Flow, what is it, and how do you use it?It's often that you hear people say that a game has bad flow when it comes to criticism, in fact, it's the type of criticism that I often level at quests. But what IS even flow? It's somewhat of an abstract concept, and people telling you that your game doesn't have any flow really don't mean anything unless you understand the concept.
This? This is an introduction to flow.
Flow in game design refers to how the player progresses through the game environment. Note that there is a difference between moving through the game environment and actually making progress through it. For example, if a player keeps walking in circles in a dungeon they are moving around a lot, but they are not making any progress.
A game has better flow the easier it is for players to figure out how to make progress through it. And again, there is a difference between figuring out what to do, and actually doing it. This does not necessarily mean that a hard puzzle breaks the flow of the game, as long as it does it for the right reasons and if the player is not stuck on it for a very long time. Because if they are, it's probably a peak on the difficulty curve, and should be addressed.
Speaking of which, and uneven difficulty curve often hurts the flow of a game. If the curve keeps jumping around the player will probably advance too fast through some content, while getting stuck at other parts. Note that a lack of flow does also not necessarily make a game bad. (Then again, "good" or "bad" is a matter of taste). One game I really like quite a bit is La-Mulana, but you can't with a straight face say that La-Mulana has good flow, because it does not.
The biggest hurdle when it comes to flow in a game is the fact that you, as in the creator, can't test flow yourself. Since flow is very heavily tied to what knowledge the player has about the game, so it becomes impossible for the author to test it, barring cases of amnesia. This is why bad flow is in general not a problem on repeated playthroughs, because the player is better prepared to deal with the obstacles. (This also makes it one of those things where you'll probably need a new play-tester for each iteration of your game if you want to test it, or one who has a deep understanding of how flow works).
Does that accurately explain what flow is? I'm trying to be very surface level here, but I might need to go into more details, let me know if so!
Now if we know what flow is and where the shortcomings may be, how do we design a game with good flow? Well luckily it goes hand-in-hand with a lot of other design principles, so barring edge cases (which your play testers should inform you about), there is not too much to it. Firstly, making sure you have an even difficulty curve. You'll never make a game that has a completely even curve, but striving for it should be enough. Another thing to keep in mind is to not have a too steep difficulty curve. Players need apt time to learn the things and mechanics you want them to display mastery of. (And in regards to new concepts it's worthwhile to spread them out over several, theoretical, play sessions so that the player has a chance to sleep in between).
Another important factor in making flow better is to avoid tedium. Games will inherently have repeating elements, but you have to make sure that they are enjoyable. To take an common example that happen in quests here: Starting the player with a low amount of life when they die or continue. The only thing this does is add extra tedium and grinding before the player can try whatever it was they were attempting again. It's not enjoyable to grind life on re-spawning bugs in Metroid 1, so I'm not sure what makes you think it's a good mechanic to include in your quest.
And to further expand upon that, if your game routinely asks the player to farm life on re-spawning objects (pots, etc) in other situations, consider just increasing drop rate of life from enemies and removing most of the re-spawning objects. If the player is not doing something that they feel is meaningful, it's probably a tedious task that needs to be looked over, and chances are that the task in question hurts the flow, though not necessarily by much.
Quite a bit of flow ties in to level design, but in general, previous principles apply. If an element in a dungeon causes the players to ask themselves "what the fuck am I suppose to do?", then that element breaks the flow. Again though, it's more of a knowledge thing than anything. If the biggest hurdle of your puzzle is figuring out how to interact with it rather than solving it then that should be a good sign that you're not conveying enough information to the player.
It's worth noting that too high difficulty, in relation to the difficulty curve, does ruin flow. If the player keeps dying too much then the task they are trying to do becomes tedious. Same goes with puzzles, if they are to steep of a jump up in difficulty, the players will just sit there for 20+ minutes staring at the screen without actually figuring out how to solve it. (And in such an instance, I'd say the game was poorly designed).
I think the reason why most puzzles in zelda games are overly simplistic is to make sure they don't stump players and break their flow. After all, the meat of Zelda games is exploration and combat, not puzzles.
So, if someone now tells you "The iron boots in OoT breaks the flow of the game, I'm glad they fixed it in the port", you should have an apt understanding of exactly why, rather than just a surface level feeling that you agree with it.
For further reading, you can look into:
Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda. In which the author analyses a few modern design philosophies in Zelda 1. Zelda 1 is an old game and it did a lot of things wrong. But it's also important to know that it did a lot of things right, and many of the design practices pioneered in that era has since grown and become standard.
That would be all for this time,
~Lunaria
Controversially, one of my biggest complaints about The Flow of Time was indeed the lack of flow. (It got a bit better though, hooray for past launch patching!).
Edited by Lunaria, 16 March 2016 - 02:49 PM.