Big(or "Huge" as the case may be) worlds are overdiscussed here. What features would you add to deepen a small game world, one which is restricted either by setting(space station, island), or gameplay (rail-shooter, one-on-one fighter)? There are three "traditional" ways of deepening the world that I can think of: The main traditional method we all know about: story. If it's integrated well with the game, it can work, but I think it's treated too much as a "band-aid" solution. Unless it's the overwhelming centerpiece(as in a Final Fantasy, adventure game, etc.), the story only helps a game that was already good. Another old standby is the mini-game. It's a nice way to relax the tensions of the main game, and perhaps tie back into it with a reward or needed item, but it's not really something you build the game around, which you can at least do with the story. Finally, there's the secret. By pushing every wall or somesuch, you can get a little trinket. It's a pretty worn-out trick by now, at least to an older player. How can we expand on this list? (Remember, an answer that needs more content isn't an answer because it'll make the world bigger)

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.

Quote: Original post by Bangladesh
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.

Exactly.

Quote: 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.