Proper respawn system design requires a depth of understanding of your game and your goals that is difficult to accomplish. (I believe “respawn system” is more accurate and “save system”, because it addresses how the user gets back into the game after death, whether it’s through loading or continuing. Maybe it should be called reentry system?)

Escape Velocity’s system on certain tricky edge cases. Bioshock’s system broke frequently because of incompatibilities with the game’s carefully-balanced inventory model: it made the resource of health infinite, while not replenishing gameplay items, resulting in non-strategic and anti-immersive zerging tactics. Mass Effect’s system functioned as a perpetual annoyance because of a lack of consideration for where players might spend their time, encouraging compulsive saving. Halo’s system, on the other hand, succeeded in almost all areas, revealing the obsessive lengths the designers went to to understand every last minute of a player’s experience.

It’s a surprise that respawn systems are as good as they are. Aside from designer masochism (”They should thank me for a save point every hour!”), there’s the simple problem that you can’t really understand your game until it’s almost complete– at which point you’re crunching, addressing critical bugs while you try to get the damned title out the door. The more ambitious your game, the worse the complexity and deadline factors become.

Conversely, the simpler your game… well, here’s a one-minute game that demonstrated a thorough understanding of the user’s play-through behavior, including the crucial out-of-game portion of the experience.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 2:40 am and is filed under Game Dev. 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.