Game Design Process and Ideation
Game Ideation
The Starting Point: A Single Idea
Most games begin with a single idea that serves as the foundation for the entire design process. This initial concept can revolve around several different elements, each offering unique opportunities for creative development.
The idea might center on a character - think of how James Bond has inspired countless action games, providing both a recognizable protagonist and a specific tone for gameplay. Alternatively, the concept could focus on gameplay or genre - perhaps starting with the desire to create a first-person shooter (FPS) or real-time strategy (RTS) game and building from there.
Sports provide another fertile ground for game ideas, whether it’s traditional sports like football, soccer, and hockey, or more extreme activities like snowboarding. The appeal lies in translating the excitement and mechanics of physical competition into interactive digital experiences.
Some games emerge from story, quest, or goal concepts - a time-travel adventure, for instance, immediately suggests both narrative possibilities and unique gameplay mechanics. Finally, new technology can spark innovative game ideas, such as motion capture systems that bring realistic sports movements to life, or augmented and virtual reality platforms that create entirely new forms of interaction.
Ideas can be original, adaptations of older concepts, or hybrids that combine existing elements in new ways. Games like The Sims and Civilization demonstrate how innovative thinking can create entirely new genres or revolutionize existing ones.
Finding Inspiration
Inspiration for game ideas can come from numerous sources, each offering different advantages for the creative process. Consider making a game based on a story you’ve written - this approach ensures you have deep understanding of the narrative elements and thematic content.
Mixing existing ideas from other games can lead to innovative combinations. The key is to identify what works well in different games and find creative ways to blend those elements into something new and compelling.
Don’t overlook other media as sources of inspiration. Books, movies, comics, and other forms of entertainment contain countless stories, characters, and concepts that can be adapted into interactive experiences. The trick is to steal ideas (but not copyrighted characters) and transform them through the unique possibilities that interactivity provides.
Market research through surveys and focus groups can reveal what audiences want, though this approach requires balancing popular demand with creative vision. Sometimes the most successful games are those that give players something they didn’t know they wanted.
Another productive approach is taking current ideas and improving upon them through better technology, enhanced graphics, improved sound design, more sophisticated AI, stronger storytelling, or different environmental settings. Finally, don’t underestimate the power of brainstorming - generate lots of ideas without immediately judging their merit.
Sid Meier’s Perspective
Legendary game designer Sid Meier offers valuable insight into the ideation process: “I find it dangerous to think in terms of genre first and then topic. Like, say, ‘I want to do a real-time strategy game. OK. What’s a cool topic?’ I think, for me at least, it’s more interesting to say, ‘I want to do a game about railroads. OK, now what’s the most interesting way to bring that to life? Is it in real-time, or is it turn-based, or is it first-person…’”
This approach prioritizes the core subject matter over mechanical constraints, allowing the content to drive the design decisions rather than forcing content into predetermined mechanical frameworks.
Ernest Adams’ Dream-Fulfillment Theory
Game designer Ernest Adams proposes that computer games exist to fulfill dreams. His approach suggests starting with a dream, then considering what it would be like to actually live that experience.
Consider the dream of being someone else entirely - the President of Ireland, a movie director, an Olympic skater, a rock climber, the world’s greatest programmer, or even a college lecturer. Each of these roles carries specific activities, challenges, and rewards that can be translated into gameplay mechanics.
While not all games fit the dream-fulfillment model, it provides a powerful framework for thinking about what players really want to experience through your game.
Interactivity
The Central Question
Interactivity is the fundamental reason computer games exist as a medium. Before getting caught up in story elements, character development, artwork, or other aspects of game creation, you must ask and answer one crucial question: “What is the player going to do?”
This question takes precedence over all others because it defines the core experience that separates games from passive entertainment. Until you understand what actions the player will take and how they will interact with your game world, other design elements remain secondary.
The Inside-Out Approach
Rather than beginning at the traditional “beginning” of a story or experience, effective game design often benefits from an inside-out approach. Start with the primary gameplay mode - the core interactive experience - and work outward from there.
Define this primary mode thoroughly before moving on to other game modes. Consider the player’s role, the interaction model, the perspective, the setting, the challenges the player will confront, the mechanics that create those challenges, and the actions the player takes to overcome them.
Create supporting material later in the design process. It’s always easier to fix story elements, user interface issues, and other peripheral concerns than to fix an uninteresting or unplayable core game.
Defining the Player’s Role
Who is the player trying to be within your game world? This question proves critical for representational and realistic games, where the player needs a clear understanding of their identity and capabilities.
Some games feature multiple roles within a single experience. A football game might allow players to act as manager, coach, or individual player, each with distinct responsibilities and interaction methods. If you can’t describe the player’s role clearly and concisely, it will likely confuse players and undermine their engagement with the game.
Interaction Models
Games typically employ one of two primary interaction models. The avatar model involves a single character or object that represents the player, with the player’s actions limited to what can be accomplished from the avatar’s current location.
The omnipresence model (though not necessarily omniscience) allows players to act in many or all places within the game world simultaneously. Chess provides an obvious example - players can move any of their pieces regardless of location. However, omnipresence doesn’t guarantee omniscience; concepts like “fog of war” can limit player knowledge while maintaining broad interactive capability.
