Krank

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Game Design

Krank, Created on 13th April 2022

Target Audience#

  • Bright, colorful graphics (--> young gamers)
  • RTS (--> older, male gamers)
  • Console as target platform?
    • Audience group on console is younger than on PC

Gameplay#

  • Anytime you introduce 1v1, it gets super stressful and competitive.
  • StarCraft 2 advertised this a lot by presenting itself as "the most competitive RTS ever"
  • Casual people get scared away by this, because after a stressful day at work, they don't want to play a super stressful game.
  • "If you don't look for 2 seconds at the right spot, your whole army is gone."
  • Ways to reduce the stress could be:
    1. Make the game turn-based to alleviate time-preassure (Civilization)
    2. Reduce the number of units controlled, examples:
      • Tower Defenses remove all the micro management, you only place buildings which attack (ElementTD)
      • MOBA's give you control over only one hero. (DotA2, LoL)
      • Efficiently manage a small group of units (Warcraft III)
    3. Reduce multitasking by limiting player interaction ("You can't do everything at once."), examples:
      • Make the units follow the player and represent the player with a character in the world, so they can only focus on one thing at the time. (Pikmin, Battalion Wars, Tooth and Tail).
    4. Defend instead of Attack
      • Defending incoming attack waves is a lot more manageable than planning a big attack.
      • Players then only have to focus on one thing (their base) instead of two things (their base + their army attacking)
      • Downside is, players hate losing buildings (see Loss Aversion, a loss is perceived twice as bad as a gain)
    5. Play Co-op
      • Play together with other people in teams through the campaign, vs. AI or vs. other teams.
      • Players in a team can help each other out if they are being attacked or need some resources.
      • Problem is that multiple enemy players can gang up on a single team member, which in most cases makes defending impossible.
      • Multiple people with the same goal in a team produce group dynamics, which can be negative: Flaming, backseat gaming of team mates, a player might turn into an overlord controlling every move of others

Managing Loss#

  • In an RTS, you usually build a big base and a big army over the course of a game.
  • To then lose feels very painful, you have to watch your base getting destroyed and often time there is no second chance (compare to simply being respawned in an FPS like TF2).
  • This can get more painful the longer the game has been going (like an Age of Empires 2 3v3 game with 90min-120min)
  • See Loss Aversion: A loss is perceived twice as bad as a gain is perceived as good.
  • Techniques:
    1. Bribe money:
      • Give many credits for winning a game, but also a few credits for losing a game (e.g. Yu-Gi-Oh: Master Duels gives you 500 gems for winning a game and 50 gems for losing a game)
      • But then the credits also have to serve a purpose, otherwise the credits are perceived as useless.
      • Also watch out for a corrupting effect: If you reward people financially for behaviour they were intrinsically motivated to do, they suddenly don't have the urge anymore to do it. (extrinsic motivation vs intrinsic motivation)
    2. Shorter rounds:
      • Make game rounds shorter to reduce the investment (e.g. LoL has shorter rounds than DotA 2)
    3. Highlight the positive:
      • When losing, Overwatch shows the personal records, like "You did more damage than ever before! 9.342"
      • Players in Overwatch can also give special awards like "best move" and "most valuable player" after the game - even to enemy players
    4. Continuous growth:
      • Factorio is super popular, and I think the reason is because every factory element naturally builds on another (nothing is lost, but useful to the whole apparatus).
      • This could mean like an overworld map which you can build on every round and carry over to next rounds.
      • Maybe it would be sufficient to have recurring units "Garry the soldier" with a kill counter on their weapon "defeated 21 foes, yeah!" (compare to Strange Weapons in TF2 or named worms in a Worms team of the player).
      • I think Age of Empires III also did this with their home port, which you can send resources from to aid in your game.
      • The biggest problem I see with this is, that it makes the game more confusing, because additional resources/units are located outside of the currently visible map. Can also become very unfair very fast, if players get a bonus simply because they have played so much in the past.