- What are the actual things we’re interacting with? Boards, cards, dice, tokens, coins, etc.? (implementation)
Tangibility is a big part of playing games. Nobody wants to play a game where you have to hold a billion things, but at the same time, it’s fun to have little pieces to move around and manipulate, and they can be good visual aids for the state of the game and convey important information (like roads in Catan). To answer this, we should probably make a crude mockup of the whole game system, just to get a sense for what players will be interacting with. I would guess this is something we could learn a lot from, and likely change drastically.
- What is the visual style or language of the game? (look and feel)
Looks aren’t everything, but nobody wants to play a game that’s unappealing, crowded, or hard to read. To answer this, we should make a prototype that involves some level of visual language (fonts, palettes, colors). I think this is something that, if done well, could stick for the rest of development.
- What feelings do we want to inspire in players? (role)
Further development should be based on doing what we can to create the feelings we decide we want to invoke. To answer this, we should make an interactive prototype of the main mechanics, and see what feelings they generate in us. I would guess this is going to be really informative.
- What’s the narrative?
To me personally, narrative is something I mostly ignore in games, but it does play a role in grounding the players in a world together. We should create a prototype story or setting, maybe from a vision board or something like that. I think this is both an easy and helpful way to get aligned on a direction.
