Design Pattern: Hidden Treasure

Overview

When a game has obscured goals or items that the player must find in order to use, but need not find in order to progress, the pattern in use is called Hidden Treasure. The treasure must at once provide an advantage and novelty; a weapon that differs only in that it is more powerful is just as unsatisfying as one that is only a re-skin of vanilla content.

Note again that Hidden Treasure is not required to progress; it can certainly make progression easier, but in order to qualify it cannot be strictly mandatory.

Hidden Treasure is a common feature of many games, but is prominent in any game within the RPG continuum as the pattern lends itself to quest systems.

Purpose

The Hidden Treasure pattern is put to use in three mutually independent ways.

• Encouraging exploration – The promise of an advantage and novelty gives the player reason to explore the game world, and thus Hidden Treasure can be used to get the player moving; only effective if the presence of the Hidden Treasure is made apparent early on.
• Creating replay value – Ubiquitous Hidden Treasure is most likely going to require multiple play-throughs in order discover all of it. If the Hidden Treasure is well-formed, then the advantage and novelty of the treasure will give life to the replay instead of playing solely to Skinner Box mechanics.
• Enthralling the player – The treasure becomes the object of the 'Just one more…' compulsion. Not necessarily a bad use, but Hidden Treasure should also provide something more than just a cheap way to keep the player playing.

Examples

Good

• Costume Quest – Peppered throughout the game are the materials and plans for new costumes; each costume provides a different set of attacks, spells, and over-world abilities to a party member. The costumes are not required to progress, but some costumes make the endgame easier. Searching for costumes will also reward you with more side quests, currency, and help uncover plot points.
• TESV: Skyrim – Most magical items fall into this category, and the Elder Scolls games in general blur the lines between 'required' and 'optional' treasure depending on how you play the game and what you personally see as the goal of playing it. Strongly geared towards replayability and enthralling the player.
• AOE II: Age of Kings – The Relics on the map are Hidden Treasure; their novel and powerful bonuses provide an incentive for players to explore the map as well as add flavor to warfare.

Design Pattern: Plot Mechanic

Overview

When the overarching theme of a game is driven by a unique mechanic, the game is using the Plot Mechanic pattern. It is the game design equivalent of a plot device in film and literature. TVTropes defines a plot device as "an object or character in the story whose purpose is purely to drive the plot or resolve situations." A Plot Mechanic is the same idea, but it renders it with gameplay instead of narrative.

Purpose

It may seem that any mechanic of a given game could be considered a Plot Mechanic, since game mechanics are the 'words' of the language of game design, but by that logic everything in a story would be a plot device. Thus, the Plot Mechanic has the same sort of central 'bigness' that a plot device has. It has to represent the agency of the player that facilitates gameplay; summoning demons, controlling time, transforming between different creatures.

Usage

As it is in film and literature, the Plot Mechanic can be a dangerous trap. Like plot devices, Plot Mechanics can come off as boring, stale, or simply lazy. You may find movie tie-ins can suffer from this: a fan-favorite element of the film is turned into a mechanic upon which and the whole enterprise is expected to rest, based solely on how well it sold on the silver screen.

It can be a great place to start, however, and it seems that often that is where we start. How often do we sit down and think, "I want to make a game where X can do Y"? Relying on the Plot Mechanic like this can be good for small games, experiments, and prototypes, but the larger the project the more thought and iteration it will require.

Examples

• The Darkness – The plot mechanic is the name of the game. 'Nough said.
• Braid – You can control and manipulate time in various ways; no one is going to argue this game didn't pull it off brilliantly. In fact, almost all of the mechanics in the entire game have to do with it.
• Banjo Kazooie: – You can flip between the two characters, as I remember, which leads to a whole bunch of great little abilities.

Counter Example

• Chronoscient – Chrono started with the idea by our lead for "a space shooter where you can see the future." Got a lot of cool words in there, and who doesn't love some good time-bending gameplay? But in the end, we found that we simply could not figure out how to get the idea to work. Space shooters are so fast and intense, how do you communicate the future without overloading the player? I think in retrospect, we did not understand that space shooters already gave you information about the future: the swarms of enemies and heavily deterministic behaviors give you all the info you need in order to predict what is going to happen. Maybe when we revisit it, we will be wiser and use the more generic statement "a space shooter where time is a dimension of gameplay".

Design Pattern: Progression Exhaustion

Overview

Progression Exhaustion is the inversion of the Progression Track; thus it employs the principle of Diminishing Returns instead of Thematic Capital. Improvement modeled with Progression Exhaustion grants more for less for sticking to a particular theme, you get less for more.

Purpose

The incentives are the opposite and the use is the opposite: encourage the player to branch out and not specialize their experience. Using both progression tracking and exhaustion together is an effective way to coax balance out of a player's development, especially in RPGs.

