Let's talk about Game Design!

[Blackbird]

As per the suggestion of @Eiwynn, I’m opening up a thread for discussions on the topic. Since the subject managed to derail an unrelated topic, I think that many people here would like a place to discuss this freely and share their thoughts and opinions.

Edit: I want to make this clear, becuase this misconception still managed to pop up on this thread:
Game Design is not a substitute word for Game Development. A Game Designer is a specific person involved in the development process, it is not synonymous with the much more generalised term of Game Development.

What is Game Design?Liz England explained it very well in the quoted content under the cut:

Summary

“THE DOOR PROBLEM”

“So what does a game designer do? Are you an artist? Do you design characters and write the story? Or no, wait, you’re a programmer?”

Game design is one of those nebulous terms to people outside the game industry that’s about as clear as the “astrophysicist” job title is to me. It’s also my job, so I find myself explaining what game design means to a lot of people from different backgrounds, some of whom don’t know anything about games.

The Door Problem

I like to describe my job in terms of “The Door Problem”.

Premise: You are making a game.

• Are there doors in your game?
• Can the player open them?
• Can the player open every door in the game?
• Or are some doors for decoration?
• How does the player know the difference?
• Are doors you can open green and ones you can’t red? Is there trash piled up in front of doors you can’t use? Did you just remove the doorknobs and call it a day?
• Can doors be locked and unlocked?
• What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open?
• Does a player know how to unlock a door? Do they need a key? To hack a console? To solve a puzzle? To wait until a story moment passes?
• Are there doors that can open but the player can never enter them?
• Where do enemies come from? Do they run in from doors? Do those doors lock afterwards?
• How does the player open a door? Do they just walk up to it and it slides open? Does it swing open? Does the player have to press a button to open it?
• Do doors lock behind the player?
• What happens if there are two players? Does it only lock after both players pass through the door?
• What if the level is REALLY BIG and can’t all exist at the same time? If one player stays behind, the floor might disappear from under them. What do you do?
• Do you stop one player from progressing any further until both are together in the same room?
• Do you teleport the player that stayed behind?
• What size is a door?
• Does it have to be big enough for a player to get through?
• What about co-op players? What if player 1 is standing in the doorway – does that block player 2?
• What about allies following you? How many of them need to get through the door without getting stuck?
• What about enemies? Do mini-bosses that are larger than a person also need to fit through the door?

It’s a pretty classic design problem. SOMEONE has to solve The Door Problem, and that someone is a designer.

The Other Door Problems

To help people understand the role breakdowns at a big company, I sometimes go into how other people deal with doors.

