When working at Harmonix on Eyetoy: Antigrav, a camera-driven boarding game, the team was intensely worried about overloading the player with too much stuff to learn. As such, one of the overarching goals was to leverage established response patterns as much as possible. If you see a ring, your immediate response is to go through it. If you see a target of any kind, you try to hit it. Trying to explain a camera-driven gestural recognition game was going to be confusing enough to the great majority of players: trying to teach them all new iconography would have been way beyond scope.

Similarly, only embellish upon players’ expectations of rules, but never break them. Remember, your game is trying to establish itself on someone else’s shores. If you violate the basic rules that have been burned into the player’s minds, they won’t know which shore to show up to.

An established rule in your genre might be: Guns on the floor can be picked up and used. Red crosses refill your health. Watch symbols give you more time. If you suddenly make a watch icon that transforms the player into an elf, you’re going to get some very confused and upset players. You’re violating a rule in their minds. To them, you’re cheating.

While the game might need to avoid breaking well established rules, that doesn’t mean they can’t be extended. As a very basic example, let’s say health packs are too plentiful for a reason outside of your hands. It wouldn’t be a violation of established rules to make the player find a limited-use needle before they can use a health pack. Or make progressive healing items be less effective.

Both of these would be additions on top of what the player has been trained to believe, as opposed to violations of it. One could also technically meet the design goal by making health packs randomly explode. However, any developer brave or foolish enough to violate the ingrained rules of health packs that deeply does so at their own peril.

On Guitar Hero, we created a hammer-on and pull-off mechanic unique to our game. To avoid alienating existing rhythm music gamers, more traditional players could still play as they knew how. However, any that wanted to look deeper could take advantage of this new system. When we decided to update the hammer-on / pull-off system for Guitar Hero 2, we took great pains to make sure that any movement which would have been successful in the first game would still work in the updated one.

Fresh players could learn new and easier ways of succeeding, but existing players weren’t fighting against their training. In short, we were trying to teach players a better way of doing something they already had experience with. If forum chatter is any indication, we’ve more or less succeeded.

4. Leave an impression

And really, that’s the point of all of this. To establish your creative beachhead in the players’ minds, you need to use their experiences to your advantage. Play off their expectations while giving them unique interactions. In the hands of a skilled development team, the liability of an established genre can become an opening for success.