Perspectives
Visual Viewpoints
Different perspectives create fundamentally different player experiences and affect how players understand and interact with the game world.
First-person perspective places the camera at the character’s eye level, creating intimate connection with the game world. Classic examples include Doom and Quake, where this viewpoint enhances the immediacy and tension of combat encounters.
Third-person perspective shows the player character from behind or to the side, allowing players to see their character’s actions and reactions. Tomb Raider exemplifies this approach, letting players watch Lara Croft’s athletic movements while maintaining spatial awareness of her surroundings.
Side-scrolling perspective presents the game world from a side view, often emphasizing platforming and linear progression. Sonic games demonstrate how this perspective can create fast-paced, momentum-based gameplay.
Aerial perspectives include both isometric and top-down views. Isometric perspective, used in games like Starcraft and various football games, provides three-dimensional spatial information while maintaining clarity for strategic decision-making. Top-down perspective, seen in games like Total Annihilation, offers complete overhead views ideal for tactical planning.
Context-sensitive perspective changes based on gameplay needs. Resident Evil pioneered this approach, switching between different camera angles to enhance specific moments or gameplay requirements.
Multiple Game Modes and Perspectives
Many games successfully combine different perspectives across multiple modes, each optimized for specific types of gameplay.
Dungeon Keeper demonstrates this approach with three distinct modes: management mode uses isometric, omnipresent perspective for strategic planning; map mode employs top-down, omnipresent view with limited actions; and possession mode switches to first-person, avatar-based tactical gameplay.
Soccer games often feature management mode (like FIFA’s career mode), play-calling with isometric, omnipresent strategic view, and play execution using either isometric or first-person avatar-based tactical control.
Sid Meier’s Pirates! showcases multiple perspectives across different game areas: sea and island exploration using isometric, omnipresent strategic view; city navigation with top-down, omnipresent perspective for stealth gameplay; and dueling or dancing with first-person, avatar-based tactical interaction.
Game Structure and Mode Relationships
The relationship between different game modes requires careful consideration. Some modes are entered by explicit player choice, while others occur as part of natural progression through the game.
State diagrams can help visualize these relationships, showing how players move between different modes and what triggers these transitions. This structural planning ensures smooth flow between different types of gameplay and prevents jarring shifts that might break player immersion.
Game Dimensions
Physical Dimension
The physical dimension encompasses several critical aspects of game world design. Dimensionality determines whether your game operates in 2D, 3D, or even 4D (multiple 3D spaces). Remember that 3D should be chosen for design reasons, not simply because it seems more impressive or modern.
Scale addresses how big the game world is and how objects relate to each other in size. This affects everything from navigation to combat to resource management. Boundaries define what happens at the edge of the game world - do players hit invisible walls, loop around to the other side, or face some other limitation? Consider whether boundary solutions maintain or break suspension of disbelief.
Temporal Dimension
Time can play various roles in game design, from purely cosmetic to mechanically crucial. Ask whether time is meaningful in your game - does the passage of time itself change gameplay conditions or create new challenges?
Games can operate in real-time or turn-based systems, each creating different strategic and tactical considerations. Variable time allows certain activities to progress at different speeds - The Sims demonstrates this by speeding up time while characters sleep. Anomalous time lets different elements progress at different rates simultaneously.
Consider whether players can adjust time flow, a feature commonly seen in flight simulators and real-time strategy games that allows players to pause, slow down, or speed up action as needed.
Environmental Dimension
The environmental dimension includes both cultural context and physical surroundings. Cultural context, in the anthropological sense, encompasses beliefs, attitudes, values, social systems, family structures, key ceremonies and rituals, and historical background.
Physical surroundings cover landscape, flora, fauna, weather patterns, and human-made elements including buildings, vehicles, clothing, weaponry, furniture, and art. The level of detail determines what players can see, touch, and interact with, affecting both immersion and gameplay complexity.
Graphical style involves both the style of the setting itself and your specific approach to depicting that setting, influencing the game’s aesthetic appeal and emotional impact.
Emotional Dimension
Consider both the emotions of characters within the game world and the emotions you hope to inspire in players. Most games limit emotional range to basic responses like excitement (“Yahoo!”) and frustration (“Damn!”), but more sophisticated emotional experiences are possible.
Explore deeper emotions such as jealousy, grief, anger, greed, and disdain. The key question becomes: how will your game design inspire these emotions through gameplay mechanics, narrative elements, and player choices?
Ethical Dimension
Ethics in games differ fundamentally from passive entertainment. In passive media, viewers bring their own ethical systems to the work. In interactive entertainment, designers provide players with an ethical framework through game rules and victory conditions.
The victory condition defines what is “good” within the game world. Players must conform to the designer’s embedded morality to succeed, making ethical considerations a crucial design responsibility.
Games encounter ethical problems when they are highly representational of the real world AND their ethics are highly disconnected from real-world moral systems. It’s generally acceptable to kill aliens and robots realistically, or to kill people unrealistically, but realistic depictions of morally questionable real-world actions can create controversy.
