Ernest Adams > Quotes

“For a more detailed discussion of the subject, read Neal and Jana Hallford’s Swords and Circuitry (Hallford and Hallford, 2001).”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“If the available power grows at exactly the same rate as the absolute difficulty goes up, the relative difficulty will be a flat line, as illustrated in Figure 11.4 (next page). In that case, a level 5 knight would find it exactly as hard to kill a level 5 troll in the middle of the game as a level 1 knight would find it to kill a level 1 troll at the beginning of the game. But relative difficulty should not be a flat line because when you factor in the player’s increasing in-game experience, the perceived difficulty actually goes down—the game gets easier. Aim to increase the absolute difficulty of the challenges somewhat faster than you increase the available power to meet them. The gap between absolute and relative difficulty widens only slowly.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“To keep the absolute difficulty level constant, whenever you increase the time pressure on a player, you should also reduce the amount of intrinsic skill required.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Design Rule The Story Comes Later Do not spend a lot of time devising a story at the concept stage. This is a cardinal error frequently made by people who are more used to presentational media such as books and film. You must concentrate most of your efforts on the gameplay at this point. Types”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Plan to throw away all sound, art, and code created for a prototype. That way your artists, audio people, and programmers can work quickly without worrying about having to debug their content later. Trying to build production-quality assets during preproduction just slows the process down. Once”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Core Mechanics The core mechanics consist of the data and the algorithms that precisely define the game’s rules and internal operations.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Unless your game is a just-for-fun simulation such as Super Mario Kart or Beetle Adventure Racing!, vehicle simulation is the most technologically oriented of games, so the core mechanics of the game are almost entirely about physics.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“You should also make fresh supplies available to him immediately after he surmounts a challenge that costs him a lot of resources, as Chapter 11 explained. In shooter games, these traditionally take the form of boxes of ammunition and medical kits for restoring health, stored in an area immediately beyond a large group of enemies.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Designing the core mechanics consists of identifying the key entities and mechanics in the game and writing specifications to document the nature of the entities and the functioning of the mechanics. This is the very heart of the game designer’s job, and the more complex the game, the longer it takes—”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Game worlds are much more than the sum of the pictures and sounds that portray them. A game world can have a culture, an aesthetic, a set of moral values,”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“What Are Action Games? Action game An action game is one in which the majority of challenges presented are tests of the player’s physical skills and coordination. Puzzle-solving, tactical conflict, and exploration challenges are often present as well.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“One of the purposes of a game world is simply to entertain in its own right: to offer the player a place to explore and an environment to interact with. As”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Myst and Gemstone both have harmony. They have it because their makers had a vision of the experience they were trying to achieve and the confidence to attain it. They laid down a solid, ambient groove that players and their respective markets can relate to emotionally. They resisted the urge to overbuild. They didn’t pile on a lot of gratuitous features just so they could boast about them. And they resisted the temptation to employ inappropriate emotional effects. Effects like shock violence, bad language, inside humor. You”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Economies about money are called market economies. But we use the term in a more abstract way to refer to any kind of system in which resources—of any type—can be produced, exchanged, and consumed.”
― Ernest Adams, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design

“The perceived difficulty of a challenge—the difficulty that the player actually senses, and the type we are most concerned with—consists of the relative difficulty minus the player’s experience at meeting such challenges. Remembering that relative difficulty is absolute difficulty minus power provided, we can put all these factors together into a single equation such that perceived difficulty = absolute difficulty - (power provided + in-game experience)”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“The level designers have to know, for example, that by the time the player reaches the fourth level, he will have earned three major weapon upgrades and a faster vehicle, so they set the difficulty of the fourth level’s challenges relative to that level of power provided.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“As a general principle, the pacing of a level in any game, especially a game with physical challenges, should alternate between fast and slow periods, just as the tempo of movements in a symphony or the levels of excitement in an action movie vary. Players need moments to rest, both physically and mentally, and on the whole, the faster the pace of the level, the more important rest becomes.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“In contrast, games of progression offer many predesigned challenges that the designer has ordered sequentially, usually through sophisticated level design.”
― Ernest Adams, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design

“Lead Designer. This person oversees the overall design of the game and is responsible for making sure that it is complete and coherent. She is the “keeper of the vision” at the highest and most abstract level. She also evangelizes the game to others both inside and outside the company and is often called upon to serve as a spokesperson for the project. Not all the lead designer’s work is creative. As the head of a team, she trades away creativity for authority, and her primary role is to make sure that the design work is getting done and the other team members are doing their jobs properly. A project has only one lead designer. •”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Drains A drain is a mechanic that determines the consumption of resources—that is, a rule specifying how resources permanently drop out of the game (not to be confused with a converter, which we’ll look at next). In a shooter game, the player firing his weapon drains ammunition—that’s what makes ammunition, a resource, disappear. Being”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“The relative difficulty is the difficulty of a challenge relative to the player’s power to meet that challenge.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Meretzky suggests that you consider the following:”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Production Mechanisms Production mechanism describes a class of mechanics that make a resource conveniently available to a player. These include sources that bring the resource directly into the player’s hands, but they can also include special buildings, characters, or other facilities that gather resources from the landscape and make them available to the player.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“People love to design and create things, whether clothing, creatures, buildings, cities, or planets. They also love to customize a basic template of some kind to reflect their own choices.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“To someone who’s playing a game for the first time, the world is vital to creating and sustaining her interest. The other purpose of a game’s world is to sell the game in the first place. It’s not the game’s mechanics that make a customer pick up a box in a store but the fantasy it offers: who she’ll be, where she’ll be, and what she’ll be doing there if she plays that game. The”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“You know, the suspension of disbelief is fragile. It’s hard to achieve it and hard to maintain. One bit of unnecessary gore, one hip colloquialism, one reference to anything outside the imaginary world you’ve created is enough to destroy that world.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Don’t confuse the term games of progression with other ideas about progression in games, such as leveling up, difficulty curves, skill trees, and so on. We use Juul’s definition of the term: A game of progression is one that offers predesigned challenges, each of which often has exactly one solution, in a fixed (or only slightly variable) sequence.”
― Ernest Adams, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design

“In the most general sense, a balanced game is fair to the player (or players), is neither too easy nor too hard, and makes the skill of the player the most important factor in determining his success. In”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Ultimately, the violence in a game should serve the gameplay. If it doesn’t, then it’s gratuitous and you should consider doing without it. Realism”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design

“Sources If a resource or entity can come into the game world having not been there before, the mechanic by which it arrives is called a source.”
― Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design