Dying in a videogame happens all the time. Even if you designed your game so well that it is very viable for the player to complete it in one go, which rarely happens, it’s good if you have also considered what happens when the player does die. And I’m not even talking about a “wow, you lose!” attitude, but just making things less annoying and more motivating.
I started thinking about dying and failing in games while playing World of Goo. After restarting one level a couple of times I realized that I wasn’t getting angry at the game. There was no annoyance at replaying the same thing over and over again. So it made me wonder – what was the secret?
One of the reasons was, well, how well the levels were designed, but that wasn’t what surprised me. I realized, that the design of the game itself felt too… cute, I suppose. That things were easy to forgive. Goo balls were super cuddly, the music was awesome, the art top notch and the gameplay fun. So whenever I failed just because the game didn’t register my click the way I expected it to, after a second of “oh come on!” came the relaxation and I was in the mood to try again.
Now, I’m not saying that every game should have cute goo balls or puppies or whatever else. What I’m saying is that – it made me realize, that the developers can make it easier for the players to forgive the death/restart cycle in the game via very means I haven’t even considered before. So if a game is designed in such a way, where after killing hordes of enemies you can accidentally fall of the level edge and die, or jump in a wrong way while climbing a wall due to how the game interpreted your input, why not also design a game where this little annoying moment can be easier to swallow?
One of the more popular ways of making death less annoying in the 90s seemed to be the concept of “cinematic deaths”. Dangerous Dave II had little cutscenes for dying. Team Fortress 2 has a similar idea for the kill cams. Resident Evil had the whole You Died (later You Are Dead) mini-cutscene. Or Max Payne that had the slow-mo death. These felt like a direct continuation of ideas of deaths from adventure games like Space Quest, Another World, Maniac Mansion, where death felt like a “bad ending” cutscene, rather than a boring game over.
Another way got popular in hard indie platformers, where you respawn after dying almost instantly. Which leads to you treating deaths more like an additional statistic to use for self-imposed challenges, like trying to complete the game with as few deaths as possible. And it doesn’t matter if you will be doing these kinds of challenges, as you’re still getting the benefit of restarting the game with no delay.
Oh and please don’t force players re-watch an unskippable cutscene or be dumped to the main menu with all the intro screens every time they die? I’m glad that with this generation of games this happens less and less, but when it does, gosh it’s still annoying as hell. Those moments of waiting keep adding up, especially if you don’t make them interesting in any way.
I’m sure there are countless more possibilities to make death/failure in games not as annoying as they usually are. In the best case, it can even be motivational, not discouraging. So, whenever you decide to make a game, please don’t skip on this “little” detail as how annoying failure is in your game.