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.
- Procure a brainstorming surface. White board, miro board, sticky notes, shared google doc, whatever’s handy
- Divide it into 3-6 sections based on elements of the player experience. Ex: combat, towns, menus. Doesn’t really matter what, you just need some structure for your brain to grab
- If you’ve got a team, bring them into the process now.
- Remind them of the goals. Write them down.
- Pick a category from step 2.
- Set a timer for 5-20 minutes. Ask everyone to brainstorm examples of moments that a player might experience within this category that exemplify the goals. Have people write down every idea they have no matter how goofy or trivial. I usually see 15-45 notes
- Repeat for the other categories
- Brainstorm is done. Now you have both goals and a huge list of example moments. If you’re doing system work, look for patterns, imagine what kind of systems or tools could output these moments.
If content, you can straight up use the best moments as beats in your mission/story - You may not be the one who set the goals. But if you have the power, you may want to update the goals/pillars based on inspiration or honing you got from this process
It’s not perfect and may not work for everyone as well as it does for me. IE I’m a very top-down designer: I work from a goal first. I like to problem solve. When design work is wide open, my goal is almost always to reframe it as a problem to solve. This framework reliably achieves that for me.
Oh and note: you can use this process to narrow down goals, too. If goals are feeling too broad, instead of the output being systems work or content work, it can be clarifying a new set of goals to do another round of brainstorming with.
Most of my career has been on short dev releases for live games, working under creative directors who set goals for me. If you were, say, a creative director yourself, or working in pre-production and need to build more careful interconnection of design features, you may need a different process.