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Legends of Runeterra: Power Curves

As a longtime fan of competitive card games such as Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone, and as a casual fan of League of Legends, it is no wonder that I would surely become interested in their own card game, Legends of Runeterra. Likewise, as a prospective game designer, I enjoy examining games and systems to understand how they work. As such, I decided to expand my game knowledge by attempting to ascertain a “Power Curve” of LOR cards to better understand what makes a strong deck.

But first, what is a power curve? A power curve, in the most simple terms possible, is how much value a certain action (in this case, card) has in contrast to the resources it costs. What does that mean? That the more resources something costs you, the stronger it should be. 

Imagine you are playing Runeterra. Even if you don’t know how to play it, assume you have 5 mana to spend on casting spells. Every spell costs a certain amount of that 5 mana to do something in the game, such as damaging the enemy’s life total (Called a Nexus). Now, let’s take a look at the card Blade’s Edge below.

As you can see, this card allows you to do 1 damage to anything for the cost of 1 mana. Seems like a fair trade, right? You spend one point of your resources to deal a single damage. Now look at the card I’ve created below, which I've called Hexplosive.

Notice how this card does double the amount of damage as Blade’s Edge, but also costs the same amount as it? Ask yourself, why would anyone use Blade’s Edge when they could use Hexplosive instead? This is where the idea of a power curve comes into play.

You can think of the power curve of a game as being the best staple cards per cost of resource, setting the standard of which every other card will be judged against. If Hexplosive existed in the game, everything around the same cost would be judged against it. Any one cost card would then have to be on par with Hexplosive if the game designers would want them to see use in game. Cards that cost more than 1 mana would also have to be stronger to compensate, lest the game solely be focused around the best cheap cards and nothing else.

Compare this three cost card, Death’s Hand, to Hexplosive:

As you can see, Death’s Hand does technically do more damage than Hexplosive, but it is much stricter about how that damage is divided. Likewise, it costs 2 more mana than Hexplosive, which would just beg the question: Why would you use Death’s Hand when you could cast 2 more Hexplosives instead? Casting 3 Hexplosives would give you 6 damage total to anything you wished, which is double the amount dealt by Death’s Hand with less restrictions.

Starting to get the picture now? If Death’s Hand wanted to compete, it would have to deal at least as much damage as 3 Hexplosives, or ever-so-slightly less when you take into account card limits, to be considered a card that is worth using. Just imagine what a 5 cost spell would need to do to keep pace with 10 damage!

Now, most of this ignores the fact that in most of these games, there is a limit to the number of the same cards you can have in one deck. If not, someone could make their deck entirely out of Hexplosives and cards that support it to just blow up their enemy in a few rounds. Card limits are useful for evening out the power curve of a game because it limits the ability to abuse overpowered cards. In other kinds of games, such as RPGs or MOBAs, the limiting factor would instead be cooldown timers or hard limits on the number of spell casts you have.

The examples I’ve laid out above are independent power, the idea of looking at cards based on raw damage or defense for their resource cost. However, there is another form of power that a designer must recognize: Contextual power.

Contextual power is simply the idea that cards that might not be independently powerful, such as not having the best damage dealing abilities or highest amount of health, can still be powerful in certain contexts. Look at this other, amazingly designed card I created below:

Seems like a pretty bad card, right? It's weak and hurts you more and more for every turn it is out on the field. Sure, it can block a few attacks here and there, but it costs a lot of mana for that defensive capability. If you don’t kill it off within 4 turns, you take a whopping 22 damage! Any bonus you could get out of this card would be useless within 5 turns at the most.

Now look at this other card I created:

Wouldn’t that be absolutely broken with the previous card? Within 3 or 4 turns the opposing player would be dead if they cannot deal with these cards. That is contextual power, where some cards become stronger because of the existence of other cards. This is also commonly called “synergies” between cards. The above example is an extreme one, but as a player and a designer you should always be looking for ways to combine cards that maximizes the power of both, even if the cards aren’t considered strong separately. Of course, it’s almost always better to have synergistic cards that are powerful separately, but the foundation of niche decks and builds are built on the back of odd synergies.

