The Game Design Canvas: Aesthetic Layout

Photo: Creativity+Timothy K Hamilton

Who cares if the main character is wearing silver armor or an orange cloak?  Does it really matter if your military troop is fighting in Europe or Asia?  There can’t be any difference between a game about saving the world, and one your one true love, right?

It does matter.  In fact it matters a great deal.  The sights and sounds and feeling contribute to the Core Experience of a game like no other part of the game can.  They are what make games a true art form instead of pure science, they are what make games closer to theater than arithmetic, painting than to geometry.  These artistic strokes are the skin that the world will see view the game, its face, its exterior.

Welcome to the fifth and final component of the Game Design Canvas: the Aesthetic Layout.

The Bells and Whistles

Hardcore gamers, and even some game developers, often tend to think of games exclusively as mechanical systems.  This is expected, because these types of people have typically played so many games that they’ve become experts.  Trained to analyze and dissect, they see through the smoke and boil the game down from bells and whistles to gears and oil.  All of the other systems we’ve talked about within the Game Design Canvas, the Base Mechanics, the Punishment and Reward Systems, and the Long Term Incentive, are all of these gears.  And once they see under the hood, they manipulate the gears as much as possible to get what they want. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »