LAFS SVI Level 3 - Game Design and Analysis

Level 3
David Mullich
Survey of the Videogame Industry
The Los Angeles Film School

Players vs. Designers
Players want the fun of playing a game as well as the
enjoyment of being with their friends.
Game designers are focused on how the game
works:
 How do you make it, and how to you break it?
 What are the different elements and how do they
fit together?
 What skill level does a player need to
successfully play and win?
 Does each player have an equal chance of
winning and a fair chance of experiencing all that
the game has to offer?

Main Role
The game designer’s main role is to be an
advocate for the player.
In some ways, designing a
game is like being the host
of a party. It’s your job to get
everything ready and then
open your doors to guests to
see what happens.

Other Roles
 Builder
 Engineer
 Scientist
 Dreamer
 Teacher
 But NOT Boss

Designer Skills
 Inspiration
 Creativity
 Process
 Teamwork
and most importantly,
 Communication

The Designer’s Journey
 Stage 1: Consumer
 Stage 2: Tinkerer
 Stage 3: Masher
 Stage 4: Creator
Teale Fristoe

Stage 1: Consumer
We all begin our game
designer lives as game
consumers. To consumers,
game design is pure magic.
Consumers believe that a
game designer imagines a
game, then creates it exactly
as he or she envisioned it.

Stage 2: Tinkerer
Tinkerers tend to imagine new
games in terms of modifications
(often additions) to existing
games, sticking closely to their
underlying rule sets. Or by
making game levels. However,
Tinkerers begin to realize that
game design is not magic, but it is
a lot of work.

Stage 3: Masher
Mashers envision new
games as collages of
existing game genres,
mechanics and themes.
They tend to focus on these
elements rather than on the
player experience.

Stage 4: Creator
Before long, a game designer will shift
his or her focus and work style. Instead
of having visions of a specific game, the
designer will be interested in exploring
broad or incomplete ideas.
Designers at this stage approach new
games with a healthy emotional
distance. They know that the initial idea
is very rarely the best implementation,
so keeping an open mind and keeping
nothing sacred will tend to result in
better final games.

Design Specialties
 Lead Designer
 System Designer
 User Interface Designer
 Technical Designer
 Level Designer
 Content Designer
 Game Writer

Extra Credits, Season 1, Episode 16 - So You Want To
Be A Game Designer (7:36)

Discussion
 Why is communication the game designer’s
core skill?
 What other skills does a game designer need?
 Why is “idea guy” a poor definition for what a
game designer does?
 Why shouldn’t game designers get too
attached to their ideas?
 What is the number one cause of failed
games?

The Iterative Design Process
Every game takes
its own journey
from concept to
product, but
skilled designers
use the iterative
design process
Teale Fristoe

Ideas
All games start out as
ideas. It’s very possible
that initial ideas will be
(or should be)
abandoned, and lots of
new ideas will be
considered during the
process.

Inspiration
Ideas don’t come out of thin air. Game designers are
influenced by personal interests and hobbies.
Spend a significant part of every day doing something
other than playing games:
 Read a book
 Go see a play
 Listen to music
 Exercise, draw or sketch
 Take a class
 Volunteer at a neighborhood organization

Game Designer’s Notebook
Many designers carry a notebook for jotting down their
ideas.

Stages of Creativity
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes
the classic stages of creativity:
 Preparation: Becoming interested in a topic
 Incubation: Period where ideas “churn around”
in your subconscious
 Insight: The “aha!” moment, where an idea
comes together
 Evaluation: Deciding whether the insight is
worth pursuing
 Elaboration: Fleshing out the idea

Game Idea Sources
 Brilliant Inspiration
 Licensing Hook
 Technology Hook
 Filling A Gap
 Following Coattails
 Orders From Above
 Sequels

Brainstorming
A group creativity technique
to find a solution to a
specific problem by
gathering a list of ideas
spontaneously contributed
by its members. In games,
brainstorming is used to
generate a large number of
ideas about game's concept,
mechanics, setting,
characters, etc.

