The goals for 4.0, and now 4.1, have been established in a previous blog. These goals will be our our measuring line for success of future prototypes. We also need a plumb line to tell us if we are on the right track overall. If the game being created is the game envisioned or if it is straying from that vision. To do this, we need to establish the Essential Experience of Biomes.
What is an Essential Experience?
I am taking the concept and definition of the Essential Experience from Jesse Schell’s book The Art of Game Design. When creating a game, one is not really creating a game, but an experience which is experienced by playing a game. The experience is what a player will remember, how they defeated the dragon or working with their teammates. When creating a game, one needs to ask:
What experience do I want to create?
What experience am I creating?
How can I make the experience I am creating more like the one I want to create?
The word essential means: when distilled to its most basic roots, what is the experience really all about? It is like trying to describe your experience at the coffee shop in a short phrase. A phrase that you can share, meditate on, and understand deeply. The Essential Experience of a game will evolve with the game, to clarify what is really essential about the experience. But it should generally contain the same core tenants at the end as when it began.
The Essential Experience of Biomes
The Essential Experience of Biomes began as this: “exploration and discovery.” That is it, I wanted to make a game about exploration and discovery. After iterating on the idea, and prototyping a couple of versions, the Essential Experience became more crystallized: “Discovering amazing things while traveling through biomes and overcoming danger by working together”. This experience has four principles: discovery, exploration (travel), danger, and teamwork. These are the core principles of what make Biomes the game I am trying to make, and not someone else’s game. Lets take a look at what each of these means:
Discovery
Games allow players to discover and interact with amazing places in new ways, ways they could not in real life. The experience of Biomes should be about this discovery. This means two things. Firstly, the player (not someone or something else) discovers, finds, and interacts with something amazing. Secondly, players should feel the pleasure of seeing something new and exciting. This feels like the awe of seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, or the floating mountains of Pandora in the movie Avatar. I want Biomes to have this feeling, this experience, as a part of its core. The player needs something to discover and that thing needs to be amazing.
Exploration (or Travel)
Biomes is about exploration; more specifically, about travelling. Ultimately, Biomes will be a video game about exploring through a series of Biomes and discovering the amazing things therein. Biomes is also about exploring the biome the players are currently in. So exploration is both the high level gameplay across many levels and the low level gameplay within a level. This means the experience of moving around the map, and between levels, will need to be satisfying and not simply a means to an end.
Danger
Every good game has something to challenge a player. In Biomes that is danger. Something is trying to kill the players, or at least prevent them from achieving some goal. Therefore, the danger must be overcome. This danger should grow over the course of a level, or match, and over the course of the game overall when considered as a video game. Players will also need tools to interact with, and overcome, this danger.
Teamwork
The idea of working as a team is the final core aspect of Biomes. The player should feel like they are a part of a team. For the board game, this means that players need to work together to complete objectives. For the video game, Biomes is not intended to be a multiplayer game. Therefore, the player will need to feel as if they are a part of something larger, a part of this tribe or group of people that are exploring these biomes. In both cases, the player should not be able to do everything alone. The player should be dependent upon another for some of what they need to win.
Ordering of the Principles
These four principles are ordered. This means that, while all are important, they are not equally important. In particular:
Discovery > Exploration > Danger > Teamwork
When designing, testing, and reviewing a prototype these principles, and their ordering, will have a significant impact on what the next prototype will be. For example, if teamwork is strong in a particular prototype, but that strength is at the cost of exploration, then adjustments will need to be made to return exploration as more central than teamwork.
Conclusion
Discovery, exploration, danger, and teamwork; these are the guiding principles of Biomes. They are also in that particular order of importance. They will be what influences the goals of a given prototype and will determine where the game will go overall. These principles will evolve over time. They will all be clarified and some may change drastically. But for now, Biomes is about discovery, exploration, danger, and teamwork.