Immersion and How Death Breaks it.

when you're making a game, the first and most important thing has to be immersion. you can get a biker gang hooked on pony games if they're immersive enough.
of course, bigger titles tend to focus more on grabbing initial sales through buzzwords like "next gen" and "cutting edge" and "facebook compatible" than keeping players interested in the long term, but as anvil's going to be released on a "enjoy this, but plz donate i need to eat" distribution model, i'm more interested in constructing that feeling of complete envelopment by the game world.

in animation, flow and immersion is created by believable movement, and broken by the unbelievable, unlikely, and the abrupt or poorly constructed.

the rules about flow in animation or film still apply to games- if the game progresses sluggishly, or retreads old ground too often, or stops, that'll distance a player- but the rules are a lot harder to enforce, as the player has a lot of control.

for example, dying in most games breaks flow pretty hard. you're doing something carefully, you cut the wrong wire BOOM back to to square one. frustrating. there are a couple of places that have tried to work around this, notably Braid- where the time travel mechanic used in normal play is used seamlessly to travel backwards to the moment before demise. doesn't even feel like a mistake, half the time. i think Prince of Persia employs a similar mechanic.

but by and large, death is a penalty, and part of that penalty is usually some kind of setback- time, resources, gold, whatever. and that setback leads to real world frustration. on top of that, you've just sen your character -yourself- die...how can anything flow naturally from that? whilst you wait to 'respawn', suddenly you're back in your chair in the real world-you realise that you're watching a screen. even if just for a moment, this is a pretty rough break in immersion.
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so how do we beat this in anvil? turns out there's a few ways.

1. make the rules of the game clear and standardised. changing the rules without warning can feel unfair and frustrating.

2. make objectives, threats and rewards clear- even if the player has to do a little thinking about the path they'll need to take through them. ambiguity in any of these three areas is a surefire way to piss off a player. it's important not to be patronisingly simple about it though.

3. make death, when it comes, as painless (for the player, the character's obviously in a bit of pain) as possible. i plan to have the character quickly fall and be swooped up to the start position by ghostly hands (STORY STUFF WOAH) without ever really breaking flow.