Skills, Goals, and Feedback

Feedback is important in games because it gives the player information about whats going in the world around them. The most common types of feedback are visual and audio. Visual feedback is usually displayed through a HUD that is directly visible to the player. Audio feedback can be displayed through music, sound effects, and voice overs. In this blog, I will pick 3 games and discuss how the feedback they give players affects their experience. I will focus mostly on how each game shows that a player is losing, or being hurt.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

In Zelda, you have a very basic and classic HUD. You have your health bar that depletes when you take damage, you have your magic bar (depending on where you are in the game), your equipped items, money count, and map. The games goal is to progress through the lands of Hyrule in order to save it from evil. Of course, this means link must survive, so I wanted to focus on the unique way the developers show you have taken damage. On top of the fact link loses his life bar. He also blinks red. When he blinks red, audio feedback is given to the player. You hear link cry out and hear a faint blinking sound. Everyone who has played Zelda knows the dreaded sound of having only 2 hearts left. The developers use this sound to tell the player "you are in serious danger" think carefully about what you do next.

Call of duty: Modern Warfare 2

In a first person shooter game, feedback is really important to the player. Call of Duty displays things similar to Zelda in which they show ammo like the items link has but instead of a life bar they show damage in a different way. When you get hit your screen is sprayed with gore. On top of that your character cries out in pain. The sound effects in this game are crucial to the experience as the player knows what is happening around them through the explosions and bullet spray

 

League of Legends

League of legends relies heavily on the play from teammates along with the skill level of oneself. The visual feedback they give player is through a minimap, life bar, mana bar. The audio feedback is the most unique feature to LoL. In teamfights players are confused on whats going on. It helps steer them in the right direction. If an enemy player has a triple kill you better be careful and play correctly from now on.

In my own GDW game I want to use skills from all the games listed above. It would be unique to have some intense shootouts in an arena that would require fast pace decisions. Skills from Zelda would be having an intelligent mind to figure out difficult endeavours. Skills from league would be a sense of teamwork and strong communication between players.