How To Design a Decision | Game Design

where do you go which item do you buy which building do you both which skill do you pick when do you jump where do you go next when do you attack which attack do you use which units do you build where do you send your unit which class do you pick which path do you go in video games decisions are everywhere one could argue that every button you press is a decision and not pressing a button can be a decision as well this week I asked myself a pretty essential question what makes for an interesting fun engaging decision what makes for a good decision in a game I came up with five points that will fill into this pyramid as we go and I also made a prototype to demonstrate what I'm talking about that's a game absolutely neat engaging decisions in order to work no I don't think so look at this clicker game I made a while ago for example it doesn't contain any decisions whatsoever relies purely on execution you have to click as quickly as possible and that can honestly be quite fun as well however if you do have decisions in your game then obviously improving the quality of those decisions will also improve the quality of your game and let me tell you that a lot of games that feel like they're purely execution based are really not it

really comes down to little micro decisions like do you move to the left do you move to the right when do you jump to your jump now or do you save your jump for later so what I'm trying to say with that is that your game probably contains a lot of decisions even if you're not aware of that and you've got to make sure that you identify those decisions and try to make them as interesting as possible let's do that for my little prototype at the moment the game just consists of a black square that you can't interact with just sits there in the center of the screen and no matter which buttons you press nothing happens so the first thing we need our options you need to freedom to choose otherwise you don't have a decision now I can move the square in four different directions up to the right down and left now the player has a decision there are four different things the player can do but what you might realize is that your decision has absolutely no impact whatsoever no matter where you go after a couple of seconds the screen looks exactly the same as before and your decision was

completely pointless so clearly multiple options are not the only thing you need in order to make an interesting decision the next thing you need are different outcomes so the second point is called impact usually the bigger the impact the better in order to demonstrate that I added a score value at the top here and now depending on which direction I press I will get a different outcome for example now I press to the right I got three points pressed to the left I got one point and if I had pressed into a different direction I would have gotten a different amount of points and here we can start seeing the next problem sure all of my options have different outcomes but there is no clear cause effect relationship I don't know why did I get two points there why did I get one point here so the next thing we need in order to make a decision interesting is a clear cause effect relationship let's just call that understanding whenever something happens the player should be able to understand which of his decisions was the cause for that here

are justice that by displaying the amounts of points you will get when moving in each direction now the player can make a more informed decision and even more importantly when you make a move you know where your points are coming from and why you've got them here I got got a three popping up got a three popping up that was because I moved to the top and there were three dots they're a good decision allows you to understand and therefore learn from your mistakes all right we're clearly not done so what else do we need to make an interesting decision your no matter where I move the points around me a randomly generated so each of my decisions doesn't really impact any of my next decisions every decision stands on its own that is not really interesting so a way to make any decision significantly more interesting is if every single decision has an impact on your future decisions that gives a decision meaning and usually it also helps to strengthen the impact I have the decision right now do I go to the left that will give me three minus points those orange ones are minus points or I could also go to the top

that would give me three points the right one point down depending on where I go that will open up different opportunities and different decisions I can take if we would have a look at this decision on its own then going to the left would clearly be the better call but if you look at the future decisions then going to the right is probably the better move because there are way more points over here that just instantly increases the complexity of the entire game which is something we'll absolutely need for our next requirement which is the cello and shred decision can provide if the chord encode correct answers too obvious to the player that can render the entire decision absolutely pointless and as you can see here here it's really easy it still really doesn't matter where I go it is very obvious what the best moves are collect all of the green stuff don't collect any of the orange stuff there's not really a lot of things you have to worry about so what we need to do is we need to make it more challenging to predict which move will have the best outcome it shouldn't be impossible to predict that but it should be challenging that's where the

challenge is coming from that's where the real fun and the real master is coming from and in order to do that I added a lot more orange minus points here and I added another rule whenever you cross an empty field you will lose alive here in the center you can see I can I have 16 lives and whenever I enter an empty field I will lose alive if I'm out of lives and it's game over though now I can't move any more games over and I've lost and these changes make it very challenging to predict which of the moves available will have the best outcome for me in the long run a lot of the things that were completely unviable before are suddenly viable now look at this situation for example I could just move two steps to the right and start collecting all of those green stuff there but that would cost me one life because I would have to cross one empty field another option would be going this route down here collecting one negative point which would mean I would have one point less but I wouldn't lose a life then of course I could go to the left as well start collecting those green things

