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[Andy@TCS]

In Jesse Schell's "Art of Game Design", Schell notes a good strategy in making parts of your game toylike. Right now, my studio is making a game based around making coffee. Before we start adding supplemental mechanics to make one of the main ones, pouring coffee, more fun, I would like to inject toylike qualities into it. However, while I understand what Schell means by making a game toylike, I didn't see any hard rules for doing this. Does anybody know any hard rules for this, or does it just come down to experimentation and taking inspiration from real life?

http://giphy.com/gifs/26BRFGy23letkEnpS

[s0]

I haven't read schell's book so i can't comment specifically on that. But i think the most important thing is to make sure your mechanics are *inherently* fun. this means you can't design completely around goals. if the fun/interest in your game comes exclusively from mastery or "playing to win", then it's not a good toy. so making a prototype without any goals is a good first step. there also needs to be opportunity for "creative" play.

My favorite game with "toylike" qualities is super mario 64. the developers of that spent months just playing around with a simple test room to perfect mario's moveset before they designed anything else. And if you need any evidence that the game's mechanics are inherently fun and encourage creative play then check out any of the crazy speedruns people still make after almost 20 years.

[Andy@TCS]

That's basically what Schell gets at. While I don't have months to work on this prototype, I am going to take some time to try and make this more fun. Not only will I try to make this more fun for myself, but I may also do some playtesting focusing on how long players are willing to play with this prototype with no goals presented. If I can keep getting that time to trend upward, I think I'll be on the right track. Anyway, thanks for the advice

[rj]

a lot of this is feedback. make sure every single button used at any point during the game does -something- in every single context, even if said something isn't functional from a mechanical perspective. just a simple feedbacky animation goes the world towards making the feel more coherent.

for example, in HALT, when you crouch, you can't shoot; however, pressing the shoot button and having nothing happen in that context doesn't "feel" right ESPECIALLY because of how much you hit that button. i pointed this out to nate, and in the final game, your character does a little cowering animation whenever you hit the shoot button while crouched. it feels a lot poppier and adds an extra layer of fun. it's not technically necessary but details like that are BIG.

so, uh, yeah. if you have a button, make sure it does something, even if it's a useless something.

[ProgramGamer]

I would add to the above: Make sure your nothing doesn't accidentally hinder the player. For an example, don't lock the player in the animation until it's done, let them keep going even if it's not over yet, that way pressing buttons by accident is not frustrating.

[rj]

oh yeah that's really super important. don't make your toy that annoying one that plays a jingle when you step on it at 3 in the morning

[valrus]

Lens-of-the-toy (or whatever it's called) is one of my favorites, but yeah, it's light on specifics.

My only "rule" for this is negative: resisting the urge to grade the player on absolutely everything and/or tie it to greater consequences.  Some cooking/serving games make not-great toys, actually, in that all sorts of tiny things that probably wouldn't really matter in real life are given exaggerated in-game consequences to make it gamier.  The nature of a good toy, I think, is "consequences without consequences": full of neat effects/results/feedback without having it all be tied to some grander consequence like winning or losing. 

Or, even if there are bad in-game consequences, they're often lenient or contingent on the player's current goals, such that you might do "bad things" to achieve some other goal, or for the fun of doing the wrong thing.  That leads to another rule I give myself about always looking at other options for "punishment" beyond "Losing HP or the game's HP-surrogate", which is a hard thing to redirect to achieve any goal.  (Like to use Mario 64 as an example again, the consequences of falling into lava -- jumping very high but momentarily losing control -- make for a much better toy than the standard consequence of "instant death".)

[eerr]

Toylike?

Make mechanics learnable from play.

Make colors bright and flashy for each interactive object.

Add things in the hope that they will be fun, and if not, then remove them.

KISS Keep things simple stupid. Making puzzles normally produces large amounts of chaff.

[dxman]

The book is on my to-read list, but haven't yet had a chance to sit down with it.

When I hear about a game having "toylike" qualities, what comes to mind for me is a set of very simple mechanics that exist independently, but which innately combine in interesting ways. In many cases, the individual parts don't actually know a lot of specifics about each other. Just like Lego bricks. Look at Spelunky or many "sandbox" games for example.

