Designing a Game

1. Designing a Game Conceptualization

2. ConceptualizationWhere do ideas come from? • Great ideas come from everywhere. • They spring up day or night, while sleeping, driving, or watching TV. • Ideas are impossible to predict. • If you are not paying attention, they will slip right past you.

3. ConceptualizationWhere do ideas come from? • Carry a notepad and pen with you at all times. • Jot down your ideas from a burst of inspiration to slow trickles that seep into your mind. • Creative people often have ideas while driving. • Ideas are ephemeral and will vanish before they are fully formed.

4. ConceptualizationWhere do ideas come from? • If you want to be a game designer, you must think of yourself as an Olympic contender in the sport of idea brainstorming.

5. ConceptualizationWhere do ideas come from? • Generating good ideas is hard work and requires dedication. • If you get into the habit of jotting down all of your ideas, your problem will be that you don’t have time to develop all of them.

6. ConceptualizationWhere do ideas come from? • Try not to drown in a sea of your own creativity. • The problem isn’t the number of ideas; it’s that your ideas aren’t being organized in a way that gives them value.

7. ConceptualizationWhere do ideas come from? • Learn to use a database program to create an IDEABASE. • Create categories for premise, plot, character, etc. • When you need to use an idea, you can sort quickly by heading.

8. ConceptualizationWhere do ideas come from? • Forcing yourself to record and organize your ideas will accomplish two things: • It cements the ideas in your memory for later retrieval. • It gives you a chance to discard the lousy ideas. • This is the first step in editing

9. ConceptualizationBrainstorming Techniques • Structured brainstorming is a powerful skill. • It takes practice to become good. • You might be a brainstorming beginner of a brainstorming expert. • Brainstormers train themselves how to generate workable ideas and solutions to problems.

10. ConceptualizationBrainstorming Techniques • Another brainstorming process is to create an Idea Tree. • Start with 5 trees trunks – well spaced apart. • Name each tree something you love. • Write down 2 ideas (branches) for each tree • Continue the process to develop each tree.

11. ConceptualizationBrainstorming Techniques • List Creation: List everything you can dream up on a certain topic. • Idea Cards: Take a deck of index cards and write a single idea on each one. Now, pair the cards. For example, pair Dinosaur with Drag Racing. Your next game could be about dinosaurs racing prehistoric cars.

12. ConceptualizationBrainstorming Techniques • Stream of Consciousness: Sit down at the computer and start writing like crazy. Don’t worry about being coherent. Don’t think about punctuation or spelling. After 10 minutes spewing words on a particular topic, read over what you have done.

13. ConceptualizationBrainstorming Techniques • Randomize It: Take out a dictionary and open it up to any page, then start with the word you see first. A newspaper or magazine also works. Now start writing down ideas related to that word. The word you find might be microwaveand you have an idea about a future on Earth where microwaves are used to levitate people.

14. ConceptualizationBrainstorming Techniques • Research: If you have a basic idea, try researching the topic. Find out all you can about the topic. Maybe the idea of ants fascinates you. Learn about ant hills, how ants live and work, what ants eat, what are army ants. You could design a board or digital game around the name Ant Colony or Ants In Your Pants.

15. ConceptualizationBrainstorming Techniques • Extreme Measures: Put yourself into new situations. Force yourself to try something entirely different, whitewater rafting, snorkeling, a new sport or even a new hobby. The next thing you know, you are designing an underwater game where players are snorkeling and coming into contact with fish, stupid sponges, evil jellyfish, and a wise old turtle. The game could be called SNORK.

16. ConceptualizationBrainstorming Techniques • Team Brainstorming: Working with others is both stimulating and highly productive. Two or more people can bounce ideas back and forth. Two minds can build upon the core idea in ways that a single mind cannot. Hearing your ideas being discussed by someone else helps you take a perspective look at your concepts.

17. ConceptualizationBrainstorming Techniques • Rules of Team Brainstorming: • State a purpose. • No idea is bad! Never criticize ideas. • Encourage differing views. • Vary the structure – don’t rely on just one method of brainstorming. • Go for lots of ideas – try for 100 ideas per hour.

18. ConceptualizationEditing & Refining • Now change gears and put on your critical hat. • Schedule your editing sessions on different days from your brainstorming sessions. • Make it clear to everyone that brainstorming is over. • Pull out the ideas that work. • Narrow down to the top 10 ideas.

19. ConceptualizationEditing & Refining • Nominal Group Technique: Now that you have your top 10 ideas, have each person put the list into rank order – assign a number value from one to 10. • Find the average rank score of each idea. • Rearrange your list using the new combined rank order.

20. ConceptualizationEditing & Refining • Take you newly ranked list and narrow down to the top 3 ideas. • Discuss these ideas. You might even brainstorm each idea for game development feasibility. • Take a new group ranking. Repeat the processes until you have 1 idea that everyone agrees on and that can feasibility be used in a game.

21. Turning Your Idea Into A Game • If you are going to produce a truly original game, try to forget all of the other games – for a second. • Don’t combine existing games to create a better one. • Work from your vision of the type of game you’d like to play.

22. Turning Your Idea Into A Game • Is your game about Africa? • Does it have wild animals? • How will the animals interact? • Does the player have clearly defined goals? • What obstacles get in the way in getting to the goals? • The game mechanics stem from your main idea.

23. Turning Your Idea Into A Game • What will be your game’s mechanics? • What do you want your game to look like? • How will your game function? • Don’t lock in your ideas early in the development process. Give yourself time to play around and experiment.

24. Elements of Game Design Formal Elements: Dramatic Elements: • Players • Number of players • Role of players • Player interaction patterns • Objectives • Procedures • Rules • Resources • Conflict • Obstacles • Opponents • Dilemmas • Boundaries • Outcome • Challenge • Play • Premise • Character • Story

25. Questions to Ask Yourself • What is the conflict in my game? • What are the rules and procedures? • What actions do players take and when? • Are there turns? How do they work? • How many players can play? • How long does a game take to resolve? • What is the working title? • Who is the target audience?

26. Fleshing Out Game Structure • Define each player’s goal. • What does each player need to do to win? • What is the single most important player action in the game? Describe how it functions. • Map out how a typical turn works. • How do the players interact with each other?