Welcome to Digital Play Zone!

I’m Winn Liu. Replayability isn’t necessary in games, but it adds a sense of depth and community to a game. It can make your game from an already good game to a great game.

That's why in today's post, I will be talking about why replayability is good for your games and how we can implement them.

Now what are the pros to having replayability in games?

For starters, it allows players to experience a new side of your game that they otherwise would not have seen. I have had many shocking revelations where I realised that the game hinted at a plot twist long before it happened.

Allowing for replayability can also let your players experience the amount of thought you put into the world and story of your game. Without replaying the game, they would most likely miss out on a bunch of subtle details that games have to push you in the right direction.

One last thing replayability lets you do is to build a loyal community around your game. These loyal players will play your game over and over improving the lifespan of your game.

Random Number Generators (RNG) and Procedurally generated content can be a good way to induce players to replay your games.

Rougelikes is a genre based on the 1980s game: Rogue. Roguelikes are games where you play you play an endless amount of procedurally generated content until you die. Once you die, you lose everything and have to restart from the very beginning.

I mostly see roguelikes use a dungeon crawler or turn based gameplay. Such as Hades, Don’t Starve and the recently popular game known as Buckshot Roulette.

These games use randomness to keep things fresh and exciting every time. It gives players a sense of excitement wondering if they will be able to beat their previous high score.

These games tend to be very fast paced or highly tense as when you eventually die, the adrenaline you will feel will be unthinkable.

Multiple choice games rely on different methods to keep players replaying the game. They tend to exploit the curiosity of human nature to make players want to play again.

These kinds of games rely heavily on the story and characters in the game. Your characters will have to be really thought out and thorough because if players don't like your characters or story, they will not be interested in finding out more.

Games like: Life is Strange and Five Nights at Freddy’s use multiple choice and ending extremely well. I in particular recommend trying out Life is Strange as I find that they understand and really thought out the characters and world of the game.

The final way to encourage replayability is through your world building. Adding elements, items, and NPCs that pertain to the main story across your map can really add a sense of life to your games.

It allows players to have the freedom to explore and divert from the main quest. Games Like Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto V and Marvel Spiderman on the PlayStation 4 are extremely good at allowing game players to get sidetracked and create their own journey.

Having a community in your games is probably one of the most effective ways to keep players replaying your game, as the community would create even more unique challenges, speed runs and playthroughs that would encourage people to replay over and over again.

Things you could do to foster your community would be to include multiplayer, leaderboards or user created content. These elements allow players to create and compete with others.

Last but not least, playtest your game. I may sound like a broken record by now, but I really do believe that playtesting is the most important aspect of game design. You will never be able to know what your audience likes if you don't playtest.

Playtesting can let you figure out what and where players find it fun allowing you to further improve the replayability of that part.

Replayability is something that most games can benefit from it can help you to increase the lifespan of your game as well as make your game have a better reputation.

Here are the notes to remember whenever you’re implementing replayability.

Thank you for reading and I hope that you have learnt something today! I look forward to playing some of your games one day. If you have any questions to do with game design, feel free to contact me!