And who knows, maybe the current popular decks won’t know how to deal with your new synergies? Either way, a designer needs to balance their games to have a proper curve of power growth, and they must also pay attention to possible synergies between powerful and weak cards alike to ensure that nothing game breaking makes it past development!

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Punishment and Fun: Are Punishing Mechanics a Valid Option in Game Design?

Let me begin by saying, yes. Absolutely yes. Punishing game mechanics are absolutely a valid choice for a game designer to make!

Now that that is out of the way, why is it a valid choice for a game designer to make? Why would anyone want to absolutely punish the people playing their game? Why would a player want to get demolished over and over by a game?

The answer is complicated, but to put it into the simplest terms possible: Because games are art.

Games are not just avenues for wasting time, or just vehicles to provide pleasure and happiness to the player. Games are not solely serotonin factories for players to use to have fun and feel good and nothing else. Of course, making a game fun is a valid and dare I say, noble endeavor for a game designer, but it is not the only valid path to take. Much like how summer blockbuster action thrillers are not the only valid type of movie, games come in all shapes and sizes and genres. Games can tell stories just as well as other mediums; In fact, they are arguably better at telling stories than any entertainment medium that has come before it!

As such, would it not be prudent for game designers to implement mechanics in their games that service the story the game is trying to tell?

The answer to that question itself is complicated, as there is a fine and invisible line between “servicing the story” and “being engaging and playable to the player.” It does not matter how well the mechanics of a game serve to enhance the story, if the player is so turned off by the mechanics that they never get to interact with the story at large anyway. At that point, you have basically defeated the purpose of using game mechanics to boost the narrative of your game!

Let us look at the cult classic Pathologic, along with its partial sequel, partial remake Pathologic 2 as an example of how punishing mechanics can both service a story and hinder it.

(Spooky huh? Can you imagine that these guys are actually something you might be glad to see in game?)

Pathologic is a 2005 role-playing and survival game developed by the Russian game studio “Ice-Pick Lodge.” It was originally just released in Russia but was localized a year later into English. Pathologic is an infamous cult-classic about 3 characters who come to a small Russian village who is quickly falling to a sickness called the “sand plague”. Each of them attempts to help the townspeople in their own way, using their unique skills to attempt to cure the town while also trying to survive in it while the town gets worse and worse with each passing day.

A major mechanic of the game is the fact that the player is incredibly weak, and vulnerable to many different ways of death. The player has to contend with a purposely awkward combat system, thirst and hunger meters, and exhaustion meter, and has to attempt to prevent themselves from getting infected with the plague. The player must contend with all of these systems while they try to cure the town, which in some cases is actively hostile to them. The player must survive 12 in-game days to reach the end, and receives multiple different endings based upon the actions they take during the game, such as how many people they protected from dying to the plague.

Sounds like a punishing game already, no? Well, that is not all. The player must also contend with a bartering system to obtain items like food and water, and as the plague spreads prices on certain staples like food go out of control. Along with that, many of the game’s quests actively punish the player, whether they make the “good” decision or not. The player must also complete some quests during each day, because if they do not, an NPC will, and they will not do as well as you and risk dying or getting infected.

One of the most infamous cases of the crushing nihilism of the quest design in Pathologic is a quest early on where the player is tasked with getting food for a shelter for the sick. While the player is given a certain amount of money to purchase food, it is not enough to supply the shelter with what it actually needs, forcing the player to spend their own money on the food. Then, once they have purchased the food and brought it to the shelter, the player finds out that the shelter is completely demolished by the sickness and cannot be used for anything.

The player then turns in all the food they gathered, including the food they purchased, and get a handful of nuts in return.

The player could have stolen this food at any moment, or just taken the money and used it for something else. The player is not punished for stealing the money or food and never turning it in, nor does anyone in the cast of NPCs die from them not handing over the food. The game simply allows the player to do a good deed and does not guarantee them something in return for it.

