Game design Toolbox – Customization
When you go to the movies, it makes you want to be a movie director, or an actor. When you play games, you wish you…
Game design Toolbox – Data Structures and Algorithms
As the design starts to make progress, it becomes increasingly important to develop the data structures. Those data structures are used to provide feedback to…
Game design Toolbox – Symbolism – Granularity
Granularity, Symbol Or Representation? This is one of my favorite subjects. When designing the details of a game, where do you stop? Should we see…
Game design Toolbox – What is not in the game
Define What Is Not In The Game So many people are trying to define games by adding more and more things to existing games, that…
Game design Toolbox – Walk through – Narratives
This tools is used very often. The designer writes what he expects the first user experience to be upon using the product the first time.…
Game design Toolbox – User time investment
Game design Toolbox – User time investment How is the user or character investing its time? I found it useful to define early what the…
Game design Toolbox – User Actions
What is it that the player does? Rather than understanding how the larger and larger goals are connecting the different actions in the game, we…
Game design Toolbox – Stairs of Productivity
Different goals at different scales, the “plateaus” graph The game is requiring the player to have different goals. Often the player is expected to be…
Game design Toolbox – The Game State Landscape
Game State Landscape Another tool to think about the game that I learned from Will Wright: Project the state of the game onto two dimensions…
Game design Toolbox – The Mental Model
The User’s Mental Model Since the goal of the design is to provide a specific experience for the user, it is often important to describe…