Alex Designs Games

Reading chapter two of “The Art of Game Design” led me to few different questions about experiences while playing games. Have you ever taken a moment to think about the different things you experience while playing games? Are you drawn to certain games because of the gameplay experience they provide? Do you ever think about how certain genres of games are better at providing certain experiences?

I want players to feel connected.

I asked myself what kind of experience I want people to have while playing a game designed by me. I really want to provide players with games that bring them joy and instills a sense of nostalgia. I want players to feel connected to the characters I create and see some of themselves in the characters. I want players to be able to relate to the stories I create. Lastly, I want to create games that bring people together offline and online.

I can’t solely rely on my own experiences to achieve the goals mentioned above. I am one person with a singular experience. I will have to rely on the experiences of many different people from different background to truly create games that many people can see themselves in. This can be accomplished in many different ways, but more on that in the future I think. Yes, I could create games for people that have similar background and experiences as myself, but that is limiting and doesn’t appeal to me.

Describing your experiences can make it easier to design experiences for others.

Game design is all about creating experiences for players. Game designers can draw upon. As mentioned before, we can draw upon our own experiences and memories but it is important to draw upon the experiences and memories of others at the same time. How can you draw upon memories and experiences to design games? It boils down to being able to describe the experience as detailed as possible and then pick what’s needed for gameplay. This may come naturally for some, but others will have to practice at it. I’ve begun to take moments while gaming to describe the describe the experience to myself. It’s been an interesting exercise as I play through Conception II: Children of the Seven Stars.

Let’s pretend you’re designing an adventure game and to get to the next checkpoint(?) you have to swim across a body of water. What do you expect to feel in the game? You’d probably expect to see and hear water splashing as you swim. If the water is cold your character would probably shiver a bit and your character might be breathing heavily if they’ve been swimming long enough. If the environment is sunny then there will probably be a glare on the surface of the water. You might be able to see fish swimming and plants underneath the water if it’s clear. All of these play into replicating the experience of swimming in a body of water.

Designers want to make people happy.

Creating wonderful games requires an understanding of a few different fields. The most important of these fields are anthropology, psychology and design, Anthropologist want to understand the human experience, psychologists want to understand why humans are they way they are and designers simply want to make people happy. Game designers can leverage psychology to learn how people will respond to their games. Anthropology can help game designer learn how to incorporate the experiences of others in their games. Game designers can learn all sorts of things from other subjects of design. Some design subjects that immediately come to my mind are music, interior design, city design, and story design.

Happy New Year!

This is my last blog post for 2023. I’m very excited to see what 2024 brings and sharing more of my learning and creations in the new year!