Abstract thinking

Before we get to the step-by-step method to designing the game, I must interject with the importance of abstract thinking. This method relies heavily on thinking about your game and system on an abstract level before writing down any mechanics. This abstract thinking allows you to flexibly adjust your features without writing excessively and thus allows you to experiment with different approaches to problems.

This constant experimentation is instrumental to creating coherent and multi-purpose mechanics. Keeping things abstract allows you to make connections that would otherwise be difficult or even impossible to make.

Gameplay as the origin point

As a designer, starting from the gameplay instead of mechanics yields a lot of benefits. It creates a vision for the game right away, and it also guides you through the entire process of designing the game.

In practise, this means you start imagining how your game would be played, and jot down some key features you want to include in the game first and foremost. Answer these questions as well as you can:

What is the primary emotion you want to elicit from your players? How much control do you want the players to have over their surroundings? Is there a Game Master or an equivalent player? How much power do players have over each others’ characters (Including the GM)? What kind of situations will player characters find themselves in often?

You should write down any relevant information that comes up in this phase. The game is still in quite the malleable state, so anything written down as of now isn’t final. This is simply to have a red thread to follow in the rest of the design.

Identity that defines

After coming up with the desired gameplay experience for the game, you need to answer the question of identity. What of these gameplay features are absolutely necessary for this game to feel like the game it is supposed to be? What is the game focusing on?

Write down a one-sentence definition for the game’s primary goal, and then write down 1 - 5 ideas for primary features for your game. These will guide you through the rest of the design process, as they will be your focus with expense of everything else. These primary ideas should thus be the most defining and unique aspects of the game, not simply neat things you want to have in the game.

Do note that the central resolution mechanic usually is not a primary mechanic, even if it feels like it due to its importance. It is then defined as a separate thing, neither a primary or a secondary mechanic.

For example:

“SOF is a game about playing inhumane robots and discovering humanity through gameplay”

Primary Features:

Make sure that the players feel like the character is inhumane Enforce humanity as an axis in gameplay Have ways to affect the humanity your character has

Game Feel, the texture of the Game

Game Feel is difficult to pin down at this point, so it is important that you come up with some kind of guideline for what kind of feel you want to achieve. Try out different ways to randomize your game, think whether you need to randomize the game, try out fiddling different dice and tokens, and just get a feel for what seems right.

Think about the moment-to-moment gameplay you outlined in the first step, and reflect your game’s identity to it, use it to give you some guidance on the matter. Don’t commit to anything yet, but get a feel for how the gameplay should feel, and note how many steps you should take to resolve each question asked.

Fine-tuning the game feel is very much an imprecise art, but it’s important to keep it in mind.

Dynamics and the Spheres of Gameplay

Dynamics are an important part of the game to pin down, because they will work as your framework to start creating the System i.e the mechanics. You can approach that question in any way you want, but the way I will promote is using Spheres of Gameplay.

Spheres of Gameplay are sectioned off parts of your game that revolve on a single thing. Combat is often a sphere of gameplay, downtime can be a sphere, and even character creation can often be classified as a sphere. However, there is a limited amount of spheres you can have. Each sphere of Gameplay should have at least one Primary feature as the centerpiece of it. This means your amount of Primary features limits the amount of spheres you have. No Primary feature should usually be the centerpiece of multiple spheres (with maybe the exception of character creation), unless it is a part of many.

Singularity, Duality, Triality

A sphere of gameplay might have more than one primary feature driving it. Often this is about balancing two or three primary features in accordance to everything else.

Singularity is the focus on a single feature. This means all other features in the sphere should be somewhat linked to this single feature either directly or indirectly. In a game where you play as divine beings, this could be your character’s domain, for example. Or in a class-based game, this can be your class. The choices you make in that sphere are somehow connected to this single feature. A singularity can often function like a duality due to features sometimes being innately dualistic.

Duality is the focus on the balance of two features. At its minimum, this can mean that there are no secondary features, simply the balance of these two. This can be like trying to balance between honor and vice, or to balance offence and defence.

