Getting into Game Design

Game design isn’t a brand new field to me, but I can’t say that I ever studied it formally.

I’ve been playing video games since before I can remember, some of my earliest memories being watching my parents try to beat the first world in Super Mario World on a SNES they won at a gas station on a road trip. They never really played again after that, my brother and I took over the system and eventually breezed past that first world.

Video games have always been a hobby, one that for a long time that I wanted to make into a career. But that still didn’t really lead me to thinking about the deeper levels of game design. Not until I started trying to make games myself, which crashed pretty quickly back in my 20s. And then not again until I started writing D&D adventures.

While D&D is already itself a game with rules and expectations, writing my own one-shots and more serious adventures really helped me get the feeling of what makes games good.

I didn’t realize it back when I was writing A Stolen Sun because I didn’t have the words for it, but the design choices that felt best to be were the ones that I now see aligning with MDA framework. I wanted to create choices and unique rules in my adventures that paired Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics all together. It’s those design choices that make systems feel alive and “realistic”. Not in a “it happens in real life” way, but in a way that when thought about can make logical sense to a brain. Instead of mechanics that a brain might see as strange and try to reject.

Now coming up with those rules is one thing, but then having to execute them as a DM is a whole other side of the coin! In a way it makes it harder to pull off in a TTRPG because in a video game a computer gets to pull it off instead.

So then still the question, why get back into it now?

Our next game

As we go through the motions of a game studio; creating a Steam Developer Account, setting up a website, creating press kits, we also need to think of what’s next.

We have two visual novels so far and we’re ready to move away from the traditional visual novel format (visuals, text, choices). Which honestly, is basically just “throw a few more game genres in there” and now you’ve got yourself a narrative game instead of a visual novel.

Since every Steam page costs 100$ to launch we started thinking about how to capitalize on what we have already as a foundation and make it more game-like. This led us to the work we’re doing on Fate Spinner which I wrote about in my last blog post.

But we didn’t just want to jump in blind, we’re both fairly education and learning oriented so reaching a solid understanding of the foundational text, language, and history of game design was important to us. So we started to study.

The course

My wife found an old online, self-directed course on Wordpress titled Game Design Concepts by Ian Schreiber. It’s one of those old blogs that’s delightful to see still alive. Something someone put a lot of work into that hasn’t disappeared to one of the vanishing social media.

The course has 20 lessons with its own recommended reading and exercises. We flipped to lesson 1 and began.

Some of the lessons are straight forward while some of them have homework that’s decently time and brain consuming. It’s been fun though. After being away from school for over 10 years it’s nice to have a semi-serious study habit developing. Basically it just still feels nice to learn new things.

Game design books

There were a few recommended books in the course so far but not all of them have been findable through free options like the library. We did get a copy of Challenges for Game Designers (available on the Internet Archive) which feels like the most central book to the course and we’ve been trying to do all of the exercises that it offers at the end of the chapters. It’s been a real test of trying to quickly apply what you’ve learned even though you feel like you maybe haven’t learnt much yet.

Besides game design I also decided to finally read Writing for Games by Hannah Nicklin. I had been putting it off because it was an expensive book. I’ve now finally made it through the bulk of the content and can dive into some of the exercises at the end of the book. It was interesting to read a book from someone who’s background just felt so grounded more in theatre than other forms of writing. I can definitely see it giving Nicklin an advantage in game writing but I don’t see myself getting interested in theatre any time soon….

Next up book wise will be The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell, which my wife has talked up a fair bit already.

Video learning

I’ve really come around to learning from videos ever since I got more heavily into art practice. It’s not a medium that does great with written tutorials, being able to see someone doing the physical motions of creating art is important to learning how. But due to the nature of the many YouTube art tutorials I watch, my brain also wants sharp editing! Sound bites! High quality and flashy! Even if the high quality visuals and flashy content might be hiding lower quality information.

My first instinct on YouTube is to pull up old GDC talks. There’s now nearly a decade of those, gotta be plenty for me to spend years trying to take it all in. Some of those early years have not so great visual and audio quality but you can still get the information being presented. I thought there’d be an obvious “go-to” kind of best of the best collection of talks but the views are decently spread across the videos so I’ve been trying to watch a bunch of different ones. Over time I’ve started to prioritize the 5 small talks in 1 talk. I enjoy these smaller lessons that are often trying to drive one point forward. It makes for a cleaner takeaway message for me to remember.

My other approach is to search around specific genres, mechanics, or even games. Since we’re working on a card game I’ve been searching for talks about those. Often ending up on Slay the Spire talks as it’s still one of the most dominant touch-points for the genre. We’re not making a Slay the Spire though so only a few key lessons to be gleaned from that content.

My second most common YouTube channel is now probably Game Makers Tool Kit (GMTK). These are often shorter than GDC talks, more in the 20 minute area so I can put one on when I want to give my brain something to chew on or get activated to pursue a more serious creative project. Kind of like an appetizer for the more serious academic papers referenced in the game design course. But the other fun part of GMTK videos is that I don’t always agree with all the points the host makes. Which turns into a boon because it then means that these videos often become more like discussion topics for me and my wife. Giving us something to dissect and articulate our own feelings about.

But maybe what GMTK is best at is just having so many references! I don’t know how he finds the time to play/learn about so many games to talk about them in his videos but it’s just so nice to see concrete examples of the things being talked about.

My idle-walking game idea

I teased this idea mostly on BlueSky last month because it was inspired by another game designer's post from there. An idle-battler where the battles take place at locations you need to walk to. Kind of like Pokemon Go’s gym system but instead of Pokemon you have 1 or multiple adventurers and they go explore a dungeon for a set time before returning to you with results.

I really like games that encourage me to go outside. I don’t love just going for a walk, I really like having a destination or goal. Pokemon Go was able to give me that for a while but it’s faded over the last 10 years. So now I’m free to think about what other kinds of walking games would get me outside.

This really took up a lot of space in my brain for a few weeks and doing the visual mock-ups helped off load the mini-obsession. I still really like the idea and there are some fun game design problems to puzzle over in the project, but I’m not super interested in developing a phone game at the moment. Desktop and web feel like enough for now. But maybe someday, when I learn more about UI design. Because a big thing about phone games is that you need to nail the UI, but that’s possibly more of a pet peeve than a rule of thumb.

Conclusion

One of the interesting realizations from studying game design has been how similar it is to writing. You can read and watch all you want about game design but you aren’t going to get any better at it until you do it. Going through some of the early exercises was tough, you grasp at simple ideas, things that are familiar. But with each iterative exercise I felt like we were getting both faster at coming up with ideas but also coming up with ideas that made more sense. Like any skill, you need to use it. Mostly because there isn’t a step by step process to making a game, you aren’t going to repeat what you did for the last one all over again as you might need a whole new approach, a whole new set of knowledge. What you need to refine are your ways of thinking and not just your ideas.

I was going to use this blog post to talk more about the paper prototyping we’ve been doing but the post has already gotten pretty long. So I’ll leave you with this, another basic mock-up. And in a month or so we’ll see how much it’s changed.