Understanding the ideation process

Before we begin, let’s make it clear that the game designer is not the ideas person. It is not their job to have a constant flow of new game ideas. These can (and should) come from anyone within the team or even from people outside your organization. It’s very common in our industry to have publishers commission a game idea to the developers, an owner of an intellectual property (IP) such as Star Wars or The Witcher to seek out licensing, or game studios themselves providing outsourcing services to other developers.

A game idea could be driven by market research, a game vision, or even, in a more artistic way, by the urge to say something or tell a story. What is important for you as a game designer is to have what I like to call a designer mindset. A designer mindset allows you to process raw ideas analytically.

You should be able to imagine a finished product being played by your audience. You will need to predict any major problems and issues, have a clear idea of the competition, and have some intuition about possible USPs.

There are no shortcuts to developing this mindset; you must play games and create them, know what works and what doesn’t, to keep a critical eye on everything you play and see. Ideally, you will strive to become a true expert in the genres you are most interested in (both as a designer and as a player), but to do so, you’ll often need to explore all sorts of games.

You might not be keen to play certain types of games, but you must still try to understand what makes them fun for their intended audience. A truly great designer can point out good and bad design decisions in any game, from a pony-nurturing simulator to a horror shooter.

Note

Every developer (not just game designers) dreams of working on their dream game, but as a professional who’s trying to make a living, you will have to adapt your skills and career goals to what’s required of you. Shift your expectations to the available opportunities and embrace the challenge of working on something that isn’t your forte. Your job will rarely allow you to create a perfect representation of your dream game; until that time arrives, be resourceful and make the best possible game, treating your constraints as interesting problems rather than depressing limitations. Learn from your mistakes and do the best you can for the players and the team!

A designer mindset and the game designer profession are something you develop with experience and dedication. As with any other discipline, you will need to study and work hard.

Coming up with ideas

As we said, ideas can come from many different sources, so let’s try to recap them in a practical list of activities that can help you come up with interesting concepts for future new games:

• Play tons of video games, especially ones outside your favorite genres.
• Watch movies, TV, and theatre, and read books.
• Travel.
• Think about how to turn your interests outside gaming into a game (bricolage, wine, fitness, art, music, traveling, and so on).
• Analyze the market and think about unique games that are not there.
• Ask people what new game they would like to play.
• Deconstruct your favorite games, focusing on what would make them better.
• Go to game jams (where you will have a very restricted amount of time to create a working game!).
• Give yourself a theme, and try to make a game around that in a short time.
• Learn the basics of a game engine and do some stuff! Anything: follow online tutorials, try to recreate some game mechanics—just mess around with example projects.

Twisting familiar mechanics

As a game developer, your goal will always be to create interesting new games, but as we can learn from other game developers’ success stories, a successful game is always a mix of novelty and familiarity. If you think about most of the games available today, you can clearly see how each of them is an iteration of an older game or well-known mechanics. Very few games are completely new and with never-seen-before core mechanics.

In fact, your role as a game designer is not to invent a completely new set of mechanics every time but to pick a set that works well with the game you are making. Using existing mechanics, refining well-known concepts, and falling back on clichéd settings is totally fine (if you think about it, many multimillion-dollar franchises do exactly that). Just make sure that you have a very clear goal of what you want to achieve and how the mechanics you picked are helping you deliver on your vision.

Don’t be afraid—there will be plenty of space for innovation and creativity, even working on proven mechanics. More importantly, there will be plenty of occasions to work on truly innovative games in your career. Just keep in mind that, as a professional game designer, your goal is to design compelling game experiences and not to do something new and different at all costs.

It must be clear at this point that everything that goes into the game concept will have a direct impact on how the game is going to be designed. This is why it is so important that it is defined as the first stage and must be kept in mind for the whole development process. It must act as the ultimate reference, a guide to keeping the vision clear and the project on track during the difficult and exciting times ahead when the proper development begins.

We are going to discuss in depth the process of creating and adapting game mechanics in Chapter 6, Designing Systems and Features.

