Daily Archives: February 23, 2022

What Are You Trying To Feel?

Making games involves a lot of consideration about how players feel, as they engage with your game. When a player is playing a game like Doom, there’s a desire for some tension, but also for a feeling of excitement; you want to push players to feel like they can achieve things, and for their fear to be at odds with their sense of invulnerability. If a player thinks they’re able to defeat things, they’ll approach the frustration of the game with a proactive attitude, but if they’re afraid of dying, they’ll also be making threat assessment very quickly. Turn based Doom is a whole thing (DoomRL), but that timing and resource management becomes very different, and that game maintains its tension in the unreliability of turn-based math combat.

Anyway, while we’re talking about smooches in smooch month, and the smoochiest of games, Doom, let’s talk about how in smoochy games you want to maintain that tension to give people feelings.

Continue Reading →
Back to top