Example

• HERO System – HERO System uses 3d6 as the central gauge of success. The probabilities of rolling a number on the range [3,18] follow a pronounced bell curve. The modifier a Skills or Characteristic grants to a roll changes linearly with respect to the points spent, and the opposition value of rolls starts at 9-. The result is that each for additional point you spend on a skill you get less of an improvement to your rolls. At some point around a 85% success rate, it becomes better to start spending points elsewhere.
  
  In terms of gameplay, this means that players rarely improve a skill to 100% competency; they spend points more wisely and anything they do push to and beyond the max will be an essential, flavorful part of their character.

Design Pattern: Progression Track

Overview

The Progression Track rewards thematic player development. The player is offered a number of choices and some number of them continue or reinforce the theme of previously choices. A choice that continues the thrust of previous decisions is rewarded by a lower cost while thematically dissonant choices cost more. This cost is either nominal or is folded into the opportunity cost of not continuing a pattern of decisions.

The easiest examples to recognize are those that involve a flavor of upgrading: if you are presented with a choice between improving your ability to do an ollie and how far you can grind. Previously you may have improved your grinding; then the latter choice may be cheaper simply because it is more in line with your previously decisions. On the other hand, if you haven't even begun to explore ollies, then it may be more advantageous to improve a skill you already excel at than to invest in a brand new one.

Purpose

Progression tracks are a great way to encourage player specialization, and so often show up in RPG's. Naturally steering a character towards a certain style of play using progression tracks is also a good way to preserve elements of the game for a second play-through.

Usage

The much maligned and often shallow morality systems found in games often use this pattern, though usually in an uninteresting way. It is usually far easier and grants greater advantage to simply be more evil than to suddenly have a change of heart. These systems try to compartmentalize and categorize the real world of grey areas and moral ambiguity, digesting real questions and ethical complexity into an easy to process model that the player can make decisions about and the game itself can actually simulate.

Usually that process removes the very interest from the content that intrigued us in the first place; a contemporary computer is a cold calculating machine, and making it run a game while modeling human emotion and morality in enough detail to preserve sufficient nuance is ill-advised. This is why the best uses of morality are not contrived but probable and grey while having little to no actual mechanical consequences. There are quests in Skyrim, for instance, which end with a simple decision, ones which the player does not have complete or wholly reliable information about and which do not provide any answers when they conclude. The player is already involved in the story enough that the simple act of making the decision is all that is needed to interact with them and the fact that there are little to no mechanical consequences does not detract from the effect on the player.

Examples

• D&D – In D&D, the aforementioned Feats have a number of progression tracks in them: Power Attack to Cleave to Great Cleave. You have to have the previous Feat in order to acquire the next one in the set. Furthermore the Class system makes for an a progression track as well since Multiclassing is expensive.
• Monopoly – In this originally educational and satirical take on capitalism, improving a property you have already developed can be more lucrative than improving undeveloped property, provided that the property is placed well, as the rent will be greatly increased.

Design Pattern: Ability Slot

An ability slot is similar to an upgrade of choice, but the choices available do not represent a permanent change to a game entity's abilities.  Instead, the entity has a certain number of slots which abilities 'take up' when equipped.

I cannot think of a real example where this would be used and not be pigeon-holed, but that does not mean it can't and hasn't been done.  Certainly, one could have a game where the player's character has three slots and only three abilities to fill them with, but with the option of putting an ability in multiple slots, thus augmenting that particular ability at the cost of flexibility.

An important feature of ability slots is that shuffling abilities around is in some way a hassle.  For instance, you may not be able to do so during combat or outside of a certain location.

Examples

D&D

A magic-user in D&D has a certain number of spells they can cast per day, unless you're a heathen and play 4.0 where you have a certain number of spells per battle, because who wants to deal with all of that pesky role playing business anyway.*

You of course need to learn the spells first, but after that, you can prepare any spells you have for the day.

FPS's

FPS's basically always have ability slots in the form of weapon choice; while gaining access to the weapon is usually an upgrade of course, which weapons you have equipped is almost always an ability slot.  Many games have dual-wielding now, and Skyrim of course makes double-equipping a spell a whole lot of fun.

Raiden

I'll be honest and say I played a fan homage Flash version of Raiden on the internet, but the important thing here is the fact that you have one ability slot, your weapon type, and three types of weapon.  Raiden also exhibits the design pattern upgrade track.

*Seriously, do not play 4.0.  Having spells per battle instead of spells per day messes with the tenuous sense of scarcity in a game where magic users were already incredibly powerful after a certain level.  The skill Intimidate can't be used outside of combat; I suppose it is better to simply kill all your enemies than to save one to interrogate later.

