Design has a pre-defined purpose, and is both the problem-solving focused approach to fulfilling that purpose as well as the result of that approach. A good designer isn't someone who can guess the right solutions fast, but someone who can go through that process effectively.
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Surprisingly, that means that pretty much anyone can become a great designer. You have to get better at the core loop of defining a problem, coming up with various solutions, selecting a likely one, implementing a low effort test, testing it, and adjusting according to results.
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In some cases, that loop is very short. Your want the player to be able to reach platforms above the ground. You implement a jump. You set the force to 3, test it, and the character disappears into space. You lower it, the character doesn't leave the ground. Eventually it's nice.
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You deciding you wanted a jump is a HUGE design decision. You setting the jump force for it is a HUGE influence on future decisions. The jump value you reached was influenced by your walking speed & gravity, but from now on everything you design is also influenced by the jump.
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This nest of dependencies obviously gets out of hand rapidly, which is why a core necessity of design is keeping focus on what you're trying to reach. Are you trying to design a game in which the player feels stealthy? Or a game about feeling free? Or a game about dread?
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How fast does "stealthy" walk, or "freedom", or "dread"? How high do they jump? Those aren't questions with answers. You could play other games with those thematics, but they're likely not going to give you answers that fit in what you're trying to achieve. You'll have to guess.
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For a lot of choices like this, the answer you end up on is the answer that's right. Because I feel a "stealthy" jump would be lower than a "freedom" jump, but higher than a "dread" jump - but that's all just bullshit. You could make a zippy stealthy jump, or a very sluggish one.
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Now, I keep talking about jumps because that's an easy example because it's somewhat isolated. Design plays at a ton of levels of game development. Design is setting the game's scope and targets, which are usually "delivering an abstract feeling, a thought, or an understanding".
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It plays all the way down to how a weaker gun that SOUNDS stronger will FEEL stronger to the player. Do you adjust the gun or the sound? What effect does making one gun stronger have on balance? What does changing the sound do to the perception of balance? Which matters more?
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Game design is a craft to me because I feel it isn't a science, nor an art. It's kind of (excitingly) dry, honestly, and the solutions are found through testing your assumptions about some abstract way computers work or a nebulous way people work against cold hard reality.
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Being a good designer, then, becomes about experience and attitude.
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A completely new designer has the strange advantage of lack of experience - they will try solutions that seem unreasonable and a waste of time. A veteran designer has the obvious advantage of experience granting them a toolbox of solutions they know probably work.
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An experienced designer whose experience forms an attitude which stops them from going through the process of experimenting becomes a stale designer, because their preconceived notions lock them into solutions that then rule out other opportunities.
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A new designer whose lack of experience forms an attitude that doesn't test (or tests too much) won't be able to make a coherent game, because they're just throwing scrap together believing that at the end that it's a functioning airplane, despite having never opened an engine.
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Honing your craft as a designer, I've been told, isn't about having the toolbox. It's about being able to force naivité. It's about being able to step outside of your beliefs. It's about seeing opportunity. It's also about knowing when to stop, and when to grab your toolbox.
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The only things that betrays a lack of understanding of design isn't having bad ideas to test. It's starting with definite answers to unanswerable questions, to irrelevant questions, to things untested, or from things other than your own puzzles.
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If you're starting on your journey into game design, focus on learning the process, not on the answers. Nothing will make you a worse designer than getting lucky with your answers (or never testing them and insisting regardless), and thinking that means you're a good designer.
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And nothing will make you a better designer than eventually getting a feeling for when to experiment with bad and wild ideas, and when to lock things down because every other value in the game depends on what number you set "jump" to.
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End of conversation
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