In the course of designing numerous rather hard-core strategy games over the years, I was one of the foremost practitioners of options mayhem. Railroad Tycoon 3 had an options window with roughly 9 categories, and about 6 options per category.

In the casual games field, the trend is exactly the opposite, and I’ve enjoyed the paradigm switch. Bonnie’s Bookstore has exactly 3 options - Music Volume, Sound Volume, and Full Screen (on/off). I was tempted on multiple occasions to avoid making a decision by instead making it an option for the player. But very few players mess with default settings anyways, and by limiting the choices, you can allow the player to focus on the handful that really make a difference and that they’d really care about, and you can avoid the development complexity that comes with supporting so many options permutations.

Even the traditional concept of a ’saved game’ disappears in casual games, including mine. The game is automatically saved every time the player exits, and automatically resumes when the player resumes (the player can also reset the game). More hard-core players can create ersatz saved games by logging in with multiple player profiles, but frankly, most players just want to pick up where they last left off, so why burden them with additional complexity? And if they lose the game, they can start a new game on the same level they last played, so there’s no real need for a ’save early, save often’ philosophy.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 5th, 2005 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Game Biz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.