Fri 4/29 Design Practice Questions

1. What entities and resources will be in the game? Which resources are made up
of individual entities (such as a resource of airplanes consisting of individual planes
that the computer can track separately) and which are described by mass nouns
(such as water, which cannot be separated into discrete objects)?

2. What unique entities will be in the game?

3. Which entities will actually include other entities as part of their defi nition?
(Remember that an avatar may have an inventory, and an inventory contains
objects.)

4. What attributes describe each of the entities that you have identifi ed? Which
attributes are numeric and which are symbolic?

5. Which entities and resources will be tangible, and which will be intangible?
Will any of them change from one state to another, like the resources in Age of
Empires?

6. What mechanics govern the relationships among the entities? Remember that
any symbolic entity requires mechanics that determine how it can get into each of
its possible states and how other entities interact with each possible state.

7. Are there any global mechanics in the game? What mechanic governs the way
the game changes from mode to mode?

8. For each entity and resource, does it come into the game world at a source, or
does it start off in a game world that does not provide a source for additional entities or resources? If it does come in at a source, what mechanics control the
production rate of the source?

9. For each entity and resource, does it go out of the game world at a drain, or does
it all remain in the game world and never leave? If it does go out at a drain, what
conditions cause it to drain?

10. What conversion processes exist in your world? What trader processes exist? Do
any feedback loops or mutual dependencies exist? What means have you provided
to break or prevent deadlocks?

11. Can your game get into a state of equilibrium, static or dynamic? Does it include
any form of decay or entropy that prevents states of equilibrium from forming?

12. How do mechanics create active challenges? Do you need to establish any
mechanics to detect if a challenge has been surmounted?

13. How do mechanics implement actions? For each action that may arrive from the
user interface, how do the core mechanics react?

14. For autonomous entities such as nonplayer characters, what mechanics control
their behavior? What mechanics defi ne their AI?