Level Up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design

Chapter 11. THEY ALL WANT YOU DEAD

Video games are populated with a plethora of beings that want to kill you: aliens and androids, pirates and parasites, mercenaries and mushroom people. However, I realize not every video game features slobbering, sword-wielding enemies—often they use guns too!

Yes, yes. I realize that there are plenty of other video games that use other forms of conflict, such as time, human competitors, or even the player's own skill, to challenge the player. But we are not talking about those types of games^[126]. As I flip back to Level 3, I am reminded of three types of conflict found in stories: man vs nature (like a hurricane or a giant white whale); man vs self (where the hero is struggling with an internal problem issue like "where to go for lunch^[127]") and man vs man, or in the case of video games, man vs zombie, or man vs ninja pirate, or man vs hideous-alien-creature-made-from-the-skins-of-your-dead-crewmates.

Those are the type of enemies we are going to be talking about. While zombies and ninja pirates and alien thingee enemies are great fun to design, you first need to follow this very important golden rule:

FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION!

FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION

FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION

Hey! I saw you trying to design that winged skeleton enemy^[128] without thinking about ...