Brainstorming
Osborn’s method of brainstorming
has four general rules:
 Focus on quantity
 Withhold criticism
 Welcome unusual ideas
 Combine and improve ideas
Alex F. Osborn

Advice About Ideas
 Come up with more ideas than you’ll need
 Never rule out an idea as bad until you’ve tested it
 Never accept an idea as good until you’ve tested it
 Do not get emotionally attached to ideas

Planning
Once a designer has promising
ideas, it’s time to test them. Here,
the keys are minimalism and focus.
Identify what the most important
questions you want to answer are
and figure out the quickest way of
discovering those answers.

Prototype
Create a prototype that answers the questions at hand.
A prototype is an early playable version of the game,
section of game, or game system.
A prototype, whether paper
or electronic, should be:
• Playable
• Quick to Make
• Easy to Change

Playtesters
Playtesters are the people who play your game
and provide feedback on the experience.
 Observe their experience
 Pay attention to what
interests or frustrates
them
 They are your guide and
it’s your mission to let
them lead you

Playtesting
OTHER TESTING
 Alpha Testing
 Focus Group Testing
 Closed Beta
 Open Beta
Playtesting is an iterative process where the game is tested, the
designer makes changes based on feedback, and the game is
retested, over and over.

Playtesting
Extra Credits: Playtesting (6:55)

Discussion
 How soon should you begin playtesting
your game?
 Why is listening so important during
playtesting?
 How much talking should a designer do
with playtesters?
 Who is the worst playtester? Who is the
best?

Evaluate
After you playtest, consider your data.
 How does it answer your questions?
 If you were testing the quality of an
idea, did it pass the test, or should it
be thrown out?
 If you saw problems, what caused the
problems, and what can you do to fix
them?

Done?
Knowing when a game is finished
can be even more difficult. A game
is never finished, it’s just due.
But you often won’t have external
due dates, so it can be tempting to
go on making tiny tweaks ad
infinitum. Eventually, you’ll have to
accept that a game is as good as
it’s going to get.

Game Concept
Defined by four elements:
 Hardware Platform: Determines the controller
configuration and technical limitations
 Genre: Determines what the gameplay will feel like.
Genres can be categorized by along two dimensions:
Action vs. Strategy and Exploration vs. Conflict
 Core Mechanic: Determines what the player will
actually do in the game
 Key Features: Determines what makes the game
different or better than other games in that genre

Pitch Presentation
A pitch is a concise verbal
(and sometimes visual)
presentation for a film, TV
series, or game, made by
the producer to an executive
in the hope of getting the
financing to do
development. "Pitch" is a
contraction of "sales pitch."

Elevator Pitch
An elevator pitch is a short summary used
to quickly and simply define a product and
its value. The name "elevator pitch"
reflects the idea that it should be possible
to deliver the summary in the time span of
an elevator ride, or approximately thirty
seconds to two minutes.
The term itself comes from the scenario of
accidentally meeting someone important in
an elevator. If the conversation inside the
elevator in those few seconds is
interesting and value adding, then the
conversation will continue after the
elevator ride or end in the exchange of a
business card or a scheduled meeting.

Example Pitch
Somehow it always falls to
Mustachio to rally his friends for
their many adventures. Run and
jump through a side-
scrolling world made of and
inhabited by blocks. With
mustaches. A world full of action,
puzzles and arbitrary danger that
Mustachio faces boldly with his
mustache-fueled power to
make block duplicates of himself.
What? Cloning AND mustaches?!
You betcha!
Elements:
• Game Title
• Genre
• Target Customer
• Play Value
• Competition
• Differentiation

Mood Board
A Mood Board is a type of collage
that may consist of images and
text that graphic designers use to
visually illustrate the style they are
pursuing. Mood Boards can also
be used to visually explain a style
of writing or an imaginary setting
for a storyline. They serve as a
visual tool to quickly inform others
of the overall "feel" (or "flow") that
a designer is trying to achieve.

Greenlighting
To green-light is to give
permission to go ahead to move
forward with a project. In the
game industry, to green-light
something is to formally
approve its production finance,
and to commit to this financing,
thereby allowing the project to
move forward from pre-
production to production.

Game Design Document (GDD)
 The lead designer is the principle
author of all the game design
document.
 To a programmer and artist, it is
the instructions for implementation.
 However, design documentation
should be a team effort, because
almost everyone on the team plays
games and can make great
contributions to the design.

