Max Nichols' Game Design blog
I realized that despite working on Destiny and Destiny 2 encounters for years, I’ve never really talked in any sort of detail about what goes into that. Let’s change that!
If you haven’t done it already, it’s worth reading my Fundamentals of FPS Gameplay article, which is a 5-10 minute read that I originally wrote for this Destiny article.
At the most basic level, FPS gameplay is the interplay of line-of-sight, movement, facing, cover, and timing between a player that can shoot what they see, and at least one opposing entity that can shoot back. Let me illustrate a little bit.
As game designers, one of our most powerful dramatic tools is the rule break:
Those moments when we break a long-established rule for the purposes of punctuating and aligning with a dramatic story moment
This was a key philosophy for, say, Undertale’s game design, but you see it everywhere.
This may sound obvious to some folks, but I think it’s worth looking at more closely!
I saw some folks thinking that voice acting in games was objectively good, always a positive. “What kind of game doesn’t have voice acting in 2025?!” sorta thing
I say that there are positive reasons why one would choose NOT to have VO.
How many design justifications we can come up with?
Join me.
I hooked up my 360 and Guitar Hero 2 and was shockedpikachu.jpg that my skills had decayed enough that I had to play Medium, hahah.
There’s a lot of great stuff about the game, but I think it is really an absolute masterclass in difficulty ramp design, and teaching players mastery. It’s worth study.
What if I told you that Pokemon Snap and Hitman have a lot in common.
To the point where if I was ever tasked with making a mobile Hitman game, I think I’d model it on Pokemon Snap.
For years I’ve thought about how games about exploration or immersion in a place work.
This is one of my five most important pillars:
“Player attention is on the game world”
The most beautiful, luscious worlds are squandered by games with systems and mechanics that draw attention away from them.
Unicorn Overlord and Metaphor have me musing–
Combining these makes me feel TRANSPORTED to a big new game world:
– Maximalist ui
– Maximalist music
– En media res opening
– Multiscan environments
– Complex systems (slowly ramped)
– Unfamiliar controls
– Culture Shock
– Novelty
After 9 years–fully half of my adult life–I was let go from Bungie this morning, along with MANY other amazing folks.
Getting to work on a game like this, where I made and helped make experiences that are enjoyed by millions of people, was a huge privilege.
But I don’t want to leave this off with a simple “it was a privilege, thank you Bungie”.
I am intrigued by the way that younger players from outside the core “AAA” gaming bubble seem to respond super well to games that are… social, lofi, watchable, and “janky”.
Lethal Company, Palworld, everything in Roblox, Five Nights at Freddy’s, even Minecraft.
The “janky” part is the most interesting bit to me. Why is this appealing, why does it work well for this audience in particular?
“How do games intrinsically motivate players to explore” is a favorite #GameDesign topic of mine.
Many of the games that do this achieve it partially by evoking a sense of awe while exploring their worlds.
Let’s talk about how that works in games.
The core question is: how do you make sure that the player sees what they need to see?
Lots of strategies. “Detective vision” is one that works in some cases that are otherwise hard to solve for.
Occasionally I post some social media threads on game design. Some of them are worth saving here. – Max So Dragonspine Mountain in Genshin Impact…
One of the ways to create a sense of place and make environments more memorable is to engage more of the player’s senses. As game creators we don’t always have a lot of avenues to do this! We can’t actually provide smells, for instance. If you’re working on a pen and paper game, as some of you are, you may not have direct access to ANY of the player’s senses, and need to instead evoke them with words.
So some useful angles to look at this from:
The theme of this class is “World Design”, a subset of Game Design. The goal of this document is to explain what that means!
“World Design” is nebulously defined. Some companies have “World Designer” as a job title, but they don’t necessarily describe the same job. I’ve seen it used to describe traditional mission or level design work, designing vast non-linear spaces in open world games, and even the design of systems or UI related to the game world. So we will use a very broad definition in this class.
If Game Design is…
GameDesign rambles-
I love moments of “recontextualization” in game worlds.
This is part of why exploring in Zelda or Metroidvania games feels good, why you keep coming back to stages in Pokemon Snap… and why live-service games can struggle to give those feelings.
As game designers, you’re used to thinking about games as systems of rules. You may know rules as things that are enforced by game systems via constraints and affordances: a game is hard-coded to allow this action, but not that action. Voilà, a possibility space is defined!
But many rules are NOT enforced by code or systems, and are instead conventions, patterns, or best practices that the developers stick to when building content. Let’s look at some examples.
One of my favorite story archetypes is the “world as a mystery”. I love it when there’s a big unknown about the setting’s mechanics or history that deeply impacts the story + characters. And the story is then structured like a mystery novel.
I love that excitement of learning a setting’s history and, as we learn more, it re-contextualizes everything we thought we knew about that world. Of course, major revelations about the world must coincide with major character moments for maximum impact!