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
BR: Make a game that you want to play. It is frustrating to talk to a designer on a sports title that
doesn’t like sports, or to a developer on a real-time strategy game that only plays first-person shooters.
Although you cannot always choose the projects on which you work, do everything you can to at least
be involved in an area that sparks your interests and passions. Also, no matter what type of game you
are designing, keep your eye on the following goals:
Easy to Play
This is the stage of getting your player into the game. The game must be simple to learn and have
a very accessible interface. As the player progresses through the game, he or she is introduced to more
sophisticated game mechanics while being given more tasks to do and places to explore. By the end of
the game, the player is playing at a much higher level than when he or she started, but the
development was made easy through a gentle learning curve.
Difficult to Master
This is the real meat of the game. After players know how to manipulate the interface, move
around the world, and so forth, what is going to keep them coming back for more? Advanced
strategies, an array of multiplayer options, and either random or player-created maps are all factors
to making a game playable and replayable for months and years as opposed to days or weeks.
F-U-N
Above all else, the game has to be fun. While this is perhaps a very esoteric statement, it is
surprising to see how this most basic of building blocks is overlooked by designers. Advanced enemy AI,
cutting-edge graphics engines, or complete digital environmental surround sound can enhance a game
that is, at its core, fun to play. These things do not, however, make the game fun to play in and of
themselves. This is also the main contribution of the designer; making sure that the course is set
for a compelling and fun experience is the designer’s top job.
TM: How do you see the design role evolving with the scope and complexity of games always on
the rise?
BR: We need to balance the increasing technology, size, scope, and complexity of games with
keeping them accessible. It is easy to get caught up in all of the bells and lights and whistles and lose
sight of the fact that when someone sits down to play the game for the very first time, they may have
absolutely no idea how anything you have designed works. You need to ease people into the game,
even if by the end you are going to have them typing tons of text, whipping the mouse around,
frantically clicking on dozens of objects, and balancing a range of resources.
Also, we need to stay focused on the key elements of what is entertaining and captivating about
our game design, and then embellish those areas as opposed to simply creating more and different
ideas. Our job as developers is to define a play experience and then stay true to that vision. If we do
a good job of that, the game will remain fun throughout for players who are excited and entertained
by the type of experience that our game provides.
Finally, we need to create and maintain tools that not only help us build the game, but also track
the progress and evolution of the design and development. If you have a massive role-playing game
with hundreds of spells, thousands of quests, and tens of thousands of different items, for example,
you need to not only be able to design and generate all of that content, but you need to be able to