Game Design Stages Part 1: Ideation
Part 1 of 6 on the six stages of game design . Back in 2021, I tried to formulate the six stages of game design as I’d observed them. Aspirational more than definitive: I was hoping to solve observable problems through structure. The stages are: The crucial bit of added texture is linearity : once you pass Commitment, you can’t go back to ideation or exploration until your next project. The reason is that I’ve seen so many projects get delayed, made complicated, or even cancelled because designers would simply never stop ideating. Even with a fraction of the schedule remaining, a new idea or a new “what if?” could flop onto the schedule like a severed limb, bleeding on everything from art production to menu flow. This makes it necessary to be specific about what you want from each stage. This six-post series starts with some tools for how to make your ideation productive. You can find more of these tools in my book (linked on the About page), and I’ve kept the overlap between book and post to a minimum. Let’s have ideas! “Ideation: the activity of forming ideas in the mind.” Cambridge Dictionary Few things say game designer quite like having ideas. Even within the profession, we run into the occasional “ideas guy” (it’s usually a guy). But having ideas is the easy part — telling the rest of your team how to execute on them is the hard part. Good ideas are informed, concrete, and practical to communicate. The first and possibly most important element of good ideation is positive communication. Not saying no — never shooting things down. Instead, borrow a page from improvisational theater: the trusted “yes, and …” When someone has an idea, you start by accepting it, and then you build more on top. “What about space ships?” Says the first designer. “Yes! Space ships, and they have like 1,000 people onboard.” This process is not there to give you a finished design, but to let you ideate without anyone feeling shot down or left out. It’s also a good way to train your collaborative communication. It’s not uncommon that your spontaneous “no” comes more easily than your spontaneous “yes,” so exercising your “yes, and …” does real collaborative work with limited effort. The greatest achievement of positive reinforcement like this is that you avoid pushing people into the defensive mindset that often takes over when you say “no” or insist on your own ideas. Gains of “yes, and …”: Indie developer Tomas Sala mentioned this, and I think it’s some of the best advice there is when it comes to ideation: “Lots of young developers want to make what they love. They want to make what they play”, he said. “My first step is get rid of that, because you’re replicating what you are, you’re not being an authentic creator that is adding to the field. That is not interesting to a publisher or an audience.” More cynically, if you plagiarise your fandom, you’ll risk making a worse version of something better. No matter how much I personally love Thief: The Dark Project , I’m probably not the person to make a first-person thief game. By all means, be inspired, but find ways to channel your inspiration into something that is yours. This is harder to do, and it will take longer than copying something else, but the more you do it the better. Gains of getting out of your fandom: In journalism, there’s an idea that you should actively work to keep yourself out of your reporting. You may be political, progressive, conservative, or have something specific you want to say; but you shouldn’t rub the reader’s nose in it. You should actively strive to keep yourself out . You do this by providing three or more sources whose combined image of a story allows the reader to draw their own conclusions. The sources should be one for, one against, and one that’s observational or represents an expert opinion or a neutral but related party. In cases where someone has done something bad, you let them speak their mind as a contrast against the words of the victim; then you get a lawyer or expert to chime in with a third angle. You can also bring in friends, relatives, coworkers, and so on, to flesh out the story even more. Like journalists, game designers should allow players to make up their own minds too. Since a game can become anything and be played by anyone, it’s impossible for you as the game designer to decide how a player will feel as they play your game. The thing you intended to be a feelgood reveal may carry emotional baggage for a certain demographic, but the imagery may cause disconnect for someone else. This doesn’t mean that everything needs to get equal terms, however. But you leave the conclusions for the players to make. An anti-example of this is the mushroom man in FarCry 3 . First time you meet him, you learn he locked one of your friends in his attic. As he unlocks the door, and reveals she’s drugged out of her senses, he seemed a total creep to me. Then the character I was playing proceeded to thank him for this treatment — I wanted to shoot him. That is the kind of disconnect that happens when the player isn’t able to “own” the experience. Gains of keeping yourself out: Theory crafting and intellectual discussions on emotions, design principles, and much more is a huge and important part of ideation. But it can’t be the only part. To “think with a controller,” you pull one out and you imagine yourself playing the game you intend to make. Which buttons you press, how frequently, and when. If there’s some interface needed to tell the player how a certain thing works. This is of course a metaphor, since it can be physical components of some other kind than a controller, but the simple act of physically interacting with your game even at this extremely early stage will help you flesh out your ideas. Gains of thinking with a controller: If you want to make games, you can’t wait to find your muses. You must be able to do the work. In ideation, the tendency is to never stop ideating, making you stay in conversation mode for longer than you should. Getting things on a page pushes you towards both the literal page, writing things down, and towards the exploration stage, where you will be challenging everything you just came up with. The effect the blank page will have on the typical writer sets in for game designers too. The dreaded block! To get out of this blank page effect and avoid getting stuck on details that are not actually important yet, you can try to just get something on the page. Gains of getting things on a page: Brainstorming and spitballing is great, but complete freeform ideation is very much a hit/miss process and often leans too much on seniority or other soft credentials. Enter intrinsic ideation! The term comes from a NoClip documentary on the making of Horizon: Zero Dawn , and the way they phrase its use is that “everything has to come from something you already established as true.” In other words, you take the facts defined for your game, and you only bring the new thing being discussed into your game if it can be motivated using those facts. It’s a handy way to sanitise your ideas and see that they fit with the game as a whole, and also to remove ideas that may be cool on their own but don’t fit into the whole. This tool is only useful if you’ve already been through a few rounds of exploration and are returning for more ideation, but the main advice I’d give you is to be ruthless . If things don’t check out against your pillars, facts, or