One of the most difficult parts of game design is viewing your creation both through your intention as a designer and the player’s naive approach to it. The best games accommodate a wide berth of player experience and approaches. New game designers often take the flexibility present in their favorite games for granted and assume that it is a natural product of game design. It’s easy to believe that your intentions behind a map’s design are naturally understood by a player. They aren’t.
Most designers create maps with a particular experience they want the player to have. Oftentimes, this experience is simple, something like: “the player will battle through groups of enemies until they defeat the boss and seize the throne.” The overall strategic experience will be complimented with more tactical experience designs: “When the player reaches here, they’ll be surprised by cavalry reinforcements.” This is a natural part of design and there’s nothing wrong with it. However, it’s easy to go a step beyond and accidentally design a map with a particular solution in mind. This solution might come naturally to the designer as they create the challenge or be the result of early playtesting. There are two problems with designing this way:
1. The designer will likely make assumptions about player capabilities.
Five paladins may not be a challenge in chapter five of your game, so long as the player remembered to buy the horseslayer in chapter three. Fire Emblem is largely built around testing a player’s ability to apply tools they’re given to the challenge they’re provided. However, one of the long running design decisions of the series is to make those tools finite and unreliable. Players may lose their strongest character, miss a droppable, or simply forget to open an important chest. Mainline series games do an excellent job designing for this, but fan games sometimes forget the fallibility of their players. Though it’s unlikely that poor design will lead to your players being truly softlocked, added difficulty from a player missing an tool you assumed they would have may make the chapter so unfun that the player would rather quit than find a way through.
2. The designer will likely make assumptions about player intuition.
It’s important for a designer to remember that a player does not know at what tempo they should take the chapter. It is generally true that the best strategy in Fire Emblem is to move slowly and methodically through a map. Designers, knowing this, will often put powerful (and sometimes undefeatable) enemy reinforcements that appear if a player is judged to have taken too long. But a player, unless otherwise warned by the game, won’t be aware of these reinforcements or when they appear. I, and likely many other players, have lost chapters to punishment reinforcements spawning right behind me as I was inching my way through the chapter. Though death may be appropriate divine punishment for turtling, it’s inevitably frustrating when a player must restart the chapter because they couldn’t foresee the designer’s intention. That was a fairly egregious example, with the more likely outcome being that a player makes the chapter significantly more difficult for themselves by not approaching it how the designer intended. It’s natural and inevitable that different strategies are accompanied by different levels of challenge. However, pigeonholing valid approaches to the chapter around your intuition creates frustrating maps.
I wanted to first discuss this advice because find myself accidentally committing this error a lot. It was especially noticeable in [Blade and Claw]( [COMPLETE] Blade and Claw (Full Length, 23 chapters) ) (chapter 19 is the worst for this) and the first chapters I designed of [The Unbroken Thread]( Aggression Project [8/~30] ) (the pirate hideout map, namely). I am very prone to finding a solution to my levels as I design them and therefore assuming that solution is natural and intuitive. Because I make this mistake so often I’ve developed some strategies that have helped me reduce how often I ship a level with this problem.
1. When playtesting, never allow yourself to use the same strategy twice.
Players often desire easy and repeatable success, and the game designer isn’t excluded from that heuristic. If a solution comes to mind when designing a chapter, that’s fine. The first time you playtest the chapter, use whatever solution feels natural. However, on subsequent playtests, explicitly ban yourself from approaching the problems in the chapter in a way you have previously. If you can’t think of alternative strategies to the problems you’ve given your players, that should be a warning sign. Alternative strategies can be as simple as deploying different characters to the chapter, banning use of a strong personal weapon or skill, or ensuring that you aren’t proceeding through the chapter at the same tempo as a previous playthrough. Try completing the chapter faster and see what happens. Try taking it slower and see what happens. It isn’t a problem if some strategies are better than the others but it may be a concern if only one strategy makes the chapter feel doable. Multiple playtests with alternating your approaches to the chapter can help uncover rigidity in your design.
2. Have other playtesters.
It’s surprisingly unlikely that other playtesters will gravitate towards the solutions that you find obvious. Getting friends, fellow designers, or even randos willing to give feedback to test out your maps can give you a sense of how a chapter feels when you aren’t the one playing it. There’s been a recurring incident between SP and I that I’ve learned to understand as a sign that I fucked up. Every now and then he’ll text me and say something like “I tried your new chapter. I liked it, but it was super hard.” This, for me, is a warning sign. I rarely set out to create challenging maps, so I often hear this from SP about chapters that I thought were fairly easy. A text like that means that my knowledge of my own design intentions has drastically simplified a map that others will find very difficult. Feedback like that means I need to talk with the playtester and take another look at the design.
3. WATCH your other playtesters.
Receiving after action reports from playtesters can be extremely helpful, but watching them play often gives even more insight. Players often don’t understand why they struggled in a given level beyond surface level insight. As the map’s designer you have an naturally deeper insight into many aspects of the chapter. You can easily notice what insight the player’s missing even when the player doesn’t know that they’re missing anything. This can be difficult to schedule, and some playtesters are squeamish about being in a call with the designer, but this approach can also be immensely rewarding to your game’s quality.
An additional note on this: when watching a playtester, do not ever say anything. Give them no hints. Explain nothing. If they are frustrated and struggling do not make it easier for them. The goal of this playtesting approach is to maximize your insight on your creation through being a fly on the wall. You are not in that call to help your playtester be better at your game. You are there to be silent and learn about problems with your design that you didn’t notice before.
4. Once you’ve finished the level, take a two week break, then play the level again.
Even when attempting to be mindful and account for the your intuition as a designer, playtesting your chapter after you first create it will often give you an unnatural advantage in it. You’ve spent a long time on the map, so it’s fresh in your mind and can’t surprise you. This can greatly reduce your ability to balance and improve the chapter, as it will always seem easier than it actually is. Instead, once the map’s in a reasonable state, move on to the next chapter or focus on writing/art for a while. Then, come back once your memory of the level has faded. I most benefited from this approach while making Chapter 3 of [Aggression Project]( Aggression Project [8/~30] ). I playtested the map extensively when I first created it, and moved on extremely happy with its quality (and thought it was fairly easy). When I returned to the chapter a month later while doing final playtests before the release I could not find a way to beat it consistently. To this day, I have no idea how the hell I cleared the early versions of that map so consistently. Reviewing the map the a fresher mind I realized the both the enemy quantity and quality was far too high. I turned it down and am extremely happy with where the chapter ended up.