How to EXPLODE Your Game Design Talent!
How often do you exercise your game development muscles? Are you a game design heavyweight, or just a scrawny wannabe?
Every few days I challenge myself: I choose a random word and charge myself to come up with 3 scales of design centered around that abstraction - a web-game, a casual game, and an medium-scale indie game. The only requirement: the designs have to be compelling. The words are usually verbal (as in “verb.”) I try to shy away from nouns, but might occasionally accept an adjective.
For example, here’s what I came up with for “radial” a few months ago:
Web Game
Setup: Two players (or 1 human player and 1 computer player) placed equidistant from a central point.
Verbs: Players rotate around a central point “circle-strafing” one another. Players fire at will, each shot aimed at the center of the circle.
Objective: Player wins when he strikes the opponent with his shot.
Casual Game
Setup: Various dots are placed on the playfield. Various circles are placed on the playfield, each is attached to at least one other circle and form a jointed body.
Verbs: Any circle can be dragged around its parent’s rotational constraint; the child circles move with it.
Objective: The player must encircle all dots with the provided circles, adhering to the rotational constraints.
Indie Game
Setup: Planets and star (or stars) on playfield in traditional solar system formation. One planet is the start point, another is the end point. Rocket begins at start point at a fixed angle.
Verbs: Planets can be rotated along their orbits around the star(s). Planets emit gravity.
Objective: Player adjusts orbital location of planets around the star(s) to create a gravity “path” for which to guide the rocket to its destination.
At first, it took quite a while to think up any attractive game designs, but after over a year of doing this regularly, I find it to be a lot easier. By the same token, this thinking has also found its way into my own productions by the way of meta-games.
Looking back, some of the ideas are rather silly, but most are truly golden - I’ll never have a shortage of designs to develop. And its value to my ongoing development simply can’t be measured.
If you aren’t already, I recommend you try to adopt a similar mental exercise you employ at least once a week. You won’t be sorry.
If you already do this, or are starting now, what have you come up with?
December 2nd, 2006 at 3:48 am
What are meta-games?
December 2nd, 2006 at 4:06 am
A meta-game is a ruleset separate from, but made available through, the core mechanic. It is one that has its own goals independent of the main goal. For example, the main mechanic in Super Mario World is to navigate each level through to completion. However, during the course of the level, the player can optionally collect 5 Yoshi coins to receive a 1UP. This is an optional task that exists within the context of the main gameplay but is not technically conjoined - a meta-game.
Meta-games aren’t always made available by the developer. Often, meta-games are created by the player as a means of enhancing pleasure. For example, a player may try to beat each level in under a minute. The developer never intended for the player to perform such a task, but the player applies artificial constraints to his play in an effort to maximize his enjoyment.
It is, in my opinion, the developer’s responsibility to identify meta-games a player might employ and implement them into the game as a means of officiating the tasks and offering the player even greater reward than just the sense of self-satisfaction.
(Of course, it is not always the developer’s responsibility, depending on the type of game. Open-ended games thrive on meta-gaming. The Sims, for example, is a platform for which the player can create his own meta-games, and as such it thrives.)
December 4th, 2006 at 9:29 pm
I think that you have a very good method of coming up with new game ideas, and I should probably try it myself, considering myself as someone who’s not really that creative.
I think that the Experimental Gameplay people at CMU used a method similar to yours, choosing a word then working around that theme.
What I find very interesting about your concept is that you take this idea further and try to put the word in three different contexts.
Thanks for the tips!
December 16th, 2006 at 5:19 am
“I’ll never have a shortage of designs to develop. And its value to my ongoing development simply can’t be measured.”
It can be measured: Take a design, make a game out of it and sell it!
February 5th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Nicely done. The first design is flawed in that one of the players could simply position themselves atop the other, thus creating a stalemate.
Look forward to your next post.