Designing from the Gut

Following your gut can be your best compass.  Photo: geebee2007

Learning to follow your instincts is paramount to becoming an experienced designer.  But to learn how to do that, we need to delve into two fundamental questions: What is the purpose of a game?  What is the job of a game designer?

There are a million answers to these two questions; everyone has their own opinion of what games are, what they currently do, and what they should do.  Likewise, “game designer” is one of the most ill-defined job titles in the world, with people thinking that it means everything from just “coming up with ideas” to god knows what else.

As a designer, I’ve talked with countless people about these questions.  I believe that the clearest answers are as follows:

The purpose of a game is to create an experience for the player.  The job of the game designer is to craft that experience.

Every game provides an experience, making the player feel a certain way.  This is the core of game design; every decision flows from this core feeling, and when it is achieved, it is a beautiful testament to the power of games.  Learning to focus on this feeling and use it as your decision maker will give your games a stronger focus and a more consistent theme, and it will help pull your games out of the mediocre and into the realm of remarkable.

What’s that Feelin’?

Games, as the only true interactive media, have incredible power to create these experiences.  Games can make you feel like you’re a ninja, a partygoer, a president, or an adventurer.  A well executed game can make you feel like you’re on a mission, on a mountain, in the sea, or in the void.  These feelings, these experiences, are what players are chasing after.

Harvard Business legend Theodore Levitt said, “People don’t want to buy a drill, they want to buy a hole!”  In the same way, player’s aren’t necessarily looking for a fighting game, they are looking for something that will make them feel like they are a fighter.  Sure, they don’t want to get kicked and bruised, but they still want to have that feeling of the fight, of struggling against an opponent, and coming out on top.  Games are attractive because they can mold this experience, getting rid of the unwanted “features” that would appear in real life.

Ok, that’s kind of interesting, but what does this mean for you?  When you sit down to design your game, you should start by making a hypothesis of what the game should feel like.  This can be anything that you like, but it should be firm and well defined.  If you don’t define what your game should feel like, then it won’t really feel like anything, and it will end up being a mediocre experience.

Some of the most successful games in the world have been built around a strong core feeling or experience.  Some examples are…

• A game that makes you feel like a soldier in war (Call of Duty)
• A game that makes you feel incredibly powerful (Infamous)
• A game that makes you feel like a hero of a kingdom (Legend of Zelda)
• A game that makes you feel like a super spy undercover (007)
• A game that makes you feel like you’re living another life (The Sims)
• A game that makes you feel like a vigilante or a criminal (Grand Theft Auto)
• A game that makes you feel like you’re exploring a vast world alone (Metroid)
• Any other experience you can think of!

Supporting the Experience

When you or your team has defined the core game experience or feeling, then it gives you a compass to follow as you make your design and development decisions.  With every issue that comes up during production, you can ask yourself, “how would this part of the game make the player feel?”  If the answer matches your goal for the feeling of the entire game, then you know you’re on the right track.  If not, then you can take that feature back the drawing board and change it until it fits.

See how honing into your game’s core experience early on can help in a variety of areas…

Level Design? If the game is supposed to make you feel alone, then the level design probably shouldn’t involve many enemies or things you can interact with.  If it’s supposed to make you feel like you’re in a crowded area, then the rooms should be small and the non-player-characters numerous.

Art Design? If the game is supposed to make you feel like you’re in a real life?  Then the graphics should be 3D and attempt to look as real as possible.  Is it supposed to make you feel  like you’re in a fantasy story?  Then it should be stylized as such.  Should it make the player feel like a kid again in the 1980’s?  Then it should use large pixel graphics and the limited color palette of the NES era.

Story Design? If the game is supposed to make the player feel like they are affecting the world around them, then the story should change depending on their.  If the game is supposed to make the player feel like they are witnessing an epic tale, then they probably don’t need as much choice.

Sound Design? Feelings of danger and peril?  Dissonant notes and startling tunes will do the trick.  Feelings of calm and serenity?  Piano and strings, long soothing melodies.

Gameplay Design? Feel like a fly?  The player should be easy to kill, quick to move.  Feel like a juggernaut?  Slow and steady.  Like a genius?  There should be many options available compared to the other simpleton characters.  What choices you give to the player at any given time affect how they interpret their experience.

Ideally, every single aspect of the game should support the core feeling that your title is trying to achieve.  You should be able to point to each art asset, every sound effect, every design choice, and say, “That belongs there because it makes the player feel ______, and that is the purpose of the game.”

When Problems Arise

When you’re chasing a feeling, then you have to learn to listen to your gut when things go wrong.

As a designer with an engineering background, I like the world to be very calculated and well defined.  If everything is assigned a value and every value fits into an equation, that just gives me nice goosebumps all over.  Define the idea, the game, the concept, the problem, and you can make sure it’s as good as it can go, right?

While that philosophy may be true most of the time, one of the most important skills I ever learned as a designer was being able to trust and follow my gut.  Sometimes there are things that are wrong with the game I’m making, but I don’t really know what they are.  I play it, I look at it, and something just feels wrong.  I can’t put my finger on it, but if I don’t find out what it is, then it will weight the game down to the ground until it’s too late.

This is a simultaneously frustrating yet valuable moment in game design.  What’s happening is that your mind is beginning to see a problem with the game, whether that problem is already there or it’s coming along down the pipe and needs to be avoided.  Your design instincts are sending off an alarm that the game you’re making isn’t matching the feeling it’s promising to deliver.  What I learned to do, and what any great designer needs to learn to do, is listen to that alarm instead of ignoring it, and learn how to trust yourself and locate the problem before it melts your game design.

As you improve your design skills, you’ll become familiar with this feeling.  If you don’t have it yet, then either you’ve been ignoring it and have created some mediocre games (but don’t know why they’re mediocre), or you just haven’t been around the block long enough.  But keep it up, and your instincts will become one of the most valuable design tools you have.

Talk it Out: Making the Abstract Concrete

Let’s say your little sidescrolling game is coming along.  You have your main character going through a couple of forest-style type levels, collecting his power ups, dealing nice damage to ugly enemies.  He’s swinging on trees and swinging his sword, and the first level is just about done.  You play through it a couple of times, and it seems you’re ready to move on to making the next levels.  But something is off.  Yup, it’s that gut feeling.

Where do you go from here?  Something in your mind is telling you that the game is about to go off track, but what?  How do you figure out what it is?

One of the best things that you can do to help unearth these vague notions is to talk to someone else.  Pull up your teammate (hopefully you have one), and talk their ears off.  Just start talking.  Even if you aren’t much of an extroverted person, this exercise will help tremendously.  When you explain your design and the core ideas behind your game to someone else, then it helps codify it in your own mind.

Start by describing why you feel the way you do.  Maybe it has to do with the power up system.  Maybe it’s how you imagine the rest of the levels playing out.  Talk about how you imagine the game going and then try and locate what’s wrong with that.  Keep talking, and eventually you will come up with the reason.  And once you find the reason that your gut is telling you something is wrong, you’ll be in a great position to do something about it.

By listening to your gut when things go wrong, you can chase that feeling that your design is promising to deliver and keep the game on track.  Learn to trust yourself and you will learn to craft a true experience.

Follow that Feeling

Focus on how you want your game to feel, and you can do no wrong.  If the game isn’t turning out as you’d like, then you can easily tell if you’re going for the wrong experience, or you simply aren’t conveying the experience well enough.  Be certain about the core of your game and it will guide you to a phenomenal gameplay experience.