Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development: From Concept to Playable Game with Unity and C#

Chapter 13. Guiding the Player

As you’ve read in earlier chapters, your primary job as a designer is to craft an experience for players to enjoy. However, the further you get into your project and your design, the more obvious and intuitive your game appears to you. This comes from your familiarity with the game and is entirely natural.

However, this means that you need to keep a wary eye on your game, making sure that players who have never seen your game before also intuitively understand what they need to do to experience the game as you intended. This requires careful, sometimes invisible guidance, and it is the topic of this chapter.

This chapter covers two styles of player guidance: direct, where the player knows that she is being; and ...