♂️ 👨🏾‍💻 🤸🏻 The bigger, the worse or why the game loop matters 🕞 🍆 🍘

As the evolution of game design over the past 20 years, the duration of games has been constantly increasing. Hundreds of hours can easily be played in The Witcher 3, and Factorio or Dwarf Fortress can be skipped more than once.

Developers have long pursued the idea of games with endless replay value. This is where the service games came from. Many game designers (especially on AAA projects) look at gaming experience as tens of hours of gameplay. And this is not always good.

Introduction

Once upon a time I wrote an article about macro and trace elements in AAA titles. Micro is what the player does in a few minutes, and macro is the main goals and objectives. In many open-world games, trace elements remain very basic or include only the transition from one macroevent to another.

The same can be said about RPGs with many-hour quests and a bunch of storylines - in them, battles and movement around the world are secondary to the main goals. In such games, the player is aimed at long-term goals, rather than short-term progress.

This approach will work for fans, but is unlikely to motivate new players who may not have much time to play. A popular idea among developers is that the bigger the game, the better. Now dozens of new projects are constantly coming out, so players do not always have time to “wait for pleasure” from the game.

That is why the games that I love do not try to impose a 100-hour passage. They just have a different approach to the core gameplay loop.

Game cycle

A game loop is a system or set of mechanics that a player will use. Whether it’s construction, battles, growing crops, anything - this is instant gameplay that creates a microlayer of the project.

This is the main reason why I prefer indie games over AAA today. They have small budgets, so developers are trying to focus on the game cycle in the first place. It cannot be measured for hours - the player must understand the essence of the game within a few minutes after launch. If the cycle catches, then there is a big chance that you will stay here for a long time.

A good game loop creates "sprints" of gameplay that bring pleasure when they are repeated. Few people launch a game in anticipation that they will play it for hundreds of hours. But if the user enjoys, then the total time spent in the game will begin to increase markedly.

One of the best examples is competitive games. Skating rinks in Mortal Kombat, Counter-Strike and even in League of Legends were not originally designed for 10 hours. These are short sessions that are repeated with each new match.

If you understand your game cycle, and you can divide it so that each time the player is interested, this will greatly improve the game.

Roguelike

Bagels are another prime example with great game cycles that provide long-term value. The best of them provide minutes of entertainment, which are then repeated, but with new challenges and conditions. The beauty of roguelike design is that developers can focus on additional content that adds variety rather than stretching the passage.

There is not a single bagel that would open its main cycle for hours before a player.

Attentive study of one session in the bagel gives an excellent feeling of "quick pick-up" of the player. When I play Slay the Spire, Spelunky, Binding of Isaac and others, I have a clear idea of how long it will take. Returning to the main point: some in Binding of Isaac have played hundreds of hours, which consisted of 30-60 minute segments.

But the advice “make bagels” will not help. Let’s talk about how to approach the design of the game, which will retain users.

Gameplay Slice

It doesn’t matter how long your game lasts (2 or 200 hours), think about what the player does from moment to moment. So you will begin to break the design into parts and fix those that will become the main game cycle of the game.

Tasks and goals in the game can be turned into segments of the gameplay that focus the player’s attention. The open world specializes in just this: it provides the player with a huge playing space and many points of interest for research.

In Super Mario Odyssey, progress is determined by the moons: they can be found both in all worlds and after special trials. The player determines the progress by the number of moons found or by unlocked worlds. For the user to see the game cycle in action, he must understand what is happening.

How to measure progress

To break a game into pieces, a player must see and understand four basic things:

The immediate goal?
What tasks do you need to complete?
How long will it take?
What progress has been made?

Sandboxes are often misleading by their "just start exploring." Without a starting point and a goal that a player should concentrate on, he will have no motivation.

The best example would be the start of any MMO. The player starts with a simple goal, tasks are completed quickly, give experience for them and unlock new quests. It also highlights the best and worst examples of MMOs and RPGs: it doesn't matter how good the endgame is if people lose interest a few hours before it.

Games that hold the player focus on trace elements or the game loop, rather than macro. The player should roughly understand how long the task will take, and (more importantly) whether he can finish it in one session.

Finally, there must be something that will be forever saved and insured against loss. That is why in many MMO games, the quest lists and quests to achieve are so exciting. To see how the list is filled with progress and grows from 0% to 100% completion is a strong motivator. The player should not risk losing progress in order to go through everything from the beginning.

The most important minutes

If everything is done correctly, then you can create a game cycle that will work both in the short and long term. In any case, the developer should first focus on short-term gameplay - without it, players may not want to spend their time on a further game.

If users do not even devote 30 minutes to the game, then it is worth revising onboarding and the gameplay itself.