Invisible Walls and Immersion
Invisible walls often break player immersion or don’t feel cohesive within the video game world. How do you go about designing these borders that still feel part of the game world?
I’ve been reading Jesper Juul’s book, Half-Real, for Dr. Nick LaLone’s Game Design class. An intriguing chapter discussed the relationship between game space and world space, leading to invisible walls being a common device in video games to denote where the game space ends.
I realized I had encountered this on Jelly Beach, one of the games part of echoes, an RIT Vertically Integrated Project.
In Jelly Beach, you play as a child trading your way to a jelly donut, based on a John Roche poem, Jelly Donut. Because we wanted to emphasize child-like joy and whimsy, our game contains almost no text and leaves most things up to the player’s imagination.
To delineate our game space, we had to come up with a different solution rather than a text box stating “You can’t go any further!” to mark the invisible walls where the player could no longer traverse.
Our solution was to have a spider block the player’s way!
As a game designer and developer, It was my responsibility to implement this border. Initially, the spider was static, but we noticed confusion among play-testers about why they couldn’t move any further, and questioned why the spider was there.
We decided to make the spider move up and down to block the player, still, my instincts said it was a bit dull. Because of this, I decided to take it a step further, by adding a slight delay and animations. This created a more lively experience in line with the game world.
At the time, it was just a design fix and I didn’t realize the importance of developing our invisible walls in this manner.
But after reading Half-Real describe how the “bounds of coherent worlds are motivated by the fiction of the game,” and seeing this be applied in my work, I have grasped how crucial this principle is to design.
It’s incredibly validating to see theory align with the practical work you’ve done, even before fully understanding the theory.