PlixPlex Challenge Arcade Game Design
We spoke with Logan Presely the Senior Game Designer at PlixPlex Virginia Beach’s first and only challenge arcade about where he gets his inspiration for the many themed game rooms at PlixPlex.
“How does your design process work?”
“The process for designing challenge arcade games generally begins with a very wide pool of research. In the early days of my challenge arcade research, this largely involved me finding every video on the internet that I could of people playing in any of the couple hundred challenge arcades around the world. I even dug into non-english games just so I could see gameplay mechanics. After that, I went through my backlog of escape room puzzle designs that couldn’t work in a traditional escape room setting and also sought inspiration from video games and board games.”
“Where else do you find inspiration?”
“Honestly, I can draw that inspiration from just about anywhere. Challenge arcade games are always short and tend to have just a couple of mechanics, so all you need is to extract little elements from games (both digital and physical), media, or even real life and mash them together to have a solid starting point.”
“What makes your challenge games unique?”
“It tends to be that other challenge arcade puzzles are a bit more shallow than I prefer and often require that I put my own twist on them or meld two games together. In contrast to this, video games, board games, and escape room puzzles tend to be a bit too dense and often require that I strip one or two mechanics out of them.”
“Do you test the game designs?”
“Yes, the second step in the process involves a lot of testing and anticipating player behavior to find points where players may encounter friction. While most people view complexity and depth as being fairly synonymous, the key difference between the two is friction. Friction is anything in game design which introduces difficulty that invokes negative emotion whereas other forms of difficulty may evoke positive emotions like gratification.”
“What is an example of Friction in games?”
“A good example of friction might be text that is tough to read or something being used in an unintuitive but non-interesting way. Removing friction from a design requires that you build an understanding of the player behavior in a game so you can make the process of playing the game seamless even if the gameplay itself is fairly challenging. Some puzzles and gameplay mechanics that work in other game settings won’t translate to immersive entertainment whether because of the need for outside knowledge, time limitations, or differences between interfacing with digital vs physical space.”
“How is your design process unique?
“The third step for me personally involves entering a dark room and simply thinking. This could be a bath with no lights or a dark room with a soft bed. The main goal here is to remove distractions and simply spend time processing the info I found in the first two steps. This also acts as a good transition between pre-design (research and ideation) and post-design (the phase where you make the final necessary choices to make a game such as the selection of text or engineering drawings).”
“What do you look for when you start to construct a new game?”
“The fourth step and the final one before implementation is post-design. This is where the rubber meets the road and game designs tend to get thrown in the trash if they aren’t feasible from a budget or fabrication perspective. There is a key distinction between knowing you need to have a sequence of four colors and actually choosing that sequence of colors. The need to consider player behavior resurfaces here as you need to not only account for the visual aspects of a build, but also the structural ones. Nothing is public proof, but some things are public resistant, so you need to design games that can last a long time and a lot of uses.”
“Do you have a lot of designs that just didn’t work”
“You inevitably realize that 999 out of a thousand challenge game designs won’t work for one reason or another, but making waste piles of notes is part of the process.”
Truly Unique Interactive Gaming in Virginia Beach
Logan Presley, the Senior Challenge Game Designer at PlixPlex challenge arcade finds inspiration for his games all around him and immerses himself in the experience. His continued research and passion to provide a unique interactive gaming experience makes PlixPlex not only Virginia Beach’s first challenge arcade but also the most unique challenge arcade in Virginia.