other documented processes, you should cut it out and move on. Ideation is the only time where cutting things out is cheap . Gains of intrinsic ideation: We sometimes forget that gaming is a form of make believe. Pretending to jump really high, or spending millions of virtual dollars, or killing half the population of Evil Land. Our species has been engrossed by make believe for as long as we’ve been about, and it can therefore be particularly useful to seek out some of that as inspiration. Make believe isn’t freeform conjuring of the fantastical, it’s imagining that you are doing something . Driving the expensive car, performing the athletic feat, climbing the highest mountain, defending your village from an attack, exploring the deepest woods, keeping your head down in the mud and trenches of World War I. It’s easy to forget that there’s a whole world out there that has nothing to do with dice or controllers. Reading, watching, and doing , is about immersing yourself in the real world, embracing that reality surpasses fiction. Perhaps you shouldn’t watch the Game of Thrones series from HBO a third time, but instead watch a documentary or read some books on the Wars of the Roses. Perhaps a book on medieval longsword fencing is not the way, when you can visit your nearest Association for Renaissance Martial Arts (ARMA) group and swing a longsword yourself. First step for this to work is to get out there and expose yourself to new things. To translate this inspiration into game ideas, there are two things you can look out for: verbs and adjectives . What is being done, and how it’s described by the people doing it. Some things are of course harder or more dangerous to try than others. You can’t try the trench life of a British soldier in 1916, but perhaps you can go to a rifle range, and you can load up your backpack and march for a couple of hours in the rain. Gains of reading, watching, and doing: Most of us have very concrete ideas of what a certain genre or type of game should be. An interesting way to start ideation can therefore be to write all these things down and actively turn some of them upside down. Conventions will usually belong in a broad category. When someone says they’re designing a worker placement game, for example, this will come with a list of conventions. Each player has their own workers, a common board with a set number of slots for workers, a placed worker will block other worker placements in the same slot. Etc. If you write each of these down, you can usually see the inverse of each of them. Each player has their own workers — what about a common pool of workers? A common board with slots — what about player-owned boards holding those slots? This exercise can go as deep as you want, and can also aid you in figuring out the shape of your inspirations. But you have to be fairly specific about what a convention is. Gains of challenging conventions: If you already have a long list of features you want to explore, you can select just a handful and focus only on those. If not, you can take a broad theme and make it a hard constraint. The reason you use constraints is that they can directly inform your ideation. Many times, ideation that is too vague will result in derivative designs. If you say that you can only use the analogue sticks and triggers on a gamepad, for example, you can push every other button out of your mind and just think about what you should do with those specific inputs. It doesn’t mean you won’t use the other buttons down the line, just that you should keep them out of your mind for now . Gains of using constraints: Ideation : coming up with ideas and vetting them. Exploration : trying things out as cheaply as possible. Commitment : deciding what to commit to. Problem solving : solving problems in the real game. Balancing : broad strokes for the core audience. Tuning : fine-tuning the marketed product. More positive communication. More diverse ideas. More constructive conversations. Forces you to find your own identity. Makes it easier to separate work from inspiration. Lets you focus on the experience of play. Let players decide the meaning of things in your game. Enhances the sense, for players, that the game is “theirs.” Respects the death of the author . Makes your design tangible, in a simple way. Gets you thinking about the practical side of things. A player story . Just a paragraph or two that describes the player going through a segment of the game as you imagine it. Bullet point lists . List verbs, cool abilities, interesting characters, key features; anything that can be readily listed and that you want your game to have. Documentation headlines . Get just the headlines of a bigger outline or document in place. “Gameplay,” “Art Direction,” “Level Design;” whatever feels important to you. Write just a sentence under each to summarise your thoughts. Goals and anti-goals . Things you want to achieve with the game, and things you don’t want at all. Moves your ideas from the purely intellectual space to the practical. Forces you to sort through the ideas you have. Things to dig deeper into as well as things to reject outright. Reinforcement of established principles and design facts. A neutral process for vetting ideas that doesn’t lean back on soft credentials. Pivots when it’s still cheap to pivot. Gets you away from the computer. Concretises your inspirations into their different details. Lets you discover new inspirations. Expands your ideation vocabulary. Activities . Killing goblins and taking their stuff. Moving puzzle pieces. Drawing cards. What if you change or invert an activity? Maybe give goblins stuff, remove puzzle pieces, and start with all cards on hand. Components . What if you change the rules around a common component? Instead of rolling a die, you pick a number and you hide it under your hand. Restrictions . You can only play one card per turn and weapons can run out of ammo. What if you remove a standardised restriction? Play as many cards as you like, and have infinite ammunition. Controls . The gamepad left trigger is for aiming, and you must press Jump when you reach an obstacle. What if you switch or remove controls? You track opponents by holding the left trigger, and you jump automatically when you reach an obstacle — you just have to look in the right direction. Helps you figure out your own convention biases. Fertile ground for coming up with new ideas that are twists on existing ideas. Makes it easier to communicate — many conventions will be assumed during ideation. Restrict theme . It must be about monster hunting in the 1800s. Restrict player avatar . The player is a bus driver. Restrict activities . Players can’t have more than two choices to make at any given time. Restrict controls . You can only use two fingers on one hand, with a touch screen. Restrict player count . Playable by exactly three players. Restrict components . The game should only use 20 cards. Restrict play time . A session cannot take more than 5 minutes to complete. Restrict narrative . Just one location, three characters, and two specific events. Restrict inspirational sources . Watch only this documentary; read only that book; play these two games. Restrict preferences . Build a game from a feature or theme you don’t like. Pushes you towards results. Allows you to ignore potential distractions. Helps you evaluate the specific thing you decided to zoom in on.
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