Game design is the act of deciding how a game will be. The whole team designs the game, in the end. Every member puts its grain of salt. And then the game starts to drive the game design!
Game designers care about Players, as I said the other day. The game is a medium to realize a playful experience for them. The team builds the game brick by brick. And we play the build every day. It happens that the build itself starts to drive its iterations.
I am reading many analyses of the new game from Supercell. Many of those are written by consultants who have to sell their services. Which is good and healthy, I am a consultant too! I don’t consume all this free knowledge to know what to do. I study because it helps to improve my toolbox, not my choices.
Players, do not care about monetization flows and core loops. Players want a game on their phones fast and engaging when they feel stressed. Something that continues forever, they want to feel the sense of progress. Someone wants to connect with other people through a game.
Every tentative of building a game on best practices, breakdowns, and playbooks fails miserably. I have worked in the last 8 years on dozens of games and it’s always like that. Many business people would love to have an algorithm to create the best game, but it doesn’t exist.
The personality is impossible to imitate. There are companies built on imitation, and the result has always shown their personality. In game design, we need tools but we give our best when we work with what we truly, deeply love and understand. And that happens rarely, that’s probably the main challenge of our craft.
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