But wait… Feature interactions are actually a GOOD thing!

Løfgren's Laws of Feature Dynamics. Click for big image.

Features interacting with features give rise to complexity, but it’s not nescessarily a BAD thing! Actually it’s really important for any game to be worth playing.

Sure it requires more work, the more a feature “touches” other features, and special cases arise, but it also makes the features more “solid”. A game entity that interacts with many other things in the game, has a greater potential effect on the game world, and thus seem more embedded and “realistic”.

Again, think of the simple example of a gun that doesn’t DO anything. It can hardly be called realistic (or even a “feature”). But if it can shoot enemies, shatter glass, bounce and make noise if dropped on the floor, be found by enemies and so on, it’s clearly more embedded into the game world, and might be considered more “realistic” or “native” to the game world.

So, as game designers we might actually be interested in having as many feature-to-feature interactions as possible in our games. The problems arise when the results of those interactions becomes so complex, that we can’t maintain an overview over the consequences of changes to our feature set.

That’s where The Feature Matrix comes in handy!

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Tags: change management, development, feature matrix, Features, game design, what-if-scenarios

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 4:37 pm and is filed under game design.