5.6    Testing Configurations

Give players options to test their setups while becoming familiar with your game.

In order for players to get familiar with your game, with the various actions they can perform, and to test how adjusting the various settings will affect their experience, consider adding a consequence-free area or mode for the player to practice in.

How you implement this will depend greatly on the nature of your game, and for some games it might not be suitable, but for those that it would be, it can be a very useful tool for players to get familiar with your game before they make potentially irreversible actions.

At the most basic level you might simply show players what inputs they’re pressing and perhaps what action that relates to. This is useful if the player has remapped many actions and would like to know what each input now does.

Going further you might have a contained sandbox area that features simplified elements of what the player will encounter in the main experience, showing them how each action behaves and what effect it will have. And by allowing them to configure settings in these areas they can see the results of changing each first hand, without the potential pressure that the main experience might bring.

So it might be that there are no time elements present in this mode where there would otherwise be. Or you might have AI opponents that are simplified to give the players an idea of what they might encounter later on, but without the other external pressures that might otherwise be present.

This module is a part of Information. Discover other modules in this topic on the SpecialEffect DevKit website at specialeffectdevkit.info.