Games are fun, and a great way to spend time with friends and family. Even the simplest games can have built-in value and help you hone a number of basic skills that include:
- Increased reasoning, problem solving, and strategic planning
- Both logical and critical thinking
- Improved motor coordination and spatial location
- Better memory, concentration, and attention to detail
Also, there's the good feeling you get from making it through the game and accomplishing the goal!
Some games teach cooperation as players work together in teams or squads. Other games reduce stress and help you relax.
With Fortnite Creative, you can develop your game, your way. Learn the tools, then shift your imagination into high gear!
What Every Game Should Have
All games are different, but they all should have most of these elements:
- An objective: The player's goal, what they need to accomplish.
- A challenge: The player's reason to work on improving their skills in the game, and what they have to overcome to get there.
- Rewards: The player's reward for completing the objective.
- Game mechanics: The elements that shape the flow of the gameplay.
- A gameplay loop: The basic steps a player will go through in the game.
Objective
What is the objective of the game? What does a player have to do to complete that goal or objective?
The objective has to be something that your player will want to achieve. Is it to eliminate the other team? To find a way out of the escape room? To do parkour over all physical barriers in the best possible time? Or is it as simple as discovering the secret waiting at the end of a winding path?
When you provide a clear objective, you've taken the first step to encourage players to get involved in your game.
In any game, the goal must be both understandable and achievable. At the same time, it must be challenging enough to hold the player's interest!
In Fortnite Battle Royale, the objective is to be the last player standing while avoiding the storm circle that's constantly shrinking the playable area.
In Fall Guys, you must navigate a series of obstacles and make it to the finish line.
With Rocket League, you want to score goals while blocking other players from scoring.
Challenge
If the objective is to walk across the yard and there's nothing in the way, it's not much of a game, right?
Those things that get in the way of a player's attempt to accomplish the objective are what makes a game challenging. There are different kinds of challenges that you can use in a game.
Constraints set boundaries that the player has to operate in to complete the objective. For example, now, when you try to walk across the yard, there's a tall fence blocking the path.
There are many kinds of constraints that you can implement, like physical barriers, time, opponents, and puzzles. A physical barrier that slows or stops a player's progress is a constraint. A fallen tree that blocks the road, or a broken bridge that must somehow be repaired before the player can move on, running out of ammo for a weapon or gas for a vehicle, these are all types of constraints.
If the player is racing against the clock, time is a constraint. This could be a countdown timer, or a limit to the number of attempts to complete the objective.
Opponents are another way to create challenge. Whether the opponent is a rival player or a team, hostile wildlife, hostile plants, or even an unfriendly alien species, opponents raise the stakes and make the gameplay more engaging.
Puzzles can also make it challenging to reach the goal. For instance, in an escape room, the room has the constraints of walls, floor and ceiling. The objective is to get out of the room, and to do this, the player has to find objects or solve puzzles, or both. The puzzle could also be that a player has to work out how to traverse a wall or other area, or climb a tree to escape a trap. A maze would be a traversal puzzle.
Let's say that the objective in a game is to capture a flag from the opposing team. What makes this game fun is not those things that slow or stop the player from getting to the flag, but the fact that the player can overcome these obstacles to attain the goal.
Which brings us to the next thing your game should have.
Rewards
So far, we've established that a game needs a goal, and it needs challenges that make it harder to get the goal. But what does the player get when that goal is achieved? Rewards! What does a player find on the other side of the yard when they get there? Maybe a garden full of cabbages ready for harvest!
A player's rewards generally fall into one of two categories: intrinsic, and extrinsic.
Intrinsic rewards are those things the player feels, like the satisfaction of completing a game, appreciation of the way a game is constructed, or the recognition that they've improved a skill through practice.
Extrinsic rewards are more tangible, such as score (points earned by eliminating opponents or achieving objectives), ranking, badges, a chance to collect loot, or even a visual effect when a player wins — those social proofs that demonstrate to others what the player has accomplished.
Both are important, but the emphasis on the kinds of rewards a player gets can vary based on the type of game you're making.
An important aspect of rewards is feedback to the player. Feedback is the in-game response to player actions. This could be points shown on the scoreboard based on score earned, changes in the player's health that are displayed in the HUD, or rankings within the game.
Positive feedback shows the player they're making the right moves, while negative feedback gives them information they need to correct their course.
An example of feedback the player receives in Battle Royale.
Game Mechanics
Game mechanics are what a player can do in a game (run, jump, and fly, for instance), how a player can reach the objective, (collect objects, solve a puzzle, or stay alive longest, for example), and any other basic rules that the player should follow.
