Games & Virtual Worlds Series
Atmosphere & Progression
Understanding Games: How Video Games & Board Games Work
Atmosphere
Elements like lighting, color palette, weather, visual effects, music, ambient audio, and sound effects all contribute to the general atmosphere of a video game and help to create a specific mood or tone.
Lighting design in video games draws on the rich traditions established in film, music performance and theater.. A game with dark, moody lighting might create a tense and unsettling atmosphere, while a game with bright, cheerful lighting might create a more lighthearted and upbeat atmosphere.
The color palette of a game evokes different emotions and moods. As with lighting, bright and vibrant color palette might create a more energetic and upbeat atmosphere, while a game with a more muted and subdued color palette might create a more introspective and serious atmosphere.
Weather and visual effects, such as rain, snow, fog, or particle effects can help to create a sense of realism and immersion. Weather is often associated with time of year and visual effects are associated with genres they are common in, which adds to their atmosphere.
Music can create an emotional response in the player, while ambient audio such as the sounds of nature or the general noise of a city help to create an enveloping sense of place or locale.
Sound effects convey the actions and events happening in the game and add aesthetic feels ranging from gritty realism to abstract stylization.
All of these elements work together towards creating a cohesive atmosphere for a game.
Progression & Pacing
It’s common practice for developers to split up a lengthy video game into multiple chapters, or “levels,” so that it may be played in chunks of time as short as five minutes or as long as an hour. If you want the player to play through the levels in order, there needs to be some sort of progression from one to the next. This might be in the form of character level, plot level, or both.
How often the player faces isolated problems is what we call the level’s pace. Fast-paced games are stressful because they present the player with numerous obstacles in a short period of time without allowing them any respite. The player is given more time to consider how best to approach the obstacles presented by a slower tempo.
Games need to evolve as you progress through the levels, but how exactly? In his “Gameplay Design Fundamentals” column for Gamasutra online magazine, designer Mike Lopez outlined five elements that should develop naturally over the course of the game.
Mechanics. Lopez means both the game’s fundamental mechanics and the player’s choices. The game’s fundamental mechanics, in general, should deepen as it progresses. The game’s internal economy needs to be simple to grasp at the beginning levels, especially the tutorial levels. Complex gameplay mechanics, such as those found in the Civilization games, can be implemented later. In many games, the economy grows as the player progresses, giving them access to more and more currency, health, horsepower, or whatever else the game considers valuable.
Experience duration. The time required to complete each consecutive level should increase, with the exception of the rare outlier. While not an absolute rule, later levels in a game should typically be lengthier than previous ones.
Ancillary rewards and environmental progression. Cutscenes, trophies, and unlockable items, are all examples of ancillary rewards that aren’t central to the main gameplay. FOr example, after completing Silent Hill 3, the player is rewarded with the ability to give Heather, the game’s avatar, a new wardrobe and continue the adventure in a different outfit. Nothing about the gameplay is affected by this. When a game’s plot involves exploration, it makes sense for the world to evolve in a way that’s both interesting and pleasurable. This is what Lopez means by “environmental progression.”
Practical gameplay rewards. These are the kinds of rewards that have an immediate impact on the player’s future actions: different vehicles in racing games, different equipment and abilities in role-playing games, different techniques and characters in fighting games, different tools and gadgets in strategy games, and so on.
Difficulty. The game’s perceived difficulty should increase over time. Faster increases are appropriate for games intended at more advanced players and slower increases are appropriate for more casual games or those aimed at younger players. Some games, like Bejeweled, have no discernible difficulty progression because their challenges depend entirely on random chance.
There are other ways to shape progression, which Lopez does not cover:
Actions available to the player. To Lopez, these were the same as mechanics, but they are not. Despite having fundamental mechanics that don’t change significantly from level to level, a game might still provide players with new moves and other activities to complete as they progress. The platform genre is especially prone to this. It’s best practice to teach new levels through a progression of introductory missions, allowing players to master the previous controls before moving on to the next.
Story progression. If your game has a story, it’s important that the player’s progress in the game mirrors their advancement in the story. How this happens is determined by a number of design choices, including whether or not the plot is linear and what mechanism drives the plot forward.
Character growth. Characters in video games can be rewarded with both increased abilities and cosmetic enhancements like new outfits to keep players engaged and interested. But you can also help them develop more like literary characters, by turning them into more complete persons (note that this is different from being turned into a zombie : ).
A character who doesn’t develop, especially after much narrative gameplay, comes across as flat and uninteresting. If a game is split up into separate levels, each with its own unique environment, win/loss conditions, etc., it is easier to incorporate these elements.
Further Reading & Exploring
Lighting design in video games draws on the rich traditions established in film, music performance, and theater.
https://tryevidence.com/blog/color-psychology-in-game-design-how-do-colors-help-design-better-games/
The color palette of a game evokes different emotions and moods.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1373&context=etdarchive
The game’s perceived difficulty should increase over time.
Related Articles
The Game State, Information & Movement
Chance, Probability & Fairness
Trade-Offs, Dilemmas, Sacrifices, Risk & Reward
Actions, Events, Choices, Time & Turn Taking
Ethics, Morality, Violence & Realism
Overview of Video Game Systems
Non-Core Mechanics: Progression
Non-Core Mechanics: Social Interactions
Common Digital Gaming Platforms
Bibliography & Further Reading
- A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design by Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark
- A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster
- Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach by Michael Sellers
- An Introduction to Game Studies by Frans Mayra
- Basics of Game Design by Michael Moore
- Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier
- Board Game Design Advice: From the Best in the World vol 1 by Gabe Barrett
- Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: an Encyclopedia Of Mechanisms by Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev
- Character Development and Storytelling for Games by Lee Sheldon
- Chris Crawford on Game Design by Chris Crawford
- Clockwork Game Design by Keith Burgun
- Elements of Game Design by Robert Zubek
- Fundamentals of Game Design by Ernest Adams
- Fundamentals of Puzzle and Casual Game Design by Ernest Adams
- Game Design Foundations by Brenda Romero
- Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton
- Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans
- Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames edited by Chris Bateman
- Games, Design and Play: A detailed approach to iterative game design by Colleen Macklin and John Sharp
- Introduction to Game Systems Design by Dax Gazaway
- Kobold Guide to Board Game Design by Mike Selinker, David Howell, et al
- Kobold’s Guide to Worldbuilding edited by Janna Silverstein
- Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design, 2nd Edition by Scott Rogers
- Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, et al.
- Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction by Kent Puckett
- Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates by David Herman, James Phelan, et al.
- Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Fourth Edition by Mieke Bal
- Practical Game Design by Adam Kramarzewski and Ennio De Nucci
- Procedural Storytelling in Game Design by Tanya X. Short and Tarn Adams
- Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing by Wendy Despain
- Rules of Play by Salen and Zimmerman
- Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (Frontiers of Narrative) by Marie-Laure Ryan, Jan-Noël Thon, et al
- Tabletop Game Design for Video Game Designers by Ethan Ham
- The Art of Game Design, 3rd Edition by Jesse Schell
- The Board Game Designer’s Guide: The Easy 4 Step Process to Create Amazing Games That People Can’t Stop Playing by Joe Slack
- The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative by H. Porter Abbott
- The Grasshopper, by Bernard Suits
- The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies by Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf
- The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory by David Herman
- The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design by Flint Dille & John Zuur Platten
- Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design by Gordon Calleja
- Video Game Storytelling: What Every Developer Needs to Know about Narrative Techniques by Evan Skolnick
- Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG edited by Wendy Despain
- Writing for Video Games by Steve Ince
- 100 Principles of Game Design by DESPAIN
