So, I faced a tough challenge – to come up with a fresh idea that would make the gameplay engaging yet easy to understand. Not an easy task, as you can imagine – Steam is full of dull, uninspired games. Many game designers struggle with this problem, and I’ve spent a lot of time chasing that “fun” gameplay idea myself, but so far, I’ve come up empty-handed.
If I put together everything I want to see in my game, I end up with quite a long list of requirements! Let’s start by fixing one thing: it should be a team-based game, where one team fights another. What else do we know about the gameplay?
- Although it’s a team game, it shouldn’t require constant communication between teammates – each player should have a clear, fixed role and understand how their individual actions contribute to the team’s victory.
- Players from opposing teams should constantly interact. Interactions within the team and with the environment are also beneficial for gameplay.
- The game should offer meaningful choices as it progresses – decisions that genuinely impact the team’s success. Whenever possible, players should be spared from making meaningless choices that have no effect on the match.
- Players should be able to evaluate the effectiveness of their choices. They will experiment in various situations, and they need to understand which of their outcomes were beneficial and which were not – ideally, in measurable terms.
- Player progression should be handled carefully to avoid a “snowball effect”, where one team pulls too far ahead and the other has no chance to recover. It’s better to reward successful actions with one-time progress toward victory rather than with permanent power boosts.
- The game should avoid adding dull, repetitive tasks just for the sake of variety – artificial complexity is worse than simplicity.
- Rewards should be distributed to both teams evenly, at a steady pace, preventing players from speedrunning their way to victory.
- The core mechanics – the routine actions that make up the bulk of the gameplay – should be visible to the enemy team. What you’re doing most of the time should be observable by your opponents, and vice versa. This visibility allows players to learn from stronger opponents, even after losing.
- The game as a whole should have its own rhythm. Intense moments should alternate with calmer ones, giving players time to both focus and relax.
- Above all, the gameplay should remain simple and intuitive.
All these points are essentially a distilled summary of my previous posts. They grew out of analyzing the mistakes I made while building earlier versions of the game. There are quite a few of them, and getting all these principles to coexist peacefully is no easy task. For example, gameplay should be varied – yet compact, free of unnecessary clutter, and simple enough to grasp quickly. How do you even begin to balance all that?
In search of answers, I started reading tons of articles on gameplay design – and that’s when collections of game mechanics came to my rescue. In such articles, authors catalog mechanics and compile them into lists. There are many like these out there, featuring dozens or even hundreds of mechanics – 50 (Monkey’s Lunch), 100 (GMTK), or even 300! (Squidi.net)
I can’t recall exactly which list I was looking at, but two mechanics really caught my attention: Physics and Parkour.
Physics
Physics in games is one of those things that makes virtual worlds feel truly alive. It relies on familiar, intuitive rules – objects fall, collide, swing, bounce off each other. The player doesn’t need to study a tutorial to understand how a ball rolls or why a bridge collapses under weight – it just feels right. Because of that, physics becomes a natural way to draw the player in, to build trust in the world, and to make the controls feel more tangible.
But physics is valuable not just because it’s familiar. It’s also a powerful generator of emergent situations and unexpected solutions. The developer only sets the rules – mass, friction, elasticity – and from there, the system begins to live its own life. One player might stack crates to make a ladder, another might hurl them at enemies, and a third might block a doorway with them. That freedom makes every session unique: wherever there’s physics, there’s room for improvisation and for stories that can’t be scripted. Many of the most memorable gaming moments are born not from storylines, but from the unplanned collision of physical systems.
Parkour
Parkour is perhaps one of the most expressive and emotionally charged mechanics in games – and it’s closely tied to physics, the physics of movement. It evokes that same sense of freedom we feel when running, jumping, or climbing in real life. Even if the controls are simplified to just a few buttons, the player still feels it’s them overcoming obstacles, catching that ledge, or leaping away at the last possible moment.
However, parkour isn’t always about realism. Often, it goes beyond the limits of the real world: characters run along walls, push off ceilings, swing from ropes, or use jetpacks and magical impulses. The goal isn’t strict adherence to physics, but rather the feeling of movement – the mix of lightness, control, and risk.
From a historical perspective, parkour was almost a revolution in how games handled movement. Once upon a time, characters could only jump along preset arcs – like in old platformers. But when developers introduced mechanics like grabbing onto ledges and pulling up, game worlds suddenly felt deeper. There was a new sense that the player was truly interacting with the environment rather than just moving through a predesigned path. Think of the first Prince of Persia or Tomb Raider – those moments when the hero barely catches the edge of a cliff became a symbol of living, dynamic gameplay.
Sports Games
Physics and parkour are essentially two sides of the same phenomenon – the interaction between humans, movement, and space. In real-world sports, this connection is everywhere. Football, hockey, basketball, tennis, boxing, racing – all revolve around how a person learns to master both their own body and the laws of physics. The ball bounces, the ice is slippery, the power of a strike must be precise, the angle of a jump calculated perfectly. It’s always a balance between inner control and external forces. And that’s exactly why sports are fascinating even to those who’ve never held a hockey stick or sat behind a racing wheel: the physics are intuitive, but the execution demands skill.
In team-based video games, the same formula works just as well. When characters slide, leap, pull off risky maneuvers, or use momentum, players are engaging with the same principles – controlling motion, feeling weight and inertia, and treating the environment as an ally. This makes the gameplay both exciting and readable even to spectators. Physics and parkour create a shared language of interaction, one that communicates without words. We see how precisely a jump is timed, how perfectly a dash is executed, or how fragile the balance is in a collision. All of this generates tension, thrill, and respect for mastery – whether it happens on a field or on a screen.
Wall-to-Wall Sliding
Physics is, at its core, about inertia and collisions, while parkour is about using not just your legs, but your entire body to move through space. Combined, they create a unique sense of physical presence within the game world. That’s when I imagined a mechanic blending the two: players move not by running on the ground, but by pushing off walls with their hands. The floor is so slippery that walking is nearly impossible – you can only slightly steer your trajectory. The movement flow comes from a sequence of pushes, impacts, and impulses, as players use the environment itself as a means of locomotion.
In such a setting, physics becomes a full-fledged battleground. Players can collide, knock each other off course, and interfere with each other’s objectives. Movement turns into a skill-based challenge, full of risk and precision. While sliding, a character isn’t entirely in control – and that lack of control creates tension, where every mistake costs momentum or leads to a dangerous crash.
Of course, such a mechanic demands incredibly fine-tuned implementation. Tiny details make all the difference – friction coefficients, push force, jump timing. A single imbalance can turn smooth, exhilarating motion into something clumsy or frustrating. This is especially true in platformers: thousands of games feature jumping from one platform to another, yet only a few feel right. In successful ones, the timing of a jump, landing, and impulse is tuned to milliseconds, creating that flow state where the controls feel like an extension of the player’s body.
So the next step was to test the idea in practice – to see whether the movement would actually feel as fun and unusual as it did in my imagination. On paper, everything looked great, but I quickly discovered that implementing such a mechanic in Force of Nature 2 was impossible. The entire world there is structured as a grid of cells, each either passable or not. Mountains and obstacles can be rendered at an angle, but from the physics standpoint, their edges are just neatly stacked steps of square tiles. All borders run only in two perpendicular directions, which means I can’t use arbitrary angles when building a level – and those are essential for the mechanic to work.
Still, that’s not a big deal. All I needed was to test the theory in practice. So I decided to leave Force of Nature 2 behind and continue the development as a completely new project.
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