The Map Decision

When many of the people playing this episode of the game realized that the GPS unit was not carried forward, they thought they were going to have to walk through the forest yet again. However, when they went to enter the forest, to their glee they discovered that the forest was represented as an overhead map. Perhaps the map is the one they created in episode 18? The key point was that they didn't have to navigate the forest yet another time. While it would have been easy to dump the 3D forest engine into this episode, I decided that such an act would not further the story and opted instead to make things easier on the player.

Far too often in games do you encounter situations that are overly frustrating. In some cases, such as with a difficult puzzle, this frustration is a necessary part of the game, and the joy of solving the puzzle far out way the frustration that was encountered. Often, however, one encounters artificial frustration in a game. Arcade games are perhaps the biggest abusers of frustrating the player. This stems from the history of the arcade game. When a person is paying money every time they play a game, it is in the best interest of the designer to make sure that the game is difficult enough that many quarters are needed to finish the game, yet easy enough that new players are willing to put in quarters. The problem is that we now tend to outright own the games we purchase, so the concept of having a limited number of lives and having to replay a large portion of the game every time we make a mistake are no longer valid yet games are still being designed this way.

This is why I decided that instead of making the player navigate through the forest yet again, especially since they now posses a map of the forest, I would instead just show them the map that they had and let them pick the point that they wish to travel to. Why waist the player's time for no reason? The player already knows how big the forest is and have a map so there is no navigation issues that they need to deal with.

That being said, if there were monsters or other hazards in the forest, I may have made a different design decision. Having a map feature that lets players quickly travel to a different spot on the map, at least if that location has been uncovered, would be a very nice feature. You could even support monster encounters while the player used the quick navigation by simply taking the players to the combat location with a “monsters near” message. When the monsters have been dealt with or avoided, then the player could continue their quick navigation through the map.