Design Pattern: Upgrade

The upgrade is a pattern that is applied all the time to games.  The player is allowed to make a decision to improve a game entity in some way.  Upgrades always cost something to acquire, usually a resource and/or time.

Upgrades come in two flavors: upgrades of course and upgrades of choice.

The former covers upgrades where you will get the upgrade just by playing and often represent an expansion of player skill and game difficulty.  In classic FPS's, like Doom, gaining access to a new weapon as you play through the levels is an example of an upgrade of course.  A more colloquial term for this flavor would be ability curve, where over the course of play (see the name?) the player's abilities expand.  Upgrades of course are useful for in-play tutorials.

The latter is the type of upgrade which pertains to the customization of a game entity.  Usually, upgrades of choice are pigeon-holed in some way; that is, there are more choices of upgrades than there are chances to upgrade, either by a restriction on the number of upgrades or by availability of upgrade resources.  This forces the player to make a choice concerning how they want to improve.  The former type of pigeon-holing is more easy described as expansion slots while the latter is an example of scarcity.

Examples

Age of ... Series

The technologies of the games are upgrades of choice almost universally, though some only grant access to other technologies to be researched.  Researching techs in most games including the Age of ... Series is almost always done with scarcity; you can research everything, but time and resources are scarce enough that you usually have to make decisions.

D&D

As characters progress in D&D (3.0 and later, at least), they are allowed to add Feats to their character.  Feats are special abilities that allow you to break the normal rules in some way, ostensibly because the character has become just that awesome.

There are many many dozens of feats, and no source book or expansion is complete without a list of new feats to make your characters especially over-powered.  Since these are permanent additions to character abilities, they are pigeon-holed upgrades of choice, or expansion slots.


Halo, DOOM, etc.

FPS's almost always use upgrades of course; as you play, you gain access to more types of weapons.  The resource you expend in these situations is usually only the time it takes to play to t a given level where access to a weapon is granted.

Design Pattern: Complementary Mechanics

Complementary mechanics are a coupling of mechanics where each reinforces the other in order to result in a desirable player behaviors.  The best complementary mechanics reinforce each other as well as encourage player behaviors that relate to each mechanic; I'm calling this type 'completely complementary mechanics'.

Complementary mechanics are a very effective way to silently pressure a player into strategic actions with them not necessarily being aware of the greater importance of those actions.  They must be carefully designed, however, so that the resultant behavior is fairly obvious given the mechanics involved.

Examples

Chess

If you are familiar with chess strategy, then you know that building a pawn wall is very important.  The pawns, though weak individually, become a powerful tool that thwarts opponent movement when used together.

In order for it to work, a pawn wall must be zig-zag shaped; pawns capture diagonally, so for one to protect another, they must all be adjacent diagonally.  To complement the fact that they capture diagonally, pawns can move one or two spaces on their first move, making the most basic pawn wall, a two space wide zig-zag one space in front of all of a players more powerful pieces, mostly trivial to accomplish.

Because most chess pieces cannot hop over allied pieces, the complementary mechanics of pawns naturally force you to move them into a defensive structure that is porous enough to let your pieces through but strong enough to repel opponent pieces until the mid-game.

Mechanics: Pawn capturing, one-or-two first move
Resultant Behaviors: building a pawn wall, opening maneuvering room for more powerful pieces

Sins of a Solar Empire

To achieve the next tech tier, you need a certain number of research labs.  You can also only build a certain number of structures around each planet.  Since there are numerous structures you could build and limited slots to build them in, the only choices you have as a player are to colonize more worlds or upgrade more worlds to get more slots to build more labs to research more techs to protect all those worlds and structures you colonized or built.  Planets also incur a cost to operate until they are completely upgraded.

This is an example of completely complementary mechanics.

Mechanics: tech tiers need more research structures, only so many structure slots per planet
Resultant Behavior: colonize more planets, upgrade planets, and later, research more techs to protect your investments

Battlefleet Gothic

A game of space battles in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, whose table-top wargame is probably Games Workshop's most widely known offering.  I don't know much about the history of naval type war games, but I get a strong sense from BG that there is a lot of influence from past games going on.

In BG, you must always move your ships (unless a ship is under special orders that involve some tradeoffs) because of the huge amount of momentum they have.  This forces play to be dynamic and constantly changing.  Ships also are harder to hit from the front and ever harder to hit from the rear, so positioning is a vital component of the game.

By forcing the player to always move their ships, the game is forcing you to make tactical decisions every turn which it rewards you with by making ships have a varying degree of difficulty to attack based on relative position.

Mechanics: forcing the player to move, variable armor based on relative position
Resultant Behavior: fast-paced and tactical play