Game Design: 14 Ways to Make Players Feel Smart! - [Animated]

yo I think everybody likes to feel smart and I think we as game designers can absolutely design for that we can make players feel smart here are 14 tips how to make players feel smart 14 hex I came up with their pretty common sense I didn't come up with them I just collected these game design tricks for you Rhys game design techniques so you can use them in your own game design projects in case you're intrigued and development in case you're a game developer listen closely I played snake paws recently and some of the early levels made me feel really stupid the snake kept falling down and I felt really unskilled and incompetent by comparison I remember playing the Talos principle which made me feel like Albert Einstein right from the get-go I'd argue that games should always try to make their players feel as smart as possible even when they're not puzzle games at the very least I should make players feel stupid right so how do you make sure people feel smart when playing your game and what can you do to avoid making your players feel stupid let's just go

through some of the basic tools in your game design toolbox very quickly so we can get to the more advanced stuff as quickly as possible I think I have some really cool tips for you later on but let's start with the very basics so the first way to make your players feel smart just make a game with simple rules because when people instantly get what's going on that's a big advantage if you don't understand the game you feel stupid and if you do understand the game you feel smart obviously we need to bear in mind that that's not possible for every game not every game is supposed to be super simple and dump-down and it's probably not even that good of an idea to apply all of these rules to absolutely every single game but if you want to aim your game design efforts just at making your players feel smart I definitely try to go for simple rules that so it's easier to understand okay let's speed this up a bit build an invisible tutorial I'm pretty sure you've heard about that having no tutorial is kind of stupid having a tutorial that is too hand holy and forces you into a too narrow set of

actions also they're kind of stupid so try to hide your tutorial make an invisible tutorial make the players feel like they're exploring and figuring everything out themselves while secretly manipulate them to find the correct solutions and to figure your game out because feeling like you're favoring stuff out yourself always makes you feel smarter obviously if you want to learn more about invisible tutorials I recommend you check out mark brown's video about invisible tutorials it's absolutely awesome use invisible tutorials because that makes players feel smart and clever use real-life objects and interactions to make your game more intuitive leverage the knowledge people already have about this world people know that igon is meant to be shot with odorous meant to be opened and food is meant to be eaten and you can use that effect your advantage to explain your game if the properties of an object in-game correlate with a similar object in real life it'll be a lot easier for your players to

understand for example if you want to explain why object a can destroy object B just turn object a into a battle realm and object P into closed gate Ebola you don't even need to explain this game plan to action now so once again in short use the knowledge people already have about this world use real-life objects to explain your game because understanding something makes players feel clever don't understanding a game makes players feel stupidly there are even more ways to guide your players by using smart designs if you want them to explore into a certain direction and place an interesting landmark in the distance there guide them with paths or lights or highlight where you want them to go if you want people to put a box into a hole give the hole a square shape if you want players to combine two parts make them look like puzzle pieces that fit together you can also use colors to hinder danger or warn players the sky is the limit here just use smart design to hint players at what needs to be done [Music]

another technique you can use is giving players a visible default option sometimes decisions just paralyze you you don't know what the best option is which guess what makes you feel stupid that's why it can be a smart idea to have a default option players can fall back on let's say you can choose between ten different words with different stats but you have absolutely no idea which one of them you want to try you feel a little stupid now because you can't decide now imagine one of the options already pre-selected for you and the descriptive text of the item is something like a decent or wrong sort if the numbers are too confusing for you or you just can't decide you can go for the default option now if you like getting into the math you can still do that and feel super smart about yourself but if you don't you don't have to feel stupid about it you don't have to do this all the time but giving players a default option can be a pretty powerful tool in your toolbox for making players feel smart so keep that in the back of your mind unlock features over time it's often a very bad idea to show your players all

of your content and all UI buttons at once because you can easily overwhelm them just introduce one thing at a time so they can learn and understand one thing at a time without getting distracted and you should apply this concept both to your game mechanics as well as to the user interface don't show all buttons right from the beginning unlock them one after another so the UI doesn't look cluttered and confusing when you get started and then later on when you're further into the game it's way easier to handle that additional complexity if you want your players to feel smart unlock one feature at a time don't show everything at once now we're getting to the really interesting stuff make an easy game that feels hard let's face it games that feel heart feel rewarding and games are hard or frustrating to get the best from both you need to make a game that feels hard while actually being relatively easy in other words you should try to fool players into thinking your game is a lot harder than it actually is because if they manage to beat they'll feel a lot more accomplished and smarter this way games that feel hard but also our heart

and reality kind of have both the frustrating part as well as symbolic factor this is a valid approaches well Dark Souls is a good example for that the worst case scenario is a game that looks easy while actually being quite hard those are the games that drive me crazy the most and I feel like I'm not the only one let's take the game snake Pass as an example it looks super friendly and easy there are no enemies nearby and the music is happiest ever but climbing this rock here was actually extremely hard for me I had to try so many times and it made me feel really stupid because it didn't even look like it was supposed to be a challenge the game communicated to me it's relatively easy to get up here at most I should be able to do this without any problems my experience however didn't quite match that message which made me feel quite stupid and yes that's probably because I actually didn't do so well I kind of was too stupid to get up there but if possible you should still avoid making your players feel that way even when it's their fault right so what could have fixed this part of

