Max Nichols' Game Design blog
In the first article, I discussed game design patterns, and called them the brushstrokes of game design. In the second article I discussed game genres, and described how they were organic groupings of design patterns that had, over time, been given names. In the third article I discussed game design choices, and how we make them.
It’s time to finally talk about what a personal game design aesthetic is!
Let’s talk about making choices. Full-time game designers typically make hundreds of choices every day. Most are tiny, some are more substantial. Most are made unconsciously or with only a second of thought, and most of the rest are decided quickly. These quick daily decisions are the engine of our game design aesthetic: they showcase it and refine it.
We can all list genres of games: FPS, action-adventure, roguelike, otome, hidden object, and so on. When someone uses these terms we (mostly) know what they mean, and they help to quickly summarize a lot of information. Developers use them as shortcuts to answer a lot of design questions, retailers and award shows use them to categorize, gamers use them to describe games to their friends, marketing uses them to set expectations. Everyone loves to argue about where exactly to draw the lines between them.
Let’s begin with a basic building block, one of our simplest functional units of game design: design patterns. This concept is borrowed from architecture, coined by architect Christopher Alexander and popularized in his landmark 1977 book, A Pattern Language. Alexander wanted to articulate, describe, and harness the dynamics that allowed architectural styles and forms to naturally evolve and respond to the life of their inhabitants and builders.
In the process he found a general-purpose way to describe a given art or design style from any context, not just architecture.
As a game designer, maybe you’ve got some high-level goals for a [system/level/feature], but how you achieve them is a blank slate. Too blank.
Earlier in my career this meant undirected brainstorming until something clicked. Agonizing.
Here’s my top-down strategy for this kind of brainstorming.
For years I’ve pondered a paradox:
1) The fact that crunch is poisonous to creative work.
2) The fact that many of my favorite games were made with crunch.
My answer:
Crunch allows a team to naively reach a crucial creative state, at high personal cost.
It can be reached without crunch.
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.
Unicorn Overlord’s Tactics (unit AI) system is a masterstroke of systems design.
It elevates the game far beyond just being the spiritual successor to Ogre Battle that it seemed at first, and catapults every element to greater heights.
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?
In animation, drastic style changes can happen for dramatic effect: to evoke a new emotion, or surprise, or emphasize something.
They also do this with framerate: more important scenes get more keyframes.
What would an equivalent for video games as a medium be?
3 concepts that are tightly connected but hard to articulate:
– Designing from “first principles”
– Having a “personal aesthetic”
– Making day-to-day decisions
Lemme talk about how these things work, and color perception of what “good design” is.
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…
With the end of our semester fast approaching, let’s talk
about “closing” this week!
I use the term “closing” for a set of related things:
The final stage of a project or milestone, where you’re trying to take it over the finish line.
The skills that one uses during that final stage.
The mindset of wanting to close: not leaving loose ends, wrapping up work in a finished state and moving on.
Let’s talk about high vs low granularity in game design, which has always been one of my favorite topics. From Wikipedia: “Granularity refers to the extent to which a material or system is composed of distinguishable pieces”.
In the context of game design, many things can be either high or low granularity, such as:
Tyson Green is an experienced designer at Bungie. I rarely work with him myself, but other designers who have will often quote this rule of his:…