Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds
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U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
As far as I know, there is no set of rules that, when followed, is guaranteed to result
in highly satisfying gameplay. Building a game is always a real-time experiment: as
a project, as a technology hurdle, and as a form of content. You have to get your
hands in the paint, move stuff around, and try out new ideas to get the play effect
you’re ultimately trying to define. This is never easy, and frequently requires much
team support. In some cases, you may have an idea that might fundamentally improve
gameplay in some way, but you may not be able to try out that idea due to technology
barriers and resource issues.
Impact of Play-Test Feedback on Daily Design Tasks
Throughout the development cycle, a design team helps to shape details for the
following:
� Character histories/backgrounds, abilities, behaviors, growth curves,
and interplay
� Environmental details, features, and topography
� Gameplay ideas
� Challenges and definitions for actors, weapons, powers, and behaviors
� Storyboarding of cinemas, segues, intros, and endings
Each of these categories will regularly be altered by play-test feedback. Even before
a game has grown up far enough to reach the testing department, designers are seeking
to avoid bottlenecks by helping to get game definition information to the development
team. If programmers are waiting on basic enemy behavior details, or artists have
vague and incomplete descriptions of characters for modeling or animation, a design
bottleneck is created. Design teams constantly work to avoid this scenario.
When the play-test feedback cycle roars into action, designers often have to shift
into overdrive as well. New or improved functionality, often as a result of test feedback,
may require further definition and tuning (for example, new interface elements or
new character powers). The design team will be challenged to find timely solutions
for such things as characters that aren’t testing well or that offer unique challenges
due to their physical construction; scenarios that are being identified as too easy, too
cumbersome, too short, too long, or too hard; or the growing sense that the overall
pacing of the game is becoming awkward.
The daily design tasks change momentum from helping to define gameplay
functionality to avoid creating bottlenecks for your teammates, to helping manage
and steer through changes within a frenzied revision process.