It is fair to say that Pathologic is a very tough game and is well known for being an absolutely brutal game. Most players drop the game after the first day if the steam achievements for days completed are anything to go by. So, if so many players drop the game so quickly, was the choice to make the game so brutal a bad one?

I would personally say no, it was not. However, I would also say that the game had troubles with properly teaching the player how to survive, and also had troubles with having too much of a difficulty spike at certain places.

However, the game had a semi-remake, semi-sequel in the form of Pathologic 2. So, what did they change there to make the game more accessible to players without compromising on too much on the brutalizing mechanics of the first?

First, the game made sure to give the players a chance to interact with the mechanics in a safe space, through a series of visions that the player character has that allow the player to do most of the things that they will be dealing with throughout the game. This section teaches the player how to get water, how-to pick-up items, and how to trade and talk with NPCs. It also serves as an introduction to the player to get them invested, beyond just dropping them into the town like the first game did.

Second, the game tightened up it’s focus and provides the player with a lot more direction than the first game through it’s map and “mental map” feature, which allows the player to refer back to it to understand what they did, what they might want to look into, and what quests they should be doing at that specific time. This shift into providing the player a quick and easy way of understanding what is important to focus on gives the player direction that the first game did not and gives them a clear objective to keep on playing with.

Third, all of the mechanics are still there, but have generally been toned down ever so slightly or improved slightly from the first game to make the adjustment to playing around them slightly easier on the player. There is also now multiple difficulties and even a slider system to allow the player to tone down or make the game as hard as they want, which provides accessibility to players who might not be able to handle the game at its “intended” setting.

So, did this change work? Did more players play the second game, and get to experience the story that they were trying to tell without compromising on the mechanics servicing that story? I would say yes! Especially if you look at the steam achievements for the first game compared to the second.

(Top first, bottom second.)

As you can see, there are almost 6x more players who completed the first day in the second game compared to the first. If you look at the final day’s achievements (shown below), you will see that almost as many players have reached the ending of the second game as finished the first day in the original!

The second game is still considered very brutal and atmospheric, and the mechanics still service the story in much the same way as they did in the first game. Simply tweaking some of the mechanics slightly allowed the game to be much more accessible to a wider audience than the first game’s mechanics allowed. What can we take away from this?

Do not be afraid of having your mechanics service your story or the intended atmosphere of the game. However, you must be careful to not overwhelm your players. It is important to focus on what most of your players can take, and not just needlessly wreck them. When you are crafting a punishing experience, you must take arguably more care in designing your systems than you would when trying to make another game “fun”.

But if you can pull it off, you can create an experience that sticks in the player’s minds for a long time and boosts the narrative of your game beyond what it would be simply on paper.

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Odd-Ball Builds: Deriving Fun from the Weird

When it comes to video games that provide customization options to the player that affect gameplay, why do so many players love to find the weirdest, most niche builds that they can? Why do some players love to put together a team of Pokemon that rely on very odd, underused abilities and Pokemon to surprise the opponent? Why do some players, myself included, love to take LoL champions like Braum out of the bot lane and into the jungle? Why do we love the weird and novel so much?

Sadly, the answer isn’t so clear as to have a fast, neat answer. I would love to just say “Well, because it’s fun to be different!” and be done with this post, but humans are much more complicated than just doing things for fun. What makes doing weird things, that very often lead to losses, so fun to so many players? Why would anyone take a chance on Braum jungle when they could select a champion that is much more suited to the role of jungler? Losing isn’t fun for most people, so why would someone derive so much pleasure from putting themselves at a handicap? 

I would like to argue that one of the major reasons people do so is because of the fact that it makes the game harder. Playing in ways that were not intended, in many cases, forces the player to think outside of the box when it comes to how they should act. Much like a puzzle, the player is forced to think of ways to use the tools they have been given to successfully fill the role they have given themselves. Much like a child trying to force wooden blocks through the wrong shaped holes, when the player is successful they feel like they have earned their success doubly, as they managed to defeat others using something that is less than optimal. 

