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Review This is one part in a series of articles that attempts to explain how I think when I design. The purpose of these articles is not as much to provide a hands-on practical approach – just to explain how I do stuff. Once I finish this series, I’ll focus on some more practical applications. (Link to Part 4) Important Point from a Previous Article Principle #1: As a game designer, your job is to ask your players Questions. The players’ job is to answer those questions using the Tools you give them. Last Time Last time we identified major weapon, enemy, and terrain Archetypes – some of which we will use in this article. This Time We’re going to talk about how I use the combat Archetypes we made in the previous article to create a series of enemy “Setups.” Note: We’ll talk about how I chain setups together with increasing complexity to form “Ramps” in the next article. Archetypes According to Google, an Archetype is “a very typical example of a certain person or thing,” and that’s how I want to use the term here, but with one difference: Archetype: A very typical example of one of the extreme boundaries of your game’s design. In the following diagram, each of the black dots represents an Archetype. You can see how they all exist at the extreme boundaries of our enemy’s possible powers (Health, Range, and Damage). Note: If these diagrams don’t make sense, check out the last few articles – that’s where we created these. A lot of people ask me why I choose only the extremes, and don’t make “jack of all trades” type enemies. According to Principle #1, our job is to ask players Questions. It’s vital that the player understand what question they’re being asked, otherwise I’ve made it impossible for them to play my game the way I want them to play it (if at all). The closer you get to the extremes of your design space, the clearer players will be on what they’re being asked to do: an enemy that takes 10 hits to kill is MUCH different than one that takes 1, or 5 hits to kill, and so prompts a different response from the player. Example Archetypes I’m going to use four enemy Archetypes, three weapon Archetypes, and all four terrain Archetypes that we went over in the previous two articles. I hope to show how these 11 Archetypes, as representatives of the extremes of your design space, work together to create a series of Questions and Tools that you can ramp up in difficulty over the course of a Path. (We’ll go over Ramps and Paths in later articles). Enemies Four enemy Archetypes: Swarmer – Low Health, Low Damage, Close Range Heavy – High Health, High Damage, Far Range Far – Low Health, High Damage, Far Range Near – High Health, Low Damage, Close Range Our example Archetypal enemies, as found in various games Weapons Three weapon Archetypes: Blaster – Long Range, Direct, Low Damage Flamethrower – Short Range, Direct, High Damage Bomb – Short Range, High Damage, Indirect. Where our four weapon archetypes fall on the view diagram we made in the last article I chose these three as examples because they overlap very nicely with the terrain and enemy archetypes, as I’ll show you later in the article. Terrain Four terrain Archetypes: Flat Gap Ledge Cover Examples of our four major terrain types, based on our “enemy placement” choice field from the previous article Creating an Enemy Setup Using Archetypes An enemy Setup is just a variously sized group of enemies of different Archetypes, placed on varied terrain. Each Setup should ask the player a question. In the combat system we’re creating, every setup asks the same two questions: “Who do you want to attack first and what weapon will you use to do it?” For example, using the Example Archetypes from above: Simple Setup: [2 Near enemies on flat ground] Who do you want to attack first? This setup is basic. It doesn’t really matter which enemy the player attacks first (except that the player may wish to shoot the closest one or target both). What weapon will you use to do it? The bomb or flamethrower may be able to hit both for high damage, so the blaster isn’t as great in this area. Combined Setup: [2 Near enemies on flat ground backed up by 2 Far enemies on ledges.] Who do you want to attack first? The player has to dodge high-damage shots from the Fars while fighting the Near enemies. Because the Far enemies have low health, the player might normally attack them first — but in this case, the ledges they’re on make them less accessible than the two nears. You can see how these questions begin to overlap to create options for the player to choose a weapon. What weapon will you use to do it? The two near enemies have lots of HP, so you’ll want to hit them with the flamethrower or the bomb. The far enemies have little HP, but are inconvenient. The player is encouraged to use a weapon like the bomb (area damage) or the blaster (range) to take them out. Note: If we had ammo in this system, the weapon choice could be even further influenced by how much ammo players have left for each