Easy to pick up - Difficult to master

For this week, I'm going to talk about one approach to designing a game, especially casual games. The approach is to design a game that's easy to pick up, but difficult to master. This will give your game a very low barrier of entry but at the same time, provide longevity, a challenge and perhaps addiction (in the good sense of course). A few examples of games that uses this approach are Tetris, Bejeweled and Angry Birds.

Anyway, let's break the approach into two pieces.
 
Easy to pick up
As previously mentioned, designing a game that's easy to pick up gives the game a low barrier of entry. This allows the game to reach out to a much larger demographic ranging from the young to the old. But how exactly do you design a game that's easy to pick up? Simple... keep the controls and goals very basic. Let's use the aforementioned games as examples.

    Tetris
        Controls -     Left        - Move block to the left
                             Right      - Move block to the right
                             Down     - Move block down faster
                             Button 1 - Rotate block

        Goals     -    Create a solid horizontal line of blocks
       
    Bejeweled
        Controls -    Swap 2 adjacent tiles with one another either through selecting them or sliding them

        Goals     -    Make a connection of 3 or more tiles of the same type
       
    Angry Birds
        Controls -    Use your finger to pull back a slingshot and launch the birds

        Goals     -    Kill all the green pigs

Now before I continue, I just want to be clear that when I speak of controls, I'm not talking about the physical controls of the game, but rather, what the player can do in the game. Anyway... as you can see, these games have very basic controls and 1 clear goal for the player to achieve. This gives the player less time to learn and more time to play.

I used this approach for one of my games, Bubbly, which you can download from my website. Bubbly is essentially a platform game but with only one control - jumping - and the goal is to just reach the top. I gave it to some of my friends to play and they all enjoyed the easy to pick up controls but the difficulty of mastering some of the levels.

Difficult to master
Now, let's talk about giving your game difficulty. I'm just gonna touch on this very briefly because I plan to talk about difficulty in a future post. But for the sake of this week's topic, difficulty should be given to the player via introducing new obstacles that challenges the player's mastery of the game's controls rather than introducing new controls for them to learn. The player should only need to overcome any obstacle by using the same controls they had learned from the beginning of the game.

That's it for this week. Thanks for reading and see you next week!