This is much like how one-trick players operate, as many players focus solely on one class or character in a video game because they like exercising their skill on a singular vehicle to show the breadth of their knowledge on that one class or character. Likewise, these odd-ball players are exercising their skill in quick decision making and adaptability, showing that they have the ability to quickly adapt to new and unusual situations with whatever tools they have at their disposal.

It could also be considered a status symbol, as one who consistently does well on something that is considered sub-optimal by the rest of the player base can easily become somewhat of a “Celebrity” among other players, especially if the player manages to reach high rank or notoriety. It is very common for these kinds of players to be very dedicated to their choices, and some even manage to change the stigma surrounding their choice of character or class. One of the best examples of this is the stream Trick2G, who made the league of legends champion Udyr into a champion that is much more popular than he was in the past, simply for being well known and knowledgeable about playing the champion. Even beyond that, it’s simply fun to brag about how you won with such an absurd character, class, or ability choice.

So, what can a game do to support this? At the very least, what can a game do to allow players to experiment without having to focus on making content that explicitly pushes for it? The simplest action is to offer players some new tools every once in a while, even if it seems useless at first. Take Magic the Gathering for example, they once released a card called One With Nothing, which simply allows you to discard your entire hand and nothing more. While the card was decried for being useless at the time, they still went ahead and printed it. Why? Because someone, somewhere, might be able to create a deck based around it. Of course, i’m not telling you to make bad items, cards, characters, etc, on purpose! However, do not be afraid to offer the players some building blocks that could lead to some interesting strategies down the line, even if they aren’t interested in it immediately. When you offer players something to experiment with, you offer a future game designer something to learn and grow with. You offer a teenager the chance to have a blast with their friends on the weekend, or offer them a chance to brag to their friends about what they pulled off.

Essentially, people like it because it offers them multiple avenues for fun!

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My First “Real” Game And Why I Am Still Proud: An Analysis

When I think about every game I have ever worked on, I commonly come back to a simple RPG maker game that I created for my first ever game jam, titled “Neru”. It isn’t the most technical thing I've ever created; I didn’t code very much for it, I didn’t change the JRPG formula much at all, and it was extremely influenced by another game I played a few months back called “Space Funeral”. The art and design direction is frankly crazy, a mishmash of different ideas colliding with off-the-wall humor, weird techno music from the 80’s, and lots of monsters and blood. By all accounts, it isn’t really greater than your average RPG Maker game. So, why does this game captivate me so much? 

Neru began as a game created for a game jam titled “My First Game Jam”, a jam created to serve as an introduction to game creation in a limited time span for people who wanted to begin jamming, but were afraid of joining the more serious jams with their lack of experience. This wasn’t my first game creation experience, as I had already taken multiple game development classes during my high school years, but it was my first “real” game. I was 19, and had just graduated high school the previous year, and I had taken a break from making games to begin my college studies. Joining this jam was my first step into making “actual” games that other people could play and enjoy.

Having discovered and played the games OFF and Space Funeral a few months before, I distinctly wanted to create an odd-ball JRPG game that defied the conventions of a typical JRPG game. After seeing the weird and wild ways that those games infused into the classic JRPG format, I wanted to channel my creative energies into making something that could creep people out and make them laugh at the same time.

I threw myself into creating it, rapidly prototyping a room and creating some placeholder sprites to fill it. This is where I created the main character, who I titled Gared. As you can see from the image below, many of the weird ideas found in the final game sprung up naturally from my attempts at creating a “creepy” and weird atmosphere as I re-familiarized myself with the RPG Maker 2004.

