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Playtesting, Functionality, Completeness and Balance

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Playtesting: This doesn't mean that players play the game simple for fun. Playtesting a game has too many aspects. Playtesting is done through the entire game level that is when a player playtests a game, the developer seeks to get a feedback where he can improve the game, find bugs, experience the game, know how the player feels at every point in the game. Some games are playtested for even more than 1000s of hours!! Playtesting, evaluating and revising is iterative process for game. Recruiting playtesters is the most difficult job a developers finds because it's hard to trust anyone with your game. You never know who is gonna give the honest opinion about your game so that you can improve it or make it even better with new added features suggested by playtesters. The fact that you and you are the best playtesters when the game is in development progress. Reasons behind this are, you will never lie to yourself about the game and always give honest opinion. When working in...

Integrating Level Design and Mechanics

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The Nuts and Bolts of the mechanics: The game a developer is designing must have something to which the player can interact like resource management, turns, action points, bidding, mini games, or interesting features. There is nothing worst than an empty level where just the player has to use WASD controls to walk through the entire level and do nothing. It's not a game play. No one would like such type of game. Anything can be said game mechanics, even open a car door by pressing some key is game mechanics, or opening and closing of a normal door, push able blocks, switches, moving platforms, more non-character players, punches, kicks, guns etc.  Something as essential as doors would als have the capacity to be amazingly difficult to structure suitably. You acknowledge that portals are clear since we use passages reliably in our lives yet that present a course of action of issues to recall while utilizing them. Think about how a player is proposed to open a portal. Cust...

Level Design : What are levels? How to map a level design?

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Level: Levels in a game can be described as an environment or location where a game play occurs. When a player progresses through different stages i.e. levels the difficulty of those levels keeps on increasing and the player knows how to break up physical space based on specific game play experience. As the player progresses, he also earns scores and scores keeps him going through the game. Some developers don't even use the word level, they call it rounds, waves or stage. Rounds are found in those game which have repeated stage as you can see in racing games. They have the same track but different cars or laps or a set time. Waves can be found in combat games where something like waves of enemies happen while the player continues to do the tasks over and over again. Stages are usually like the waves but in stages player knows what activity he is doing. Developers even sometimes call it acts and chapters (as seen in Max Payne), Maps (First person shooters) and world (Rockst...

Game Formal Elements

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So, basically all of the games have some certain rules and terms and conditions to which all players agree before they start a game. They read all the rules and understand how the game is played. It's just like something they are limited to, they have certain restrictions that they can't cross this boundary to which game is build. Games create their own temporary worlds Either there is single player game or there is multi player games. It just depends on what type of game it is. Single player games are obviously a lot different from the multiplayer games. Even the games designed for variable players is different from the game designed for specific number of players. For example. GTA 5 is a single player game until you connect it online and play with variable number of players all around the globe and TIC TAC TOE is a 2 player game. Role of a player varies from game to game. In some games player has to maintain a certain role and like ludo, snake and ladder while in...