Skills, Goals, and Feedback

In this blog, I will be going over three different  i like games. More specifically, I will talk about the feedback the game gives the player, the skills required and the goals in the game. The three games I am going to cover are SSX, Left 4 Dead, and StarCraft 2.

First off, in SSX there is lots of feedback given for many different scenarios. The one feedback I will be focusing on is the music. I really like when the player goes into super tricky mode, the music blends the song it's tricky and plays that while you are in super tricky mode. The song ends and blends back to your other song when the super tricky mode is over. The skills needed to play this game is how quickly you can gain and maintain super tricky mode. Once the player has access to super tricky they can move faster, and do better tricks. These are two different goals that will also be found in the game.

Next game is Left 4 Dead and this game has several different ways it shows feedback. One of the ways the player is given feedback is physically. When the player takes damage the controller vibrates to optimally give physical feedback. The most important skill in this game is teamwork. Without teamwork the survivors won't be able to make it to the safe house. This brings me to the goal of the game which is to make it to the safehouse alive.

Finally, I will address StarCraft2 and the feedback that is given in this game. There is a visual feedback provided in the game. This feedback is a blinking explanation mark on the minimap to show when something you own is under attack. Another example of visual feedback that's really nice is the green circle that shows up around your unit that is selected. Some skills that would be needed for this game would be the ability to micromanage groups of units while macro managing an economy and production of an army. The objective of this game is to eliminate the enemy player's base.

Those are the three games I have decided to talk about. I wanted to make sure I covered three different types of feedback. These three that I covered were: auditory, physical, and visual. I also wanted to make sure that in this blog there were three different skills and three different types of goals.




SSX, Left 4 Dead, and StarCraft2. Describe feedback generated. List the skills required. What type of skills do people enjoy that you could incorporate into the games i design.