There isn’t an official list of laws on game design, but if there were one, ‘the art of losing’ would be near the top of the list. How often do you see a great Flash game with an engaging experience ruined by forcing its players to restart? In an ideal Flash gaming experience, there are no losers and winners… only gauges of success.
Dying Sucks
TG Motocross 3 on Teagames is a perfect example of an impressive, fun, and addicting Flash game that unfortunately interrupts player experience. So I started up the game and clicked Play (my favorite button). The game is organized by levels. Each level has its own terrain and difficulty and it’s the player’s goal to bring the character riding the motorcycle to the other side of the map. It’s quite simple and incredibly fun. The first thing I noticed when playing TG Motocross (besides the smooth style, easy controls, and advanced physics) is that I died – a lot. The terrains are tough, and the game takes a bit of practice. But once you get the hang of it the game becomes quite fun.
Unfortunately, the pain of losing nearly ruined my entire experience. You only have five lives.
Five lives is all you get before having to start all over from the very beginning.
Annoyingly, I am forced to restart the game after falling five times to my death. It’s hard to want to continue seriously when you’re only level 2 of 10 and only have one life. You know that you’ll eventually die and have to start over… so why keep trying to get to level 3? That’s the big problem with having lives. Having only 1 life left doesn’t make me appreciate my character’s life more when I’m only on level 2. I might as well kill myself and start all over with a fresh 5 then to continue trying to complete the game.
Don’t force players to repeat challenges
Consequently, one of the best attributes of the game quickly becomes worthless. The advanced physics made me want to play around with my character (the ragdoll effect). However, with only five lives, I am unable to drive like a maniac (which can be very fun) because lives are too valuable to be lost. No playing around if you want to complete this game.
All this dying made me remember a Practice Mode button I saw on the main screen. Thinking this could be the “sandbox” mode I’ve been looking for, I refreshed the page. It turns out that practice mode is identical to Play Mode. The only difference is that the player has the ability to select which track to play. You still have lives on practice mode!
In summary, a game is only as great as the players that play them. If you make a game with 10 levels and nobody can reach level 8, then that’s 30% of your game that nobody will ever see. TG Motocross would have still been a fun game if lives were taken out of the picture. If the game had unlimited lives, then more people like me wouldn’t be so frustrated and we’d be able to enjoy the well designed levels and driving physics. The more advanced users who compete for highscore boards would still have to compete for points (based on time and viewable on the top left).
Games typically don’t need to have more than one dimension of challenge. TG Motocross has two – score and lives. Scoring is all games need to distinguish players from one another! Adding more usually just complicates things. So, to flash game developers out there, don’t make me restart!
Read the rest of the series: ‘Designing Fun’
- Designing Fun: Learning To Play
- Designing Fun: The Art of Losing
I see your point on making a game too hard. What about lives per level? So you have 5 chances to complete that level and if you lose them all you start the level, and not the entire game again?
Sam:
Interesting question. What would be the difference in lost 1 time then to lost 5 times? You have to start the level over either way? Or do you mean checkpoints?
-Danny
Sorry I forgot to mention that, There would be ckeckpoints throughout the level to keep your progress. So if you lose you lose your progress. This could also work with concepts such as “worlds” where you would have 5 lives to complete “world 1″ and all the stages in it. Lose and you have to start world 1 again.
Sam,
I like the idea of checkpoints as a compromise, but just keep in mind that players hate repeating things. Maybe try thinking of alternative, creative ways to punish the player rather than having them simply replay something they have already completed.
Hi again,
I’ve done a bit of research on live systems,checkpoints,worlds etc. I found one that works quite well. As you may know Bioshock for xbox 360 & PC has chambers set around the levels, if you die you go to the closest ones. This may seem like a glorified checkpoint system but here is where it gets interesting. The level itself is not reset in anyway leaving the player to have another chance without losing his/her progress. Thoughts on how this could be used in flash games?
I just recently finished playing EA’s SKATE. Games like that really capture some of what your saying danny. It’s a free and open world, where you CAN just play and skate if that’s all you want to do. If you ‘die’ there’s a brief animation and you just restart right where you were. It’s similar to the trick used in racing games. If you crash you just reset back on the track and keep going…you can do that all you want.
I really like that style, it makes it easy to just experiment and explore because the cost of ‘dying’ is so low. The Bioshock mechanic sounds like it is as close as you could reasonably get to this style in an FPS.
You forgot the most anoying thing about tg motorcross, when you press play again it refreshes the page and you have to wait for the loading to go away and intro to finish and then click play before you actually start over!
I assume they do that in order to get more revenue off the advertisements…
Good article. In many games, things like score and lives seem pointless to me. The key seems to be to get the user to keep playing because the game is rewarding to play even when they lose.
[...] Don’t Make Games That Are Painful! I just read an article, and it was pretty good! And I agree, don’t make people restart…well…read the article… [...]