Editor: If you enjoyed this video, you’ll also enjoy a more in depth article on Minecraft game design.
Hello! This is Brice Morrison, game design and Editor of The Game Prodigy.com, the site for practical Game Design. Today we’re going to talk about making a sandbox game, and the requirements for doing so.
Sandbox games are one of the great genres in all of video games. Will Wright is one of the most famous designers credited with pioneering this genre. While working on early games of his own, he found that he enjoyed playing around in his level editor tool more than actually playing the game itself. This concept eventually became SimCity.
Sandbox games allow the player to come up with their own goals, to choose the path that interests them most. Sandbox games typically have a wide variety of activities that the player can engage in, and the game itself provides minimal guidance as to which to pursue. This gives players a great sense of freedom and can be very condusive to incredible player creativity.
But what are the keys to a successful sandbox game? Can you just take any game, get rid of the order of levels, and call it a sandbox title? Well, not exactly.
The term “sandbox” is actually very useful, because in order to make a sandbox game, you need a lot of sand. What I mean by this is that for a game to allow for true sandbox gameplay, players need to see that there are enough interesting moving parts for them to get their hands dirty with. If a game only has one or two blocks to play with, then players are going to exhaust the play space very quickly. They’re going to see everything you can do in a short amount of time. But if there are more, then the combinations can seem endless and peak their interests.
In this example, there are a couple of things that players can stamp down in this world to build their own level and then play through it. However, if we give them only two things, then it isn’t very interesting. Sure, you can move the trees around and place enemies in different places, bu with the jellies. Bt in a short amount of time, players have felt like they’ve already explored everything. The entire space has been made, or at least, they can think of everything else that hasn’t been made.
They key is to add enough features so that it seems like the possibilities are endless. Once you hit that point, then it’s much easier for players to enjoy creating their own ideas. Humans can only hold a handful of ideas in our head at once, and we can extrapolate a system out but so far. Once the capabilities of a game design cross that threshold, then the kinds of things that it looks like you can do in the sandbox start to look much greater.
One important distinction that I should make here is that there is a careful balance here between the rules that the game imposes and the rules that the player makes up for themselves. This is where the real meat of sandbox game design comes into play. For example, in SimCity, the player still needs to cater to the rules of building a city using plumbing, electricity, and so forth. In Minecraft, the player still needs to build a fort at night to stay away from the zombies. These tiny rules make it a game and push the player in a creative direction. If it didn’t have any rules, it wouldn’t really be a game.
Sandbox games are one of greatest examples of good game design because they take advantage of the medium of interactivity. Sandbox games are one of the only forms of art where players can actually create things that the developers never imagined. And that is a very special experience.
Hi. It is really great to see you talking about sandboxes games. I think the genre is awesome, mostly because it opens the players minds to inspiration, motivate and give the tools to then to create that inspiration and when they do, they will want show it to others, which pave the way to build a community around the game. Those and others things.
If I may, I would like to add my 2 cents about the things that I believe is important in a sandbox game.
1 – Interation between elements of the game
In games there is what the player(s) control directly, the environment and the interaction between both. This is common and expected. But when the environment interacts with itself it opens the doors to new levels of interest and a more meaningful experience. For exemple: imagine if in a city building game building schools would improve the quality of other public services and lower the criminality in the area, or if building a university with civil engineering course would improve the height and max occupation capacity of buildings and architecture course would improve their appearance and this, in turn, would increase the value of the area, and so on..
This could alow the player to feel that an action here have an impact there, that focusing on particulars aspects of the game or comming up with small but elegant solutions have a great impact in the whole environment, that the game is amplifying their actions. Making this particular to a gameplay and not something that the player could easly find in the internet would let him feel that he is a mastermind in the game´s world and make then capable of creating great, unique and, finally, valuable things in the game.
The fun thing about sand is how the grains of sand interact with each other in a way that make it fun to play and a interesting medium of expression. And there is basicaly just one type of object here. I am not trying to make a counter argument here but to work on the idea, if you add water to the play, that also changes how the sand grains interact, it will make it more fun and give the player a more versatil medium.
2 – Player´s Avatar/character as the player´s only agent of interaction in environment.
Maybe this would require further investigation, but I believe that it would improve the experience if the only agent of interaction on the game´s universe that the player could use was the player´s avatar or the character he controls. Well, maybe this is nothing new too. Avatars can easily become a complicated subject, specially when the player wants to make it something more then he is or something else. I think the theme “avatar” deserves a post in the blog (like.. where it goes in the Game Design Canvas? If you think about it, it can be part of all components). I may be using the term wrongly here, but everybody call the player´s character in World of Warcraft avatar so… I think the name ‘agent’ would be more appropriate for the sake of my argument.
The idea came up after seeing the game that you used as exemple and realizing how the experience would change if, instead of placing the trees by selecting the location with the mouse, the bubble was the one who would ‘plant’ the tree.
This is specially important in sandbox games because the player will want to interact and be creative in a world that is alien to him and, since the player´s agent is native to that world, if designed well it can be the best link between the player´s desires and the game´s world and the world´s response could come to the player thought his agent. Beware though, doing this wrongly can backfire and break the sense of realism of the game, maybe the key is to create strong, believable links between the game´s world and the player´s agent, and between the player´s agent and the player.
Those two aspects can increase the level of immersion of the player in the game. That is important in any game, but specially in sandbox games.
I hope I didn´t extended myself too much here and that I could add something.
@Victor, that’s a great point, having lots of interactivity between the parts is important to make it feel like a cohesive system. That’s one of the reasons behind the success of The Sims, there are so many systems at work that it’s interesting to see what it will do (of course it’s also a horror to debug :)
I personally think there is room for sandbox games with and without avatars, Will Wright’s work being a great example. But there is something special about actually being in the world.
Dude. Minecraft isn’t so much made by the sandbox in my opinion as it is made by the monsters. Didn’t you notice how most updates are about harder monsters?