This is a post I made to the Zinnia Games Blog: https://zinniagames.com/the-friday-tiding-3-the-invisible-skill/

Game Design.

It's a very strange thing. All important for making a game right, but at the same time so impossibly nebulous. Game Design is a skill that you can only learn by making a game. Trying to learn it in a class or from a lesson can only teach you so much, since every game has its own unique needs. To make a game you have to be able to see the music, hear the sounds, keep your finger on an invisible pulse.

As pretentious as that sounds its pretty close to the mark. Game Design is all about theory. As Project Petunia continues to grow, figuring out how I want the final game to come together has gone from irrelevant to all-important. So this week's blog post will be going over a few things that have been stewing in my mind regarding the Game Design of Petunia.

The Value Of Currency

The first thing and something that I have been ruminating on since the first version of Project Petunia from months ago was how to implement the humble coin, if I implement it at all.

A coin in the context of a platformer refers to a low value, common collectible that shows up throughout levels. These take various forms depending on the game, but the most famous example is the coin from the Super Mario Bros. franchise. In older games coins would usually be used for extra lives or score. These mechanics have fallen out of favor in most games nowadays, and Project Petunia eschewed implementing either one of them very early on.

So that begs the question, what is a Coin worth without extra lives or score? The unfortunate answer is not much of anything. While I can place them in a level for the player to collect they just end up being there and I don't like that personally.

My current thoughts have been either adding some kind of shop that the player can access in the world map that allows them to purchase buffs or something of that nature, or maybe locking some levels behind a toll that can be paid for with the coins of the game (though I really don't want to make the player have to grind levels for coins out of all things). I could also just get rid of the coins entirely, but you can't deny that collecting them feels good.

The Difficult Question

Another big consideration I've been stewing over is how difficult I am wanting the game's levels to be. My original plan was to make the main levels on the easier side and save all the difficulty for bonus content. The problem here is that if a game is too easy, than it isn't going to engage the player much.

The first demo for Project Petunia had three levels that were sorted by their perceived difficulty for me, and the second demo will have six levels that are sorted the same way. I haven't had any comments on difficulty so far so I can't say whether I did a good job or not. This will certainly be an area that requires a lot of playtesting to get right, but that also means I'll have to track down people who are willing to regularly playtest development versions of Project Petunia.

The First Time

One final thing I've decided to try and do for this project is the most pointless but perhaps interesting thing I've thought about so far. After some feedback I received on the first demo from someone who wasn't so experienced with platformers, I started to think what it would be like to make a video game for someone who had never even picked up a controller before. Would it be possible to teach this theoretical person how to play my game?

I believe I could, and my plan here is to make Project Petunia a very beginner friendly game without sacrificing the complexity it has started to gain in mechanics. This is likely a completely delusional idea that will have no benefit whatsoever, but that's a one sentence review of my life so I don't got anything to lose.

A scant post this week, more just theorycrafting than actual development, but as I said at the beginning of this post this stuff is important. Game Design really is a strange thing. We made little virtual programs that people can interact with, and now we've assigned qualities and attributes to these programs based on how they make us think and feel.

Thank you for reading this post, and see you next week.