gun when they arrive at this setup. Complex Setup 1: [5 Swarmers backed up by 1 Far enemy with cover and 1 Far enemy on a ledge.] Who do you want to kill first and what weapon will you use to do it? I combined the two questions here because it’s starting to get difficult to describe the answer to one without considering the other. Because they are small fast targets, Swarmers aren’t easily killed with the Blaster. The player would probably want to get all of them with the Flamethrower. The bomb might also be a good pick, if it has enough area of effect to get all the swarmers. Half of the leftmost Far enemy is obscured, making him a harder target for the Blaster, while the one up on the ledge is exposed and would be an easy target for that weapon. The bomb is probably a good pick for the Far enemy behind cover – it can arc over the cover and there’s plenty of floor behind the enemy for the bomb to land and catch the enemy in its area of effect (assuming the bomb has that, of course). You could use the bomb to attack the Far enemy on the right, but as there’s no wall near it and you can’t see the floor, so you’d have to be very accurate with a relatively inaccurate weapon. The blaster is probably best there. Complex Setup 2: [5 Swarmers on flat ground in front of 2 Heavies across a gap. Between you and the swarmers are 2 Near enemies. 2 Far enemies stand on ledges shooting down at you.] Who would YOU attack first? With what? Who do you want to kill first and what weapon will you use to do it? Personally, I’d whip out the Flamethrower and try to take out the Nears and the swarmers, then switch to the blaster to wipe out the Fars. Then I’d run up on the ledge where one of the Fars are standing and fire bombs down at the heavies – but you can see how many options have arisen from these 11 simple tools. Conclusion Once you understand your game design’s extreme edges (which we’ve been working on for the last few articles) you can begin to define archetypes for the various parts of your game like enemies, weapons, terrain, and so forth. By combining the archetypes together, like using letters to form words, you end up with a complexity and depth of meaning that defies the simplicity of the method. (Link to Part 6) *Note: This article is published with permission from the author, and in accordance with Creative Commons guidelines. Source: http://www.chaoticstupid.com/trinity-5-setups/ Follow Mike Website: www.ongamedesign.net/ Website: http://www.chaoticstupid.com/ Twitter: twitter.com/MikeDodgerStout Follow Next Level Design Join the Forum: http://www.nextleveldesign.org/index.php?/register/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NextLevelDesig2 Discuss on Discord: https://discord.gg/RqEy7rg

Intro This is one part in a series of articles that will attempt to explain how I think when I design. The purpose of these articles is not as much to provide a hands-on practical approach – just to explain how I do things. Once I finish this series, I’ll focus on some more practical applications. (Link to Part 3) Important Points from Previous Articles The Big Principle: A game is fundamentally a conversation between the designer and the player. Principle #1: As a game designer, your job is to ask your players Questions. The players’ job is to answer those questions using the Tools you give them. Principle #2: When the designer creates a challenge to ask the player a Question, the designer must also create Tools for the player to answer it. Game mechanic: A game mechanic is the meeting point of two design ideas: a Question the designer asks the player, and the Tools the player has for answering that question. Choice Field: A collection of spectra all of which describe a single game mechanic. Spectrum: Any two opposing concepts which are the same in nature, but differ in degree. Dimension: A single spectrum inside a choice field. Last Time Last time we looked at a game mechanic that described one possible relationship between Enemy Placements and Weapons: Range vs Horizontal – Weapons that have good Range will solve Horizontal enemy placement problems (gaps), but not necessarily Vertical ones (ledges or cover). Directness vs Height – Indirect weapons are usually very good at solving Vertical enemy placement problems (cover, a ledge, flight). This Time I’m going to talk about the limitations of the choice field drawings I’ve been making – specifically that they do not represent complex relationships between game mechanics very well. I have some diagrams that are great for that, called Chen Diagrams, but I won’t get to those for a few weeks, when we start to talk about meta-game stuff. So for this article, I want to show you how spectra (a plurality of spectrums) relate within a choice field, and how one can view that data in different ways by opening little “windows,” or views into the field. Chromaticity diagram for the CIE 1931 xy. Because spectrum. It’s my hope that by the end of this article, a few of the concepts I’ve been working on for the last few articles should