Designing to Last: Core Principles in Game Design

Over the years I’ve designed a number of game systems that have grown to be much bigger than I originally ever dreamed they would. These game systems were devised for single projects: BattleCON: War, Pixel Tactics, Millennium Blades. Only Exceed was really invented with an eye turned towards the future. Of course, all these games went on to spawn many, many expansions over time, and only some of these expansions were designed by me personally. Others were built by enthusiastic and talented members of our team, and they’ve done a great job in bringing these games to life.

When designing a game system that’s built to last, I’ve learned that it’s not enough to understand the foundation of the engine and to create a few sets and some proposed future mechanics. In order to ensure a game’s continued success, you have to define some core philosophies to the game design, and make sure that your designers understand those philosophies.

It’s poor form to expect anyone else to design exactly the same way you will. At the same time, it’s imperative that a future designer builds sequels to a game consistent with the base game’s core philosophy. If the core isn’t held to, the future iterations of the game will feel disjointed and out of touch with its base. Even if you are planning to build successive versions of your game yourself, that’s an endeavor that can take years, and it’s a great idea to set your core principles down as you get started.

Design Creep

The core principles can help to keep your successor-designers and your developers on track. But first, it’s best to talk about why things might go off-track in the first place.

Technology - Over time, due to novelty, player sophistication, and better understanding of the rules, the play effects which define a game naturally evolve. Timings, restrictions, keywords, and standardized movements of components all change (usually tending towards the compression of complex ideas into simple terms).

Developer Preferences - Developers and successor-designers are people with their own strong opinions of what makes a game great. This is probably why they’ve opted onto the team, after all. While respecting and exploring these preferences is good, it’s important to have a compass that lets your team know which direction is correct when faced with multiple paths. Designers have biases, developers have biases. If you’ve overcome your own biases to build a game that entertains people who enjoy different play styles, then you should make efforts to instruct your successors on this point too.

Player Meta - We love our players, and players love our games, however, players have their own biases as well. Sometimes a new community springs up with strong opinions on one element of design, and they may even be successful in changing the way the game is played, contrary to its core design ideas. In this case, rather than adapting the game to the player Meta, designers need to look for ways to pull the game back to the center while compensating for an aberrant metagame.

Principles to Grow By

Defining principles is easy. The good news is that there aren’t any wrong principles in game design—the population of gamers is so diverse and open-minded that both Dungeon Lords, Space Alert, and Codenames can all be enjoyed by some portion of overlapping audiences. The important thing is that you have some principles and that you stick to them.

So what should go in your core principles? Here’s a short list of must-haves:

Game Feel Principles

How is the game meant to make players feel? This is the crux of the matter, because if feeling changes, even if design remains solid, the things that attracted the core audience in the first place will not be present in the next edition. Maintaining a game’s feel is key. For this reason, game feel should be the thing that we don’t allow to change, no matter how many iterations or editions we go through. New editions should be designed to rekindle the original feeling, perhaps through a new lens, but not to change it.

Major Design Decisions

Outline and justify the reason behind major design decisions in the game. These design decisions aren’t sacred, like game feel, but they should be understood and should only be changed with care to their original reasoning.

Design Omissions

Use this section to explain omissions in the game’s design. Things that were tried but didn’t pan out. This can help your designer-successors and developers to avoid reinventing the wheel again, saving significant time and energy.

Principles of Balance

Most games that run for a long time are competitive in nature. This necessitates that future expansions be balanced against the past. If there are concrete ideas or useful heuristics, include those here as well, but make sure to explain how they help to achieve the principles.

In each case, tie your Design Decisions, Design Omissions, and Balance Principles back to the Game Feel Principles. This helps to reinforce the language you are creating, as well as to explain the justification of each item’s inclusion in this document.

Some more Tips

Prune down your Core Principles as much as possible. These are principles, not a dissertation on game design. The cleaner and more simply that you can present these ideas, the easier it will be to have the development and design teams read them and begin using your language. If something isn’t absolutely critical, either cut it or collapse it into one of the other points.

Review and revise over time. With each new iteration of the game, take some time to review your core principles (or to make them up, if you haven’t done so yet!). Particularly the omissions and major decisions portion of your plan are likely to receive constant updates, as you accumulate and record wisdom gleaned from hundreds of hours of gameplay.

Use principles to temper inspirations. Inspired developers and designers will often come up with great new ideas for effects, abilities, or gameplay paradigms. The purpose of the document is not to deny these changes, but to refine them and ensure that they are complimenting the core principles rather than fighting against them.

About the Author

D. Brad Talton Jr. is the President of Level 99 Games, as well as the designer of BattleCON, Millennium Blades, Pixel Tactics, Exceed, and many more games. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife Lynda and daughter Kathryn.