Throughout my career, I’ve heard that lead designers should be the visionaries for their projects. That statement contains truth, but it doesn’t contain the whole picture. The lead designer for any project must know what they wish to make, yes. Heck, the lead designer should know what they’d want to make if they had an ideal set of development circumstances.
Knowing what you’d like to make in an ideal world, however, isn’t the same as knowing what you can make in the real world.
I’m getting ready for a possible move. How possible? It’s incredibly likely at this point, unless something magical happens within the next week or two.
That move and where I land (wherever that might be) are topics for another discussion. The great part about getting ready for a move is running across things you thought you’d lost long ago.
I need to get a few things done today. Among them, I need to get a few more job applications out and I need to practice some programming. I woke up this morning wanting to talk a bit about the value of ideas.
When we were working on Ultimate Chef, the initial design was a bit… loose. The design team spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to bridge the gap between fine dining, restaurant management, celebrities, and the order board mechanic that sustains the core loop of so many crafting economies.
As a game designer, one of the things you have to deal with is coming up with ideas that will never, ever see the light of day.
Over time, you appreciate the process, even if those games will never get produced. With each new idea, you get a little better at articulating what might make an interesting experience.
Like any designer with any time in this industry, I have many ideas that only exist in the form a single document and my mind. Some ideas only exist as an outline. Since I’m digging through my own past documents, I’ll share what I find as I find it.
Back in 2003, the game industry was determined to suss out how we might be able to standardize game design. This wasn’t so that we could make cookie-cutter experiences. It was to ensure that we had a common language and that we defined certain core principles of good (i.e. effective) design.
Duncan Makes Games 