Personal Reflection

Picture the moment when finally, after all the design and conception is done, you think your various elements, objects, and mechanics are ready. This may be a mixture of frustration and excitement. “Now we are going to build our game.” And what building really means is writing lots of rules in documents, finishing up objects, coding, actually cranking the machinery, and tying all the parts together.

The enthusiasm dissipates, the frustration ramps up, and the thought that we have a lot of work ahead of us prevails.

All of this is built around the misconception of what “completeness” is.

If we redefine completion in terms of coherence, we begin to understand that our goal is to provide a coherent experience to the players. The question is: What do players need? What do they actually experience? What actions and effects does the game elicit? What drives them forward? What emotions do they feel? What connections do they make? What is their journey?

Let’s take our most concrete example, the game we are currently building, Nightfall: The Last Train. During one of the early meetings, I asked the team a question: “What happens during the transition from the heart of the train to the rest of the experience?” This question was hugely important. Each chapter in our game is distinct and different in visual style and challenge, but they all describe the same journey. How can we make that journey a compelling, coherent experience?

The designers first responded with a barrage of answers, everything from “there is a connection between the train and the city of Echo City, which we have to reflect,” to “the Painted Country and the Museum/Labyrinth each need to share transitions.” This question turned out to be at the heart of our game design process.

Later, we realized that maintaining coherence means that, as designers, we must anticipate the feelings, thoughts, actions, and motivations of the player during these transitions. Each chapter must remember the previous one in some way. It must continue, emotionally and sometimes literally, the work the player has done before. Each chapter must retain some detail from the previous chapter that was left unanswered.

We also talked about how onboarding is similar to puzzle design. Designing a puzzle can be viewed as structuring a learning opportunity that starts small, then becomes harder and more complex. Onboarding can be approached in the same way by progressively adding pressure and space. We structure the player’s development around small, easy interactions, scaling them up gradually.

Use playtesting as a tool to check for integration problems. Players can be trusted to provide you with a feedback loop that reveals unclear objectives and confusion about the changes from one chapter to another. If mechanics are natural to you but obscure to players, then you may need to change your trajectory. Do not continue filling the game with more content. Revise what you already have.

In the future, imagine that your next steps begin by establishing a clear concept of the experience you want players to have. Create a timing for their journey. Create a rudimentary plaything out of your screens, models, mechanics, and visual information, and test it before expanding it. If you follow this approach, your goal in building becomes one of coherence rather than scale.