terça-feira, 25 de fevereiro de 2020

Leading the Player's Eyes

A designer’s main responsibility is making sure that the game provides the experience it intends to.


Achieving such a goal on every situation you're put into requires all sorts of skills, but, in the end, it comes down to leading players towards situations where the goal experience hides without making them feel forced or controlled. This article showcases how things may not always go as intended and how we can use visual structure to solve some of these cases.




As I write this, the game in topic has no name, so let’s just call it Top Down Summoner. It is about throwing undeads against hordes of strong and shiny paladins on your way to conquering their castles. As a result, there are lots of objects moving around and activating visual effects that beg for the player’s attention.

The core experience revolves around watching your summoned warriors perform visually pleasing attacks and abilities. Not only that, you’ll also be using the undeads on the battlefield that already performed their moves to cast some cool stuff, as well as utilizing their bodies to block paladin strikes. The most important thing is seeing the awesome things that your creatures can do for you.
The events we want players to focus on during combat are, from bottom to top:

  1. Paladins charging attacks, so that players can perceive and avoid them. We put a highly saturated yellow vfx at the actor’s location whenever it's starting an attack;
  2. Undead animations and interactions. For this, we add high-saturation sword trails and dash movement;
  3. Finally, Necromancer’s position. This one is constant and automatic for top down shooter players, hence why it is so low on the list.


Looking good for a prototype, huh? Problem was, as I played the game, it came to me that I wasn’t really watching the undead animations play out unless I moved my attention away from the paladin I was hitting, despite the exclamative visual effects of my soldiers. The reason behind this was: 

  • Before each small action is taken, a player has to perceive the situation, find a micro goal and only then decide what to do;
  • Once the decision is made, the player's attention goes to the objects he or she has to interact with in order to reach the goal. In this case, a paladin;
  • After performing an action, they look for feedback on the performance. Because the point of focus was the paladin and there's clear feedback on their health bars, the player's attention stays there;
  • Undeads attack during the feedback state, but end up dashing past the player's point of focus (paladin) and stopping close to edge of the screen, far from all the action. Players perceive them as they dash, but it looks more like a blur or simple projectile, not a badass soldier. All the feedback they create remains at the paladin's health bar.

With that in mind, we know our solution requires having a smooth transition of focus from paladin to undead. Not only that, undeads also shouldn’t be landing too close to the camera borders.

First step, then, is to move the camera’s anchor point forward by just a little. This makes the Necromancer closer to the edge and the undead’s ending location farther from it. If a paladin is preparing an attack but off-screen, the game centers the point of view back to the necromancer for a while in order to reveal blind spots created by the camera offset.

Second, instead of having undeads pierce through enemies, we get them to stop and knock paladins back a tad. This forces our summoned creatures to invade the attention focus and divide it with the paladin being hit, rather than going for a far spot.

As observed, visual structure is one of the important skills we can use when planning how to lead players towards the desired experience. It allows us to tweak the amount of effort they have to spend in order to find information, make aesthetic rewards be perceived and do better than sticking to the same camera POVs forever.


My book recommendation for this topic is The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media.

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