As I was designing, I quickly realized that while I could capitalize on my poor spriting work as a cohesive visual style (At least, as cohesive as a game like this one could be), that was no excuse for leaving things looking terrible without any effort. Thus, I began to refine the game’s style and aesthetic before I began creating the world in full, simplifying all of the possible sprites into something that was still messy and odd, but simple and easy to read at a glance. In my earliest play-test with friends, many of them believed that touching the lake would hurt them, convinced that the blood was actually lava.

Notice how the blood became much simpler in the last screenshot. In the screenshot before, the “water” looked more like magma than it did blood. The harsh, detailed lines causing it to clash against the simplified ground tiles. By simplifying it into a pure red color, I made it much easier for the player to look at the blood lake, as well as made it much easier for the player to recognize that it was in-fact a lake of blood! Through this realization, I subconsciously learned about the importance of visually “explaining” what something is while making a game, you can’t just expect a player to understand something because you understand it, you need to design what they are looking at in such a was as to tap into their subconscious biases to behave how you would like them to.

After this point, my focus shifted towards a battle mechanic that I wanted to include, inspired by Space Funeral to take my first steps into designing a combat system. This system was the Mystery command, which would cause something odd or mysterious to happen once per battle. It was here that I got to stretch my creative muscles, breathing new life and humor into the combat system through simply giving the player a chance to have something mysterious to happen to them. This could be both good and bad, or simply do nothing to alter the outcome of the battle at all, but the random nature of it enticed players to try it out with different enemies to see what they would get.

Quickly, I began to flesh out the story and game through creating enemies and maps, along with various NPCs. With the limited abilities that my game mechanics gave me, I began creating small wacky situations for the player to discover while they searched about the world. It is here where I had my most fun, designing the world to provide the player with little insights into the odd lives of the monsters around them. They could enter a house and find a pair of lovers, and read their secret “romantic” letters to each other, or they could walk into a home and find a tongue-person pretending to be a mouth-monster, hiding the fact that he is different simply through the monsters not having eyes.

While I would create more interesting mechanics for the player to interact with on the over world, such as more story interaction along with puzzles for the player to solve to progress, with my more advanced knowledge of design, one still has to admire the unique attempt to make the game shine through my limited design knowledge, taking what I knew I could do and turning it into a feature for the player to look forward to.

That isn’t to say that this game is anything great; Quite the opposite in fact! I gave the player no direction, no tutorial on how to interact with the world, and frankly no challenge either. Every single battle can be defeated without much more than 1/8th of your maximum health, and healing items are extremely common. In the combat menu, there is an extra row that does nothing, mistaken left in. Money is trivial, as well as grinding levels. Heck, even the Mystery command is broken, where if the player runs from a battle after using it, they lose the ability to use the Mystery command until they defeat another enemy!

But, if this game has so many flaws, why do I still look back on it so fondly? Is it just because it’s one of my first ever games shown to anyone but myself? Is it because I received praise on my dialogue writing? Is it because I saw videos of people playing it and enjoying it?

Well, you could say that all of that does help in making me feel fond for it, but I think it goes beyond that. That game was a reflection of myself at the time, something created for myself. Of course I wanted other people to enjoy it, but throughout making the game I tried to think of things that would make me laugh or smile if I came across them in a game. It was really one of my first, and probably most genuine, attempts at actually creating something fun for fun's sake.

That is why, I'd like to offer this piece of advice to anyone reading who wants to make games: Make something that you would actually find fun yourself. Don’t create something just because you think it would be popular, or just because you think other people would like it. Create things that you personally enjoy and they will provide you with a lot more long term satisfaction than the thing you made to appeal to everyone else.

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Why does toxicity exist in online games? How do we deal with it?

I’m sure anyone reading this can easily think of a time that they played a game with someone that was a jerk. In fact, I'm sure just about anyone who has played an online multiplayer game has had to deal with the reality that they will eventually be forced to interact with other players who do not want to interact in a civil way. These players, for one reason or another, lash out at both their teammates and enemies in unacceptable ways, creating environments that foster anger, hostility, humiliation, and frustration.

