Intro
As game designers we often find ourselves having to make decisions quickly. Complex design decisions. How should we face such and such system? Are all these mechanics and features really necessary? What needs to be developed first? Do all these interesting-sounding ideas actually fit together?
When we get to a fork in the road and both options sound good, how do we choose one over the other?
Having to face these situations often, not being able to provide a concise and clever solution can (and usually does) lead to two types of consequences:
Poor design: making design decisions with no solid fundament or clear criteria, guided only by instinct or contextless taste usually leads to a design that’s limp, with games that end up suffering from “feature creep” (a heap of features, stacked on top of one another).
Suffering team: a good portion of the teamwork stands on the decisions made by the creative team, meaning that if you can’t explain those decisions through clear and logical reason the entire crew will feel as if their work is headed towards random whims and/or chance. That’s no good.
On the other hand, industry folk (no matter their role) usually show a creative restlessness that drives them to put forward ideas, yearning to have some input. In that context, if we as designers can’t justify why someone’s idea is or is not relevant, you can end up on a stage of discomfort and ailment.
Now, there are tools that help us make choices, to stay true and not reinvent the wheel over and over. A few of those could be: common sense, an understanding of the technical and production aspects, examples of how such problems were solved during other games, and lastly the pure study of game design as an expressive and communicational medium.
Common sense: I believe that the craft of game design is largely an exercise in applying common sense. Basic concepts such as “trade-off” in order to balance experiences, or the difficulty curve in order to create an experience that isn’t frustrating, etc, all tools that were not discovered through mathematical formulas. That is why so many players might feel that they “could certainly design a better game” than the one they’re playing, since practically anyone can notice what’s necessary for an experience to be more or less enjoyable.
An understanding of the technical and production aspect: videogames as products are extremely hard to create. You’ve got completely unrelated disciplines that are working together, with all the problems that this scenario implies. There’s constraints and conditions everywhere: time, resources, what technology to use, what platform it’ll be released on, the team’s knowledge and ability, priorities, objectives, etc. And game designers, not exempt from this reality, have to work in this context. You could draw the conclusion that so many constraints end up being disadvantageous for the design, and maybe they are in the long run, but they are at least useful (they’re practically an extra tool) when it comes to everyday decision making. In a small team and with a short development cycle, it’s rather easy to decide if the game will have five characters or a hundred. There’s no way you can do a hundred, so that’s done, the design will have to compromise, and that decision is made thanks to the constraints. It doesn’t take us even five seconds to reach that conclusion and we’re all in agreement.
Benchmark: studying how other games solved this or that design issue is one of the most basic tools we’ve got when it comes to tackling complex problems in our own games. Playing an assorted collection of games (and plenty of them) is without a doubt a source of useful knowledge when it comes to understanding the medium, with the good and the bad. “You don’t need to reinvent the wheel”, a graphic design teacher used to say, and it’s a phrase you can easily apply to any creative space, including game design.
The study of games as a medium: books such as “Aesthetic of Play”, “Uncertainty in Games”, “Rules of Play”, “Game Feel”, “On the Way to Fun”, “A Book of Lenses”, and a long etc. can provide tools towards understanding the medium, to grasp the anatomy of games in general and thus being able to design better experiences. They are useful when you’re looking to design at a macro level and when it comes to making decisions at a micro. It’s important to understand the quirks, strengths and weaknesses of the medium where we’re trying to express ourselves in order to create solid experiences and to nourish many of the design decisions that we must make everyday during development.
However, given these tools at hand (that I’ve managed to acquire along the way through experience) I still believe there’s something missing. Some solution or way of understanding design that allows us to create solid experiences. So solid that there can be no doubt how they should be designed (what I call “auto-designed” experiences). Products with such a clear vision, such a strong pivot that decisions leave almost no room for discussion, and you can focus your creative efforts towards creating rather than arguing.
This is how I came upon a methodology I nowadays call “Core, Focus and Power”, which fills this void, can be applied to mostly any development and delivers the expected results (solid experiences and an enjoyable development)
Core, Focus y Power (in a nutshell)
That’s what I call this methodology, which is simple:
First you define the core.
Core is the objective, the intent behind the design, the North that we’ll keep through the design.
This is defined only once, preferably before you even begin making a prototype.
You then Focus on that Core.
Focus means that EVERYTHING in our game should be pointing toward the Core, focusing on it, and if something isn’t then it should be for a good reason and it should be on purpose.
This step is taken every time a new feature is brought forward, or every time a design decision needs to be made.
You take every focused feature and you seek to give it Power.
Power means that at least one of the game’s features should go the extra mile, take the product to a non comfort zone, with a fresh and bold outlook.
This step is taken after having designed a feature or an element that focuses on the Core, and is achieved by asking: how can I take this beyond, or hopefully to the extreme?
Core
The Core is the central piece in our game. It’s what we want to deliver. It’s the message.
The Core could be a word, a feeling, an emotion, a mechanic, a character.
It could be a business objective, a platform (for example making use of the Switch’s capabilities).
I like to sum this up by saying that the Core is: “the design’s intent”.
Practically anything could be the Core. For example, all along this essay I’ll use a game I’ve developed as reference. It’s called Mages & Taverns, and it’s a board game. In this case the Core is something as quirky as: “generating an interaction between players”.
Other examples of Core can be:
Fez: perspective
Ico: the relationship between two characters
