For Dummies iPhone and iPad Game Development 978-0-470-59910-5 User Manual

Product codes
978-0-470-59910-5
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22
Part I: Getting Started 
Encouraging patterns of play
Play your game (and have others play it) enough that you can pick out pat-
terns of play. Then build responses to these patterns by adding a slight tilt to 
the screen, highlighting screen areas, adding subtle animations, and so on to 
make the player feel like his character is more involved in the game action. 
The effect is subtle but noticeable, and the game plays better for it.
A great example of one of these patterns is a side-scrolling game based on 
jump mechanics (think Super Mario Brothers, by Nintendo). After a certain 
amount of time playing, people become used to timing jumps as well as 
combining running and jumping. Observe this when you test your game with 
others; you can reward skilled jumping and running combinations, and work 
out new ways to test these skills. 
 
If your game is so eclectic that your players can’t find any patterns to improve 
their game with, take that as a signal that you need to add a little more struc-
ture to the game.
Applying Sid Meier’s Rule of Halves
A lot of games rely on the finely tuned parameters, such as the speed of cars, 
the strengths of enemies, and the amount of ammo in your gun. These param-
eters often need to be just right — if they’re not, the game feels wrong in 
difficult-to-define ways.
When trying to tune a game, the logical choice is to make small changes until 
it’s right. Unfortunately, that’s not possible when hundreds of factors are 
involved in a game — it’d simply take too much time. Thankfully, there’s a 
solution.
Sid Meier, the legendary developer of such classics as Civilization, has a 
simple rule for tuning a game’s parameters. If a parameter doesn’t feel just 
right, either double it or cut it in half. If a car moves too fast, reduce its speed 
by half. If the gun feels too weak, double the amount of damage it does.
The point isn’t that these new values are magically correct; in fact, you’re 
likely to overshoot by a wide margin. The point is to narrow down the range 
of things to check. If your car is now too slow, change its speed to some-
where between its old speed and the speed it is now. Repeat this process 
until your parameters feel right.
Sid’s rule of halves is quite a bit faster than the alternative, which can often 
involve plugging random numbers into your game code and seeing what 
works best; in fact, the math nerds among us will notice that it turns the time 
needed to figure out the best value from a linear equation to a logarithmic 
one. There’s no arguing with science, kids.
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