How can you make a small world involving?

Put lots of cool little things that don't really do anything useful, but are just fun to play with. MYST used this to good effect, as do a lot of other games.

Unfortunately, I think you have the same problem, whether you broaden or deepen your world. Either there is more territory, or the small amount you have is filled with many interaction points, all of which have complex rules and stats in order to foster a wide variety of interactions and strategies.

Story gets you a non-replayable game which in most cases doesn't even hold up to your typical good book. Adding more filler story simply creates more non-interactive sequences, and if done the low content way (text and dialog) is unsatisfying to most players who have come to expect cutscenes. Of course, adding better story the professional way requires more spoken dialog, more animations, more models-- IOW, more content.

Minigames have to tie into something, or they're irrelevant. You might as well be playing a self-contained arcade game which at least does it better by virtue of focus. If you tie it in, this creates more complex rules, which increase your workload.

Secrets might help, but like you said, this has been played out and can be irritating to those of us who don't want to press every wall looking for them.

If you want a small world that has a lot of offer, you're going to have to deepen something. Perhaps you make a bazillion NPC behaviors, or items that can be combined in a multitude of unique ways to get past environments whose stats alter.

Your other alternative is to create really pretty, really simple games without much depth but which you or players can frequently update in some meaningful way (I'm thinking of all the Soul Caliburs). You play to people's desire for fashion and style, like Soul Calibur did with its costumes and one unique character per console (Link, Spawn and I forget whoever else).

More details in the game world. They can also be the part of the gameplay, not just useless stuff.

Games like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights had books you could read about the history of the world. Take it a step further and add a history to almost everything and weave it together with the main plot. Even the little diner down the street has a history that needs telling on your space-station. Details, details and more details. If you have a bunch of kids playing in the street, one nice thing might be to even meet their folks. Or visit their home.

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Original post by Wavinator Unfortunately, I think you have the same problem, whether you broaden or deepen your world. Either there is more territory, or the small amount you have is filled with many interaction points, all of which have complex rules and stats in order to foster a wide variety of interactions and strategies. ... If you want a small world that has a lot of offer, you're going to have to deepen something. Perhaps you make a bazillion NPC behaviors, or items that can be combined in a multitude of unique ways to get past environments whose stats alter. Your other alternative is to create really pretty, really simple games without much depth but which you or players can frequently update in some meaningful way (I'm thinking of all the Soul Caliburs). You play to people's desire for fashion and style, like Soul Calibur did with its costumes and one unique character per console (Link, Spawn and I forget whoever else).

OK. Here's something I got once I thought about it some more: everything takes some amount of content, but there is a cost/benefit ratio that depends on the kind of content and the player - and, this is the big part: all kinds of content have diminishing returns, and the rate of decline depends on how spread out the content is.

Story is an example of how this works; a few lines of text vs. million-dollar cutscenes - in the end, you still save the world, and there ain't much getting around that. But small scraps of stories(detail), we know, can add up to a greater effect than one continuous epic quest(breadth), because the epic has to be very predictable to continue for so long. The smaller stories can vary a lot more, so they are more novel.

Mini-games? Same idea; Wario Ware would be crap if instead of having dozens of "barely-qualifies-as-games" it tried to make four "big" mini-games.

Secrets? An exception, maybe. Secrets tend to become less unique as they get more common, as there is little difference between getting 10 coins or 20 coins. But in general having more secrets seems to be a good idea, so long as they are not overblown and overemphasized as in Donkey Kong Country, where they become a percentage statistic, rather than really being "secret."

This is probably what led me(subconsciously) to say that we needed to talk about "small" games, because they force you to split up your content usage.

You haven't really discussed any of the technical drivers, so it's hard to gauge where you're going here. A game can be deepened by using elements in unique ways - a small world with a rich physical interaction framework is an excellent toy (Truck and Stair Dismount come to mind) and can be pushed much further. A game which taps multiple senses (audio, especially, since it's used but not in interesting ways in most small games) is also effectively "deeper" than its counterparts. These don't really require extra content, just different kinds. If you're going to reach for the level where it's worth talking about how deep your game is, then you need all the basics - gameplay, art, sound, user interface, probably some form of multiplayer.

