As a game designer, I’m afraid of the blank page. The white expanse glares at me, daring me to soil it with my half-baked ideas. I can feel it silently judging me, like Mr. Wilby from third grade, glaring at me over his glasses, his lips pursed, his head slowly shaking. When you’re free to create anything, it’s hard to know where to start.
Luckily, no page is truly blank. There are always limitations. Even if you don’t see them — even if they’re self-imposed — there are walls surrounding your game design. Every defining feature about the game adds one of these walls. Know the walls. Love them. Become like ivy, and use them as a framework and foundation.
It’s true that most designers rarely have to face the horror of the blank page. We’re usually handed a rough idea, complete with plenty of limitations thank you very much, and a hard deadline circled on the calendar with fire.
But if you’re working on an independent game pitch, or trying to develop something based on a property rather than a platform, you might find yourself gazing across the ivory expanse and feel like you’re adrift on a sea of possibilities. If that’s the case, let me throw you a life vest made of bullet points.
- Is your game a book? Then you’re restricted to what books are, and must consider page count, format, art quantity, ancillary game bits (dice, beads, etc.).
- Board Game? You’ve got a much larger box to think inside (pun intended) with cards and tokens and boards, but here, your biggest constraint is price point. Even without knowing the actual costs of manufacturing, you can look at games in your price range to figure out how many components you can stuff into the game. Then consider how many cards you have in the deck, how many square inches of card, and how big your board must be.
- Video games appear to have an infinite box. It could be anything from Bejeweled to World of Warcraft — which is why it’s so important to identify and embrace your limitations. Who is your player? Is he buying your game in a box? Downloading it? Playing it in a browser? What’s his skill level, and how long is each play session? Is he actually a she? (Video games also have tons of technical limitations which you’ll need to consider, but by first narrowing the scope through design, you know whether to fret about framerates, server bandwidth, or a mad genius AI.)
Of course, rules were made to be broken, walls to be broken, and limitations to be exceeded. Once you’ve defined the borders of your project, you can always design beyond them (assuming they weren’t put in place by management). But before you can officially break the rules, you need know what those rules are — even if you’re just making them up yourself.
Thanks for your words of advice. I’m in the midst of developing a strategy game of my own. I don’t know where it will lead, but suffice it to say that several have tried this vein of gaming and been at least fairly successful. However, I am looking at taking the game back to its roots and developing it beyond what paths have been trod. I know there is more there than what the developers have published. Therein lies the rub, eh? What is desireable in my eyes may be prohibitively expensive to produce. If nothing else, I will have an outrageously expensive game that only my family and friends will enjoy (or curse).
Best of luck on your game! Once you’ve got it working, take another look at your expensive components, and see if you can get the same functionality out of something a little cheaper to produce. Custom dice, for example, can be replaced with a deck of cards. Huge quantities of cards can sometimes be replaced with a single pad of paper. Dozens of glass beads for tracking resources might be replaced with a single sheet with tracks printed on it, and a handful of cardboard tracking tokens. Stay true to your vision, of course, but don’t forget to keep an eye out for economical alternatives.
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