Scoping down practice

This month I want to show part of my personal exercises for analyzing and practicing scoping down.

One of the things I do when applying this for games is that I look at already existing games and try to answer the question “What feature can be cut or changed while still keeping the game interesting?”. This is less difficult to do for games I don’t like, so to make it more challenging and encourage some deeper thought, I mostly do this for games I enjoy playing.

Here are a few examples, where I also explain the reasoning behind my choice -

Rocket League:

I didn’t just want to pick the ‘easy answer’ of just removing some of the later game modes that got introduced after a while. I wanted to look at more core elements and consider how different elements being changed would change the game.

The first I looked at was the ability of players to destroy opponents by driving into them at top speed. This is an element that then respawns the car in one of the corners of the player's team. This also resets the player to their starting amount of nitro, and while there is nearby nitro to get, this can feel very troublesome for newer and more inexperienced players. This makes me wonder if the destruction and reset is strictly necessary or if the nudging of opponents cars that happens when driving at a slower speed should carry over into the top speed hits.

While I was considering the above, my thoughts drifted towards the nitro pickup spots. There are two types spread across the playing field. Most of these are smaller amounts, while a few grant full nitro. This is another spot where a change could potentially be made. I have noticed that one of the main differences that show when someone is new to the game, is that they focus too much on the full nitro spots, and if an opponent gets there first these players often try to go out of the way to get to another full up spot or try to play on with little to no boost.

The more experienced players will adjust their driving across the field to constantly pass over the smaller spots and in that way keep their nitro topped off as much as possible. I would love to see how newer players would approach and learn playing the game if there were no full nitro spots.

Most of the nitro spots visible are of the small amount kind, each corner and halfway point along the sides have the full up. One full up is visible on the image with a floating sphere over it.

Minecraft:

This was also a difficult one as there are quite a bit of systems interacting with each other, so messing with one would likely affect one or more other systems. Every time a new version of the game is released, it comes with new blocks, new mobs and other additions. This also invariably leads to praise from some players and disgruntled complaints from others. In my case I often see many of them as ‘quality of life’ improvements, which is part of why I found the exercise difficult in this game. 

I decided to approach the exercise for this one differently by not focusing on something as mechanic related and lean more into what the overall feedback from players seemed to be and that ultimately led me to taking a look at the Phantom mob. This mob was introduced as the winner of a vote that Mojang held, but has mostly been considered an annoyance by players when playing. The mob will spawn at night if a player has not slept in a bed for several nights, and the more nights without the player sleeping, the more phantoms spawn. The best way to keep them from spawning is therefore sleeping almost each night. This leads to some play patterns where players will be bringing beds in their inventory to be able to sleep. But this ties into the respawning mechanic as this will be the location of the latest bed slept in if it has not been broken, and if it is, it respawns the player at the spawn point of the map. That is why I think this is one of the features/elements of the game I would look at first, should I ever get to be a designer on Minecraft.

The not much liked Phantom dive-attacking me at night.