Speaking of multiplayer, I also find co-op play to be a beautiful way to enrich gameplay. You can enjoy the game with your friends in a very similar idiom to that of a movie, instead of having to beat on each other. The gfs, especially, are more open to this type of play, which is a huge bonus.

I think, basically, that you have to approach a small world from the perspective of increasing the dimensionality of content, making it useful in a larger variety of ways and to a larger number of players simultaneously.

ld

How about focusing more on emergent behaviors rather than scripted ones? With this technique, you could get a great deal more interesting behaviors from your game elements without having to specifically script every single one.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask had a very interesting way of handling character interactions. Since there were a total of only three day-night cycles (after which you had to return to the beginning of the the cycle), all the characters in the game actually appeared to live a fairly realistic life. Of course, not every character was very in depth, for some it was as simple as where they were each day, but the consistency and depth was still impressive.

Recursion. I think the smallest you can possibly scope a game in would be the size of a moderate-to-large city, you simply need to draw every corner of the city together again and again in an interesting weave of plots and characters without turning it into a 'take this here, follow me there' questfest.

Much harder to do, IMHO, than with a larger world.

A city seems a little large to be the smallest possible setting. It's certainly possible to create games which take place in a smaller setting. The smallest possible setting I can think of in viewpoint-relative terms would be something along the lines of a game where the character is trapped in a single place - Shawshank, for example, or the Green Mile as a more extreme example. The interaction has to deepen at each step, of course, which is exactly what we're discussing anyways, and I think the focus has to sharpen at every constriction as well - the player has to have specific goals at every moment, and they have to be capable of a number of interesting and engaging actions which make a difference in the flow of events.

The absolute smallest, most focused, deepest game setting I can imagine would be at the site of a disaster, where the player would be trapped under debris trying to guide his or her rescuers to their current location. I'm sure someone else could come up with something even tighter, but I think that's pretty much at the limit of my imagination.

ld

There was a thread in the "Writing For Games" forum titled "Closed Environment Stories" which you might want to look at.

Some of the environments mentioned were on a train, in a cube (like the movie) and in a haunted house.

As for commercial games set in a small environment, several adventure games have been set on a ship/spaceship or in a single house (murder mysteries or horror stories) and a number of RPGs have been set within a single dungeon (Eye of the Beholder) or a castle (Stonekeep).

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Original post by liquiddarkThe absolute smallest, most focused, deepest game setting I can imagine would be at the site of a disaster, where the player would be trapped under debris trying to guide his or her rescuers to their current location. I'm sure someone else could come up with something even tighter, but I think that's pretty much at the limit of my imagination. ld

You could imagine playing a bacterium trying to escape the white blood cells. The setting could be a frog body, even smaller than a human. Of course, the actual in-game size would be the size of a planet to a human, since bacteria are so small.

Alternatively, how about a game where you are required to control your immune system and involuntary reflexes to fend off disease / repair damage, SimCity style? Again, a game the size of a single body, although of course I am moving away from the adventure genre.

I think would be making the content you have adhere to a set of rules, like physical matter laws, that can be combined in any game-situation.

Ex:

Make everything you do have more interactable. If you have the picture of a plant, make it pickable, make it burnable, make it killable.. basically make the world as interactive as possible-- you will get problems but you will also get creative reward.

if you can see it, make it what it is supposed to be. Build things with rocks? You cant lift it if you are too weak. If you build an engine that can efficiently mimic physics you could get away with so much just with good models for mass, collision quality, durability..

it would be possible to get carried away, but it is the job of the game designer to decide what needs to make the cut.

haiku

I just want to point out the two Glden Sun games for the gameboy advance made good use of space. The dungeons weren't large for no apparent reason, but they took quite a while to complete, making them feel a lot bigger than they actually were. Maybe this would be a good reference for sizing and filling of a game.