games everyone can enjoy

In light of the game design contest over at Jay Is Games, I thought I’d write something about the competition’s theme: replay. Since my skills with Flash are close to non-existent, I won’t be entering the contest myself, but hopefully this article will help some of you who do have a go at the prizes.

Replayability

Some games we like so much that we play them over and over, others we only play once, no matter how much we like them. Highly replayable games seem to have one thing in common: a strong core game mechanic. Think of games like Tetris and Bejeweled. They offer hardly anything beyond their core mechanic, but since that mechanic is so thoroughly enjoyable, it provides all the player needs to come back to the game time and again.

Playing again

Computer games have the unique ability to let the player relive a certain experience, but this time with some slight differences, so that the player can experiment with different approaches to a situation. The best more traditional, linear media can do in this respect, is to show a couple of pre-selected varations in sequence, but the consumer never has a say in the matter.

In its simplest form, computer games offer this kind of replay through save games. You play a certain part of the game, but you don’t like the outcome, so you reload your last save game and retry. This time you can take a slightly different approach, hopefully one leading to a more satisfactory result. Of course, this is merely a side effect of save games, but you can also design this kind of what if-experience into your game on purpose.

The trick is to force the player to make a certain choice and then let her wonder: “What if I had made a different choice?” If the game is short, or if there is some kind of provision for replaying certain parts of the game, then this can lead to an interesting game mechanic. To my knowledge, this hasn’t been done too often. The only two games that spring to mind are Façade and Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy).

Playing back

Another form of replay is the one we know from sports games, where part of the action is played back in slow-motion to offer a better view. Merely playing back parts the player has already played wouldn’t really add to the fun, but maybe you could offer a replay that shows events that the player wasn’t able to see before, because she was too busy with other things. This might influence her future actions or - if you combine it with the idea described above - it may get her to retry her last actions in a slightly different way.

Maybe you could even let the player change the action during the replay, so that she can correct the things that didn’t go altogether well the first time around. I know many sports fans how would love to have this ability.

Your turn

Those are just some of the spins you can put on the theme of replay. Hopefully, those of you who are participating in the competition can take away some ideas from this article. I know I’m looking forward to seeing what people come up with.

(14 votes, average: 4.14 out of 5)

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