In Fortnite Creative, these mechanics are built using devices. A device is something you can use to set up specific interactions in your game.
For example, you can place a Player Spawner device where you want a player to be at the start of the game, such as the wrong side of the fence, or use an Item Granter device to grant a cabbage to the player each time they make it over the fence.
For a racing game, you can use Barrier devices to keep vehicles on the race track.
There are also devices you can use to provide information to the player, such as how to play, or what to do in specific circumstances.
Many devices can be combined with other devices to build unique functionality that makes a fun and challenging game. There are lots of devices available in Creative, and more are added with every season release.
You can also control some game mechanics from settings within the Creative toolset, such as how many players can play, how many points are awarded to a player when they eliminate an opponent, a player's starting health, or whether players can mantle up and over an obstacle.
As you build the mechanics of your gameplay, it's a good idea to keep notes on what you're doing, and why. These notes will come in handy when you're ready to playtest your island, and again when you're ready to onboard your players.
Gameplay Loop
A gameplay loop is the sequence of actions that a player takes in the course of playing the game. These loops are often repeatable, with each pass through the loop resulting in some sort of expanding reward or increase in skill for the player.
For example, a gameplay loop for crossing the yard could include getting over the fence, picking a cabbage from the garden on the other side of the fence, carrying it back over the fence, adding it to a basket of produce, then repeating the loop until the basket is full.
An entertaining gameplay loop is vital for keeping players engaged and returning to the game. You can have a good objective and great restraints, but without a solid gameplay loop, a player won't want to play more than one round, much less revisit the game over and over.
A compelling gameplay loop would include a series of player actions (observe the surroundings, locate an opponent, engage in combat, defeat the opponent), feedback on the loop (a reward of points, for example), then repeated action until the player achieves the final objective.
Gameplay loops vary widely from game to game, and the way they're put together is based on the game mechanics.
Types of Games
There are many different types of games, or genres. Examples of genres would be shooter games, puzzle games, platforming games, or racing games.
It helps to have an idea of the type of game you want to make, as some genres have specific conventions that make them familiar to the player and so get the player playing more quickly. For example, a box fight game would probably not ask the player to solve a riddle to win the fight.
It's a good idea to have some familiarity with the genre you want to make your game in for an idea of what gameplay mechanics work best with that type of game. See Games and Game Tags for more info.
To explore possible mechanics for different types of games, see Exploring Gameplay.
Designing Your Island
The design of your island is a combination of environment (which includes the aesthetic of the visual elements), and the way the gameplay elements — objectives, challenges, rewards, and devices — integrate into that environment.
Set a Visual Theme
Every starter island or template island has an island theme.
This is where your game design adventures begin!
For example, if you select Arctic Island as your starting place, you can find prefabricated structures in Prefabs and props in the Galleries that are designed to work visually with the Arctic Island theme.
With so much inventory availble in the Creative toolset, there's plenty of room for designing an island the way you imagine it, and plenty of resources to choose from!
Integrate the Gameplay
But beyond the aesthetics of the island, there's a more important aspect of your island design, which is how you can integrate the gameplay into your game in a way that makes sense and provides environmental clues that will help the player with an intuitive understanding of how to play your game.
For example, if you set barriers to control where players can and cannot drive vehicles in a racing game, this gives an unspoken instruction that keeps the players on track to the finish line.
In platforming games where the player must jump from one moving surface to another, it's important to ensure that the distances are possible to span, and that the speed and movement of the platforms supports a player's progress.
For more tips on how to support gameplay in your island design, see Level Design Best Practices.
The Vital Importance of Playtesting
Once you start building your game, get other people to playtest it for you, and encourage them to give you their feedback on their experiences.
Keep in mind that you will not be there to explain your game to everyone who plays it, so be willing to let your game speak for itself and observe how players interact with it. This can also show you the points you'll want to cover in player onboarding.
Iteration is a key element of game development. Something that seems so obvious to you might be totally missed by your players, and ruin the game for them if they miss it, and a fresh set of eyes can catch something you missed. It's also a good idea to find as many different playtesters as you can. Every player will have their own ideas and experiences, so the more variety you have in your playtesters, the more you can understand what does and doesn't work.
This Is Just the Beginning!
This is by no means everything there is to know about game design, but hopefully it's enough to get you started in the right direction. If you've played a lot of games over time, you'll find that much of the information here is already second nature to you. And if it isn't, hopefully it will be soon!
Go to Building Your First Island to get started!
Check out Template Islands and get inspired to make your own!