How to make GOOD games

We’ve made it easy for you to make games with Gamefroot, but making a GOOD game is something you have to put a bit more effort into. A good game will keep the player interested, engaged, and coming back for more – and that will ultimately be reflected in your game’s play count and comments. Who DOESN’T want to have a popular and successful game?

There are a few rules that you can follow to make your game play better.

Constraint

Keep areas well defined and don’t let the player get confused and lost. Games with just a character, an end point, and all sorts of random tiles splattered everywhere have no constraint, and the player will get lost, bored, and frustrated. A lack of constraint is fine for open ended games, but for games with a beginning and an end, constraint helps keep the users focused, on track and unravelling the events that we have set in motion.

(Desolation by Obsidian)

Story

Why should the player keep playing to the end? What is his struggle? You should set objectives in the game so that the player knows what they have to do for each part of the game. Create emotional connections and give the player a reason to play. Try to have different kinds of spaces to move through and different kinds of enemies to fight or avoid. Things should always be progressing from one state to another, preferably from easy to hard.

(Redemption by jaminscript) 

The 30 second rule

The developers of the popular puzzle-platformer game “Braid” have good advice for keeping the player interested: Something must happen at least every 30 seconds. Never allow a dull moment in your game.

That means regularly having enemy encounters, tricky sets of jumps or maneuvers, game item interaction – anything that the player has to really think about and concentrate on.

(DeathPizza v 0.1 by Richard de Jonge)

 

Randomness

A lot of game play is about recognising patterns, but adding random variation prevents players from getting bored. The key here is not to break this pattern learning process, but to help build a world that appears to behave in a more natural way. For example: once the player has learned that a cactus is deadly to touch, they will from then on try to avoid cactuses. Adding randomness to cactuses to make some hurt you and some harmless would just be confusing.

One of our more popular Gamefroot games that uses randomness as an gameplay enhancement is Super Froot Box! This is an homage to an iOS game called Super Crate Box.

(Super Froot Box by vlad)

Originally players would start off with very low scores but through repetition they would quickly get better. The random crate drop doesn’t interfere with the gameplay, and it spices things up enough to keep players coming back for more.

You can add randomness to your Gamefroot games by varying the terrain in your level, by having stronger enemies interspersed between weaker ones, by varying your placement of pickup items (like health, ammo, and weapons), and you can even use the Advanced behavior editor to make randomized events occur (you can make your games a lot more interesting by tinkering around with advanced behaviors).

 

Music for the mood

Music immerses the player in your environment. It can be used to set a scene, make the the player relaxed, nervous or anxious.

Video game composer Tommy Tallarico explains, “If you remember in Space Invaders, you know, as the ships started to come down, the aliens, and as they got closer and closer, the sound got faster and faster. Now, what the game programmers did was that they took the person’s heart rate, and as they’re getting closer and closer, people would start to panic. Now they’d do the same studies without the sound, and the people wouldn’t panic as much. And it goes to show and prove how significant audio and music are.”

 

(It Came From Over There! by Jesse Griffin)

Find music that fits the mood and set it as the level music. To have different music for different parts of your game, you need to split your game up into different levels, and set the music you want for each level.

Check out the Knowledgebase

We have a bunch of articles that can help you to do more cool stuff with your games, go here to learn more.

Have fun, and share your games around!