How to make interesting choices

Most kinds of games are made of choices. In shooters you choose which weapons to carry, which to use in each situation, which enemies to prioritize, and where to take cover. In strategy games you might choose which resources to gather, which types of units to train, and how to position your units. You could say that almost the definition of a game is a series of choices that affect each other. So, the most fundamental challenge of game design is to make these choices interesting.

To be interesting, a choice must let the player exercise some intellect. That means it must have 3 traits:

It matters what the player picks
The player knows what each option does
It's not obvious which option is best

The first two are relatively easy. As long as the options aren't all equally good in every situation, it matters what the player picks. A lot of games fail the second trait by not explaining their rules, withholding quantitative information like how much damage an item will deal, but avoiding this design flaw is not hard. Just tell the player what each item does.

The third trait is much harder. What can failure look like in practice?

Some of the early Assassin's Creed games fell into a style of combat design where there's a 1:1 mapping between your abilities and enemy types you're supposed to use them against. For example, against normal enemies you're supposed to wait for them to attack and then use the 'counter' button, but against enemies with spears you can't use the counter button, you have to use the 'dodge' button followed by a normal attack. And against shielded enemies neither of those work; you have to 'kick' to knock their shield aside and then attack. I might've gotten the specifics wrong, but it was something like that. This design is bad because it's always obvious which option you should use, because it's completely determined by which type of enemy is attacking you at the moment.

Another example is the elemental damage spells in many RPGs. In Lost Odyssey, water spells are strong against fire-themed enemies, fire spells strong against wind-themed enemies, wind spells strong against earth-themed enemies, and earth spells strong against water-themed enemies. These don't create any interesting decisions because which element you should use is completely determined by which type of enemy you're attacking.

To make better combat, we should make the player consider multiple factors to decide what move to make.

In Jedi: Fallen Order, there are 2 main defensive options: block and dodge, and either can work on any enemy, but each has pros and cons depending on the situation. Blocking is easier to execute, but it costs stamina, so you can't do it forever. Dodging doesn't cost anything, but you have to pick a direction to dodge in, and consider whether that direction puts you in a good place. If you're facing multiple enemies, you need to make sure you're not dodging into another attack, and that you're not getting surrounded. It's not perfect, but it shows how you can create tradeoffs in an action game.

In Hollow Knight, you have several movement abilities, such as jump, horizontal dash, wall jump and double jump. You can't block, so you have to use these tools to position yourself out of harm's way. Since it's all based on positioning, which abilities you can use to avoid an attack depends on where you are relative to the enemy, whether there's a wall or a platform nearby, whether you've already used your dash and double jump since the last time you landed, etc. And you have to think about more than just avoiding one attack at a time, because you have to avoid getting cornered, and you want to stay in a position where you can counterattack. These are just some of the things you think about when deciding how to maneuver in Hollow Knight.

A lot of interesting games are based on positioning multiple units, such as Chess, Go, Into The Breach, and Telepath RPG. Having pieces that can move in different ways, or attack at different angles, is one way to create a lot of interesting choices.

But not all interesting games use positioning. I'd like to highlight Dominion and Prismata which don't:

In Dominion, the main decision you make is which card to buy each turn. Cards can have a lot of different tradeoffs: victory cards are what make you win, but you don't want to buy them too early, because they clog your deck and prevent you from drawing your money cards. Some action cards can draw you more cards, but you don't want to have too many of those, because you can only play one action per turn by default. Some cards just lift that very restriction. Some cards let you get rid of your worst cards so you can draw your better ones more often, but those cards themselves can become dead weights once you've gotten rid of all the other bad ones. Some cards let you add bad cards to your opponent's decks.

In Prismata, you make decisions like how much economy to invest in before you start investing in attackers, which technologies to invest in, and which attackers to use. Different units are available for purchase in each match, and almost every decision depends on that. If there are good defensive units or powerful units that require a lot of technology, you might want a bigger economy. The red technology generally gives access to the best attackers, but it can't help you defend when you inevitably need to. The green technology is the most flexible because you can store it across turns instead of having to spend it or waste it, but it's usually not the best at attacking nor the best at defending.