over here or if I want to go there without losing alive I could go to the top suddenly all of these options are completely viable it is hard to predict which one of them will have the best outcome and that is where the challenge is coming from that is where the fun is coming from let's go with this here you can see that not all options are always equally viable for example going to the right in this situation wouldn't make a lot of sense that would probably cost me a lot of life so that is very easy to predict right that's right it's very easy to predict that going to the right will not result in a good outcome but then going to the top going to the left and going downwards are all options that I still have to consider that could still all result in a good outcome for me and that is what makes for an interesting decision what I find really fascinating about this parameters that no matter which one of those five points you remove the decision just doesn't work anymore it wouldn't be fun it wouldn't be interesting it wouldn't be engaging anymore perhaps you can remove the challenge for sandbox games that are about creative expression if you eliminate meaning and understanding then

what you're left with is gambling and if you remove one of the bottom tools then what you're left with is not a decision anymore another super exciting thing that I didn't expect to find going into this is that by designing one good decision and then just repeating that decision you basically designed an entire game like this is an entire game and it's not a bad one perhaps you've heard that making a game is about finding five seconds of fun and then just repeating those five seconds I think that is absolutely true and I think this is one way you can do that let's have a look at Islanders for example a game I worked on and that you can get on Steam get it now link inscription PPP preview it is basically designed around one core decision where do you place your buildings and in which order this decision provides you with a lot of freedom because you can pretty much place your buildings wherever you want everyplace building has a big impact on the game as you gain or lose points depending on how well you placed it you can understand which impact your decision had which by the way means you'll be able to learn and improve every building new place will impact

your future decisions quite heavily and that makes it quite challenging to predict what the best place for your building is in action based games it can be a little trickier to break it down like this but it's obviously possible as well in will you snail for example you have the freedom to move to the left to the right and to jump where you move impacts the state of the game in a way the player can understand it also impacts future decisions and deciding which button to press at which time is also quite challenging because you only have a very limited amount of time to make your decision now the question is if a decision in your game fulfills all of these requirements does that mean you're good you can probably already assume that the answer to that is no these requirements are fairly easy to fulfill and some decisions fulfill these requirements better and some fulfill them worse so if you want to make your decision better more interesting more engaging I highly recommend you go through all of these points and see if you can make some improvements perhaps you grant the player a bit of additional freedom give the player a new ability or other new options to choose from however I would be a little bit careful with that because it sounds like feature creep and it does not necessarily sound

like elegant design if there is a cool and elegant way to give your players additional freedom then hell yeah go for it the next step giving a decision a bigger impact or at the very least a bigger perceived impact can definitely make it more engaging as well and what that requires is different outcomes if all of the possible outcomes are very very similar to one another the impact is very small but if the possible outcomes are very different from one another the impact of that decision is quite big another thing to consider is that decisions feel way more impactful if they have lasting consequences and then of course understanding is unfortunately a big problem in a lot of games I see sometimes weird stuff happens in the game and you don't know why you don't know if you cost that not knowing what the hell is going on definitely decreases the quality of a decision quite heavily the basic philosophy being if you don't understand the impact of your decisions you also don't feel the impact of your decisions understanding allows for learning learning allows for progress and progress feels quite rewarding another thing to look at if you want to make your decisions more interesting is how

they impact future decisions usually the more they influence future decisions the better and the more meaningful they feel last but not least challenge is actually an interesting one because challenge has the weird property that it wears off after a while players become better and better at taking certain decisions so you need to find ways to keep it interesting for them after a while you get really good at judging which move will probably result in the best outcome for you and once again that's where the decisions start to get a little boring again one thing that really helps for example is randomly generating the levels imagine this level would always be the same then after a while you would just have the best wave figured out and it would definitely not be a challenge anymore so introducing a bit of randomness is a good solution we did that in Islanders as well of course another way to resolve this issue is to make players go up against each other that keeps it challenging for a while and then the most important factor for this is of course good balancing and good balancing means you've got to make sure that the players always have multiple options they have to consider

if the best option is too easy to identify and not challenged to find that most of the time comes down to poor balancing which by the way it's definitely a topic that deserves a video on its own if you liked this video then make sure to check out my other game design videos I'm have a bunch more of these and a link use them in the end card right here please also keep in mind that this is just an abstract model I'm sure there are exceptions to all of these rules but I still hope that this will provide you with a good toolset to analyze the decisions in your game and to hopefully make a better game as a result of that thank you very much for watching and see you in the next one bye