• Creative Director: “Yes, we definitely need doors in this game.”
• Project Manager : “I’ll put time on the schedule for people to make doors.”
• Designer: “I wrote a doc explaining what we need doors to do.”
• Concept Artist: “I made some gorgeous paintings of doors.”
• Art Director: “This third painting is exactly the style of doors we need.”
• Environment Artist: “I took this painting of a door and made it into an object in the game.”
• Animator: “I made the door open and close.”
• Sound Designer : “I made the sounds the door creates when it opens and closes.”
• Audio Engineer : “The sound of the door opening and closing will change based on where the player is and what direction they are facing.”
• Composer : “I created a theme song for the door.”
• FX Artist: “I added some cool sparks to the door when it opens.”
• Writer : “When the door opens, the player will say, ‘Hey look! The door opened!’ “
• Lighter: “There is a bright red light over the door when it’s locked, and a green one when it’s opened.”
• Legal: “The environment artist put a Starbucks logo on the door. You need to remove that if you don’t want to be sued.”
• Character Artist : “I don’t really care about this door until it can start wearing hats.”
• Gameplay Programmer: “This door asset now opens and closes based on proximity to the player. It can also be locked and unlocked through script.”
• AI Programmer: “Enemies and allies now know if a door is there and whether they can go through it.”
• Network Programmer: “Do all the players need to see the door open at the same time?”
• Release Engineer : “You need to get your doors in by 3pm if you want them on the disk.”
• Core Engine Programmer: “I have optimized the code to allow up to 1024 doors in the game.”
• Tools Programmer: “I made it even easier for you to place doors.”
• Level Designer: “I put the door in my level and locked it. After an event, I unlocked it.”
• UI Designer : “There’s now an objective marker on the door, and it has its own icon on the map.”
• Combat Designer : “Enemies will spawn behind doors, and lay cover fire as their allies enter the room. Unless the player is looking inside the door in which case they will spawn behind a different door.”
• Systems Designer : “A level 4 player earns 148xp for opening this door at the cost of 3 gold.”
• Monetization Designer : “We could charge the player $.99 to open the door now, or wait 24 hours for it to open automatically.”
• QA Tester: “I walked to the door. I ran to the door. I jumped at the door. I stood in the doorway until it closed. I saved and reloaded and walked to the door. I died and reloaded then walked to the door. I threw grenades at the door.”
• UX / Usability Researcher : “I found some people on Craigslist to go through the door so we could see what problems crop up.”
• Localization : “Door. Puerta. Porta. Porte. Tür. Dør. Deur. Drzwi. Drws. 문”
• Producer : “Do we need to give everyone those doors or can we save them for a pre-order bonus?”
• Publisher : “Those doors are really going to help this game stand out during the fall line-up.”
• CEO: “I want you all to know how much I appreciate the time and effort put into making those doors.”
• PR : “To all our fans, you’re going to go crazy over our next reveal #gamedev #doors #nextgen #retweet”
• Community Manager : “I let the fans know that their concerns about doors will be addressed in the upcoming patch.”
• Customer Support : “A player contacted us, confused about doors. I gave them detailed instructions on how to use them.”
• Player: “I totally didn’t even notice a door there.”

One of the reasons I like this example is because it’s so mundane. There’s an impression that game design is flashy and cool and about crazy ideas and fun all the time. But when I start off with, “Let me tell you about doors…” it cuts straight to the everyday practical considerations.

Basically, Game Design is a subcategory of Game Development concerned with the focus of analysing and creating good player experiences. It borrows from disciplines such as psychology, mathematics and architecture among others to create a framework on how to design a good experience. To break it down into the simplest explanation, a Game Designer asks the question “what makes a good game?”

In practice, Game Designers supply the rest of the development team with an outline of the basic functions and intent behind elements of a game, writes flowcharts outlining the gameplay loops, acts as a bridge between separate disciplines to solve questions that pop up during the process, and so on. A Game Designer puts all his focus and efforts into the actual gameplay experience.

For those interested, I’d recommend reading The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell.

Further reading material for those who want to get deeper acquainted with the topic:
Preproduction Blueprint by Alex Galuzin. Level Up! by Scott Rogers. And for those interested in Level Design, A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander is a great resource.

Game Design also touches upon another subject which is a vast rabbithole in and of itself, Game Psychology. This includes topics such as The Magic Circle, Suspension of Disbelief and Ludonarrative Dissonance, among others. I recommend, no, implore interested parties to read up on these subjects, because it’s endlessly interesting!

In hindsight, I realise that what I was struggling to formulate in the last thread was that CoG authors doesn’t always seem to understand the difference between continous mechanincs and discrete mechanincs.

Continous Mechanics refers to the active process of navigating the game world through movement and in-the-moment decision making. Racing Games incorporate this perfectly.

Discrete Mechanics refer to a more tactical, slow paced approach where the game affords you thinking time to make relevant decisions. City builders are a good example. Sometimes games can have both, but there’s usually a clear emphasis on one over the other.

I find quite often that CoG authors try to imitate continous mechanics without realising that the medium doesn’t translate into this kind of design. As text based games, CoG deals purely in the realm of Discrete Mechanics. It’s this mix up that I believe to be a recurring to source of some of the problems CoG’s can run into. For information limited to Discrete Mechanics, I’d suggest reading up on Board Game Design, as it’s similarly limited by it’s medium to Discrete Mechanics only.

