In game feel terms, constraints de?¬? ne sensation. If objects are packed in, spaced tightly
relative to the avatar??™s motion, the game will feel clumsy and oppressive, causing anxiety and frustration. As
objects get spaced farther apart, the feel becomes increasingly trivialized, making tuning unimportant and
numbing thoughtless joy into thoughtless boredom.
Concurrently to the implementation of your system, you should be developing some kind of spatial context
for your motion. You should put in some kind of platforms, enemies, some kind of topology that will give
the motion meaning. If Mario is running along with an endless ?¬? eld of blank whiteness beneath him, it will be
very di?¬? cult to judge how high he should be able to jump. So you need to start pu ing platforms in there to
get a sense of what it will be like to traverse a populated level.
Constraint is also the mother of skill and challenge. Think of a football ?¬? eld: There are these arbitrary
constraints around the sides of the football ?¬? eld that limit it to a certain size. If those constraints weren??™t
there, the game of football would have a very di?¬? erent skill set and would arguably be a lot less interesting
because you could run as far as you want in one direction before bringing the football back.
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