Level 2.0: Game Design

What is Game Design?

We will use the word “design” a lot in this course, and unfortunately it is a term that is a bit overused, so I will clarify what I mean here. As it says in Challenges for Game Designers Links to an external site., game design is the creation of the rules and content of a game. It does not involve programming, art or animation, or marketing, or any of the other myriad tasks required to make a game. All of these tasks collectively can be called “game development” and game design is one part of development.

Unfortunately, I have seen the term “design” used (particularly in some college curricula) to refer to all aspects of development. When used in the video game industry (or the board game industry), “game design” has a very specific meaning, and that is the meaning that we will use for this course.

Multiple Types of Game Design

As mentioned in Challenges, there are many tasks associated with game design: system design, level design, content design, user interface design, world building, and story writing. You could fill several 10-week courses with any one of these, so this summer course will not be a full treatment of the entire range of game design. We will touch lightly on UI, story writing and content when relevant, but the majority of this course focuses on system design (also sometimes called “systems design” or “core systems design”).

System design is about defining the basic rules of the game. What are the pieces? What can you control? What actions can you take on your turn (if there are “turns” at all)? What happens when you take each action, and how does it affect the game state? In general, system design is the creation of three things:

  • Rules for setup. How does the game begin?
  • Rules for progression of play. Once the game begins, what can the players do, and what happens when they do things?
  • Rules for resolution. What, if anything, causes the game to end? If the game has an outcome (such as winning or losing), how is that outcome determined?

If you look back at Level 1.4: Let's Make A Game you’ll notice those very simple rules contain all of these parts. The creation of those rules is system design, and that is what we will be spending most of our time with over this course.