Mark of the Ninja

Precise previews let players plan exactly. Mark of the Ninja shows exactly what a thrown knife will do to a lamp, so players can make very specific plans.

The trade-off: the further ahead and more precise a preview is, the less players have to internalise how the mechanics work themselves.

Peggle cuts its shot preview short so players learn the physics. Peggle's shot indicator stops at the first hit, so players must work out the ricochet, and a longer preview is a power-up.

The opposite choice to Mark of the Ninja's precise knife preview: "it forces the player to learn and internalise how the game's mechanics work."

Explicit tutorial quests taught players to depend on tasks for meaning. Klei added quests like surviving a number of nights to help stuck testers. Players then ignored everything outside the quests, played in optimised, risk-averse ways and lost motivation once the quests ran out.

Klei: "In structuring the game as a series of explicit tasks to be completed, we taught the player to depend upon those tasks to create meaning in the game." It fits the overjustification effect: expected rewards weaken motivation for play people already enjoy.

Subtle UI hints onboarded players without killing discovery. Klei removed the quests and instead tweaked the UI with gentle nudges, such as highlighting the most important items you can craft.

Testers who were stuck at first enjoyed experimenting once given hints, and still learned the game by themselves.

Placeholder assets kept the first prototype focused on mechanics. Klei's first Don't Starve jam prototype used Link from Zelda as a stand-in hero.

Placeholder art, music and plot let a team iterate on design before committing to content.

Klei followed how players wanted to play and built co-op. Players showed they wanted to play the solo-built Don't Starve cooperatively, so Klei made Don't Starve Together.

Gadgets that rewrite guard behaviour create cascading chaos. The Terror Dart makes an enemy panicked and paranoid, so they may accidentally kill their own teammates.

It goes beyond moving a guard: it changes how the AI acts and lets the player trigger chain reactions.

Reveal the perception system fully to make players feel like apex predators. Mark of the Ninja draws guards' vision cones, shows light and shadow on the ninja's sprite, and previews sound pulses before a noise is made, so detection is binary and readable.

How much of a perception system you surface sets the feel. A hidden system like Alien: Isolation's Xenomorph keeps tension high, while a revealed one trades tension for confidence. "With the info on screen, there's no arguing about what's happening in the system."

Clear information turns guessing into planning traps. Producer Jamie Cheng found he cared far more about building elaborate death traps than guessing whether a guard would hear him. Because the information is already fair, detection can be near instant.

"I wasn't nearly as interested in guessing whether a guard would hear me or not, and way more interested in creating an elaborate death trap." Refuge zones and gadgets can also create the predator feel, but clear information gets players there faster.

Reusing combat mechanics for negotiation cut the cost of conversations. Griftlands uses a card deck for both: negotiation has resolve like health, gambits like attacks, composure as defence and arguments like shields. Players can beat enemies up or talk them round.

Cards like threaten and segue mirror fight cards like elbow strike and feint. Klei: "having a chat with someone requires the same design skills and workload as punching them in the nuts."

Reward restraint to make non-lethal play a challenge. Mark of the Ninja took Thief's ideas into a side scroller and added rewards for finishing without killing.

Thief enforced the same restraint as a constraint on higher difficulties instead of a reward.

Size each system's depth to how much it should matter. Mark of the Ninja first had an in-depth combat system with stances and parries, so players tried to sneak, failed, then went Rambo through the level. Simplifying combat showed players that sneaking was the point.

Designer Nels Anderson: "the amount of presence it had in the design was about proportional to how important we thought it should be, that's when it sat about right."