This blurb was inspired by my comparison of Death’s Door and Tunic, though since it wasn’t related to Souls-likes, Death’s Door, nor TUNIC, I split it into this short post.
A tangent on using Health to build an experience Most games with a notion of “health” or “lives” have a way of using that resource to incentivize an experience. In a first-person shooter focused on energy and excitement, for example, a game might use cover-based combat and a health bar which quickly recovers when hiding.
These two mechanics together keeps combat snappy, since players need only take a quick pause and then can jump back into the action. We can see this done in plenty of AAA titles like Uncharted, Call of Duty, and Battlefield.
But a designer could instead use spacious levels and remove the ability to recover health, creating a much slower, tense game. Players will want to surprise their enemies to avoid losing as much health as they can.
We can see this design used at great success in Counter-Strike or even Call of Duty sub-games like “One in the Chamber” where players have only one health and a pistol with a single bullet.
Here are some other ideas of how health mechanics can be used in some other genres:
| Genre | Recovery Mechanic | Experience Objective |
|---|---|---|
| Platformer | Collect Pickup | Introduce tension between challenge of collecting the item and the risk of failing to do so. (e.g. a difficult to reach 1-UP) |
| Fighter | Respawn / Lives | Incentivize players to fight tooth-and-nail to inflict as much damage before losing a stock. (e.g. 2 KO’s in one life) |
| Rhythm | Rebuild Multiplier | Encourage mastery of die-hard players while tolerating higher levels of failure from novices. (e.g. scores climb quadratically with skill) |
| MOBA | Return to Base | Healing is always an option, at the cost of not exerting influence around the map. (e.g. not around to stop your opponent) |