MAPPING MULTILAYER GAME DESIGN
At conventions I’ve been approached by new designers, who want to make a game, but don’t know where to start. I decided to make this list to help them and people like them take their first steps into the wonderful world of game design. This is a rough idea of the process we take our games through.
What I’ve found most important when working on a large project is keeping it small. To quote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry “What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.” Along with the project you are building, you are also building habits. It’s those habits that will determine whether your project reaches fruition or decays in your memory. If you think of that great game you love as a sort of “accident”, there are plenty of designers out there who will prove you wrong. It’s their habits that have been able to produce great games again and again. So, develop a schedule and stick to it. Work on little bits of your game every day and you’ll see how the game takes shape.
If you asked me several years ago, how much to invest in your prototypes looks, my answer would be simple- “As many sheets of paper as you want, printed in black and white without artwork”. In fact, most designers I know would probably tell you not to focus on the looks of the game, instead just make it as mechanically stable as possible. And sure, why spend all that extra time picking out artwork when the publisher will throw it away anyway?
This is why:
When it comes to game design, you are only limited by your imagination… and perhaps the attention spans and patience of your playtesters, but that’s a different topic. Before I choose a theme or particular mechanic I want to use, I think of what feelings I want to produce through game design.
Making a well-functioning artificial intelligence in a board game has been an obsession of mine from the first prototypes I worked on. Since the dawn of gaming, games have been used as a tool to compete. Our non-analog brothers have been able to move the competitiveness in gaming from being between players to being against the designer. And let’s face it, we as designers want to be challenging.
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