GDD Topics
 High Concept
 Background Story
 Tone
 Objective
 Gameplay
 Interface
 Camera Perspective
 Story Structure
 Multiplayer
 Difficulty
 Completion Time
 AI

GDD – Other Topics
 Characters
 License
 World
 Controls
 Menu Structure
 Levels
 Graphics
 Cut Scenes
 Music
 Sound Effects

The Soul of the Game
A good GDD describes not just the
Body but the Soul of the game.
It should convey the feel that the
game should have, the purpose
behind each element, the
experience each user will have,
and any other aspects of the
game's look and feel the designer
can envision and describe.

Game Genres
 Action
 Ball and Paddle
 Beat’em Up
 Fighting Game
 Maze Game
 Pinball Game
 Platform Game
 Shooter
○ First Person Shooter
○ MMO FPS
○ Light Gun Shooter
○ Shoot ‘Em Up
○ Tactical Shooter
○ Rail Shooter
○ Third Person Shooter
 Action-Adventure
 Stealth Game
 Survival Horror
 Adventure
 Real-Time 3D Adventure
 Text Adventure
 Graphic Adventure
 Visual Novel
 Role-Playing
 Western/Japanese RPGs
 Fantasy RPGs
 Sandbox RPGs
 Action RPGs
 MMORPGs
 Rogue RPGs
 Tactical RPGS
 Simulation
 Construction/Management
 Life
 Vehicle
 Strategy
 4X Game
 Artillery Game
 Real-time Strategy
 Real-time Tactics
 Tower Defense
 Turn-based Strategy
 Turn-based Tactics
 Wargame
 Other
 Casual Game
 Music Game
 Party Game
 Programming Game
 Puzzle Game
 Sprots Game
 Trivia Game
 Board Game

Game Genres
 Defined by gameplay interaction
 Classified independent of their setting
 Most fall within one genre but some are a
combination of two or more genres

Combining Genres
Extra Credits: Combining Genres (4:52)

Discussion
 When combining genres, what should you
focus on?
 What is wrong with the hacking minigame
in BioShock?
 What’s right with the combat in
PuzzleQuest?

Core Game Elements
 Player Format
 Objectives
 Procedures
 Rules
 Resources
 Theme (for some games)

Player Format
 Single Player vs. Game (Player vs. Environment)
 Player vs. Player (Head-to-Head)
 Multiple Individual Players vs. Game
 Unilateral Multiplayer (One vs. Many)
 Multilateral Competition (One vs. One vs. One…
or Free-For-All)
 Cooperative Play
 Team Competition

Player Roles
 Sports: Team Leader vs. Team Mate
 Mastermind: Codemaker vs. Codebreaker
 D&D: Fighter, Magic User, Cleric or Thief
 MUD: Achievers, Socializers, Explorers or Killers

Objectives (or Goals)
Objectives give players something to
strive for. They define what players are
attempting to accomplish within the
rules of the game.
Ideally, they should be:
 Obtainable, but challenging to reach
 Worthy of obtaining
 Immediately replaced by new goals

Examples of Objectives
 Capture
 Chase
 Race
 Alignment
 Rescue
 Escape
 Solve
 Outwit
 Beat the Clock
 Collect
 Build
 Destroy
 Explore
 Advance Story

Types of Goals
STRATEGIC
(Mental)
REFLEX
(Physical)
CHANCE
(Random)

Procedures
Procedures are the methods of play and the actions
players can take to achieve them.
One way to think about procedures is:
Who does what, when, where and how.

Types of Procedures
 Set Up or Starting Action: How to put the game
into play.
 Progression: Ongoing procedures after the starting
action.
 Special Actions: Available conditional to other
elements or game state.
 Resolution, or Resolving Actions: Bring gameplay
to a close.

Rules
Rules define game objects and allowable actions by the players.
In digital games, rules can be explained in the manual or they
can be explicit in the game itself.
Too many rules might make make the game too complicated for
the players to understand.
Leaving rules unstated or poorly communicating them might
make players feel confused or alienated.
Rules should be consistent with the game’s theme.

Rule Hierarchy
 Rules
 Mechanics
 Systems
 Scoring
 Progression
 Economics
Examples of
Systems
 Combat
 Artificial Intelligence
 Multiplayer

Resources
Resources are assets that are used to
accomplish the game’s goals.
Resources must both be useful and be
scarce (or they lose their value).
Managing resources and determining how
and when to control player access to them
is a key part of a game designer’s job.