Creativity through constraints

The main risk of defining and refining a game concept during the ideation phase is underestimating the project scope or the actual ability of the team to accomplish its goal. The fact that these limits exist is all good news, though. Imagine having a blank canvas and being told to draw a beautiful painting or having a blank page and having to write a short story. This is when artists experience the so-called artist’s block: the inability to produce any new work or let their creativity flow.

Your blank canvas is your ideation space. The more constraints you can identify, the more that space will shrink, allowing you to focus on ideas that could work! The size of your team, the expertise on the platform, your budget, the available technology...

These all help to inform what you can and cannot realistically do. Every design decision you make will be somehow constrained. You must embrace those limits and create something that works within them. Game design is problem-solving, which usually means compromising.

Finding the fun

What do you think about this?

A game where you play as an astronaut who watches planet Earth being destroyed from a space station.

Or this?

An augmented reality (AR) game in which you use your phone to find clues and solve mysteries.

These may sound like good hooks for a game concept (if you think about that first one, that could be a hook for a book or a movie as well), but the most important thing when you are ideating your game is: How can this be fun? What do you do in that game? Is the space station game a survival adventure or a horror FPS? Is it about managing resources or solving puzzles? Is it a space shooter? Think about the games you love—what makes them fun? And what is fun anyway? Is it the joy of learning and mastering new systems, exploring and interacting with virtual worlds, and making interesting choices?

We’ll be exploring the connection between fun and game mechanics in further chapters while trying to avoid any unnecessary deep dive into the theory. That said, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to! There are entire books and articles dedicated to the topic of fun. Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun and Nicole Lazzaro’s Four Keys to Fun are just two of many noteworthy examples.

Good designers are fluent in practical game design techniques and well-informed in theory. Excellent game designers are experts in both. Fun in games comes from the player’s experience, which is ultimately related to the core game mechanics. As you can imagine, if those core mechanics are not fun, no one will be interested in the game.

Of course, you cannot wait until the game is finished to try it out and see whether it’s fun... So, how do you do it?

There’s only one answer to this question, and it is by prototyping.

Prototyping

We will talk about prototyping in detail in Chapter 7, Making Prototypes; for now, let’s just understand the basics:

A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept.

Only 15 years ago, building a prototype for a video game concept or just trying out some mechanics was out of the question for most game developers. Today, with tools such as Unity and other accessible game engines, prototyping is extremely quick and efficient, and, most importantly, not only a prerogative of game programmers.

Imagine that you want to make a 3D game where two armies clash in battle. Developing a playable demo of such a game, with 3D models of every soldier, the battleground, and the rules behind movement and fighting, is a massive amount of work.

And what if after everything is ready, you find out that the battle is not as fun as you thought it would be?

Prototyping means focusing on the essentials and answering gameplay questions. Once it is clear what we want to test out with a prototype—in this case, whether the battle mechanics are fun—we realize that we don’t need fully rendered 3D models for soldiers and accurate terrain. We probably don’t even need soldiers.

By abstracting, we might find that we only need some 3D cubes moving on a flat plane. Setting up a plane and some cubes requires 5 minutes of work in Unity. Eventually, you might find out that the concept of two armies fighting is simply too generic to have a meaningful or realistic prototype.

In this case, you can start by adding more details and asking yourself more questions. What kind of battle are you trying to represent? A medieval battle is very different from a battle between tanks in the Second World War.

Tip

If you’re planning to show the prototype to a less imaginative audience, you might want to replace the abstract cubes and shapes with some basic models and images found on the internet. The likes of Unity Asset Store can be a great source of effective prototyping assets! Just make sure that the audience realizes that you’re not trying to represent the final look of the game.

Iteration

While prototyping, you essentially iterate on the concept, stripping it down to its core. For example, you may find out that the essence of the game you’re trying to make can be described as your unit charging the enemy in a medieval battle.

That’s your next direction for prototyping; just focus on the charge element, on the enemy’s reaction. They can flee if you’re charging their flank or react by firing arrows or standing their ground if you’re charging the front.

