- It's Not All About the Objects
- The Ground Brush
- Mountains and Molehills
- Much More World Building to Come
- Moving On
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Much More World Building to Come
I’m one of those people who likes to push buttons and click features just to see what they do, so I’m not going to tell you to stop poking around Kodu Game Lab’s other tools. Feel free! But I will be covering the topics of water and roads in a later chapter. For now, you should have enough hands-on experience with the basic Ground Brush and terrain-modifying tools to start creating some wild and crazy worlds of your own.
And that’s a good thing, because as I said earlier in this chapter, a good game is more than just throwing some objects on the screen and programming them to shoot at one another. If you’ve got a great game idea growing in your head, you absolutely cannot forget to include the look and feel of the terrain in your plans.
The world that your game exists in needs to be eye-catching, of course, but it also needs to make sense in terms of the rules of the game. If you’ve put pits everywhere that look good but that frustrate your players because they keep falling in, that’s not a good thing (well, unless the point of the game is to avoid the pits). Instead, the pits should be used sparingly, a few here and there, to make a game more exciting, not frustrating. Your players should be focused on the main goals of the game (such as collecting coins or shooting flying enemies), and the terrain and obstacles you’ve created should be adding to the fun, not taking away from it.
A good balance of goals, game rules, and world design is what makes a game great. And you’ll get better at it over time, I promise.