Let's talk about how a video game's rules can help your game achieve a balance that keeps your players interested and engaged. Say you're playing a favorite video game, progressing through the levels. You're gaining skills and practicing, finding new tools and power-ups for your character. Your skills are increasing and your character's getting stronger. However, just as your character gets stronger as you move to tougher levels, all the enemies in the game are getting stronger, too. The puzzles are getting harder and the skill required to keep progressing in the game is always increasing. It's like a conspiracy. My power increases throughout the game, my character becomes more powerful, and my skills as a player increase, but just as I do, the game gets more difficult the whole time. It's like the game is trying to maintain a steady difficulty over all of its levels. It's, ow, my brain. Well, what's going on there is the designers are trying to keep the game challenging. You probably remember a time when you've solved the game, then replayed an earlier level that you once thought was really hard, only to find that the level is now not so much of a challenge. Well, this has happened to most game designers, too. They know that their games need to be challenging enough to keep you interested, but not so challenging that you become disheartened and give up. The game designer tries their best to keep things balanced. Just as the levels get more difficult, your character might discover a new power that will help them overcome these new obstacles. And if that power starts making things too easy, the designer needs to make some obstacles even more difficult. You can see how this becomes a cycle that repeats throughout a lot of games and how that cycle can keep a player interested in gaining a better power in order to solve a new problem, in order to gain an even better power, in order to solve an even tougher obstacle, and so on. Where else can we find balance in the rules of games? Well, a lot of the rules that we see repeated in a lot of games are repeated because there's balance to them, and that keeps things interesting. What's an example of a rule we find in many different video games? Yes? In the front row? >> Oh, lots of games have health and hearts and life energy, stuff like that. >> Right, lots of games have some sort of game mechanic that involves the character's health points or lives. You'll see this in a lot of different games. Now, if a character has a ton of health and they're in great shape, the player might take more risks. Those risks will cause them to lose some of their health, which will make them more cautious and they'll take fewer risks, which will help them maintain their health. There's some balance to that, and it keeps things interesting as a player plays the game one way when their character is healthy and another when their character is unhealthy. You might notice that most of the really good power-ups in video games have at least one big disadvantage. Pac-Man might get a power pellet and be able to eat ghosts, but it only lasts a little while, and there are a limited number of them on each level. Your character might get a rocket launcher in Grand Theft Auto and it might be really powerful, but it turns out the rockets are harder to find and slower than the other weapons. Your character in another game might be a wizard who learns a high-level magic spell that they might need a long time to say all those magic words. These rules, with their trade-offs, help to keep the game challenging. Even though the character might gain more powers, they still need to learn how to use them and work with the quirks and imperfections of those new powers. So keep in mind as you make rules for your games, will they keep the game interesting and challenging for a player? Will they make things too easy or difficult? Will they give your player a new goal to reach for or help create a new challenge? Will they force your players to think of new approaches and techniques for playing? Keeping your game balanced is one of the biggest challenges you have as a game designer, but one that pays off many times over for you and your players.
