What’s important when you’re designing games

Lewis Pulsipher Printed December 20, 2005

•          Know your audience! What do they like? No game can satisfy all tastes.

•          Know your objectives! What are you trying to achieve?

•          Design is “10% inspiration and 90% perspiration”, especially if you also develop the non-video game.

•          Writing usable rules (or doing the programming) is the hardest part.

•          Write everything down (and back it up).

•          Playtesting is “sovereign”. No matter what you think about how the game will work, only efficient playtesting will actually show how it works. Without a playable prototype, you have *nothing*! (That’s only a slight exaggeration.)

•          Ideas are cheap (easy); a playable game is much harder to create.

•          Players must be able to influence the outcome of the game by their choices amongst non-obvious alternatives–otherwise it’s not a game (though it might be a story or a toy or a puzzle).

•          Be willing to change the game again and again.

•          Hardly any idea is original...but ideas can be used in new ways. And there’s almost always a new way to treat any subject (many, many ways to do real estate–Monopoly is only one).

•          Games are supposed to be fun. But “fun” means different things to different people.

•          Keep in mind the nine fundamental structures of games:

            Theme/history/story 

            Objective/victory conditions

            Movement/Placement (1 at a time is the norm)

            Sequence (taking turns is the norm)

            Conflict resolution/interaction of “entities”

            Economy/resource acquisition (norm is none in boardgames, card draw in cardgames)            Information availability (norm in a boardgame is all info available)

            “Data storage”/Information Management (often a board/map)

            Player interaction rules (the players, not the objects)

•          The road to the complete game: 1. Ideas, 2. Playable ideas, 3. Prototypes, 4. Play solo, 5. Playtest, 6. Fully written rules, 6. Keep experimenting. 7. “Blind” test.