FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Revisit Your Earlier Design Work
To begin designing the core mechanics, go back to your earlier design work and reread it to identify entities and mechanics. Make a list of the nouns and verbs that you encounter. Whenever you come across a noun in your design documents, that noun will probably be implemented in the core mechanics as an entity, a resource, or both. Whenever you see a verb, that action will probably be implemented as a mechanic. Also watch for sentences that include the words if, when, and whenever. These designate conditions that will become part of the mechanics.
Look particularly closely at the following items:
■ Your answers to the question, "What is the player going to do?" The answers to this question give the player's role and some information about the challenges he will face and the actions he will perform. They will include some of the most critical nouns and verbs of all. Even if the answer is simply "fly an airplane," it contains the key verb for the whole game, fly, and the key noun, airplane.
■ Your flowboard of the game's structure. Each gameplay mode and shell menu represents a separate state of the mechanics, so the mechanics will require a symbolic entity to keep track of the current gameplay mode during play.
■ Your list of gameplay modes and your plans for them. Be sure to pay special attention to the challenges and actions you plan to offer the player in each mode and any user interface feedback and control mechanisms you have specified.
■ The general outline of the story you want to tell, if any. If it's a branching or foldback story, look at the structure that you made for it. Take note of the circumstances that cause it to branch. You will convert these into conditions.
■ The names of any characters you planned for your story. Unless these characters only appear in narrative events, they will certainly be entities in the core mechanics.
■ Your general plans for each level in the game. Unless the level designers are already at work, you won't have specific details, but you will know what kinds of things you wanted to include in each level.
■ The progression of the levels that you want to provide, if the levels progress in a sequence. Note whether any information carries over from level to level; you will create entities to store the data.
■ Any victory or loss conditions that you expect to use (or that you anticipate the level designers will want to establish).
■ Any non-gameplay actions that you may wish to include, such as moving the virtual camera, pausing or saving the game, and other forms of creative play.
Certain nouns and verbs in this material may not apply to the core mechanics. If a noun describes a passive landscape feature that acts as a challenge or something purely cosmetic, you can cross it off your list. If a verb describes an activity unrelated to gameplay, such as setting the volume level of the sound effects, you can cross that off, too.
