Today is Good Friday and it was a good Friday. I enjoyed writing some events in Archmage Rises. I had to be away from the project for the past 2 weeks to wrap up a teaching semester.
We are near the end of completing the Event tech. We are working on content and feel.
Today I will share a bit of the process and a game design insight I had on “Making Nothing Fun”. I’ll inevitably be sharing some insider info in order to explain it, but that’s part of the payoff reading a dev blog, right?
Starfall
I started writing a fairly basic resource event. You see a meteor in the sky. It is like a regular resource pickup event, but with a twist: the meteor splits into 3 parts creating 3 sub events. At normal foot speed, I expect players to have time to visit 1-2 of the crash sites and get some loot (unless you have flight, or teleportation, fast mount, or other cool things).
I work on the Minor meteor hunks, then get to finding the Major hunk.
You see the crater ahead. Heat shimmers in the air, and the earth hums faintly beneath your boots. The rock in the center glitters with fractured shards of strange luminous metal.
I put that "luminous metal" phrase in there to make it clear you are at the really good crash site. Well done! What options does the player have?
[Investigate]
That’s it. That’s all I came up with for what is basically a lootbox.
I’ll grant it’s not too interesting. So, I thought really hard and managed to come up with a perfectly suited, contextually sound, in-world second choice:
[Investigate]
[Back away]
There. Now there is a choice. I know, I know, very impressive right? And I did it all by myself!
Given this scene and those two choices, how many people would choose #2? I’m guessing close to 0% with +/- 10%.
In class, I specifically teach my students not to do this. This is called a false choice. It looks like choice, but isn’t because it isn’t yet an interesting choice. Whoops! Better no choice than a false choice – why? Because all choice involves some tiny amount of thinking effort on the player and don’t waste their effort thinking through a false choice just to not choose it. See Steve Krug’s excellent UX book Don’t Make Me Think for more info.
How to turn this into an interesting choice? Make both paths equally valid. Not equal in reward, but equal in Satisfying Outcome.
This is when I had my realization – I actually do this a lot: Present the option to do something and another option to do nothing.
“Nothing is never interesting!”
Even super risk-adverse people aren’t happy having nothing. What makes them happy and feel good is not getting nothing, but avoiding something bad. The fear of “bad” or the satisfaction of avoiding a bad outcome is the dopamine reward which reinforces the behavior.
OK, so let’s modify the event a bit and make it clear by showing there is a risk-reward / avoid danger choice here:
The crater comes into view. Heat shimmers in the air. The ground hums beneath your boots, steady at first, then sharp and uneven. At its center, a rock glitters with fractured veins of luminous metal. But the glow within pulses erratically, eerily.
[Quickly investigate]
[Back away and observe]
We’re getting somewhere! If I feel like taking a chance, investigate the space rock that invaded my planet. If not – well do nothing.
There’s that nothing choice again…
“How can we make ‘nothing’ feel good?”
I had to think pretty hard to suss out when, in gaming, does “nothing” feel great?
Then I remembered a very common scenario in D&D.
You are low on health and the enemy is making an attack roll. If they hit, it’s time to roll up a new character.
And they miss! They miss the THAC0 (or whatever it’s called these days) by some number.
Nothing happens and it’s jubilant and wonderful!
What makes this moment sing? It’s:
1. Seeing the danger
2. Knowing it is real
3. Managing to avoid it (even if you didn’t have control over the outcome)
It’s the near miss that is so exciting.
Another example, from Warhammer/40k:
Your opponent makes 3 hits against your character. He’s about to die.
You roll a 6+ armor save – and get three 6’s!
Nothing happens and it’s jubilant and wonderful!
This realization of how to make Nothing feel fun was so exciting I wrote it down as a design rule in my notes!
Empowered with this new knowledge, I revisited the event. I had to make the ‘miss’ clear. I also had to change the first choice into a pass/fail check.
The crater comes into view. Heat shimmers in the air. The ground hums beneath your boots, steady at first, then sharp and uneven. At its center, a rock glitters with fractured veins of luminous metal. But the glow within pulses erratically, eerily.
Now there are three outcomes:
Quickly investigate - Success
You circle the sky rock and find it cracked, its shimmering veins bleeding pure gold into the dust. You gather what gold you can and make your escape. As you stride away, a sharp implosion echoes behind you.
Gain gold size 4
Quickly investigate - Fail
You linger too long. The pulsing light stops. After a few breaths of silence, an explosion rips through the air, scattering knives of glowing stone in every direction. You hit the ground hard. When the smoke clears, there is nothing left but silence, pain, and blood.
Down to 1 hp
Back away and observe – Always succeeds
Wisely, you withdraw and observe. The pulsing quickens, then stops. In the next instant, the rock explodes, hurling glass-like shards in every direction. When the dust settles, you find a small pool of gold gleaming where the stone once sat.
Gain gold size 2
Now the safe “nothing” choice is a near miss with a gain. Not as large of a gain as the risk taker’s win, but that’s just fine – they got a steady return on their stock portfolio and didn’t risk losing it. That is a win! I also put the word “wise” in there as a compliment to this kind of player that they chose the prudent path and it paid off.
(As an aside, there is a difference between reading it here and playing it in game: they won’t know how much more they could have gotten on the risky path.)
So, that is what we are working on. It takes a while to write these events, hopefully we’ll get faster!
A big shout out to Jonathan who reads these updates every time and asks me about them each week. Especially if I don’t write one!
Thanks everyone for your continued interest and support!
