This means that your game entirely depends on you finding an interesting, solid and fun gameplay mechanic, that you’re going to use and juice all game long. Portal, Fez, Braid, Minecraft, etc…the list is long and obvious when you think about it.

They all use a single core gameplay idea. And this idea is like a material that you’re going to riff on, twist, to expand, to restrict, to split. You have to find its strengths and weaknesses, then exploit them to achieve a great diversity of situations, of enemies, obstacles and bonuses. It’s an exploration process that you take the player on with you.

That’s what Jonathan Blow described when making Braid. He started by implementing his time reversal mechanic. Then, he thought that some objects shouldn’t be affected by the time travel, that they should be continuing their life while everything else go back in time. He used this time-immune feature on moving objects first. Then he tried it on levers, then enemies, then keys. And finally, even on the player. Each time he found an interesting configuration, he created a specific puzzle to highlight it. He is a master of this exploratory process, and this is why he’s such a brilliant puzzle designer.

In this level, time unravels as you walk left or right: another unique twist on an single core idea.

These gameplay discoveries were so entertaining to him, that he said the game “created itself”, that he was “sitting on top of a treasure and he just had to dig to find gold”. This way of making a game allows you to jump quickly into production: get a prototype running, then you iterate. As it is an empirical process, the result is, of course, not predictable, because it relies on the game developer’s flair & some degree of luck/divine inspiration.

Not everybody is able to find an innovative gameplay mechanic that is easy to access, but deep enough to dig in for a full game. The main flaw of this process? Storytelling, lore, pacing, world-building are often an afterthought put between puzzles. Much as we love Braid, it’s also the perfect example of that. An oblique story of nuclear physics and existential regret told through blocks of text in dreamlike paths between levels? Not exactly a gripping narrative.

But there is another way to start making a game…

2 • Build a World.