Anyway, with that long introduction out of the way let’s dive into the topic! What Game Design elements do you prefer? What pitfalls do you think that most games run into in the process? (For me, it’s a failure to sufficiently bridge narrative, environments and gameplay together. Games that so often manage to reverse the “Show, don’t tell.” principle.) How do you think that this topic could lend further insight into the process of making Choice of Games? Let’s discuss!

[Zalim]

I heard that other topic was getting interesting, lol.

Blackbird, what games have you designed? Can we get links? It’d be cool to see some actual examples of all this stuff you’ve been speaking so knowledgeably about in action and I think more to the point than Wiki articles and such. I’m sure it would help to educate the authors you’ve been arguing with too.

[Gower]

Since this is all in a category called “game development,” I wonder if a more bite-sized topic than “let’s talk about game design” would be more discussable. This whole category is us talking about game design. It sounds like you want to have a thread offering a basic bibliography (including wikipedia links) and also educate about types of mechanics. Might be worthwhile narrowing the scope of your thread.

[DPerna]

I am in the process of creating the first chapter of the first game I will be creating in the CoG universe. The issue that I have is that most of my writing is in the short stories or flash fiction.

The issue that I have in creating a first demo is the focus on the story without stats or dynamic mic character building. It is realistically looking at how to narrow the direction a story can take in a meaningful way.

What I imagine is a 300-500 word introduction. A choice and 3 different paths to take that result in a different 200-300 words after the consequence of the choice. Then to do so where every choice then after is an either out of two choices. Where both choices create a different 200-300 word path. What I imagine it would mean is that it will be light on programming language but it would follow a story that changes based on the decisions that are made.

That in the end the there are consequences that might end a story before it really has a chance to begin if it follows one path. But if the opposite choice is made after a succession that it could be a different outcome all together.

[Eiwynn]

@Gower – The gist here is to start a general discussion … or rather to continue it from another thread. I think a general free-flowing discussion to begin with, hopefully spawning related threads that are more focused is called for.

This community has not had a conversation about mechanics in a long time and I think this is a great doorway into improving an understanding that many of us need.

@Blackbird – I am glad you took up my offer – thank you. I’ll respond sometime soon – just finishing up some things before I go rest.

[poison_mara]

I am more interested If a professional as @Blackbird uses one Cog as a sample, and explain the game mechanics, What goes well and what goes bad and how interwoven with the story to create a cohesive experience. Maybe compared with his own games. That will be super useful for me.

For example, Choice of Vampire of Choice of Dragon as early Cog could be really good examples.

[Blackbird]

@Zalim @poison_mara
I have no interest in framing myself as a professional, all I’m doing is bringing up a topic about something that came up during my education. My actual professional experience has been as a concept artist and 2D animator.

I’m more interested in a general discussion than delving into specific games, but we could talk about specific mechanics that has popped up in some of these games.

@Gower
Eiwynn already justified the need for discussion quite well, but I want to issue a reminder that Game Design is not an umbrella term for the whole process of Game Development, but refers to a specifc set of roles and theories within the process. I realise the wording makes it easy to mix it up, but they are not synonymous.

I’m only sharing all these links because I’m passionate about the subject and want to share what personally brings me a lot of joy and inspiration. I don’t want to make myself out as the de-facto authority on any subject, I genuinely just hope to spark an interesting discussion.

[E_RedMark]

Geez…that intro is kinda scary it’s like I’m stepping in a lecture at Uni and I’m late…and Blackbird is the teach

So…are you saying that Game design is like being…uh…the guy who is responsible of shooting the movie ? whatcha call it…producer ? or was it director ?

You know, this kinda bring back something I was told a long time ago . It was on G3 forums, and about a romance mod ? The author of said mod, told me something along the line that once you start coding you kinda start thinking differently then when you are writing .

