Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Day 19: FotLC through the 113 lenses from The Art of Game Design

Day 20 - Lens 56: The Lens of Parallelism
Parallelism in your puzzle brings parallel benefits to the player's experience. To use this lens, ask yourself these questions:

Are there bottlenecks in my design where players are unable to proceed if they can not solve a particular challenge? Could Parallel challenges help?
The only way for a player to get stuck if for them to run out of paths in a place where they can not pick one up. It's an easy situation for players to avoid and hasn't come up yet... it is possible for them to have all of their placeable bases taken, which restricts their ability to generate new warriors. If that happens early in the game it can put them into a defensive posture, but even recruiting only one warrior from your home base each turn it is usually possible to be a credible threat in the end game and with victory points from alliances and city heads to win the game.

Are my parallel challenges different enough to give players the benefit of variety?
I think so... there are several pretty different ways to go about trying to win the game with the three sources of victory points.

Can my parallel challenges be connected somehow? Is there a way that making progress on one can make it easier to solve the others?
I think that this is the case with all of the elements of the games design. Alliances give VP, but also help both players mechanically. Heads give VP but necessitate leaving bases unattended. Taking the center takes guards that you could have defending bases... and so on. Everything is a meaningful choice that makes some things in the game easier and some harder... hopefully in a balanced way that is fun to interact with!

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