Game Challenges
Physical Challenges
Physical challenges test player dexterity and reaction capabilities. Speed and reaction time challenges, often called “twitch games,” require rapid responses to changing situations. Accuracy and precision challenges appear in activities like steering vehicles or aiming weapons, testing fine motor control.
Timing and rhythm challenges, exemplified by dance games, require players to match specific temporal patterns. Learning special moves, common in fighting games, combines memorization with execution skills. Races create urgency by requiring players to achieve objectives before opponents do.
Logical Challenges
Logical challenges, or puzzles, should be based on underlying principles rather than trial-and-error experimentation. When players must guess randomly to progress, it typically indicates poor puzzle design. Effective logical challenges give players sufficient information to reason through solutions systematically.
Exploration Challenges
Exploration challenges encourage players to investigate and navigate game spaces. These might include locked doors and traps that require specific items or knowledge to overcome, mazes and illogical spaces that test spatial reasoning and memory, and teleporters that create non-intuitive navigation puzzles.
Conflict Challenges
Conflict encompasses strategy, tactics, and logistics. While logistics (such as feeding armies) is rarely emphasized in games, it offers rich design possibilities. Common conflict challenges include survival and reduction of enemy forces, defending vulnerable items or units, and stealth scenarios that require avoiding rather than confronting opposition.
Economic Challenges
Economic challenges focus on resource management and system optimization. These include accumulating wealth or points, efficient manufacturing processes, achieving balance or stability in complex systems, and caring for living things within those systems.
Conceptual Challenges
Conceptual challenges require understanding something new through deduction, observation, and interpretation. Detective games exemplify this category by requiring players to piece together information and draw logical conclusions to solve mysteries.
Game Mechanics
Core Mechanics and Internal Economy
Core mechanics define the internal economy that drives most games forward. Understanding this economy is crucial for creating balanced, engaging gameplay.
Consider a first-person shooter’s economy: resources include ammunition and hit points; sources include ammunition clips and medical kits; drains include firing weapons and taking damage from enemies. Game balance emerges from carefully adjusting the relationships between these elements.
Balance Principles
Balance involves making games fair (all players have equal chances of winning at the start), appropriately challenging (neither too hard nor too easy), and winnable (games must be able to conclude).
Symmetry provides the simplest approach to balance - games like Chess and most deathmatch games give all players identical starting conditions and capabilities. Asymmetry proves harder to balance but often creates more interesting gameplay, as seen in strategy games like Starcraft and Warcraft where different factions have unique strengths and weaknesses.
Positive Feedback
Positive feedback occurs when achievements make subsequent achievements easier. Taking an opponent’s piece in Chess provides advantage, and if you could use captured pieces as your own, the advantage would compound further.
Without positive feedback, games risk stalemate conditions where no player can gain decisive advantage. However, positive feedback must be controlled to prevent leading players from gaining insurmountable advantages.
Examples include getting ahead in a race and becoming more likely to collect power-ups, acquiring property in Monopoly that generates more income, or the way churned water in swimming races slows down trailing competitors.
Controlling Positive Feedback
Several mechanisms can control excessive positive feedback:
Introduce negative feedback - achievements that make subsequent achievements harder. Examples include gold that slows down movement or upkeep costs that increase with expansion.
Increase the impact of chance - if chance elements are fair, they help and hurt all players equally over time.
Define victory in non-numeric ways - Chess wins through checkmate rather than piece count, preventing simple accumulation strategies.
Increase difficulty as feedback kicks in - role-playing games demonstrate this by scaling enemy strength to match player advancement.
Negative Feedback Examples
Negative feedback can include getting lost more easily when ahead in races, wind drag in bicycle and car racing, or games like shuffleboard where having pieces in scoring position makes it easier for opponents to score against you.
Balance Progression Patterns
Effective game balance creates an ideal progression where players maintain hope of victory while still experiencing meaningful challenge. Avoid both positive feedback that creates runaway victories and negative feedback so strong that leads constantly change hands without player agency mattering.
Which approach does Sid Meier recommend for game ideation?
[ ] Start with a genre, then find a topic
[x] Start with a topic, then determine the best way to bring it to life
[ ] Always begin with cutting-edge technology
[ ] Focus on market research first
What is the most important question to ask when designing game interactivity?
[x] "What is the player going to do?"
[ ] "What story do we want to tell?"
[ ] "What graphics engine should we use?"
[ ] "Who is our target audience?"
Which represents positive feedback in game design?
[ ] Gold that slows you down when collected
[x] Taking an opponent's chess piece
[ ] Increasing difficulty as players advance
[ ] Random events that affect all players equallyGame Worlds
Mental Spaces and Rules
The game world exists as a mental space - a conceptual area that is explicitly not-the-real-world. This space operates under its own rules and is entered through the conscious choice to play. Players understand and accept that different logic, physics, and social rules may apply within this space.
The game setting represents the fictional component of this world, contributing to entertainment through immersion and fantasy. However, the relationship between setting and gameplay importance varies significantly. The more absorbing the core gameplay, the less crucial elaborate setting becomes - Chess and Quake players often ignore thematic elements entirely, focusing instead on mechanical interactions.