Blog 1: The Door Problem

Blog 1: The Door Problem

 By Payton Grady

The Reading

After reading the Gamasutra article, "'The Door Problem' of Game Design", I learned some interesting perspectives about game design. There are many factors to consider such as utility vs aesthetic, locking and unlocking, and differentiating types of player and non-player interaction. Despite being such a common item, there are several complex decisions made. There needs to be a way to tell whether a door is locked, unlocked, open, openable, or permanently closed. As an example, colors might be used for this. But there are other practical factors that need to be accounted for such as how many players can enter a door, when certain players can enter, whether or not enemies can spawn, what allows the door to close, and when the door can close. In general, doors can have several distinguishing features.

The Sketches

While brainstorming door ideas, I considered how different games handle doors. Skyrim, for example, has locks on doors and might have doors that are barred from the other side. Battlefront 2 uses blast doors that slide open, without having to do any pushing or pulling. Halo has similarly functioning doors, but the game indicates which ones are locked and unlocked by using red and blue respectively. With these on my mind, I settled on something complex yet intuitive: a set of sliding double doors with a rotating bar to lock and unlock it. The thought process going into this is that when the bar is down, the door is locked but can still be opened. It just needs to be unlocked first. People generally associate green with go and red with stop, but I would go with blue instead of green to tell the player that this door is open. The double doors would be blue, but the lock/bar would be red to signify that the door is not yet usable. To do this, players would either have to press a button and wait for the door to slowly open up, or use a key.