Design Goals III: Accessibility

This article originally appeared on The Next Generation blog at Simtropolis.com

One of the challenges of making any game is tuning the difficulty.  Ideally, a game should be intuitive enough for someone who has never played it (or any game) to pick it up and be able to get started, while on the other hand having enough depth to keep a player interested for the long term.  Sim City 4 hit this balance pretty well, although perhaps leaning more towards the steep learning curve side of the equation than otherwise.  The question with our new game is, how can we deepen the Sim City 4 experience while still retaining, or improving upon, Sim City 4's accessibility?

Modularity, as I was saying yesterday, is one key factor here.  Modular design will allow simpler or more complex elements of the game to be added or subtracted seamlessly.  Another is what I would call the option/preset/default paradigm: allowing a player to access a broad range of options while also offering default presets for simplicity.  This paradigm appears in most modern games when you look at the display options:  There is a setting for low, medium, and high, but also the option to adjust the details (anisotropy, bloom, antialiasing, etc.) more precisely if desired.  Let's look at how this might play out in our game:

Tool options

Default Sim City 4 had just a few types of (non-highway) roads: streets, roads and avenues.  Obviously, many people didn't feel this was enough, and soon mods for other kinds of roads began to appear.  But when this happens, the options tend to become cluttered and overwhelming, as there are many kinds of roads that it might be desirable to model.  This becomes especially true when you add secondary permutations:  if you want to have roads without streetlights, now you need a new, no-streetlight version of all three types, plus any additional types anyone might have added.  This is not only cumbersome for the player, but intimidating for the newcomer.

A diverse number of options can be simplified into basic choices by using default presets. However, the more complex settings are available for users who want to use them.

The solution here is to organize the options and conceal them beneath presets;  In this case, instead of fixed road types, we would have three presets for common road types composed from univeral options: width, paving, lighted, etc. These could be adjusted with different options when used in a specific situation.  Furthermore, the player could create their own custom presets with their favorite options, or the elements most appropriate for the type of city they are building.  This would make the game approachable for casual players while still offering complexity for those that want it.

Difficulty Modes/Game Options

Another more powerful way to streamline the difficulty level would be to apply the same model to difficulty modes for the game: Use general presets (easy, medium, hard) that represent default configurations of complex options.  Many games already use a similar setup (Anno 1404 is one that springs to mind) but with a modular design in place you are able to add to and diversify the game options.  A player could choose between different simulation models, budget interfaces, starting conditions, etc.  Even the UI would be adjustable: a player that doesn't care about advanced tool options could opt to have them hidden in the interface.

Furthermore, this preset/option model can be nested:  Say that within the general game options (easy, medium, and hard) one of the component settings is traffic simulation (simple, default, complex).  Those settings in turn could be presets for more detailed options (pathing algortihms, road capacity, etc.).  Thus you could create a hierarchy of options that would allow as much or as little customization as the user wanted.

The above are only examples, but the whatever the final form of the software, accessibility for a wide range of players should be a key consideration.