FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

The Ability to Synthesize

Synthesis, in this context, means bringing together different ideas and construct­ing something new from them. Different people on the development team and at the publishing company have concerns about their own areas of expertise (pro­gramming, art, music, and so on), and their opinions pull and push the design in different directions. A professional game designer must be able to synthesize a con­sistent, holistic vision of a game from this variety of opinions. As the designer, you may be tempted to seek sole ownership of the vision and insist that things must be exactly as you imagined them. You must resist the temptation to do that, for two reasons:

■ First, you must allow your team some ownership of the vision as well, or its members won't have any motivation or enthusiasm for the project. No one builds computer games solely for the money; we're all here so that we can contribute creatively.

■ Second, a designer who can't deliver in a team environment, no matter how visionary she may be, doesn't stay employed for long. You must be able to work successfully with other people.

Game design always requires compromise. Compromise means more than just negotiating with other people, however; it also means working within the prevail­ing circumstances. In many cases, you are given a task that limits you to designing a genre clone or a heavily restricted licensed property. On a commercial project, you are almost certainly told, rather than get to choose, the target hardware upon which your game will run. Your project always has a desired budget and schedule
that it is expected to meet. A professional designer must be able to work within these constraints and to make the compromises necessary to do so.

Summary

This chapter puts forward the view that game design is not an arcane art but rather a craft, just like any other, that can be learned with application.

Video games are not created by a mysterious, hit-or-miss process. Instead, they are recreational experiences that the designer provides to the players through rules and a presentation layer. A game is designed by creating a concept and identifying an audience in the concept stage, fleshing out the details and turning abstract ideas into concrete plans in the elaboration stage, and adjusting the fine points in the tuning stage. All video games have a structure, made up of gameplay modes and shell menus, that you must document so your teams know what they are building and how it fits together. In the course of this process, you use a wide variety of skills to create a wide variety of documents for your team. And at all times, you should seek to create an integrated, coherent experience for your player that meets your most important obligation: to entertain her.