All you will see on your screen is just colored cubes chasing each other. But that’s already a great start. The sooner you have something playable, the sooner your vision will become more tangible, and you will have real feedback not only on its playability but also on its feasibility.

Armed with feedback and data, you can refine your work, add or remove details, or completely change direction. Game design is not about getting everything right the first time, but constantly improving what is there until it becomes the best it can be.

Defining fantasy

A common association of the word fantasy is with a fictional world populated by magic and fantastic creatures. Let’s leave that idea of fantasy behind for now. By fantasy here, we mean the activity of imagining things, not necessarily things that cannot happen in our real world.

You can fantasize about being a doctor, an athlete, or a gangster. That’s what we mean by fantasy. Defining fantasy means establishing imaginary settings and environments for the game world and the actions the player is able to do in it.

Fantasy is not something that needs to be explicitly stated in the game concept, as it emerges from how the game is designed around the initial vision. In the example we made previously while discussing prototyping, we were creating a strategy battle game in a medieval setting. Through iterations, we stripped the game to its core, imagining the fun of issuing orders to our units and commanding a charge through enemy lines.

What we did there is come up with a fantasy—the fantasy of being a general ordering troops to charge into battle and conquer enemies. Note how the genre influences fantasy. A strategy game with many different troops to command implies the player is the strategist, therefore the fantasy is being a general of a medieval army.

If the concept were about a first-person action game where you command a knight during a charge on the enemy lines, we would have a completely different fantasy (the player being the heroic knight leading the charge). Different fantasy, same setting (and the same battle).

Other common fantasies in games include being a hero through someone’s journey to save someone (from Super Mario to The Legend of Zelda) or controlling a team in a specific sport. Again, a fantasy always suggests a genre, but it describes something more telling: a bigger story about the player’s actions. Clearly, defining a fantasy means setting up more guidelines that will drive the entire development and any design decision down the line.

Creating a fantasy through game mechanics

Let’s go back to the charging knight example we just made. You want that charge to be spectacular, tense, and ultimately satisfying for the player; that means designing the enemy’s reaction and behavior (and even the game physics) in a way that is meaningful for that fantasy.

Imagine if the combat system didn’t include any physics and the knight simply stopped in front of his target after the charge and began a static fight where both he and his enemy just swung their weapons until one was defeated. Wouldn’t it be so much better if the momentum built by the charge sent the enemy through the air and the knight continued advancing until the momentum was gone (and many enemies knocked out)? Creating such a game requires the design of the core mechanics to be built around a very specific fantasy.

The mood, or how the game looks and feels

Part of the identity of any video game is how it looks on screen and how the combination of its mechanics, visuals, and audio creates the aesthetic of the game. This combination evokes an emotional response from the player and defines the mood of a game.

The mood is very much part of the design, as with any other element, as important as gameplay or story. Games such as Limbo and Journey are essentially designed around a mood, with the specific intention of evoking certain emotions in the player as a central part of the experience.

Defining the mood of a game is a collaborative effort from the entire team, often under the direction of a specific person (or multiple directors, in the case of bigger productions). Artists create amazing content that can define the mood and the aesthetic of a game, and sometimes it’s the designer’s responsibility to put it together.

Designers are likely to be the first ones to actually see it in-game. Keeping in touch with the art team is crucial to the final quality of the game; designing new content that the art team will have to create is not unidirectional. Make sure to get as much input as you can from the art team about any work they will have to do based on your design!

Exercise

It is time to go through the document you have written, taking into account everything we have been saying. If you chose to create a concept for your own game idea, try to write a new one for an existing one and vice versa. Try to have someone else read your game concept and give you some feedback. Did they understand the game? Did they get the vision you had in mind while writing? Discuss your results online or with other designers or developers. Don’t be afraid of sharing your ideas. Yes—there might be a chance that someone would steal them, but there is a far greater chance that someone will like them and might even hire you because of them!