Non-mechanic: Tweaks and Changes

A Time For Changes

It's that time, friends and readers!  I mentioned way back in the other boring stuff entry that when stuff changed, I would be above-board about things that had changed.  Well, some of those changes have come to pass, and this post has just been published immediately after those edits.

Some of this has happened because I stopped posting Game Mechanics Pokedex entries to the corresponding topic on the Unity Forums.  The user interaction was so thin when I was prompting for it, that it simply wasn't doing any good.  I stopped prompting for feedback from my colleagues, and almost immediately after, got tons of feedback.

Counter-intuitive...but I'll go with it.  The point, as said before, is to provide a helpful overview of common game mechanics so that designers can create better games.

Anyways, to the changes!

Errata

1. Quick-Time Events - In "What Makes the Mechanic Distracting?", added a bullet-point for a criticism of QTEs in general, failing to the beginning of a sequence.  My thanks to BoredMormon from the Unity community for that suggestion.
2. Also in Quick-Time Events - I missed a Designer Consideration, the "mean margin" across a QTE Sequence.  It's a useful datapoint, because it correlates directly to the difficulty of a sequence; if you don't have enough time to make the next action, it affects how the player performs the sequence.
3. In Leveling Up - I added a reference to the TVTropes page for 'Character Level', as there are additional cases of how the mechanic is used there.  Of note - TVTropes is primary a writer-based resource, approach it as a game design resource with caution.  Also, TVTropes will ruin your life.