Examples of Resources
 Lives
 Health
 Currency
 Actions
 Energy
 Mana
 Time
 Moves
 Turns
 Power-Ups
 Building Materials
 Combat Units
 Inventory Items
 Spells
 Territory
 Special Terrain
 Information

Theme
 Setting: The time and/or place where a
game takes place
 Characters: The people in the game setting
whose actions cause the game (or game
story) to progress
 Story: A series of game events related to the
game’s setting or characters that presents
the player with an initial problem to solve
near the game’s start and brings closure
near the game’s end
 Helps players become engaged
 Makes game easier to learn
 Tells a compelling story

Abstract Games
While many games are thematic, some are
abstract, meaning that they don’t have a theme.

The process of creating content and rules for
games.

The Player’s Journey
“Great games are compelling because the
player’s experience and expertise changes
over time in meaningful ways.” – Amy Jo Kim

Experience Phases
Therefore, a good game designer will look at one game as 4
different games, which emphasizes on the 4 Experience Phases
of a game, as defined by Professor Kevin Werbach:
 Discovery
 Onboarding
 Scaffolding
 Endgame

Discovery Phase
 This is when people first discover your
game.
 How did they find it? Was it from a friend?
Through the news? Or a clever marketing
campaign?
 How do we entice players to enter the
Magic Circle and experience the other
phases?

Onboarding Phase
 This is when you train them to become familiar with the rules
of the game, options, mechanics, and the win state.
 This is what most designers focus on because everyone
thinks once a player plays their game for some time, they will
fall in love with it.
 Mastering the Onboarding Process can get your users to
start participate in your game with excitement and interest.

Scaffolding Phase
 This is the phase where players use all the rules and options
they learned during onboarding to try to achieve the win-
state.
 This is where the most “fun” should happen.
 Once you have a well designed win state in scaffolding, you
will start to see player engagement and motivation.

Endgame Phase
 This is when players have done everything there is to do at least
once and are starting to see more repetitive actions to get to the
win-state.
 In this phase, if the designer didn’t create a good endgame, people
easily get bored and quit the game.
 But a good endgame can be achieved through evergreen
mechanics as well as creating a system where the game producers
can easily add new content in a system consistently.
 If you mastered the endgame, you will create a lot of contributors,
evangelists, and long-term customers.

Game Design Goals
 Fun
 Interactive
 Social
 Easy to Learn
 Hard to Master
 Well-Paced
 Immersive
 Replay Value
 Affordable
 Manageable in
Scope and Time

Flow
Flow is the mental state of operation in which a
person performing an activity is fully immersed in a
feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and
enjoyment in the process of the activity.
When players experience flow, time stops, nothing
else matters and when they finally come out of it,
they have no concept of how long they have been
playing.

Flow
Psychology professor Mihayli
Csikszentmihalyi identified some key factors
that could lead to such a phenomenon:
 Clear goals and progress
 Constant and Immediate feedback
 Balance between the perceived challenge
and the perceived level of skill needed

Flow
In 1997 he
provided the
world this visual
representation of
his theory.

Flow
 If a challenge exceeds
the abilities of the
current skill level, it can
lead to frustration
 If the skill level is
increasing faster than
the challenge, it leads to
boredom
 Both of these will
normally end with the
player leaving the game

Flow
 If we combine the ideas of
Flow and Player Journey,
you can begin to see how a
game, in theory, should
behave in an ideal world.
 You start off with a
challenge that is acceptable
for a new comer who is
starting in the game – on-
boarding.
 Over time, you increase the
challenge as skills
increase. Most games tend
to build up each level to a
boss battle of some type.

Flow
 Not all games have this
“ideal flow”.
 A game like Tetris would
have a flow like the top line.
Tetris. There are no lulls in
the progression with Tetris.
It just gets faster and faster,
and you might feel
frustrated until you achieve
Mastery.
 A game like WOW would
have a flow like the bottom
line. You must endure
grinding until you get to the
interesting sequences.

Difficulty
 How much skill a player needs to have to
complete a game objective.

Games should be easy to learn, but hard to
master.