I think it might also be worth noting that it may be true that "fun" equals "happiness" in many cases, but that's not true 100% of the time. A difficult game may lead to frustration, but eventually gratification. A scary game could make someone scream, but they laugh about it later. A thoughtful game might make someone question the world around them, but they're glad to learn something new. All of these are "fun" to certain audiences in their own way, and "toy" qualities can be used to evoke any of them.

Whether you start with the mechanics or the intended feeling first, just give careful consideration to what each mechanic says, and how the total of them all informs the player’s reaction.

[Andy@TCS]

Lens-of-the-toy (or whatever it's called) is one of my favorites, but yeah, it's light on specifics.

My only "rule" for this is negative: resisting the urge to grade the player on absolutely everything and/or tie it to greater consequences.  Some cooking/serving games make not-great toys, actually, in that all sorts of tiny things that probably wouldn't really matter in real life are given exaggerated in-game consequences to make it gamier.  The nature of a good toy, I think, is "consequences without consequences": full of neat effects/results/feedback without having it all be tied to some grander consequence like winning or losing. 

Or, even if there are bad in-game consequences, they're often lenient or contingent on the player's current goals, such that you might do "bad things" to achieve some other goal, or for the fun of doing the wrong thing.  That leads to another rule I give myself about always looking at other options for "punishment" beyond "Losing HP or the game's HP-surrogate", which is a hard thing to redirect to achieve any goal.  (Like to use Mario 64 as an example again, the consequences of falling into lava -- jumping very high but momentarily losing control -- make for a much better toy than the standard consequence of "instant death".)

On your first point, I agree to an extent. You mention that cooking/serving games often make not good toys due to many things related to the mechanics having an impact on gameplay when they wouldn't in real life. I don't think this is a problem, as long as things stay intuitive to the player and follow standard rules of design. At the same time, I think your "consequences without consequences" is a great rule of thumb. I think what I'm going to do going forward is first make the feedback directly related to my mechanics feel as fun to play with as possible. For example, in the GIF I shared, the cup that the player controls is eventually going to be a coffee pot. I might give a slight movement to the pot when it is turned; the liquid will rush to the front and make it top heavy. This might have very slight effect on gameplay. I will then test this for fun without respect to mechanics. This could have the potential of hurting how fun the actual gameplay is (the player might find the physics cool when playing with the toy, but get annoyed when they're playing the actual game), so I will test to make sure it does not. Once this process is pushed to its limit, I will follow your "consequences without consequences" rule, making sure that the additional toylike qualities fit well within the game.

Your second point is something in design I take to heart. Its always more fun when a game gives you some interesting way to react to punishment. My friend disagrees with me, but I absolutely hate how the Street Fighter series disobeys this rule with its stun mechanic. It is never fun in a competitive game to be punished for a longer period of time while having no interesting way to react.

Anyway, thank you for the advice. I really think this is going to help us out going forward.

[Andy@TCS]

The book is on my to-read list, but haven't yet had a chance to sit down with it.

When I hear about a game having "toylike" qualities, what comes to mind for me is a set of very simple mechanics that exist independently, but which innately combine in interesting ways. In many cases, the individual parts don't actually know a lot of specifics about each other. Just like Lego bricks. Look at Spelunky or many "sandbox" games for example.

I think it might also be worth noting that it may be true that "fun" equals "happiness" in many cases, but that's not true 100% of the time. A difficult game may lead to frustration, but eventually gratification. A scary game could make someone scream, but they laugh about it later. A thoughtful game might make someone question the world around them, but they're glad to learn something new. All of these are "fun" to certain audiences in their own way, and "toy" qualities can be used to evoke any of them.

Whether you start with the mechanics or the intended feeling first, just give careful consideration to what each mechanic says, and how the total of them all informs the player’s reaction.

You definitely should give it a read. I am very much a beginning designer (my team is hard at work developing our first game), and this book has helped me out immensely. That said, I think you're correct in that toylike comes from mechanics being fun independently. A mechanic is toylike when it is fun to play with, not just in the context of a game. It has to have inherent values that make it fun outside the context of a higher set of rules.

[quantumpotato]

A lot of what's fun is in non-gameplay effects, like the cowering animation.