Triality is the balance of three things. This can easily carry an entire sphere, and is surprisingly quite common. The most common type of triality is in character creation, where you balance versatility, offensive capability and defensive capability. This can also be balancing movement, offence and defence in a combat situation.

Structuring a Sphere

The sphere has the inner layer, which consists of the primary features within it, and the outer layer, that consists of the secondary features within it. Within it, there are arrows that connect features to each other if it can nullify the other. This can be like grappling being able to nullify movement or movement being able to nullify melee combat.

When you have made these connections, look at the number of arrows coming from each feature. Are there secondary features that can nullify more than primary ones? Maybe those features should be primary features, or maybe they’re overpowered. Keep this in mind as you go forward.

Additionally, make connections between the spheres. What is the most central one that affects the other spheres the most? And what affects that? Keep this in mind.

A single sphere can encompass the entire gameplay of a game, or it can be only one of many. Regardless of their number, the spheres you have are extremely important when going to the next phase of designing.

Review, review, iterate, review

After all this, we would be ready to start writing the mechanics and system proper. However, this process, all these steps you have gone through, have been the very first draft of the game. This first draft is often subpar and might have things you simply don’t like. So now it’s time to rectify this.

Start from the beginning. Do the spheres of gameplay that you wrote reflect that gameplay goal that you had in mind? If not, which is in the wrong?

Do the spheres reflect the game’s identity and feel? Were some parts of the identity less central than you hoped, or were they less central than you assumed?

Are you satisfied with this draft of the game? Review all your notes, and make changes in it until it all makes sense. Start from the beginning, so if features do not fit the spheres but you want them to, retrofit them to the previous sections.

Once you’re satisfied, it’s time to proceed to mechanics and the System.

Mechanics and the System

After all these steps, we arrive at the mechanics. If you haven’t taken one already, now is a good time to take a break and let the game sit for a while.

Drafting your mechanics

When you start building your mechanics, it’s important to start without worrying about numbers. Just write about the concrete conclusions of what the mechanics aim to carry, how they affect each other. This drafting of mechanics is important, because you can get a feel for how the game works before you need to think about balancing the numbers. If you can’t express the mechanical underpinnings of your game without the use of numbers, numbers won’t help you a lot.

Start with your spheres of gameplay. You can technically start anywhere, because the spheres are mostly contained, but I usually like to start with the part the game is focused on, whatever it is. Exploration? Combat? Social Intrigue? Spaceship racing? You know best what you want your game to be.

Take a primary feature for that sphere, and describe it without numbers. Describe how it affects the features around it, describe how it works in isolation of numbers. Then simply follow the path by explaining all the other primary features for that sphere and then the secondary ones. If you feel like some secondary features work better as sub-features to the primary ones, write them as such.

After finishing everything in the sphere, read it through. Does the text explain the mechanics in sufficient detail? If you had dice and knew what you did with them, would the mechanics make sense? If the answer is yes, move to the next sphere.

Do this for every sphere until you’ve gone through all of them, then connect the spheres in a way that explains the most autonomous sphere first and the most reliant sphere last. This creates the outline for your game’s physical layout.

Crunching the numbers

Then, it is time to crunch the numbers. This is the part you’ve probably been waiting for, the quintessential part of making a game for many. And, well, to making a System, it is technically the most important part. It must be treated with due respect.

All this preparation has been done so now, at this point, you don’t really need to do much. This is supposed to be the difficult part of the design, but it should not be. At this point, you already know what you’re supposed to do. You have laid out the game’s most important aspects to the writing, and now you only need to apply the numbers to it.

I ask you to return to part 3 of the hierarchy: Game Feel. Now that you know how your mechanics work, fiddle with dice, tokens and cards once again. Just fiddle with them while thinking about your game. Roll them a bit, count things. Choosing the central resolution mechanic for your game is now much easier than before. Think about the amount of influence you want your players have over the central resolution mechanic, look at your features for it and try things out.

From that point on, the design work is basically done because you’ve done most of the work already. Write the numbers, reference your notes for the previous things in the hierarchy. Reuse the numbers and mechanics as much as you can, and apply until the game is finished.

Rinse, repeat, edit and rewrite.