Game Design Process

Game Design skills

 - Rapid prototyping

- Scope management

- Documentation and maintaining it

- Polishing and juice


Game Design Disclaimer

Game design and development is an incredibly diverse and difficult discipline where you have to take in consideration an incredible amount of different things (pacing, balancing, player feedback, goals,  challenge, progress, juicing, story, world etc) and there is no simple "right" way to do it.  What I will detail here is simple my current process. But most important is to try to look at your design from many different perspectives and angles, something you can train yourself but ultimately you will always need playtesting for.

Feel free to look at the embedded board here to see the entire process in the embedded miro board. 

I generally start from a brainstorm / wordcloud with the given mechanic I am thinking around. This will be a phase where most of the ideas are general fodder. There will also usually be nonsensical stuff but I've learned to embrace the randomness of it all, good ideas can come from anywhere.


I might be sketching or doodling stuff in this phase as it keeps me concentrated but keeps me iterating, it's just an entirely different way of doing it.  This is also the reason I like including a lot of visuals, a picture is a thousand words and a thousand words are a lot of words to get inspired by.

After that I pick up the ideas I like the most and do more of the same, I will just think about them and try to link them up with other ideas and let my imagination run rampant. If I am in a rut (as pictured here) and I can't think of anything I will take random inspirations.


Random inspirations can be anything in this case I took some games I liked and tried my best to link them up to the ideas I had to get inspired. But the inspiration can be and has been anything from flowers to music I listen to to random pictures on my camera roll. Constricting myself even more is what tends to give me the most creative ideas.

When I am happy with the couple ideas I do have I start iterating and prototyping, this is where the ideas make or break. I try to document as much as possible (thoughts, videos etc), and especially love making GIFs as its very visual. Getting the habit of doing this means it is also extremely easy to show my work to other people as I have GIFs of them on standby already. 

And of course one of the most important steps of the process, getting feedback from others and applying it. Being able to break down feedback and knowing what to apply for me is the difference between a good artist and a great one.  It's also very important to try to understand why you get certain feedback. Sometimes people will come with suggestions to remove certain mechanics for example but this is usually because they aren't happy with the implementation or it doesn't feel good.


This step is one of the longest but also one of the most fulfilling as I love seeing people interact with my work.

All these steps you can repeat as much as you want but usually only as much as you have time for.  But for this project it was just about polishing up what I had.


Feel free to click the link below to see the in game.