snake path for me I think if the game designers realized to imply testing that a couple of players got stuck at this point for a little too long they should have simply put a couple of danger signs around the rock there should have been something that communicates it's actually a little tricky to get up here that's a win-win because if I manage to do it the first attempt I feel smart and accomplished and if I keep falling again and again I don't feel that stupid because I can see this part is supposed to be a little tricky best-case scenario for most use cases in my opinion make things look harder than they actually are prevent people from getting stuck nobody likes getting stuck you know why correctly it makes you feel incompetent and stupid very linear games suffer from the Simoes because you literally can't experience the rest of the game if you can't get past a certain section so firstly you should provide your place with some mental support so they keep trying show them that it's normal to get stuck every now and then maybe even do something smart like giving them an achievement for getting stuck and secondly help players to get

unstuck for example you could have a gameplay structure that allows players to progress in different routes or with different levels in an adventure game the main character could start dropping hints if you don't manage to make any progress for a while just something like maybe I should check how to Rafe yarder gear just prevent players from getting stuck you want players to feel competent not incompetent then another thing you can do to make your players fits mara is to help them through potentially frustrating parts of your game sometimes having slightly frustrating parts of new game is just unavoidable there are some acceptable things you can patch over these frustrating parts though to make them more enjoyable firstly make it look harder than it is but we already covered that secondly tease the play and tell her that there's something interesting and rewarding when she manages to make it through this part of the game thirdly show the player that it's okay and normal to fail for example you could trigger a funny new voice line every time you fall on a cliff and this

just shows the player that developers already knew this was going to happen because the same thing probably happened to other players here as well reason by the way where we want to avoid frustrating part is because they probably don't make you feel clever be respectful with your players time this works in a really weird meta level if people feel like the games wasting their time they don't feel stupid because they failed they feel stupid because they play a game that's wasting their time if you want to make your players feel smart it's probably a very good idea to have a lot of check points because if you have to replay too much content after dying that makes you feel stupid it makes you wonder why am I even playing this why am I wasting my time with this having checkpoints really far apart from each other also gives players more opportunities to fail again and feel stupid about that as well so that was just one example but in general just be respectful with your players time and they'll feel a lot smarter about purchasing and playing your game next up don't overwhelm players with information it's quite simple and obvious don't give

players more information than what they can handle that makes them feel stupid don't give the players too little information either though because that tells your players you think they are stupid you think they can't handle more information for example I really dislike when tower defense games don't give me the exact numbers and are just like a tech speed fast damaged medium do the developers think I'm too stupid to handle the numbers of course every player can handle a different amount of information so you probably can't find the perfect balance between the two if I had to decide between having too little and way too much information I'd prefer too little though it's okay if the developers think I'm stupid it's not okay if I myself think that I'm stupid so don't overwhelm players with information so here's another really cool trick give players a scapegoat when things go wrong this can be an insanely powerful tool in making your players feel smart and I have fewer that it's one of the really big reasons why team-based multiplayer games do so well for certain kinds of players when you

lose a match you have somebody you can blame which instantly makes you feel a lot better it wasn't your fault right I think you can use that natural human response to your advantage give players a scapegoat they can point out if things go wrong so it doesn't need to be their fault you can either point a teammate's wedlock and for balancing to get the failure away from yourself to somebody or something else try to design for that give players a scapegoat that makes them feel smarter because they don't have to deal with their failures as much let people know when they did something clever so far we've mostly talked about not making players feel stupid finally we've got something that is exclusively for making your players feel smart and if applied correctly works like a charm whenever a player beats a level relatively quickly or finds a new solution or manages to collect all items reward that and tell them that they did something remarkable imagine you find a hidden past that leads up a mountain and there's nothing at the top you don't really feel like your cleverness is appreciated but if there is it's an

awesome moment and you feel super clever it's a really obvious method let people know when they did something smart because that makes them feel smart make sure to reward and take notice of every little accomplishment of your players so they can feel good about it now to make this a little more practical and actionable I have three challenges for you let's start with the easy one think about one game that made you feel really smart why did it make you feel smart and then think about one game that made you feel really stupid and why did it make you feel that way you don't have to but feel free to share your results in the comments by the way the second challenge is to fix a game that made you feel stupid what could you change about the game so you actually feel clever instead of dumb maybe just go through the ideas I mentioned in that video one by one and try to apply them to the game or maybe you have some additional ideas my knowledge about the subject is clearly not perfect so feel free to correct me or add additional stuff once again very curious to hear your results so share them in the comments and then the hardest toughest challenge try to apply these concepts to your own game or

alternatively if you don't work on a game at the moment try to come up with a short game concept that is purely designed to make the player feel smart how would a game like that look like if you want to see more awesome game design content like this I'll link you to my playlist here this video was a bit of an experiment how did you like this and did you get anything valuable out of it and although which kind of video would you like to see next week other than that make the work your playground have an amazing week peace out