How to Design a Game
Making games involves a lot of different technologies, but in this article we’ll go over how to create value for the player and bring a concept to life.
There are a lot of different systems, content, and interfaces to design depending on the genre and mechanics of the game you aspire to make. There’s no single way to design a game, but there are processes to complete at each step of development that will drive clarity for yourself or for your team. One of the most fatal things to happen to a game is diverging from the core fun of the game. Always be asking yourself “What’s fun, and where can we trim the fat?”
If you’re hoping to make a career out of games someday, consider making a game, joining a game jam, and picking up some books like Rules of Play, The Proteus Paradox, and Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design. The best experience is just going through the process. With around 16 game jams under my belt and a few games and products shipped at companies, this is what I’ve learned making games.
Develop the Concept
When you’ve figured out your main idea, research other games in the genre and do some breakdowns like this breakdown I did on Neko Atsume so you can start prototyping and developing your Game Design Document, which will contain the summary, main systems, mechanics, and assets. This is a living document of your game that will grow as you progress and iterate your game.
A core loop consists of actions, results, and rewards.
Figure out your core loop. This is the core game system that defines your game. It incorporates mechanics and systems that the player finds themself repeating. Designers will often fixate on a mechanic without figuring out the core loop, but understanding what systems you want your players to go through will help you understand what features to focus on, and which ones can be postponed or even cut. Keeping the scope from bloating is important, but it’s also helpful to design systems that don’t block you from your ideas you might want to implement later on. I always ask myself, “will this keep us from being able to add x feature or system down the line?”
Make an X-statement. This is a 1–2 sentence statement about what your game is to help decide priorities. It captures the player fantasy, and mechanics of the game. I like to envision a few decisions that could be made on a project and see if I can prioritize those decisions. If I can’t, then I make the statement more crisp. Here are some examples:
Sunset Overdrive: “Rock and roll end times”
Assassin’s Creed: “A blade in the crowd”
Craft some game pillars. Game design pillars are high-level goals established towards the start of a project and will typically be 3–5 high level values. They provide a clear foundation for goal setting and prioritizing tough decisions. Always keep these visible so you and your team can refer back to them, whether they are posters on the walls or a desktop background.
Create a user journey storyboard to clarify what your players do in each play session, what types of players are playing your game, their daily or weekly gameplay, their environment, and the community behaviors you want your players to embody.
An example user visual journey. Image source: Nick Babich.
During this phase, make sure to answer the questions:
What is the core game loop?
What are players doing on a daily and weekly basis?
What are the short term and long term goals?
Prototyping & Building
Now that you have your concept fleshed out, now’s the time for the real work! You’ll want to be prototyping, playtesting and developing a vertical slice. A vertical slice is a playable, polished version of the mechanics. It’s a slice of the content, the aesthetics, the user interface, and the music and sounds.
Let’s say your game is an on-rails, steam punk, submarine shooter with multiple levels. Your vertical slice would include the submarine controls, a version of one of the levels, along with the user interfaces and sounds to deliver the content and mechanics.
Make sure to answer the questions:
Do players understand what the game is about?
Do player understand the controls or main mechanics?
Designing the Onboarding
Surfacing systems and content and teaching the player about them is just as important as creating them. Why implement features if the player doesn’t know about them or know why they are important to their progression or gamplay?
Designing your first time user experience (FTUE) and player onboarding is an iterative process that should start as a basic, text and image version, and with playtesting you’ll find the best experience for the player to understand what the short and long term goals are.
Be sure to create to list out all the items you want the player to learn and add in information for each part.
Make sure to answer the questions:
Do players understand short term goals?
Do players understand long term goals?
Designing Progression
Map out your player progression. Making a progression map is beneficial for all games, even ones where levels aren’t shown to the player. It helps you understand what you want players to be doing from day-to-day or week-to-week and aligning your feature unlocks to their progress. For each week or level, write out the behaviors you want the player to exhibit. What are they thinking, feeling, and doing? Are they mastering a skill or collecting something? Are they interacting with the community to help teach them about how to solve a puzzle?
A player progress template with a logarithmic curve to adjust difficulty as the player progresses in their lifetime.
Make sure to answer the question:
Do players feel like they are working toward their long term goals?
Playtesting
Playtesting is one of the most important parts of making a game. It helps you understand how players engage with your game, if they understand it, and helps you see emerging behaviors. Start playtesting as early as you can, but be intentional and targeted about the questions you’re asking.
With every milestone or build, make sure to develop a core set of things you want to learn about your progress and your hypotheses for each. I’ve gone more in-depth about playtesting in this article. It’s easy to focus on the wrong things. Always be testing with new players and existing players. Scale your testing with surveys while also doing focused 1-on-1 interviews.
This article doesn’t cover everything about making games, but it will help you focus the design of a game in order to keep you on track of bringing a concept to life.
No matter the type of game, make sure to lean into the fun, drive team clarity, and create player purpose during each phase of game development. Have fun!