So why does this happen? Why do so many people, many of them just regular, normal, well adjusted people lash out so harshly when it comes to video games? I’d argue that even you, dear reader, have gotten heated while playing a video game before. You might have even said a few things that you wouldn’t ever say in front of your mother. I’d assume that you like to think of yourself as a normal, nice person. Why then, did you act that way?

The answer is actually fairly simple: Anonymity, and the inherent separation between people that the internet provides, mixed with the competitive nature of humans, creates toxic behavior.

When you are playing an online game, you usually won’t be matched with people that you know personally. You and however many strangers are thrust together for 10 to 40 minutes at a time, made to play a game where one side wins and the other side loses. It doesn’t matter if only one player or multiple players will end up winning, the general idea is the same: People want to win, they want to come out on top of the other side, and they want to be known as the best.

Now, that isn’t to say that negative behaviors in online video games online only arise due to the inherent competition that these games provide. However, when you look at the problem from that frame of reference, it becomes a lot clearer why many people who are very nice people in real life might act out in negative ways when playing competitive video games. That is, the inherent stress and competitive nature causes people to act up. 

This also connects with how people use video games to feel a form of control in their lives, as video games provide agency to the player. Agency is essentially the feeling that what you do matters and has an effect on the world, which is something that many people turn to video games to provide when their lives don’t give them enough of it. When you take that, and combine it with the fact that competitive video games give other players a chance to take control of a match, you have a perfect situation for players to unconsciously heap their agency related stress and frustration onto other players. 

It’s not their fault that they’re losing, it’s their teammates faults for not doing enough. They didn’t die because the enemy player played better than them, they died because the enemy player is using a cheap strategy. Their internet acted up. The excuses are numerous, but the general idea is the same. People don’t like feeling a lack of agency, especially in a competitive situation, and that can cause them to lash out.

Of course, there are some people who do these negative things without needing something else to trigger their lack of agency. What about them? The general idea actually stays the same, it’s just that they are forcibly obtaining agency through ruining the games of other players. They obtain their feelings of power and control through the easier method possible: Forcing other people, ones that they don’t know and won’t be negatively affected by, to deal with their trolling. 

Let’s say you are playing League of Legends, and you only have one more win left before you rise to a higher rank. You get your favorite position and lock in your champion, feeling ready to work hard to get your win and prove you deserve to be in a higher rank. Then, suddenly, the guy below you in the pick order instantly locks in a champion that doesn’t work well with your team, and demands that he gets your role instead of you. You read his name and feel a sense of dread fill your stomach. This player’s username? “PromosAndIFeed”.

That player is forcibly obtaining a sense of control through trolling other players, stealing their agency to satisfy their own. When you’re trolling, you don’t need to worry about actually doing good or bad, you can do whatever you want and it doesn’t matter because “I was just trolling.” When you combine this type of player with the former type, you have a recipe for a recurring loop of players ruining games through negative attitudes. The players who have to deal with that move onto the next game in an angry state, commonly called “being tilted”, and go on to be more aggressive and mean with other players who had nothing to do with their negative mood.

So what can you do to fix, or at least mitigate this problem? Let’s use Riot Games as an example, how do they combat toxicity in League of Legends?

The most common method of dealing with negative players is to punish them for their negative behavior. This commonly involves things such as being banned from speaking in the in-game chat, to suspending and banning players for recurring bouts of negative behavior. While this can stop the player from cursing at their teammates, or force them to take a break to calm down, this doesn’t exactly make most players give up on this behavior. If the player does it sparsely enough, they might never even get in trouble in the first place. These kinds of punishments don’t diminish the factors that cause players to act out in toxic ways, and even if they do get permanently banned they will just make new accounts to continue their negativity on. Riot does use these methods of punishment, but has also decided to do something different: Reward the players who are good and respectful to their team.

Riot rewards their players with “Honor” for being a good teammate. Currently at the end of a match, players can choose to honor their teammates for things that they did well in the game, such as staying chill or being a shot-caller. As a reward for this, players earn key fragments that go towards chests that give the player access to new champions or alternate costumes called skins for these champions. When players gain enough honor, they also get access to exclusive skins that are only obtainable for being a great teammate.

