Designing for Emergent Gameplay

ULTIMATE CLIMAX BALL EXTREME was our attempt at designing for emergence.

Emergence, usually, is a sort of happy accident in a large scale game. While not impossible, designing for it on a small scale is certainly tough. We thought the best way to handle it would be to use minimal rules, and allow for lots of player to player interaction.

As such, our game presents players with a ball and a net, then lets them chose what they want to do with them.

Other emergent mechanics in our game came by accident. One of said mechanics is the team mechanic. It was at first a bug with the goal system that made it so that if you have the same name, it plays the winning vuvuzela out of both people's phones. We left this bug in, since we thought it could be used to make teams.

Emergence is really really tough to design for, but I think we managed to nail it.