Game Design Framework: On the way to good Game Design

This is a repost from my blog.

We love to talk about design theory. There are many design talks about system design, UX, narrative, or new monetization methods. But we often missed the path from design to implementation when you as a designer have to interact with other people in order to implement your ideas.

It all started with a question: “Why some games are better?” I mean, systemically better.

It’s only two examples, but you can see the trend, right?

But what is so special about them? They all have different genres, platforms, different audience and market. There’s one similarity between them: the quality of experience. In other words, these games are good because of their game design!

What is the key to this quality? Ideas, maybe? What do we have here…Indy-style adventure, a zombie movie, generic fantasy, generic sci-fi…I don’t see radically new ideas here, to be honest.

So, perhaps, they have some very special talented people who create all this great design? Good point. But the game industry is full of great talents with the highest quality of their work on the individual level. Besides, if we see at people who left, for example, Blizzard, usually, they do not create new Warcraft or Diablo right away.

Or, maybe, it’s some kind of a special marketing? But we have a lot of financially successful companies who don’t have games with so high quality.

If we dig a little bit deeper and study Blizzard and Naughty Dog post-mortems, we might notice that these two companies have a lot of surprising similarities in their approaches to production culture and game design. Perhaps, this is our secret? Is production culture the key?

And that’s where is my research started. My next question was: “What production culture leads to a successful creative product?” Actually, I was not the first who asked such question. Game design, by its nature and process, is very similar to the process of innovation adoption. And innovation methods is a well-studied topic in other industries.

I’ve studied a lot of things about creativity and innovation and then stopped on two sources of inspiration, two books, to be more exact.

My first source was a book called “Collective Genius.”

It’s a big research about production culture of successful innovative companies, like Pixar, Google, or IBM, and why are they systemically successful at innovation. And this research says that successful innovation is always about people and how they interact with each other. It’s not just about talents, but about talents in proper context.

You can find shorter version of the book in Linda Hill’s TED talk.

Here are these principles:

Looks familiar, don’t you think? You can see an application of these principles in many post-mortems of successful creative products. If you ever had an experience of successful implementation of some creative idea working in the team, you used such principles, at least, informally (in many cases, informally).

Another important thing when we talk about creative ideas is knowing how to overcome constraints on the way. My second source of inspiration was a book called “Creative People Must Be Stopped” (and related Coursera course “Leading Strategic Innovations In Organizations”).

It is a book about innovation’s way to success, but I found there a lot of similarities with my game design work when you often have a feeling that all the world works to stop you from the implementation of your ideas. The book shows the most common of such constraints and shows how to overcome them.

Which led me to my next question: “Can we systematize the proper principles and use them for game design?” Yes, our design and games might be new, but all “human factors” are very similar from project to project. Can we learn how they work and then learn how we can overcome them?

For almost 12 years in the game industry I had a lot of different experience, sometimes, successful, sometimes, not. After my research and armed with the new knowledge, I started to analyze all my previous game design and production experience. And came to an interesting conclusion: when I did things right, the process was very similar to the content of these two books. So, I’ve gathered the proper principles from my experience, identify the most common constraints (or obstacles) for good game design and identify the ways of overcoming these obstacles.

That’s how my Game Design Framework was born. In many senses, this is systematization of all my practical game design experience. My game design mindset, if you want.

Framework contains three stages:

DESIGN

Our first stage is the creation of the design. And I’d like to start here, perhaps, from the most important thing in any design process and all my framework.

Everything seems right in the picture? We’ve generated our idea, made GDD, went to production and reached GM. But very often, players are not happy. Something missed here, in this scheme, one very important component.

This component is the player experience.

In IT and the game industry, we love to think using fancy models. Every specialization has its own in the form of pretty documents, perfectly optimized code or an extremely polished content. But very often, these cool models are not assembled into a good game. It doesn’t matter how good are your documents, code, or content; this is still not your final product. The game, as an experience, born at the moment when the player starts to interact.

This is what we really sell. Not software, not disk or box – interaction. This is the primary goal of all this framework – how to pass all of the steps on the way to good game design and build high-quality interactive experience. Now, as we have formulated our goal, we can start our way to good game design.

Let’s assume that we have some idea of the great player experience. How to turn it into design? First, we need to know what kinds of design exist. There are many classifications and approaches, but from the organizational point of view, I would divide the game design into two main types: Macro Design and Micro Design (I’ve used Naughty Dog terminology that was presented in 2002 by Mark Cerny in his THE METHOD).

Each type of design has its goal and abstraction level.

Any feature starts from Macro Design, the high-level vision that describes the player experience on the proper abstraction level. Macro Design should be created before the implementation, and has very few changes during the implementation. The format can be different: Creative Brief, One-Pager, Table with the list of your levels and gameplays, etc.

Macro Design is your answer to question WHAT? What game/feature you’re doing and what is your final goal.

The second type of design is Micro Design, a detailed description of the features that takes in account all technical restrictions and edge cases.

Micro Design is your answer to question HOW? How is your feature should work? What are restrictions?

Usually, Micro Design is creating during the implementation, and might have many iterative changes during feature creation. How it usually happens: you made a document, made the first iteration of the feature, saw that it didn’t work as intended, updated the document, made a second iteration of the feature, and so on.

If we look at the relationship between these two design types, we can easily notice, that the biggest part of the design is Micro Design. The most of the production time, game designer do not “generate ideas”, but answer to the team’s questions such as “How it should work?”, and do it during production, not before (this is, by the way, one of the reasons, why it’s so hard to do game design remotely).

Game Design is about execution! It’s not what you came up with, this is what you have done in the end. And, by its nature, game design is a live and iterative process (which makes it very similar to innovation adoption process).

Let’s look at our two design types in details and what obstacles might be on our way in each case.

Macro Design

What is important about Macro Design that it is, actually, very time-consuming and has an extremely high cost of the mistake. I would put it this way: it is 20% of Design where you make 80% of the biggest mistakes.

It’s very common, and I see it again and again when teams try to “save time” on Macro Design stage. Th