Scars of War Developer Blog Update

The Scars of War developer blog offers an interesting read as developer Gareth Fouche discusses the function of mini-games in RPGs, and what makes them good or bad.

1) Complexity. Often the simplest mistake with mini-games is to make them too simple. The type of person who buys a complex and deep roleplaying game isn’t going to be happy if the game forces them to play tic-tac-toe every 20 minutes. Sure, that person might enjoy the occasional game of tic-tac-toe, but anything too simple lacks challenge and variety, especially on repeated play-through’s of the mini-game. Your mini-game doesn’t need to have a gazillion moving parts, it simply needs a large enough solution space in comparison to how many times the player will encounter it.

If you only encounter a puzzle once in the game, a single solution is ok. The more times the player encounters it, the larger the solution space needs to be to provide variety, novelty and challenge. Chess is a good example, there aren’t that many types of pieces but the solution space is vast, enough to have kept humanity enjoying the game for centuries.

Spotted on RPGCodex.