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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The reason crafting is in every game now: It’s like money laundering for game designers
Let me explain.
Let’s first look at Zelda 1.
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.
Sacred Realms is a Zelda retrospective podcast, where hosts Matthew and Lyndon Willoughby discuss the Zelda series as they replay all the games. I’m a frequent guest on the podcast, offering my perspective as both a game designer and a Zelda fan.
Despite not being a game I hold in high esteem – or perhaps because of it – Phantom Hourglass was a fascinating game to analyze and discuss. Over the course of this season of the podcast I discussed my thoughts on what they were trying to achieve, the historical context of 2007, the sea changes happening to the Zelda team, my thoughts on the touch control system, and a lot more.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a towering achievement, a game that raised the bar far above all that had come before.
In 1998, 3D games were not new: 3D games with first-person, top-down, and side-scrolling viewpoints had already arrived, as had third-person platformers. But nobody had yet made a third-person game with both strong camera control and melee combat, especially not in a vast, immersive world. There was no blueprint, and design pitfalls awaited any team that tried.
Ocarina of Time solved that puzzle decisively. It was a model for making third-person 3D action games that were approachable and ambitious. It broke new ground in camera control, melee combat, level design, and world design. It achieved a high standard for readability and approachability; nothing like it had ever been made before, and it set a high-water mark that wouldn’t be surpassed for years.
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?
“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.
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…
I recently posted a challenge to game designers to share more of their documentation, so academia had more examples to learn from. And then I posted an Outline of Game Documentation, with some high level descriptions of different types of game design documents. Time for me to share some!
Previously I shared a bunch of character specs from Infinite Crisis. These were finalized spec documents, representing the end point of a long iterative design process before production on the character began in earnest. This time let’s look at some of the documents that I wrote as part of that design process.