The base unit of a design. This is anything that can react with anything else in any way:
For instance in an adventure game, every inventory object, every item that the player can interact with, every NPC and the player themselves are all entities. In a FPS, any missile that an NPC fires is an entity, as is an exploding section of wall or an exploding dustbin.
As a game has more entities, the ways that they can react together increases geometrically. Thus entity relationship management becomes necessary.
Managing the relationship of game design entities (see Entity).
As the number of entity types in a game increases, the relationships between them increases geometrically, so for instance in a game with 3 entity types there are 3 possible relationships. For a game with 4 entity types there are 12 and so on.
For games such as large adventure games where there may be many different entities, it will become necessary to manage this in some way, by creating standard interactions, or reducing the number of entities available in any one scene.
The way a game moves from beginning towards a (possibly undefined) end. The most common game progression is linear, however many other game progression structures exist.
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