Elegance in game design
One of the most important principles of good game design is elegance. In your career as a game designer, you are going to hear this all the time: we need an elegant solution for this, look at how elegant this tutorial is, such elegance in this feature design. What are they talking about?
If you look at the meaning of the word elegance, two key words are widely used to explain what it is: efficiency and simplicity.
Games are extremely complex systems, so elegance in design is not a luxury, as the word might suggest, but a strict requirement. Elegant design refers to features and game mechanics that are simple to learn and hard to master. It means that despite the intrinsic complexity of the system, pretty much everyone should be able to interact with it. Elegance allows accessibility.
Ben Brode, in his brilliant talk Designing MARVEL SNAP! at GDC 2023, defined elegant design as “mechanics that yield a lot of depth for a small amount of complexity...