While this system isn’t anywhere near perfect, it does offer players something to think about when they are thinking about doing something negative in game. If even 1/5th to 1/10th of the players who are thinking about trolling during a game stop and decide not to because they might lose access to the honor skins, that is an incredible improvement over the other possibility.

However, at the end of the day players are real people, and that means that you can’t stop 100% of them from doing or saying negative things. If you could do that, we’d probably be able to institute world peace soon afterwards! That, however, isn’t what is really most important about dealing with toxicity. The most that a game developer can do is attempt to protect the players who aren’t already doing bad things from the players who are, as well as attempt to reform the negative players into people who can play the game with a positive mindset. By trying to stem the tide of negative feelings, as well as promote positive interactions between players, you can keep toxicity low enough that most players can enjoy the game without much problems. 

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What makes a game mechanic or system unfun?

Now, I’m sure anyone reading this can understand what an unfun game system or mechanic is like. It can vary from someone abusing a game mechanic to kill you from an unreachable place to a game simply having horrible driving or terrible gunplay in a first-person shooter. It’s not fun when something doesn’t work how it should, or when something just doesn’t feel right.

But what actually leads into a game mechanic not being fun? Is it just because some game designer made the wrong choices? Is it because there are just certain things that are not fun? Is it because the game didn’t get vetted by quality assurance enough? I would say that while these things can lead to unfun mechanics or game systems, they aren’t the major cause of most unfun mechanics or systems.

The major cause of unfun mechanics and systems is that the systems and mechanics are not cohesive to the overall design of the game.

Now, I understand how this sounds at first glance. I mean, of course a game system wouldn’t be fun if it didn’t fit cohesively in the game that features it. You wouldn’t think suddenly going from catching a Pokémon to pulling out a pistol and gunning down Ratatta for sport would be a cohesive mechanic shift, would you? (Although I’m sure there is already something like that, somewhere on the internet). But that isn’t what I mean when I say cohesive design.

Cohesive design is what I call “how the different mechanics of the game flow into each other.” That is, how does each mechanic or system fit in with the mechanics and systems directly related to it? This can encapsulate a lot of things, such as what buttons do you need to press to access this mechanic and system? How is that button placed on the gamepad? Does the use of that button interfere with another mechanics use of another button? You wouldn’t want to shoot with the same button as movement after all, it just doesn’t make sense. You need to make sure that for each mechanic, you understand how it could affect every other mechanic and system.

This doesn’t just apply to button presses, but just about everything in a game. When you press the jump button, do you have the ability to control where you land by using the movement keys? How early or late into the jump can the player adjust their path? Can they tap the button quickly to have a short jump, or is every jump going to lead to the same gain in height? Can they even jump at all? What about jumping from a crouched position, can they do that at all, or do they need to stand up first? If so, how fast do they stand up? Can you run directly getting out a jump? How long will this whole change in state take?

While you would think that those settings would just be decided naturally through the game design process, the best games all think about how all of these mechanics and systems interact with well before they are implemented in game. While yes, they definitely do usually end up getting changed with vigorous testing, there really isn’t always time at the end to change certain mechanics to fit better with the rest of the game. When you change how high the player can jump, this can seriously mess with how the player can interact with a level. Making them able to jump higher means they can possibly jump onto level geometry that they were originally not supposed to get up to. Making it shorter can make longer jumps much more frustrating to land. These things need to be tested, and sometimes when a mechanic isn’t thought out enough you just can’t change it in time for release.