Shrug I made a comment about her mod and a choice of dialogue that was given . And she said it translate differently when she start coding .

Hence why, what you said made me remember that and I wondered : Is that what could’ve happend to some writer ? They get lost (Or fall in love with coding) , and all the writing atmosphere become just lines of codes and lose…something ?

@Blackbird

How do you think that this topic could lend further insight into the process of making Choice of Games? Let’s discuss!

this is just a theory, but…maybe cose peoples learn to code ? what I mean is, they learn to code . They get better, they even learn how to fix their own codes and what not . Fix error, add a save-load for their demo and what not . But their skill in writing grow very very slowly in comparaison . Though thats not an issue for everyone, some writer just have the freaking gift (lucky them :P) .

Maybe that inbalance show ?

[Blackbird]

Geez…that intro is kinda scary it’s like I’m stepping in a lecture at Uni and I’m late…and Blackbird is the teach

Haah. I’m not as scary as I seem, I’m just socially inept as fuck.

Obviously I can only speak for my own experience here, but I found that once you learn the basics of the code it starts to flow on smoothly and you can put your focus on the writing. But I don’t know, I personally actually really enjoy the coding part which might have something to do with it, if you don’t like the coding I can imagine it being rather disruptive to your flow.

In big companies, the roles are often very restricted, so the two might never have to care about the other much at all. Personally, I think this is an issue, and is one of the factors that contributes to why the narrative can be so at odds with the gameplay at times. For example when your’e supposed to play as the good guy but commit mass murder every 5 minutes.

Though this is often the result of idiotic producers who only care about more guns and boobs.

[E_RedMark]

@Blackbird

For example when your’e supposed to play as the good guy but commit mass murder every 5 minutes.

Or lack of time to change it . Though in the exemple I’m thinking about, it was done for the purpose of ‘‘It gotta be different’’ . But it translated really badly . And still look weird to this day .

what I’m talking about ? lol in Swtor (an MMO) thats what they did . They created the Imperial side and run out of time . When they made the Republic side, they just threw that whole ‘‘It gotta be different’’ which translated in Jedi getting Bonus : Kill 40 mobster . Which feel wrong like hell . Then the exuse came that they run out of time . Nowdays, they are afraid of fixing anything (and dont have the money to do so) .

well thats like for movies and what not . But in choiceofgames, you have the author playing all the roles . They are the coder and the writer at the same time . So if something feel ‘‘Off’’ …it’s pretty much stem from them and them alone . At least in the early stage, since once they hand their work over…they have the choiceofgames staff to help them . And I don’t know what happen behind closed doors .

@Blackbird

but we could talk about specific mechanics that has popped up in some of these games.

the real question is : What are these mechanics . Cose that’s pretty vagues .

And there are all kind of games on this forums . You have management games that focus more on managing X then story (Sometimes the story is inexistant) . And you have romances games, and all kind .

[Blackbird]

The “we ran out of time” excuse is always shady. If you aren’t sure whether you’ll have enough time to complete a portion of the game, then you just scrap it altogether. Huge sacrifices are constantly made during the development process. Indeed, one of the first thing we learned was “kill your darlings.”

the real question is : What are these mechanics . Cose that’s pretty vagues . And there are all kind of games on this forums . You have management games that focus more on managing X then story (Sometimes the story is inexistant) . And you have romances games, and all kind .

Yeah no, that was in response to @poison_mara 's request for me to dissect a specific CoG to illustrate what I’m talking about. I meant to say that I’d rather talk about a specific example instead of a whole game.

I don’t want this thread to be me preaching around like I’m a bloody veteran or something, which is ironic given my opening post. The only thing I claim to know more about is the meaning of the term. (Looking at you @Gower and your growing number of likes… sigh.)

[The intended tone of my comment: playful and sassy. I love y’all.]

[Perihelion]

Agree with Gower that this is pretty broad. Why not pick a specific subject to discuss?

