GAMEPLAY LOOP

Your gameplay loop will largely depend on the themes and goals of the characters. For a traditional dungeon crawling game, your loop will be to discover the location of an interesting dungeon, explore it for treasure and secrets, return to town to spend your goods, repeat.

However, for more slice of life style games, you’ll most likely be focusing on the fallout of confrontations, leaning toward the roleplaying moments. For our college wrestling scenario you may find a loop like this: Practice for the match, Match, Deal with the fallout of the win or loss, repeat.

Finding distinct locations and scenes that your game will move through (the gameplay loop) can help you lock in what types of Paths you’ll need for your game, how you’ll handle hit points, and what kind of equipment if any you’ll want to use.