 Have you ever had a time when playing a game that everything else around you just faded away? Where the plate of pizza rolls next to you didn’t matter, only the next zombie head you needed to smash mattered? That is the level of flow that cohesive game design wants to bring you to. I’m sure you’ve played a game that is the exact opposite, where instead of everything feeling like it flows naturally, you have to play around the games clunky controls and get used to how everything works. This can be excused by players if other mechanics or the story is engaging enough, like the tank controls in the early Resident Evil and Silent Hill games. Some players even say that these controls are a part of the experience, but in modern times these kinds of mistakes just usually don’t fly anymore. Moving like a slug through levels is boring, and combat taking forever is just annoying. When the player takes damage because of how clunky swinging a weapon is, it isn’t the players fault, it’s the game’s fault.

Game systems can fall into similar problems as well. Take Blizzard’s World of Warcraft for example: In the most current expansion as of writing this, Battle for Azeroth, many players have been complaining about the Azerite Armor system in place. This system is fairly simple, certain items that the player can equip can have bonus abilities and buffs that the player can select from a few random options. As the player ups their “Azerite level”, they can unlock more traits attached to their items. On the surface, this seems like an interesting way to add growth to the end game of an MMO. The player continues to unlock abilities while playing the game at the maximum level, meaning that they almost will never reach a point where they have no more growth to earn. However, since these are bonus abilities, inevitably some abilities will be better than others. As such, if you want to have your character do the most damage, you have to have these abilities. But what if you don’t find any gear with that ability? What if you have gear with that ability, but it is of a much lower level than another piece? Even if it is stronger, wearing a ‘weaker’ piece of gear is never fun. What if the balance team decides to change one of those abilities? If it gets weaker, then everyone will have to rush out and get new gear, effectively meaning that they now have “useless” gear that they worked hard to earn, which is never a fun thing for a player to experience.

So, how would you make a system like this better? Well, by going back to the way they had it before. In the expansion before Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard has each player level up an item called an “Artifact weapon”. Each player in a character class effectively had the same weapon abilities, but earlier on they had a choice in what order they could unlock these abilities. As more people unlocked all of the abilities, they made it easier to unlock the previous abilities until everyone could earn all the abilities at a quick pace as the expansion drew to a close. When a certain ability was changed to be weaker, no player got punished for picking that instead of another ability. When all players of a certain class have the same abilities, none of them are punished for not ‘picking the right one’ without the knowledge of what the game designers were going to change. They don’t even need to go back to a system such as the artifact weapons, they simply could allow players to select any ability they wanted on their Azerite Armor, instead of limiting them to random chance of getting something good. While randomly getting an epic drop can feel great, it doesn’t feel great when a player has to keep working on getting that randomly dropped piece of gear or face being left behind by all the other players. The same thing applies to Azerite Armor, nobody likes being locked behind getting a certain item to perform at the same level as everyone else. It’s one thing to earn it, its another to have to keep doing something over and over and leave it up to the dice if they get it, because someone will inevitably not get it however hard they try. The WoW team in this instance seems to have not thought about how their change to a randomized chance could have, and did, affect the experience for all of their players. One simple change to how players continued their growth made a lot of players have a lot less fun with their game, simply because they made growth go more towards random chance. Taking away a player’s agency can easily turn them away from your game. (Not that this is an attack on Blizzard! I know very well that a lot of these systems are designed well in advance and can’t be changed on a drop of a hat. It takes a lot of time from designing something to implementing it to testing it, and sometimes you just can’t change something before it needs to be shipped out the door.)

The long short of it is this: You have to think about how every design choice affects the other parts of the whole system. Everything down to how fast a player moves, how far their attacks can hit, how high they can jump, and what buttons correspond to whatever action can have an effect on how a player plays and enjoys a game. When one part isn’t thought about enough, it can lead to cohesion breaks which can quickly lead to a player having less fun with your game than they could have. Having tight controls and interesting mechanics isn’t the end all, be all of gaming. You can have a tight mechanically driven game still be boring if the game doesn’t have anything else going for it other than the jumping feels good. You can also have a game with poor controls be very fun because the story being just that interesting. However, you can’t count on that story saving you.

So how do you make sure a game is fun? Make sure everything fits together before you’re stuck shipping it out the door.