There are two basic ways to go about designing a game: try to complete everything in the game from the get-go, or sketch out a rough set of rules and fill in the rest later. Neither way is really wrong, but each results in different challenges.
When you plan everything out initially, it requires a lot of work. It’s possible you might lose interest before the project is complete. Another risk is putting in all the work only to discover afterwards something is fundamentally flawed making it unplayable and wasting your hard work. A third possibility, which is quite likely, will be that you’ll still be missing something in the game: a ‘hole’.
When you sketch things out roughly before trying out the game, you’re essentially guaranteeing yourself ‘holes’ in the game design. This allows you to test the basic mechanics and ideas of your game and rely on some support from the players to ‘flesh it out’ afterwards. Often, a good playtest will inspire you to put a lot more work into your game anyway and start to fill in those ‘holes’. The disadvantage is that the players will need a clear idea of some rules to play the game properly. A second flaw is that if your rules aren’t fleshed out enough, you might not be able to portray the key ideas to the players.
I find a balance of rough and finished works the best. Particularly, it seems to pay off to write character creation rules and those governing combat and other things the players will be getting into right away. Character options can be kept simple until you decide if you like the game or not, unless certain character builds are key components of your game design in the first place. A game called Knights and Mages would obviously need both knights and mages to be tested fully. Once core systems are in place and tested at least once, the gameplay will often inspire you to either chuck the game, or improve/expand upon it. I’ve often run a series of playtests and expanded the game first a couple of pages, then a dozen, then 50 more. The better things seem to be going, the more likely I am to be enthused enough to put the hard work in to improve the game. There is such a thing as over-improvement where you add so many things that the game bogs down. Not all ideas are automatically golden. If you find yourself in the rare position of needing to cut out things because you’ve added so much, you should congratulate yourself. You’re nearing the polishing stages of initial game design.
When you have such a massive amount of material that you start to swap out parts, change it, and cut things; it probably means you’re nearing a finished version of your game. When you’re finally happy with all the changes, you can stamp it as ‘done’; but you’re not done yet. In a perfect world, that would be the end of the story. However, it’s now time to get your game out there, sell it, market it, take it to friends/hobbyists and so forth. For many games, this is where the design ends. However, I think this is actually a crucial stage in improving your game design. Once your game gets to an outside audience, they’ll bring to light problems you and your playtesters never would have dreamed of. Often, these insights are completely invaluable. You are then faced with the hard decision of what to change and what to leave. No one but you can make this decision, but I’d advise to take outside advice very seriously. Often, the opinions of a few people can make a huge difference in the quality of your game. It’s now time for a complete overhaul. In the computer world this is often called version 1.1 or similar. Very rare is the game that comes out absolutely perfect on the first go. In all likelihood you’ll have to go through another dozen of these stages until the game is finally complete, or is it?
After an unknown number of revisions to a good game design, you’re usually left in a special position. This position is often the realization of all the integral flaws to the game design, all the things you learned through the design process, and all the true strengths of the game. How you use this information is up to you. It could be that your game has reached its ‘peak’ level where further revisions would be redundant and it’s actually better to come up with a new game design. However, like any creative project, there is no upper limit to how much a single game design can be improved. If you want to, you can keep altering a single game system for years and years. It’s a personal decision when to call it quits, only make minor changes, come out with a new edition, or start on a new project.
So what can we do about holes? What are they exactly? A hole is anything in your game design which wasn’t addressed fully or properly. If you’re a normal person, all of your initial game designs will have holes and you’ll never be able to see any of them until someone points it out to you, or it pops up in the course of a playtest. Holes could be missing statistics, unanswered questions, mechanics left up to debate, key components missing, or things you left out intentionally which the players want you to put back in the game.
How do you find holes? There are many ways. Going through the motions of gameplay without anyone around can be a huge time saver. Often, just pretending to play the game against yourself can highlight a myriad of things you forgot or didn’t address properly. Once you have all that covered, you’ll need to grab a few great friends who can help you with an official playtest. After this initial playtest, it’s usually clear if the game is a total flop, has some potential, or has a lot of potential. Assuming you actually like the game still, you’ll probably have already patched a number of crucial holes out of necessity, and noticed a number more even if the players didn’t. After a successful playtest (or one which failed for an obvious reason) I’ll go back over the game and add all the rules necessary to fill the holes I can see. Often, there are still huge gaping holes I still haven’t spotted yet. After that, it’s a few dozen more playtests over the weeks with changes after almost each of them—assuming I’m still interested in the design.
