El autor de este artículo reflex´ona sobre los métodos que hay para analizar un juego y sacar sus puntos fuertes y débiles en cuanto a usabilidad, capacidad de mantener el interés, jugabilidad, premios, etc.

I find that your last example combined with the “granularity” concept is how I deconstruct most of my stuff. I think I’ve had some pretty successful levels that I put together based off of Valve’s concept of “vistas”. When Half-Life came out, I read some kind of design doc that turned me onto the idea. It takes a lot of time to implement, though.

Basically, the idea is that the player should be rewarded by some kind of “scene” that shows them they are making progress. Each “scene” consists of some kind of landmark (such as the helicopter or the dam in Half-Life) that is followed with an experience that occurs with that landmark. Therefore, there’s not just one long memorable experience of playing the game where it all gets lost. It’s breadcrumbs to a series of events. Whereas the player’s immediate motivation might be to find a way out of the command bunker, they’ll know when they’ve found the way out because of the fight with the helicopter. That “experience” signals the end of their search.

I find that using this method, I can tease the player into seeing areas where they know “something” is going to happen and then leading them past the area only to return for some kind of event. This way, you’re using the granularity concept to make sure that the player is always feeling certain things at certain times to affirm that they’re doing the right thing. It also makes the accomplishment factor higher because the player is proud of getting to that point. These vistas really make the individual experiences come together. It’s like an interactive progress meter for the player.

That’s my 2 cents, anyways.