In this blog post, I will be talking about Chapter 10 from the textbook Game Design Workshop, by Tracy Fullerton. In this chapter, it talks about functionality, completeness, and balance in video games. Functionality means “that the system is established to the point where some who knows nothing about the game can sit down and play it” (Fullerton p. 313). For instance, if I play a game that is new to me is means it is a functional game. Something to consider is that functionality in a game does not mean that the game is complete. Completeness in games has many different sources of things it needs to fix to make a game complete. For instance, in shooter multiplayer games it is a huge concern with spawn camping. The developers need to think about how they can balance the spawn point. There are many different kinds of respawn points, such as a player choosing where to respawn. An example of this would be battle royal games. A battle royal game such as Apex Legends will let you drop anywhere you want on the map. Sometimes you will get lucky and have not enemies near you or sometimes you land where there are multiple enemies by you. In Call of Duty multiplayer, the game chooses where you spawn. In theory, the game tries to spawn you away from the enemies, but sometimes it is not possible due to enemy players being scattered around the map. Balance in games is very important and if a game is unbalanced, then fewer players would be interested in playing the game. For instance, I used to play Call of Duty Black Ops 4 when it first came out. I used to love that game because to me their gun line-up and characters were well balanced. When the game introduced new guns in loot boxes, it made the game extremely unfair. The guns that were in these loot boxes were way overpowered compared to the guns you got at the beginning of the game. This made me dislike the game so much that I chose to not play this game for multiple months.
Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: a Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. CRC Press, 2019.
