Let’s not waste any time. Here we go… Today’s topic is design.

Step 1: Idea

And all design starts with an idea. What type of game do you want to make? Here’s a hint. Make it simple. If you’ve never driven a car, don’t start with Formula 1 Grand Prix. Similarly, if you’ve never made a game before, try to minimize the amount of balls you need to juggle. When you get some experience, when you know what you’re doing, when handling simple problems becomes routine to you, THEN it’s time to challenge yourself with more complex projects. Even when playing games, you don’t start with the last level first. The difficulty would be impossible. You start with something easy. When you get routine going, you’re ready to move forward. Be patient! Here are a few ideas… 1. Pong 2. Flappy Bird 3. Tic Tac Toe 4. Memory game Not very exciting? Well, hear me out… As you may be aware, game development is super complex. If you’ve never made games before, it can feel quite overwhelming. The idea with picking an easy project is to get you moving. To get you learning something while still making a finished, playable game. That way, you minimize the number of things you have to understand. But in your next project you’ll already know quite a bit about the process. Selecting a basic game type is important, but for an idea to work, you also need to pick a theme. Like a theme restaurant or theme wedding would have a theme. Don’t pick the first one that comes to mind. List at least ten theme ideas and see what feels the most interesting to you. When you’re ready, you should be looking at something like “Flappy Bird with The Flying Beaver called Mark”. Call it Beaver Mark I. Idea is really only an idea. We have them all the time. But how do we know if it’s a good idea? How do you know if a car you’re looking to buy is going to be good? You don’t… really. I draw a very strict line between knowledge and educated guesses. Also, “good” is a relative term. It’s relative to your goal. What is your goal? Is it… 1. Get 100,000 people to play the game? 2. Get $100,000? 3. Get 100,000 people to tell you they like the game? 4. Get a 90% review score? 5. Finish a game that you like? These are all worthy goals in my opinion. But you might have something specific in mind. The only way to know for sure is to do it and see. To go and figure. But that takes time. And obviously some ideas are better than others. How can you determine if you should pursue your idea? Test it. Test the idea. Tell about it to your friends. To strangers on the Internet. See how they respond. Does it get them excited? Maybe tell them about another idea and see if you get another response. Take the idea and bounce it around. Ask yourself: “How can I make this better?” Think about seeing your game online. But only, imagine that you never came up with the idea. Somebody else did and made it into a game. Now, you gotta be honest with yourself… Would seeing a tweet or Facebook post about that game make you excited to play the game? If not, what would have to change to get you excited? I know, this requires a lot of imagination, but hey, it’s game design. What did you expect?

Step 2: Design

Next, it’s time to write down all the individual elements of your game. • Required mechanics • Goals • Progression • Winning/losing • What the player does in the game • How the player is challenged • Movement • Actions • Controls • Feedback • Levels • Obstacles • Items Try to think of everything that somebody needs to make for the game to be considered finished. Let’s consider our Flappy Bird clone. The controls of the game are quite simple. You tap the screen and the game character jumps up. The challenge comes from trying to navigate the character through hoops that keep scrolling towards it. You could even call the game an endless runner. It wouldn’t be that bad, if not for the pesky gravity that in its infinite codependency keeps pulling everything, including the game character, towards it. It’s a very elegant design because it is very lean. If you remove any part, it stops working. Its incredibly difficult to get good results in the game because it requires constant concentration. If you lose your focus for a moment, the game is over. Obviously, the goal of the game is to get high score. And the score increases with every hoop you’ll be able to clear. If you miss a hoop, the game is over. How about the game art? What is the style going to be like? 2D? 3D? Pixel art? Cartoony? Realistic? Black and white? What sounds are required? Does the game need music? Art and sound have two purposes. On one hand, they are trying to capture the player and create an atmosphere that keeps them engaged in the game. On the other, they must provide the player with feedback. What is feedback? Imagine you’re in a bus and want it to stop. You press one of the buttons that has the word “STOP” printed on it. Nothing happens. Are you now confident that the bus is going to pull over at the next stop? Yeah, me neither. Feedback is the “Ding” sound you hear when you press the button. It is the “Stop” light that comes on at the front of the bus. They are indicating that you succeeded in what you were trying to achieve. Think about all the situations where the player needs to be informed about something. Sometimes a little heart symbol is better than a text that says “+15 Health”. Sometimes a sound effect is better than the heart symbol. Sometimes all three combined give you the best results. Feedback is essential, because a lot of the fun in games comes from that joy of pressing a button and perceiving some type of effect that is caused by it. The ultimate goal of game design is to make something fun or engaging. How do you know if your game is fun? You gotta make a prototype of it as quickly as possible and then get people to play it. And don’t trust what they tell you! Your friends will lie (or at least refrain from telling the truth), because there’s nothing for them to gain. Worst case scenario, they hurt your feelings. Best case scenario, you don’t mind the truth. Even if you know the value of honest feedback, they don’t. They will instinctively try to keep the atmosphere nice. Don’t force them, because that will just taint the data. What you need to do is inspect. Do the play the game once? Twice? Ten times? Are they invested in the result? Do they want to get further? Do they want to see what else the game has to offer? Or do they just push the buttons a couple of times and get up? Again, don’t force them to play the game. If they don’t want to, then that’s valuable data! Your job is to make something fun or engaging. If it’s not that, then back to the drawing board.

Step 3: Project Management

Keep reading, friend! Even small game projects are quite large undertakings. This means you absolutely have to organize the workload somehow or you will get trampled over. My suggestion is that you divide that work into tasks. Something like this… 1. Character sprite 2. Background sprite 3. Tap sound effect 4. Background music 5. Main menu 6. Hopping mechanic 7. High score list And so on. If any one task seems too ambiguous or large like “Make the enemies” then you have to divide that into smaller chunks. Once you have a list of tasks, prioritize. Pick the most important things out of the list and put them at the very top. Once you’ve organized your list, pick the first task that you can do and start working. This method helps you to focus on small bites at a time. If you just start “making the game” you might find out that you’re just sitting around feeling generally overwhelmed. Tasks like “draw a character sprite” are easy to complete. They give you some much needed focus. That’s it for the first day! Congratulations for making it this far. Keep finetuning your design and thinking different ways to improve it. Tomorrow we’ll start working on something a bit more concrete.