You can also intentionally leave holes in your game design. This can sometimes be a good strategy. If you have a great idea, but you’re not really clear on skill mechanics; you can probably still whip up the game and tell everyone the skill mechanics are ‘in the works’. This means you can test all the cool ideas without killing yourself over minor mechanics until you have to. I’ll often leave out massive lists of monsters, skills, equipment, and so forth until I know if I like a game or not. Sometimes I’ll write up half a dozen (or even full lists), but you’d be hard pressed to see me write out a hundred monster entries for a game I haven’t tested out yet. It’s partly laziness, and partly a stop-gap measure. With a high game design mortality rate, it only makes sense to cut loses where you can. This is not to say I expect every game to fail. I think every idea is good, it’s just the implementations sometimes fall short. For me, it’s just a part of the game design process. Just as there are always ten flops for every good game, there’s always one game for every ten flops.
The opposite of holes are clunkers. Huge parts of the game which you’ve spent a lot of time working on. Unfortunately, they just bog down the game. Massive, vague, or overcomplicated rules are often fun to design but don’t work out so well in actual gameplay. Sometimes you’ll create a clunker of a rule without realizing it. Often, you’ll love this clunker and think it’s pure genius. I still recall a few ‘clunkers’ I created and still vaguely like. I once created a system where you had to roll for about 160 attributes before you could start play. It was a huge clunker. I also found it pretty hilarious and the wild characters people would envision afterwards were pretty cool. I guess I like the idea of what the mechanic was trying to do even if it resulted in a huge, cumbersome rule.
Clunkers can usually be spotted by: the groans of the players, any part of the game which takes over half an hour to resolve, any section of the rules over ten pages long which doesn’t really do anything, or any section which makes perfect sense to you but to no-one else. Sometimes these are really great ideas, but they just don’t work. In literary terms, it falls under the old quote: “If it doesn’t contribute, cut it.” A good strategy is to cut out the offending rule for a single playtest. It’s not like once you take it out you can never put it back in again. Usually, it’ll be pretty clear after this playtest if the rule should stay out, or be returned to power. More often than not, game designers are more scared of removing rules than they should be. Taking out even a minor rule is like pulling teeth, but you can often yank a dozen without serious harm to the game design.
So, holes aren’t necessarily all bad, and don’t be afraid to chuck clunker rules. You can always put them back in again. Enthusiasm is also a powerful tool. If you’re passionate about a game design, you can work all kinds of wonders with it.
When you plan everything out initially, it requires a lot of work. It’s possible you might lose interest before the project is complete. Another risk is putting in all the work only to discover afterwards something is fundamentally flawed making it unplayable and wasting your hard work. A third possibility, which is quite likely, will be that you’ll still be missing something in the game: a ‘hole’.
When you sketch things out roughly before trying out the game, you’re essentially guaranteeing yourself ‘holes’ in the game design. This allows you to test the basic mechanics and ideas of your game and rely on some support from the players to ‘flesh it out’ afterwards. Often, a good playtest will inspire you to put a lot more work into your game anyway and start to fill in those ‘holes’. The disadvantage is that the players will need a clear idea of some rules to play the game properly. A second flaw is that if your rules aren’t fleshed out enough, you might not be able to portray the key ideas to the players.
I find a balance of rough and finished works the best. Particularly, it seems to pay off to write character creation rules and those governing combat and other things the players will be getting into right away. Character options can be kept simple until you decide if you like the game or not, unless certain character builds are key components of your game design in the first place. A game called Knights and Mages would obviously need both knights and mages to be tested fully. Once core systems are in place and tested at least once, the gameplay will often inspire you to either chuck the game, or improve/expand upon it. I’ve often run a series of playtests and expanded the game first a couple of pages, then a dozen, then 50 more. The better things seem to be going, the more likely I am to be enthused enough to put the hard work in to improve the game. There is such a thing as over-improvement where you add so many things that the game bogs down. Not all ideas are automatically golden. If you find yourself in the rare position of needing to cut out things because you’ve added so much, you should congratulate yourself. You’re nearing the polishing stages of initial game design.
When you have such a massive amount of material that you start to swap out parts, change it, and cut things; it probably means you’re nearing a finished version of your game. When you’re finally happy with all the changes, you can stamp it as ‘done’; but you’re not done yet. In a perfect world, that would be the end of the story. However, it’s now time to get your game out there, sell it, market it, take it to friends/hobbyists and so forth. For many games, this is where the design ends. However, I think this is actually a crucial stage in improving your game design. Once your game gets to an outside audience, they’ll bring to light problems you and your playtesters never would have dreamed of. Often, these insights are completely invaluable. You are then faced with the hard decision of what to change and what to leave. No one but you can make this decision, but I’d advise to take outside advice very seriously. Often, the opinions of a few people can make a huge difference in the quality of your game. It’s now time for a complete overhaul. In the computer world this is often called version 1.1 or similar. Very rare is the game that comes out absolutely perfect on the first go. In all likelihood you’ll have to go through another dozen of these stages until the game is finally complete, or is it?
