Game design: thoughts on decisions

For myself I define two types of decision-making: direct and indirect.

Direct decision-making happens via option selection window and it’s perfectly suited for dialogs but not for actions. E.g., when talking to Karas in the Episode One the player can end his ponderism or can keep listening, can agree with him or can object. The options appearing on screen correlate with mental articulation — similar principle both in-game and in your head helps immersion though a limited number of options opposes that.

In the scene with the bear everything is more difficult: the choice is not between phrases, but between actions. And usually a person would act before wording the right action. And so the actions must be peeked by immediate actions: escaping from the bear by running with the Shift button pressed, falling on the ground by pressing the button to fall and scaring the bear by activation of Dance ability that would be done as a rhythmic QTE. But RPG Maker offers simplified experience with lots of conventions. Running through the map tiles would look bad and it would be hard to control, and it won’t create enough tension. The button to lay down would make sense in hentai game but it’d be mostly unused and easily forgotten. Skill activation when meeting the bear is the best option but it would have to consider where the player stands, which direction the bear looks to, how much time has passed, is such action universal and if it correlates with other decisions — that and many other things that can influence one’s perception of this action. Due to such limitation it is necessary to sacrifice deeper immersion for simpler and clearer method. And from the desire to improve immersion come indirect decisions.

Indirect decisions do not involve exact wording. The options won’t appear on screen and time won’t stop. The player makes indirect decisions during gameplay by moving, using skills and items, interacting with objects and characters.

For example, there were such decisions in the witch house where players themselves chose to inspect the hut and interact with the spellbook or to head to the door right away to go outside.

There will be indirect decisions in the beginning of the Episode Two. In will be possible to go to the village in the rugged dress by simply heading toward Zalesje, or one can interact with the white dress on the rope.

Such indirect decisions help immersion due to being inseparable from the main activity in game. And thanks to that, as well as their non-obviousness, indirect decisions help to ease the disappointment from limited number of options.

In order to increase immersion and thus to improve game experience I set for myself the following goals:

1) To increase the number of indirect decisions;
2) ‎To improve gameplay component of indirect decisions (in addition to interaction and movement introduce skills, spells, items and mini-games);
3) ‎To increase the number of direct decisions connected to Rodinka’s personality (by putting aside decisions that couldn't have crossed her mind);
4) ‎To plan step-by-step adaptation of decisions to gamers’ desires by developing characteristics and the decisions made before.

And that’s it, next post on my vision of game design I will dedicate to consequences.