Process
Decision variation test
You might say: does the answer change with the situation?
Replay a decision across changed resources, threats, positions and goals, recording why the preferred action changes or stays the same. Then watch target players to distinguish a deliberate preference from misunderstanding.
- What it does
- Checks that repeated core-loop decisions stay sensitive to context rather than becoming rote.
- Ask
- What reachable change in state makes a different action worth taking?
- Typical
- Use representative states with stated goals; compare alternatives and causal explanations, not a requirement that picks be evenly distributed.
- Trouble
- The same answer survives every relevant change, or apparent variety comes only from players not knowing the rules.
Connections
- See also: Playtest
- See also: Dominance check
- See also: Iterate
Sources
- Tynan Sylvester, Decision-Based Gameplay Design, Recognition; Evaluation; Design: dynamically generated decisions
The specific circumstances of each individual match make every instance of these decisions unique.
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Decision variation test" (choice-context-test) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/game-design/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
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