Designing Games for Game Designers

1. Note: Turn on “Notes View” to see the outline of the talking points. Several images are temporary. Most of them will be enhanced. Designing GamesforGame Designers Stone Librande Creative Director, EA/Maxis

2. Overview • Class Philosophy • Fundamental Exercises • Advanced Exercises • Designing your own “design games”

3. Class Philosophy • CogswellPolytechnical College, Sunnyvale, CA. • Paper, cards, dice (no computers) • 2 to 3 hour workshops • Focus on one specific topic

4. Warm Up Design Goals: • A chance for the class to get acquainted • Focus on physical rather than cerebral

7. What is a Game?

8. Goals Design Goals: • Goals come in many forms • All the rules stay the same, only the goal can change • How does changing the goal change the game?

10. Rules Design Goals: • How do you structure rules? • What are the key words to prevent ambiguity? • Players make up games from scratch by adding one new rule each turn

13. Decisions Design Goals: • It’s not enough to put decisions in your game, you need “interesting decisions” • The rules and goals don’t change • The players are given a character and must create three actions. Only one action can be taken per turn.

16. Obstacles Design Goals: • Use the items in a room to build an obstacle course • Players must try to get a ping-pong ball into a cup • Start with a par 1 hole, then slowly add obstacles until the hole becomes par 5

20. Balance Design Goals: • Make an asymmetric game where the two sides are balanced • One side is a giant robot that operates autonomously • The other side is a squad of 4 tanks under the players’ control

22. Odds Design Goals: • Learn how to calculate odds while playing a game • Start with simple calculations and slowly progress in difficulty • Show how statistics can give you more information than play tests

24. Rewards Design Goals: • Show the students how powerful rewards can be • Roll dice as fast as possible and try to get a double 6. • Do this for an hour!

25. Entertainment Design Goals: • Using the lessons on odds and rewards, make a casino game • Balance the player’s payout with the houses ability to consistently make money • Make the rules simple, but give the player options

28. Mash Up Design Goals: • Bring in a board game but ignore the rules • Combine it with another random board game

30. World of Rulecraft Design Goals: • MMO style game where the rules change as the game is being played • Each player is either a wizard, thief or warrior and levels up by battling other players • Guilds tend to form naturally, which opens up new rule requirements

32. Paper Simulation Design Goals: • Take an existing video game and recreate it using cards and dice • After removing the graphics, sound and controllers, what will survive?

33. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater

34. Asteroids

35. Making games for designers • The base game must be simple • Let the students/players do the work • Iterate the lesson constantly

36. Thank you! Detailed rules and materials for many of thes games can be found at: www.stonetronix.com