FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
The Stages of the Design Process
Now that you have learned about the player-centric approach to game design and the key components and structure of a video game, you are ready to start thinking about how to go about designing one. Unfortunately, there are so many kinds of video games in the world that it is impossible to define a simple step-by-step process that produces a single design document all ready for people to turn into content and code. Furthermore, unless a game is very small, it is not possible to create a complete design and then code it up afterward. That is how the game industry built games in the 1980s, but experience has shown that large games must be designed and constructed in an iterative process, with repeated playtesting and tuning, and occasional modifications to the design, throughout development. However, not all parts of the design process can be revisited. Some, such as the choice of concept, audience, and genre, should be decided once at the beginning and should not change thereafter. The process is therefore divided into three major parts:
■ The concept stage, which you perform first and whose results do not change
■ The elaboration stage, in which you add most of the design details and refine your decisions through prototyping and playtesting
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The tuning stage, at which point no new features may be added, but you can make small adjustments to polish the game
Each of these stages includes a number of design tasks. In the sections that follow, we look at each stage and the different tasks that you perform in each.
Chris Bateman and Richard Boon discuss the relative merits of various design processes in Chapter 1 of their book 21st Century Game Design (Bateman and Boon, 2006). Look at it for further discussion on the subject.