So those are some examples of what success and failure can look like. How about some general advice for creating interesting choices?

Give items multiple uses or effects

In Hollow Knight, the ground pound spell gives you a second of invincibility, so it's a defensive move as well as an attack. The fireball spell interrupts falling so you can use it to stay in the air for longer, and it also pushes you back a bit, so you can accidentally push yourself into danger.

In Hollow Knight you also choose which "charms" to take into battle, which give you different bonuses. There's one that removes the slight knockback you take whenever you swing with your weapon. This can be used to let you stay in place so you can hit an enemy more times in a row, or it can be used to prevent accidentally knocking yourself into danger while swinging.

Have multiple ways to overcome obstacles

In Into The Breach, you can deplete an enemy's health by attacking, or you can push them into water (where they drown), or push them into each other (dealing collision damage to both).

Have items interact with each other

Items can be stronger or weaker when used in combination with other items, or they can create or cost opportunities to use others.

In Prismata, high-tech red units have the major drawback that the red resource is not useful for defense, so it'll be wasted in the late game when you have to spend everything on defense. If there are "red sink" units available that give you an outlet for all the red at that stage of the game, high-tech red units are better.

In Dark Souls, attacking, blocking, and rolling all draw from the same stamina meter, so attacking too much at once can leave you unable to defend yourself, and blocking or rolling too many times can leave you unable to attack.

In Hollow Knight, hitting enemies with a downward swing while in the air ("pogoing") bounces you upward and refills your dash and double jump.

Let differences in timing or positioning affect the outcome of an action

In most platformers, you can jump high by holding down the jump button, or jump low by just tapping it. Also, you can double jump at any point in your jump arc, and it generally *sets* your vertical momentum rather than adding to it, so you get the most height by double jumping at the peak of your first jump, but the most horizontal distance by double jumping near the end.

Some other examples of interesting choices:

Unit types in real-time strategy games: in Age of Empires 2, most unit types have about 3 possible counters. For example, knights (heavy cavalry) are weak against pikemen, monks, and camel riders. If your opponent is massing knights, any of these 3 could be a good choice, with different pros and cons that make you want to choose differently depending on the specific situation:

Pikes are the hardest counter, but they're slower than knights, so they can't actually force a fight against them. The knights can just run away from any fight they won't win.

Monks are effective because they can convert enemy units, and knights are individually high value, so one conversion means a lot. They're also great because they're ranged, so if knights are attacking your walls, you can chase them away with monks without having to go outside your walls and face a straight fight (useful if you're too outnumbered to win, even with your counter units). But they don't scale well, because they require a lot of micromanagent since you have to manually assign each monk a separate target for maximum efficiency.

Camel riders are a softer counter, but they have the advantage of being slightly faster than knights, so they're the only one of the three that can actually force a fight against them.

But there's also a fourth option, which is to just keep making your primary unit: either your own knights, or something else general purpose. Why would you want to make something that's just neutral against the enemy's units instead of something that counters them? Because counter units are not very general purpose. All of these units die easily to fire from defensive buildings, and aren't very good at destroying buildings or worker units. So they might win you a battle, but then not be useful for attacking the enemy's base, giving the enemy a chance to come out with a counter to your counter. But if you stick to making general-purpose units and manage to come out ahead, then you also have the tools to attack their base.

Some abilities in turn-based RPGs:

Buffs (abilities that have no immediate effect but make you stronger for the rest of the fight) have a short term vs long term tradeoff. Their value depends on how long the fight will last. This can be an interesting choice because unlike the type of enemy you're facing, that can be difficult to judge.

Abilities that damage the entire enemy team: these make you weigh the benefit of doing more total damage against the benefit of focusing one enemy at a time to reduce incoming damage sooner. This depends not only on how many enemies you're facing, but also on how dangerous the most dangerous one is.