After an unknown number of revisions to a good game design, you’re usually left in a special position. This position is often the realization of all the integral flaws to the game design, all the things you learned through the design process, and all the true strengths of the game. How you use this information is up to you. It could be that your game has reached its ‘peak’ level where further revisions would be redundant and it’s actually better to come up with a new game design. However, like any creative project, there is no upper limit to how much a single game design can be improved. If you want to, you can keep altering a single game system for years and years. It’s a personal decision when to call it quits, only make minor changes, come out with a new edition, or start on a new project.
So what can we do about holes? What are they exactly? A hole is anything in your game design which wasn’t addressed fully or properly. If you’re a normal person, all of your initial game designs will have holes and you’ll never be able to see any of them until someone points it out to you, or it pops up in the course of a playtest. Holes could be missing statistics, unanswered questions, mechanics left up to debate, key components missing, or things you left out intentionally which the players want you to put back in the game.
How do you find holes? There are many ways. Going through the motions of gameplay without anyone around can be a huge time saver. Often, just pretending to play the game against yourself can highlight a myriad of things you forgot or didn’t address properly. Once you have all that covered, you’ll need to grab a few great friends who can help you with an official playtest. After this initial playtest, it’s usually clear if the game is a total flop, has some potential, or has a lot of potential. Assuming you actually like the game still, you’ll probably have already patched a number of crucial holes out of necessity, and noticed a number more even if the players didn’t. After a successful playtest (or one which failed for an obvious reason) I’ll go back over the game and add all the rules necessary to fill the holes I can see. Often, there are still huge gaping holes I still haven’t spotted yet. After that, it’s a few dozen more playtests over the weeks with changes after almost each of them—assuming I’m still interested in the design.
You can also intentionally leave holes in your game design. This can sometimes be a good strategy. If you have a great idea, but you’re not really clear on skill mechanics; you can probably still whip up the game and tell everyone the skill mechanics are ‘in the works’. This means you can test all the cool ideas without killing yourself over minor mechanics until you have to. I’ll often leave out massive lists of monsters, skills, equipment, and so forth until I know if I like a game or not. Sometimes I’ll write up half a dozen (or even full lists), but you’d be hard pressed to see me write out a hundred monster entries for a game I haven’t tested out yet. It’s partly laziness, and partly a stop-gap measure. With a high game design mortality rate, it only makes sense to cut loses where you can. This is not to say I expect every game to fail. I think every idea is good, it’s just the implementations sometimes fall short. For me, it’s just a part of the game design process. Just as there are always ten flops for every good game, there’s always one game for every ten flops.
The opposite of holes are clunkers. Huge parts of the game which you’ve spent a lot of time working on. Unfortunately, they just bog down the game. Massive, vague, or overcomplicated rules are often fun to design but don’t work out so well in actual gameplay. Sometimes you’ll create a clunker of a rule without realizing it. Often, you’ll love this clunker and think it’s pure genius. I still recall a few ‘clunkers’ I created and still vaguely like. I once created a system where you had to roll for about 160 attributes before you could start play. It was a huge clunker. I also found it pretty hilarious and the wild characters people would envision afterwards were pretty cool. I guess I like the idea of what the mechanic was trying to do even if it resulted in a huge, cumbersome rule.
Clunkers can usually be spotted by: the groans of the players, any part of the game which takes over half an hour to resolve, any section of the rules over ten pages long which doesn’t really do anything, or any section which makes perfect sense to you but to no-one else. Sometimes these are really great ideas, but they just don’t work. In literary terms, it falls under the old quote: “If it doesn’t contribute, cut it.” A good strategy is to cut out the offending rule for a single playtest. It’s not like once you take it out you can never put it back in again. Usually, it’ll be pretty clear after this playtest if the rule should stay out, or be returned to power. More often than not, game designers are more scared of removing rules than they should be. Taking out even a minor rule is like pulling teeth, but you can often yank a dozen without serious harm to the game design.
So, holes aren’t necessarily all bad, and don’t be afraid to chuck clunker rules. You can always put them back in again. Enthusiasm is also a powerful tool. If you’re passionate about a game design, you can work all kinds of wonders with it.
