Max Nichols' Game Design blog
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:
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.
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:
Let’s talk about a problem that plagues live service games.
If your game relies on releasing MORE content in pre-existing categories –
characters in League of Legends or Overwatch, exotics in Destiny, new cards in Magic: The Gathering – then there are
two fundamental design problems you need to solve:
– Diminishing Returns: How do you make content that is as exciting on the Nth update as it was on the first update? How can your 50th piece of content compete with all 49 previous pieces?
– Narrowing Design Space: How do you leave room for each new thing to feel unique and different over time?
This week let’s talk about an important skill: Prioritization.
In a large studio environment, the ability to prioritize –
triage – every task or problem that comes your way is crucial, especially if
you’re in a role where you may be randomized or need to react to sudden pivots,
changes, or requests.
Let’s do some quick vocabulary. These are all terms that we use at Bungie. I can’t promise that they use these same definitions everywhere, but they’ll help us talk about these concepts:
“Technical game designer” as a role in the industry is hard to pin down. I’ve known people with that title who solely build tools, and others who never touch code or tools and instead build content. Ask around, and every tech designer will give you a slightly different definition for the role. Here’s mine.
“Technical Game Design” is a subset of Game Design as a discipline. There are two features that set the role apart: