Making small games, which is fun in itself

I do apologize for not having the time to edit these comments to be shorter. But if I did have the time to edit and polish text, then the polished text would have value as a blog post, so I wouldn't post it here. I see HN as a place for unpolished conversation — i.e. a place to drop long bullshit rants on people. AFAICT, this is how other people mostly see HN as well — they just don't type as fast, and so don't have time to write screeds as stupidly long as mine on their coffee breaks.

> Have you actually designed a game whether inexperienced or not?

Yes. I spent much of my teens and 20s designing games (first mods, then original games); immersing myself in the game design community; reading every book or blog post on the art of game design I could get my hands on, along with tons of interviews with game designers (and this was before decent ML translation, so I had to pay to get some translated, and also ended up learning functional Japanese because it came up so often); collaborating with other game designers and game developers online, and participating in game jams for things like puzzle-boxes and one-page TTRPGs; reverse-engineering the designs of games I love to determine what's so good about them, and the designs of games that "suck" to determine where the fatal flaw is, turning those into blog posts, and learning from the discussion those posts generate; etc.

I have huge binders full of fully-worked game designs, many many paper prototypes, and many repos containing half-developed games that stalled on the custom-engine-development part (which led me directly to the advice that inexperienced designers should not attempt to design "art games", because they won't yet have a sense of what's practical in the medium.) And I used to have a blog much like the one I linked to, where I posted some of these as public-domain works, encouraging others to take them and build them.

In my 20s, I set out to learn programming deeply in order to be able to pull off the development side of these more unique game concepts. My goal was to do one-man indie game development of fully-polished works — so there were a number of skills I needed to acquire, and programming was just the first.

But I never got to the point of actually starting that studio, or of learning most of the other required skills, as I studied programming a bit too deeply and ended up as the CTO and cofounder of a very much not-gaming (financial data-analytics) company.

Which is not to say I gave up on my dream. I just don't currently have time to execute on it. My eventual F-U money from this company, will be put directly toward my goal. My life's work is in games, not in programming.

> Ruminating on how games might be designed is all very well but it isn’t how they’re actually designed.

Though, with all of the above being said, I think you might not be aware of a distinction. I was trying to ignore it so far because it's the kind of finicky pedantry that nobody cares about if they're not already working in the field. But it's important here.

A "game-mechanics designer" (sometimes called a "gameplay designer" or "systems designer", depending on the studio) isn't the same thing as a "game designer." The output of a game-mechanics designer, is mechanics, not games.

In other words, the whole job of a game-mechanics designer, is to create "ways games might be designed."

This distinction is behind my point about Miyamoto above: as a director of a game, he designs/offers up mechanics to the design team, and always has; he has never designed whole games. Designing whole games is not his job. Designing (or deciding on) game mechanics, is.

Sometimes he thinks of a single mechanic and, boom — obvious game concept, built around just that one mechanic. Even if everything else in the game is derivative, it'll still be novel, because of that one mechanic. He takes that mechanic and pitches it to other Nintendo leadership as "the concept of the game." If someone scoffs, he has one of his EAD1 team-members prototype the mechanic, to prove out the fun. And then, assuming he's convinced everyone, that mechanic becomes the core for a project assignment brief to one of the development teams, where Miyamoto then serves as a product manager and creative director — that brief being, to build a game that develops naturally out the challenge-space of that mechanic. (He has defined exactly this workflow in numerous interviews.)

Other times, he thinks of a mechanic, and it's not good enough on its own to be a game. Shelves it. Then, whenever a development project is spinning its wheels in the "prototyping to find the fun" phase, he looks at his mechanics backburner. Considers what each one might add to the combinatoric challenge-space complexity of the project. If there's a good one, he asks the design team to do a proof-of-concept rework of the base design of the game with that system made core to it. And often that's enough to give the project momentum. (Again, has mentioned this in numerous interviews. For one famous example of this: Yoshi's Island wasn't always a Yoshi game! Yoshi, and specifically the egg-laying-and-throwing, was worked into an existing game that was stuck in "design hell", the close neighbour of "development hell.")

A game-mechanics designer, is to a game designer, is to a game developer, as:

• a speedrun glitch/tech hunter (ideates tech, with a lot of thinking offline, and reverse-engineering the game, and "fact-finding experiments" by probing memory using debuggers, etc — and then just a little actual attempting-to-make-it-work); is to a speedrun route planner (takes tech and plans and produces practicable potentially-faster routes; does a lot of interactive R&D using e.g. TAS tools to prove out the route but also to figure out when and where the new tech works, i.e. what its constraints are); is to a speedrunner (takes a route plan, and executes on it to produce actual runs.) Someone can be all three, but these are still separate hats!

• mechanical-engineering inventor (ideates something like "a wound spring used as a timer", produces a patent); is to a toy designer (licenses the patent, designs and prototypes a pop-goes-the-weasel box); is to a toy manufacturer (gets 100k such boxes made in a factory, sourcing the parts, figuring out the shipping logistics, etc.) Again: the same guy who invents the timing spring might then turn it into the pop-goes-the-weasel box, and even commercialize it. But, all different hats.

---

The thing I personally love, and live to do, is game-mechanics design. My goal has was never really to be a game designer; and my advice isn't really targeted at people whose true goal is to pursue game design.

However, I wasn't always aware that I really wanted to design game mechanics specifically. And I think this is a common thing. There are a lot of game designers who have never designed a novel game mechanic in their entire lives, even though they want to produce — their goal and their dream is to produce — novel and innovative games.

To me, this says that they really want to be designing mechanics, but just aren't aware of it yet.

These people never attempt to ideate on mechanics, because they don't think of game-mechanic design as this separate thing that you can intentionally set out to do. They think of novel game mechanics as only being things that might magically arise one day out of the aether while they're sketching out or implementing a game. And that kind of thinking, is the reason that we don't have more Miyamotos in the world.

The Narbacular Drop folks developed a game with an innovative core gameplay mechanic, because DigiPen, as part both their Game Design and Real-Time Interactive Simulation programs, actually has classes on gameplay design and systems design, that teach students a reified concept of game mechanics. DigiPen also requires students to study industry advances (reading journals and conference proceedings, etc) and consider how the state-of-the-art can be evolved. Together, this means that students are thinking about how to create games with innovative mechanics, rather than just aiming for "innovative games" as black boxes. Which is to say: this mode of thinking gets results!

So, with all that being said, let me restate my premise from my original comment:

Paper prototyping is a way to do gameplay-systems design, separate from doing game design. This enables you to explore gameplay-systems design as its own discipline. You can also do gameplay-systems design interactively on a computer — but it's so very easy to get distracted into doing game design/development on a computer, that if you only ever use a computer, you may never end up putting any brain-power into doing gameplay-systems design at all.

Everyone’s process is different though and as long as you’re enjoying your own then more power to you. Hopefully one of your binders (or Lego models) makes its way to completion one day!

I have one, it's fun to play with, and I have one of my games working on it, although I don't think it's good enough to release yet.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/12/ars-technicas-best-vi...

I totally agree! Doing too much game design up front can be detrimental!

But there's no such thing as "too much design" of a mechanic, because a mechanic is only a certain size.

And also, when you're designing a mechanic, you aren't usually designing it in the context of a game. You're often designing it for its own sake — and then you might see a way to make a game that just is that mechanic... or maybe not.

By analogy to programming:

Game design is like software architecture. Doing it up front (waterfall model) is bad, because you don't know enough about the game / what makes it fun yet. The only model that will get the design right is a gradual one that works hand-in-hand with development iteration and client validation.

Game mechanics design is like designing an algorithm or data structure.

• It's an act of invention, and the result has value all on its own, separate from being applied in a use-case.

• A novel one is invented in a moment of inspiration, usually arriving as a gestalt top-down sense of how the whole thing should work.

• That moment of inspiration will strike at random (though more often if you keep yourself in a receptive mindset for it, and know a ton about existing ones for your mind to do lateral-thinking against.) It's not something you can force.

• Trying to capture the idea will put you in a fugue state of furious writing, like trying to capture a fleeting dream in a dream journal upon waking. You won't want to stop because you'll lose the gestalt "sensation" of the idea, that you're using to generate the individual concrete working model of it, and there'll be no good way to get that gestalt sensation back, if you haven't fully realized the idea on paper. (Though, you might stop if you decide that the idea doesn't feel worth the time it takes to capture it.)

• This will go on for exactly as long as it takes. Maybe two minutes. Maybe three hours. Maybe four days. (You want to use a medium to capture your idea that minimizes the time. Don't prototype it in any sense yet; that'll require you hold the gestalt longer!)

• Once it's done, it's done. There are no more corollaries to the idea; the sponge has been wrung dry. You've successfully captured/communicated the concrete/formal partwise shadow of the gestalt sensation, allowing you to conjure it back at any time by reading your notes.

• Maybe you ended up with five bullet points. Or maybe a 100-page document. Either way, the notes themselves — and their level of detail — aren't the point. They only exist to summon back that gestalt sensation, in yourself and in others. To communicate the spirit of the idea, such that you or someone else who goes to actually use it, won't implement or integrate it in such a way that it "does what it says" without capturing that gestalt.

• If you are drained at this point, you put these notes away for later.

• But if you're still very excited by the idea at this point, then you immediately move on to prototyping — proving your idea out. You're turning those notes (probably full of private jargon) into something other people can understand the value of.

It's at this stage — when you have the notes for a discrete game mechanic, that has never been seen in a game before, and so has no clear "fun value" yet even in abstract — when you'd do paper prototyping.

(If you're working in a studio context, you'd likely be required to do this, to "sell" your concept to others — in the same way an architect of buildings makes architectural models to communicate their own design intent.)

This is analogous to the person who has an idea for a novel algorithm, taking their pseudocode and actually coding the algorithm in some language, to find out whether, when the algorithm is turned from a hand-wave-y declarative definition, into imperative code, it's practical / efficient to use.

Where do algorithms go when they've been proven out? Not directly into applications — at least not usually! (Not unless the algorithm unlocks the possibility of building a new kind of application, and you're the one to do that.) Instead, algorithms go into journal papers; library reference implementations; or language runtimes.

Where do game mechanics go when they've been proven out? Not directly into games — at least not usually! (Not unless the mechanic unlocks the possibility of building a new kind of game, and you're the one to do that.) Like I said, I keep mine in binders. And in theory, you could build a certain kind of game mechanic into some sort of component you could buy in an asset store.

But really, where novel game mechanics should be going — but aren't (because there isn't such a thing) — is to journal papers as well. In a journal of "gameplay systems research", probably treated as a interdisciplinary field crossing HCI and behavioral economics.

I want to subscribe to that journal! Don't you?