Chess is a total information game, whereas Poker is not.
"Total Information" means that all information about a game's internal state and each player's resources is available to every player at all times. It mostly tests attention and reactions, but our design doesn't care about those things. Scrolling reduces the player's ability to focus, and doesn't add any interesting ways to test THINKING. No scrolling in DQ - what you see is what you get Mini-maps and notification barks ("our base is under attack!") help a little, but the underlying trade-off remains. But a larger map has costs too - the cognitive burden of scrolling, and the stress burden of having to worry about something happening off-screen. Of course, this limits the size of your map, which puts a constraint on your level designs. In TD, however, the only thing you care about is defending your stuff, so limiting the map to just what you can see makes sense. StarCraft 2, note the minimap in lower-left RTS is all about hyper-vigilance, fast reactions, and the ability to jump around from place to place putting out fires.
This is fine for some types of games - for instance, Real Time Strategy (RTS) games. If you have to keep worrying about what might be happening beyond the edges of your viewport, you're going to get stressed and your focus will be shattered. This in turn lets us crank up the difficulty of the game's thinking-based challenges without overwhelming or stressing out the player.Īs we worked on the game we eventually wound up with a list of "best practices" for Tower Defense game design, at least for games that share our goals.
We don't want to TEST the player's focus (ie assault them with strobe lights and dancing kitens and see if they can still concentrate), we want to LET them focus, freeing up as many mental resources as possible. The design philosophy for Defender's Quest boils down to two guiding principles that play to the Tower Defense (TD) genre's strengths:
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