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Evaluating Your Game: Part One
This is part one in an ongoing series, designed to help you evaluate your game from the ground up.
The most basic part of any game is the genre. This one choice determines more about the course of game play than any other factor, including setting. An espionage game is likely to encourage little combat, lots of role-playing, and characters designed with a wide variety of skills in mind, while a science fiction game of space fleets is going to encourage players to design characters with piloting and tactical skills in mind.
When looking at your game, ignore all other aspects of it and try to determine what kind of genre or mixture of genres your game best falls into, and what aspects of it your different players respond to the most. Armed with this knowledge, you can adjust your presentation of game elements to better match the genre your players want to see.
Setting contains all the specifics and details that genre leaves out. Everything from geographical to political, legal, and religious matters all into the setting, as well as the laws relating to physics or magic, which may well be different from that of our own world.
Is there an aspect of your setting that your players are ignoring? If so, why? Are they aware that it exists? Have they had the time or opportunity to explore that aspect of your game? If an aspect of your game is generally ignored or avoided by the players, they are either unaware of it, or unaware of why they would want to deal with it. Make a point of demonstrating why that part of your game is there and how your players can enjoy it; if they still don’t react, it may be time to remove it from your game.
Scope determines how much of the setting your players are likely to encounter, and how they are going to be interacting with it. The scope of your game is the starting point of the players, and everything they do right up to the end - there exist aspects of the setting/game world/game mechanics outside of that scope, but it does not affect the course of the game.
To determine where the scope of your game is likely to extend to you, look at how characters start off in your game. Are they lowly (or not so lowly) adventurers or mercenaries, just looking to make money? Or are they spies, stealing secrets from an enemy agency? Or are they simply ordinary people put into strange circumstances?
How the scope of your game progresses throughout it is also determined by the type of game, whether it is story, drama, or combat based. Characters can begin in a more powerful position in the former two types of games, as advancement is not the primary focus. Most combat games, however, include progression as an essential aspect, and if characters have nowhere to grow, the players may soon feel the game has no point.
The final aspect for this installment is reward. How do you reward your players? How do you reward the characters? Is the reward type appropriate to the game type? Items and equipment are seen as important in combat based games, but unless they forward the story or drama, they are far less useful in a less combat oriented game.
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[…] designed to help you evaluate and improve your game from the ground up. Previously, I discussed Genre, Setting, and Scope, followed by an analysis of Character Generation Methods. Today, I’m going to explore the […]