gel together and make sense as a whole. First off Before I can get into the meat of this article, I have to add one more spectrum to the choice field we’ve been building up since last article (the choice field describes a combat system similar to those found in Skylanders or Ratchet and Clank games): HP vs Damage – The player generally wants to use a high damage weapon to take out a high HP enemy. Conversely, the player wants to avoid getting hit by high-damage enemies but can afford to suffer several low damage hits. Note: I’m not describing specifics of our HP or damage systems here. For example, this could describe both a Halo-style “regenerating” health system or a Quake-style “hit-points and health pickups” system. It doesn’t really matter yet, though it will matter a lot later on. For this article we can safely avoid the topic. The important thing is that damage removes HP from players or enemies until they reach 0 HP, then their avatar dies. The Spectra, Unconnected So now we’ve built a rudimentary combat system out of six spectra. For a moment, let’s ignore how they link together dimensionally and just focus on them as separate things: These six spectra make up the combat choice field we’ve been constructing Each of these spectra reveals a potentially interesting aspect of the game’s design. Ideally we’d be able to combine all of these into a nice image that shows us all the extents of our choice field… but there’s a wrinkle. One of the limitations of the diagrams I’ve been using thus far is that drawing a four-dimensional choice field is not really a simple thing to do (just look at these hypercube illustrations as an example of how hard it is). Just adding on a single dimension as we did with 2 and 3 dimensional fields doesn’t work very well, as you see from this image that tries to display all the information we have about weapons: Figure A: This diagram may seem useful, but because directness and damage don’t overlap at all, the diagram is missing all four extremes dealing with both damage and directness. This gets even worse as you add more dimensions. Fortunately, this limitation doesn’t present too much of a problem, since you rarely need that much information at any given time. By regarding two or three of the spectra at a time, we can create “windows” or views into game mechanics that can give us a ton of information. For example, this is one possible view into weapons (notice it’s half of figure A, minus directness): The above diagram shows us eight of our possible weapon archetypes (one per dot). The most obviously useful info we get are the eight archetypal weapons we can create – but it gets better. The important thing I’m trying to show here is how the overlapping of all these spectra create new and interesting choice fields. Each choice field comes with a selection of archetypes (the dots), which represent the extremes of your system. Each weapon is made to answer a question, so by knowing the answer you also can know the question the weapon is built to counteract. This shows us our weapons and enemies are related opposites (Principle #2). By knowing eight possible weapon archetypes, we also know eight possible enemy archetypes. These archetypes don’t represent the full richness of our choice field since many things are missing, but eight weapons and eight enemies is a hell of a start in getting there. I don’t think I’ve ever created a combat game that needed more than four or five enemy archetypes at one time, and three axes tend to be more than enough to give ideas for interesting enemies or weapons. Usually you spread the full richness of your choice field out over the course of your game, so this one choice field view diagram gives you enough information to start creating enemies and weapons. If you create another view into the choice field, for example, to represent the other half of Figure A, it can look like this: Another view diagram that shows more of the weapon choice field — this time we get the missing info about directness. With this data, you can start to see some archetypal ways that weapons can interact with enemy placement (high, low, far, near). I talk a lot about these enemy/environment interactions in my GDC Talk on Skylanders (language warning). This gives you more than enough information to start designing combat setups and even more enemies because you know what tools you’re allowed to use to ask level-design questions in combat: flying enemies, enemies behind cover, enemies on ledges, enemies across gaps, etc. (Link to Part 5) *Note: This article is published with permission from the author, and in accordance with Creative Commons guidelines. Source: http://www.chaoticstupid.com/trinity-4-spectra/ Follow Mike Website: www.ongamedesign.net/ Website: http://www.chaoticstupid.com/ Twitter: twitter.com/MikeDodgerStout Follow Next Level Design Join the Forum: http://www.nextleveldesign.org/index.php?/register/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NextLevelDesig2 Discuss on Discord: https://discord.gg/RqEy7rg