I’m working on a visual novel, not an IF game, but I think there are a lot of commonalities. (The main writing difference is that VNs are often more linear and are less likely to have self-insert protagonists.) My writing background is in linear fiction, and it was really interesting to think about choice design when moving into an interactive medium. In VNs at least the most common varieties of choices are branching the story (e.g. between different routes), influencing relationships with characters (stored in a variable), or just providing a bit of interactivity or flavor, but you can effectively use choices as a literary device even in something pretty linear. Here are a few examples of things you can do.

• Highlighting information you want the player to remember. The player is never paying as much attention as when they’re trying to decide what to do, so making them make a decision about something is a good way to get some foreshadowing or exposition to stick.

• Heighten tension by offloading a tense or high-stakes decision to the player. The impact is greater when the player has to go through the same decision-making process as the protagonist, even if the “wrong” option only leads to an early end and the player never picks it. An example use of this is making the player sympathize with something unpleasant the protagonist has to do, even though it’s emotionally difficult.

• Create greater understanding of a situation by comparing the different outcomes to each other. For example, if you have a nasty problem with no good solution, you can show the pros and cons of different approaches by exploring the different ways it could be resolved. This might be more applicable to VNs than IF, though, since it’s standard in VNs for players to play all routes and get all endings.

I’m interested in whether other people have come up with other ways to use choices for dramatic effect.

[SimpleUnicycle]

When you make a thread with a topic as broad as “Let’s talk about Game Design!” then you invite a lot of people who might misconstrue the topic, even when you try and explain what you meant.

Then there’s the matter of getting actual game designers and game developers in on the thread, who will do more than just throw around buzz words and definitions.

[Blackbird]

All right mate, I refuse to be blamed for peoples inability to read factual information repeatedly presented right in front of their noses.

For those still in doubt about how game design differs from game development, read this.

[Zalim]

Sigh.

[Blackbird]

Click to read an excellent explanation of the subject under the cut, by Liz England.

Summary

“THE DOOR PROBLEM”

“So what does a game designer do? Are you an artist? Do you design characters and write the story? Or no, wait, you’re a programmer?”

Game design is one of those nebulous terms to people outside the game industry that’s about as clear as the “astrophysicist” job title is to me. It’s also my job, so I find myself explaining what game design means to a lot of people from different backgrounds, some of whom don’t know anything about games.

The Door Problem

I like to describe my job in terms of “The Door Problem”.

Premise: You are making a game.

• Are there doors in your game?
• Can the player open them?
• Can the player open every door in the game?
• Or are some doors for decoration?
• How does the player know the difference?
• Are doors you can open green and ones you can’t red? Is there trash piled up in front of doors you can’t use? Did you just remove the doorknobs and call it a day?
• Can doors be locked and unlocked?
• What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open?
• Does a player know how to unlock a door? Do they need a key? To hack a console? To solve a puzzle? To wait until a story moment passes?
• Are there doors that can open but the player can never enter them?
• Where do enemies come from? Do they run in from doors? Do those doors lock afterwards?
• How does the player open a door? Do they just walk up to it and it slides open? Does it swing open? Does the player have to press a button to open it?
• Do doors lock behind the player?
• What happens if there are two players? Does it only lock after both players pass through the door?
• What if the level is REALLY BIG and can’t all exist at the same time? If one player stays behind, the floor might disappear from under them. What do you do?
• Do you stop one player from progressing any further until both are together in the same room?
• Do you teleport the player that stayed behind?
• What size is a door?
• Does it have to be big enough for a player to get through?
• What about co-op players? What if player 1 is standing in the doorway – does that block player 2?
• What about allies following you? How many of them need to get through the door without getting stuck?
• What about enemies? Do mini-bosses that are larger than a person also need to fit through the door?

It’s a pretty classic design problem. SOMEONE has to solve The Door Problem, and that someone is a designer.

The Other Door Problems

To help people understand the role breakdowns at a big company, I sometimes go into how other people deal with doors.

