Game Design Workshop Notes & Thoughts: Chapter 1

The Role of A Game Designer

Louis Chan

As the impacts of video games gradually spread across industries in various aspects, it has also inspired people and provided them a digital world full of possibilities, pleasure, and experiences of epic stories. I believe there are many people like me, who have been excited to explore the unknown, touched by the love and hatred among characters, lost in thoughts after finishing the journey and contemplating to digest the emotions, etc. All those immersive experiences can only be achieved by video games, and the indispensable dedicator behind each of them is the game designer.

Lots of people were able to find or regain their true passion for life through video games, including me, even so inspired to pursue game design and hoping to become game designers one day. In order to do that, we have to understand who are game designers, what do they do, skills we need and what is the best method of designing for a game.

"The game designer envisions how a game will work during play. She create the objectives, rules, and procedures, thinks up the dramatic premise and gives it life, and is responsible for planning everything necessary to create a compelling player experience". In other words,

"the role of the game designer is, first and foremost, to be an advocate for the player".

Sometimes people are thinking that game designers are proposing their ideal form of the game, raising a bunch of creative ideas, and getting to put things into the game based on their preferences. However, as Richard Carrillo said in his GDC talk, simply providing ideas is not really a game designer's job, instead, collecting various ideas that are from different teams or referenced from other games, and designing mechanics and systems that can integrate all those together and verify the functionalities.

Most of us know that the process of design is basically to keep asking questions and finding solutions, and there will be obstacles on the way. Since game designers are not idea critics but problem solvers, when we encounter problems, we have to do more than just decide whether an idea or a solution is good or bad, we need to identify the problem and propose suitable solutions based on our thorough understanding of the system, which is a series of mechanics, and mechanics are series of ideas. Therefore, when a new idea pops up, game designers have to think about how that changes the mechanics and alters the system eventually.

As game designers, we should keep our concentration focused on the player experience, building engaging gameplay loops, keep players hooked and invested in the overall experience. The design process will be highly iterative since there might be new ideas pop up and adjustment in response of playtest feedback.

As the technical aspect, a playcentric approach should be applied to create a gameplay experience that is for players.

The playcentric design process is iterations of design with feedbacks in each step:

1. Brainstorming

   1. Set player experience goals (NOT features of the game but descriptions of the interesting and unique situations that players will have)

   2. Game concepts/mechanics to help achieve the goals

   3. Write up a one-page concept document to describe each of the ideas

2. Prototyping and Playtesting

   1. Create a physical and playable prototype using crafting tools (pen and paper, etc.) to test the concepts, then playtest it

   2. Write a gameplay treatment describes how the game functions

   3. Try to express concepts in detailed for each position and try to communicate on how to start working (art style, mechanics, etc.)

   4. [Iterate between step 1 and 2 until an ideal version of playtest prototype is created]

3. Presentation (Optional to secure funding)

   1. Demo artwork

   2. Demonstrate solid gameplay treatment

4. Software prototype

   1. Create rough computer models of the core gameplay (several prototypes that focus on different aspects of the system)

   2. Playtest the software prototypes

   3. Write a document about how the prototype demonstrates the features that fulfills the goals explicitly

   4. Move on after the working gameplay achieves

5. Design Documentation & Asset Lists

   1. Draft that outlines every aspect of the game and how it functions (with accumulated knowledge and ideas from the previous steps & previous treatments) so that programmers and artists can turn those ideas into reality

   2. Can use design wiki

6. Production

   1. Communicate with team members to make sure each aspect of the design is achievable and correctly interpreted from the design document

   2. Artwork & programming

   3. Keep testing the artwork, gameplay, characters, etc. (should have few changes)

7. Quality Assurance

   1. Make sure the game meets the entire target audience and the gameplay is solid

Each iteration can be seen as:

Generate Ideas → Formalize Ideas (Integrate the idea with the system) → Playtest →

Result (feedbacks)

To become a game designer, we need something more than technical skills, interpersonal skills, so-called soft skills. It includes the ability to communicate, teamwork, process, and seek inspiration.

Communication

Among all the skills, communication might be the most important one because game designers need to express their thoughts to different departments and teams, "sell" the game concepts to management and investors and compromise between the original design and available time and resources. Also, listening to playtesters and members from different teams is important since they might provide fresh ideas that can lead to new directions, reinvest the sense of authorship in their own responsibilities on the project, and more importantly, they might provide opinions from their specialized perspective that we missed.

Teamwork

Since game designers are collaborating with different teams, we will interact with a wide range of personalities, from money-minded executives and business managers to creative artists to computerese who doesn't often communicate well. To guarantee a smooth workflow, we have to be a universal translator to make sure every group is working on the same game and their direction is correct.

Process

Game development is long and stressful, in order to save a game from D.O.A (dead on arrival), a good process must be instilled from the beginning. During the process, game designers often have to make critical changes without causing new issues; however, that is difficult if we get too close to trying to solve some specific problems because the solutions can be a host of new problems. Therefore, we have to maintain the big picture of the system and focus on our goals by applying playcentric approach of playtesting and controlled iterative changes.

Inspiration

If we want to be game designers, try looking at the world in terms of its underlying systems, try to analyze how things in our life function, and what are the underlying rules.

Inspirations are not only from other games but life too.

End Note

Innovative Principle

• Think beyond existing genres of play

• Appealing to both new and old players by balancing the learning and gaming

• Integrate story and gameplay (mutual advance) to create emotionally rich gameplay

• Empathy for characters

• Creating emotionally rich gameplay

• Relationship between games and learning