[THex] Game Design Workshop: Part 1 - Introduction

じ☆ve冰风

​

    Hey guys, it's me, multidisciplinary Game Developer Titanhex.


    Incase you don't know; I write scripts, create art, and design game mechanics.


    In this instance, I want to talk about the much more abstract and hard to capture Game Design.


    I'll begin by talking about the big mistake the RPG Maker Community has made about Game Design. From there, we'll talk about the Correction. And then, in the final part of this 3 Act introduction I will talk about the Value this correction will have on the community. I then will end it all with a brief conclusion.


    This introduction is meant to connect and segue into a lengthy series of tutorials that will be done in audio clips, videos, and written out to ensure access for everyone. I encourage you to follow along, especially anyone who has ever wanted to get into high level design.


    Audio Version:

1. The Misake
​

    Lets not dance around it. The mistake the community has made with design is thinking it is intangible, too abstract to be communicated, and is too subjective to be graded and studied to get the highest quality possible.


    All these beliefs are false. Ludology is an emerging term, game rules and game environments are being put in the classroom, and Design itself is a major discipline in many fields. Textbook after textbook is being written on Game Design by professionals to teach both the hard and soft skills used in the field, the techniques and processes, and new software is emerging to help game designers.


    I've read many of the books, used a handful of the software, and have applied and taught myself the skills to go from being a mess who can't remember the last step he took to someone who has their process documented in various forms from visual aides to flowcharts to simple written text documents.


    And I'm here to explain what real design is, and how you can do it like a professional.

2. The Correction
​

    We must correct our misunderstandings about design by first observing what a documented design looks like.


    This, however, is difficult. Documentation for a game is often very specific to that game. It can be observed for study, but unlike a sprite, music, or plugin, it cannot be easily transferred from one project to another.


    Companies and designers also have no reason to release a design after it has been executed and the final product is released.


    Often times deisgns are full of sensitive information about the game that could be used to exploit it or to duplicate the work of the designer.


    What we typically have to work with is a reverse design document. One of the best examples of that is on this site:
http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/reverse_design_ff6_1.html


    We'll take a quick look at a single visual aide from this article and explain how it relates to a design document. However, I recommend reading the entirety of this article, and the others on the site, to take note of the reverse design documents written and how they could be used prior to the finalization of your game.







    This document was used to show where the most powerful equipment shows up in the game and the projected level players will be when obtaining it.


    This visual aide shows us how the designer spread this gear across the game to ensure players explored and searched many areas, not just a single area, for items that would help them in the completion of the game.


    This is a very minor visual aide that simply shows when and where gear appears. This was a deliberate decision by the Designer to put these gears in these locations, at these levels, and in these quantities. They also had to communicate this to other team members.


    In many ways, putting a lot of powerful gear in a certain location may make an upcoming location easier, or a previously-visited-but-too-hard-to-traverse location now an appropriate challenge.


    These decisions are small ways a designer retains control over what the player is experiencing.


    Another set of amazing examples can be found on this site:
http://garethrees.org/?category=Game&style=detail

    For this example, I will use one of the visual aides that analyzes the Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time.







    This is an Item Dependency tree/flow chart. It demonstrates how certain items are needed to progress the game. This illuminates both where the game is linear and where it is the most open.


    Imagine trying to explain this chart to someone without this visual aide.


    You can bet your bottom dollar that this chart went through hundreds of iterations and was distributed to a lot of the designers in a Nintendo conference room as they discussed the design. It shows a lot of information about the game.


    These make good cases for the tangibility of game design. That they can be read, distributed, and processed and that someone can create a design for your use to help shed light on many parts of it.


    But these technical documents aren't the only thing that makes up design. Artistic documents also exist, which can illuminate color palettes, shapes, and styles that will contribute to the over-all experience a game provides.


    This article is a fantastic read on color and art being a large facet of the design. It goes over a large range of techniques and decisions across multiple video games:


http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/Herm..._at_one_of_game_designs_most_useful_tools.php


    In one section we are treated to how Journey uses color to illustrate a change in time and space throughout the game:







    Feel free to analyze it, especially as an artist, to catch the subtle visual cues and gradual and contrasting changes that may occur. It can easily be pinpointed from the color palette that a dramatic change in the game occurs between points 3 and 4 in the palette.


    Most remarkably, there is a correlation between this and the interest curve found in popular media. To fully grasp it, it's recommended you understand color theory and what certain colors may mean:







    It's quite clear that these are highly tangible devices and aides that we can create to turn our abstract ideas and convoluted designs into organized structures we can manipulate, alter and re-arrange to fit the experience we want the player to have.


    Further we can begin to see what skills a designer may need to have in order to create compelling game devices, and that those skills can be graded.


    If game design was subjective, then Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Skyrim would be rated the same as Superman 64 and Link: The Faces of Evil. But there are clearly methods of game design that result in better games.


    Since I'm going farther into the territory of Game Designs merits, lets get into the Value that instilling concrete, tangible design disciplines will have on the RPG Maker community. A community that has largely been adopting professional standards.

3. The Value
​

    The information obtained through tangible design documents and visual aides is the quintessential knowledge needed to control what your player experiences. You will get to steer them to monumental realizations and beautiful points that will interest them.


    Game Design is a multidisciplinary job that deals with many abstractions. The Designers job is to take the abstract and intangible and then convert it into a form that is tangible, and can be communicated to many people. The information should be able to be manipulated and altered to fit the desired experience.


    This gives the designer an amazing amount of control over their game.


    Further, non-visual disciplines like subtractive design, iterative development, and interest curve projection can result in fewer wasted assets, less wasted time, and a more enjoyable and cohesive game experience.


    I know many of my past games would have benefited from these disciplines.


    It's obvious to anyone who has made a game, but building one combines hundreds of hours of work stretching across several different disciplines. The complexity of this task becomes exponential with each layer added to a game. In the end, this leaves a ton of room for error.


    Game Design minimizes the chance of error and can lovingly craft a unified experience through out each stage of development.


    In the RPG Maker Community, a lot of the same mistakes are repeated that could be fixed with planned, informed, and conscious design decisions. We could sit down and talk more about the merits of a design if we can see it properly laid out. Infact, we may not even need to talk about a design once we've gotten it out and can see it for ourselves.


    Stronger designs means better games for the community. And it also means that we'll always know the next step in our game as we work on it. It also means that people will have a more concrete set of tools to build their game from.

4. Conclusion
​

    I've stayed the mistake many in the community have made about design, gone over how we can correct that mistake, and the value in correcting the mistake we've made.


    The conclusion I want you to draw from this is that Game Design is not intangible, nor is it simply a bunch of abstract thoughts and ideas we talk about. It's the steps taken to implement those ideas, the clear and concise communication of them, and the discipline and knowledge needed to structure our game to provide the experience we want by subtly controlling the player.


    I hope you'll go on this journey with me over the coming weeks as I release more tutorials detailing how games in the past may have been designed, how we can design our own ideas, and how we can manipulate those ideas later to fit the structure of a living, breathing game development project.


    Each section will be broken down into several disciplines, detailing technical designs, artistic designs, and non visual design.


    Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you in the next workshop!


本贴来自国际rpgmaker官方论坛作者:Titanhex处,因国际论坛即将永久关站,为了存档多年珍贵资料,署名转载到本论坛存档,由于官方帖子为英文原帖，需要中文翻译请点击论坛顶部切换语言为中文就可以将帖子翻译成中文浏览,方便大家随时查看,原文地址：https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/threads/thex-game-design-workshop-part-1-introduction.69543/