When Difficult Is Fun
Extra Credits: When Difficult Is Fun (7:44)

Discussion
 Why were early video games so difficult to
play?
 How did the game industry transition to the
philosophy of “Everyone Wins”?
 Why are we seeing more difficult games
now?
 What’s the difference between “difficult”
and “punishing”?

Difficult vs. Punishing
 Rules should be consistent
 Players should be given enough resources
to solve challenges
 Players need to be given enough
information to make decisions
 The player’s choices should be meaningful

Difficult vs. Punishing
 Randomness should only be used for
variety and uncertainty (replay value)
 Low iteration time for trying again
 Create useable control interfaces
 When the player fails, they should feel they
could have done better

Balance
A balanced game does
not give an unequal
advantage to any player
(or the game system).
The relative strength of different resources,
mechanics, objectives and starting states.

Are these two characters balanced?
The fighter, on the left, can do 6 points damage,
but the archer, on the right, does only 1 point of
damage.

Perfect Inbalance
 Slight deviations from
perfect balance so players
can discover what choices
will give them an edge
 Cyclical Inbalance: When
players gravitate to a weaker
gameplay element looking
for ways to defeat a stronger
one.

Metagaming
Metagame literally means 'beyond the game' and refers to
any planning, preparation, or maneuvering that a player
does outside of actual gameplay to gain an advantage.
 Strategic decisions to exploit the game’s rules
 Strategic decisions to exploit an opponent's or map's
style of play
 Strategic decisions to exploit a player's reaction or
weakened mental state in the future. This is also known
as 'mind games' or 'psychological warfare'.

Complexity
The greater the
complexity, the
harder it is to
learn how to
play the game.
The number of rules or the number of elements
with which the player interacts.

A cluttered or non-intuitive interface can also
make a game too complex.

Complexity ≠ Difficulty
Difficulty Complexity
How much effort or skill is
needed to accomplish a task?
How many different steps or
skills are needed to
accomplish a task?
How many people can
accomplish a task correctly?
How many different ways can
a task be accomplished?
Easy or Hard Simple or Complex

Depth
The greater the
depth, the harder
it is master the
game.
The ability to find enjoyment in a game as one’s
skill improves.

Depth
 Tic-Tac-Toe has few decisions, but it also
has few rules
 Chess has more rules and elements, but it
has many interesting decisions
 Monopoly has even more rules and
elements, but relatively few meaningful
decisions
Depth is directly related to the number of
interesting decisions the player can make.

Complexity vs. Depth
 You want to create as much depth without
too much complexity.
 Depth comes from complexity, but too much
complexity also reduces depth.
 Elegance in design is therefore something
that is high in depth to complexity ratio.

Ways to Reduce Complexity
 A well-crafted tutorial
 Don’t require the player to learn all the rules
before they start playing
 Intuitive user interface
 Lower the rate at which player’s must make
decisions

Pace
Pace is the speed of play, or how quickly the
player receives information and takes action
or makes decisions.
Turn-Based Real-Time

Proper Pacing
 Grab the player’s attention at the start, but keep it
short
 Give them a breather to set the proper baseline for
the experience
 Oscillate engagement level in a steadily increasing
manner
 Intermittent reinforcement is more powerful than
constant reinforcement
 Bring player’s down after an intense experience so
that they feel closure

Engagement Segments
 Arc: The game as a whole
 Scene: A subsection or level of the
game (this has its own engagement
curve)
 Action: A specific moment of player
experience (even this should follow
an engagement curve)

Replay Value
 Play Value: The reason a person plays a
game
 Replay Value: The reason they play a
game over and over again
Designers increase replay value by:
 Adding more choices to make and things
to discover
 Increasing depth
 Multiplayer gameplay

Age Appropriateness
The age or maturity level of a game’s
intended audience

Sid Meier: Everything You Know Is
Wrong
 Game design is a psychological experience in
which the designer needs to make the player
feel good about playing the game
 Winner Paradox: Player gladly accepts a win,
but complains about an (unsatisfactory) loss
 Unholy Alliance (between designer and player):
It’s important for the designer to make the
player feel good about their ability, while the
player needs to suspend their disbelief
 The First Fifteen Minutes: Needs to be very
engaging and foreshadows the rest of the game
Sid Meier

LAFS SVI Level 3 - Game Design and Analysis

LAFS SVI Level 3 - Game Design and Analysis

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