Hi! I’m Patryk Nosek, Game Director for Stargate: Timekeepers. Today I wanted to share with you our approach about Stargate: Timekeepers trial and error mechanics.
Achieving a sense of fun in a game that heavily relies on a trial and error approach presents a unique set of challenges. This game design philosophy, while engaging, runs the risk of frustrating players if not carefully balanced. The key lies in designing a gameplay experience that encourages experimentation and learning without leading to excessive repetition or discouragement.
To mitigate potential frustrations in our game, we aimed to encourage experimentation within the gameplay. We understood that providing players with multiple solutions to problems and equipping them with a variety of tools and techniques to tackle challenges was essential. We wanted players to feel they had the agency to try different strategies and eventually succeed. From a technical perspective, we knew that the game's loading times had to be lightning-fast to keep the trial and error approach engaging. We put a lot of effort into optimizing the game's performance to achieve this, hoping to ensure that the process becomes more about exploration and learning through each attempt rather than about repetitive failure. We sincerely hope we've managed to accomplish this goal.
This technical pursuit, our dedication to perfecting the game's loading system to ensure it was as swift as possible, became one of the reasons why we were unable to release the game on schedule. In our effort to make experimentation a core part of the gameplay experience without the frustration of long loading times, we encountered unforeseen challenges that led to bugs. We want to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize to our players for these delays.
One of the primary goals we set for ourselves in creating this game was to maintain a delicate balance between challenge and frustration. We aimed for the game to be challenging enough to provide a sense of achievement upon overcoming obstacles, but not so difficult as to lead to repeated failures and frustration. Finding this balance required meticulous tuning of game mechanics and difficulty levels on our part.
Fun fact from player psychology: players don't like to play on "easy" difficulty levels, so surprisingly, it took us a long time to choose the right word to name our lowest difficulty setting, ensuring it didn't sound discouraging in all the languages into which we translated the game.
Finally, the rewards for overcoming challenges must be meaningful and satisfying. Whether it's advancing the story, unlocking new abilities, or simply providing a display of visuals and sound, the reward must feel worth the effort. This positive reinforcement encourages players to persist through challenges and contributes significantly to the overall fun of the game.
We believe we've successfully delivered rewards to players in the right manner, providing them with satisfaction and a sense of achievement that are crucial for a positive gameplay experience. However, we've noticed that the penalties awaiting players who failed were too severe. The duration of alarms and the enemy's firepower are aspects we are currently examining. We want to implement adjustments that will allow players to more easily and quickly recover from troublesome situations in case of failure, rather than solely relying on reloading. This approach is part of our commitment to enhancing the gameplay experience and ensuring that it remains challenging yet fair and enjoyable.
Nobody likes waiting in the bushes, we hear you, we see you, and we're on it! Expect changes in the alarm duration in the upcoming patch.
In conclusion, designing a game that relies on trial and error while remaining fun and engaging is a complex task. It requires a deep understanding of player psychology and a careful calibration of game mechanics. When done right, it can lead to a deeply rewarding and memorable gaming experience that players will cherish and return to. Despite the fact that, of course, Stargate is not a game without flaws, we believe that we've succeeded in many of these aspects, and it can only get better from here.