• Creative Director: “Yes, we definitely need doors in this game.”
• Project Manager : “I’ll put time on the schedule for people to make doors.”
• Designer: “I wrote a doc explaining what we need doors to do.”
• Concept Artist: “I made some gorgeous paintings of doors.”
• Art Director: “This third painting is exactly the style of doors we need.”
• Environment Artist: “I took this painting of a door and made it into an object in the game.”
• Animator: “I made the door open and close.”
• Sound Designer : “I made the sounds the door creates when it opens and closes.”
• Audio Engineer : “The sound of the door opening and closing will change based on where the player is and what direction they are facing.”
• Composer : “I created a theme song for the door.”
• FX Artist: “I added some cool sparks to the door when it opens.”
• Writer : “When the door opens, the player will say, ‘Hey look! The door opened!’ “
• Lighter: “There is a bright red light over the door when it’s locked, and a green one when it’s opened.”
• Legal: “The environment artist put a Starbucks logo on the door. You need to remove that if you don’t want to be sued.”
• Character Artist : “I don’t really care about this door until it can start wearing hats.”
• Gameplay Programmer: “This door asset now opens and closes based on proximity to the player. It can also be locked and unlocked through script.”
• AI Programmer: “Enemies and allies now know if a door is there and whether they can go through it.”
• Network Programmer: “Do all the players need to see the door open at the same time?”
• Release Engineer : “You need to get your doors in by 3pm if you want them on the disk.”
• Core Engine Programmer: “I have optimized the code to allow up to 1024 doors in the game.”
• Tools Programmer: “I made it even easier for you to place doors.”
• Level Designer: “I put the door in my level and locked it. After an event, I unlocked it.”
• UI Designer : “There’s now an objective marker on the door, and it has its own icon on the map.”
• Combat Designer : “Enemies will spawn behind doors, and lay cover fire as their allies enter the room. Unless the player is looking inside the door in which case they will spawn behind a different door.”
• Systems Designer : “A level 4 player earns 148xp for opening this door at the cost of 3 gold.”
• Monetization Designer : “We could charge the player $.99 to open the door now, or wait 24 hours for it to open automatically.”
• QA Tester: “I walked to the door. I ran to the door. I jumped at the door. I stood in the doorway until it closed. I saved and reloaded and walked to the door. I died and reloaded then walked to the door. I threw grenades at the door.”
• UX / Usability Researcher : “I found some people on Craigslist to go through the door so we could see what problems crop up.”
• Localization : “Door. Puerta. Porta. Porte. Tür. Dør. Deur. Drzwi. Drws. 문”
• Producer : “Do we need to give everyone those doors or can we save them for a pre-order bonus?”
• Publisher : “Those doors are really going to help this game stand out during the fall line-up.”
• CEO: “I want you all to know how much I appreciate the time and effort put into making those doors.”
• PR : “To all our fans, you’re going to go crazy over our next reveal #gamedev #doors #nextgen #retweet”
• Community Manager : “I let the fans know that their concerns about doors will be addressed in the upcoming patch.”
• Customer Support : “A player contacted us, confused about doors. I gave them detailed instructions on how to use them.”
• Player: “I totally didn’t even notice a door there.”

One of the reasons I like this example is because it’s so mundane. There’s an impression that game design is flashy and cool and about crazy ideas and fun all the time. But when I start off with, “Let me tell you about doors…” it cuts straight to the everyday practical considerations.

If people still bring this up I’m probably gonna cry out of sheer frustration.

[corgi213]

Honestly might work better if you try to explain yourself. Few people are willing to click random links

[DPerna]

This is the part where I decide to go get a drink and realize that I know nothing about game design. Oddly enough, I know quite a bit about security doors, but not the door question. So I will be quiet now…

[Blackbird]

I’m supplying the links because I’m not really good with words myself. But based on the sheer amount of quotes and resources I’ve shared at this point there really is no excuse to keep this discussion up.

Game Design is a subset of Game Development. End of story.