Game Musings - Finding your game's core

This is a re-framing of advice that I once got from my beloved friend Maddy Thorson, but it also rapidly advanced how I approached my projects, so I wanted to share it.

The advice is essentially just that, when planning out your game, you should learn what the core idea of your game is - the central pillar that defines what your goal with the project is. Knowing that makes iteration and prototyping easier because any time you’re trying out a new idea for your project, you can ask whether or not it contributes to the core idea of your game. If it doesn’t support the core idea, then you can easily discard it.

For example, in Chicory: A Colorful Tale, I wanted to make a game where players could be creative and draw freely as their main method of interacting with the world. I tried a lot of ideas early on that broke this rule. At one point I thought the game might be about the world missing bridges or other landmarks which the player had to fill in. But this made the game into a simple lock-and-key “fill in the blanks” experience where your actual drawings were meaningless, and instead were a means to a more important end (replace the missing landmarks). This led me to the idea that the world has lost its color, so that your drawings themselves were the “solution” to the problem in the game, and not a means of fixing some other problem. There were a lot of possible “drawing games” that Chicory could have become which would have been perfectly OK, but by focusing on the experience I wanted players to have, I narrowed in on exactly what pieces the game needed to have and which it didn’t.

Lately, I feel like I’ve met more and more designers working on projects that don’t have a clear core. Sometimes this is because the game is very complex, like an elaborate simulation game whose “fun” only becomes clear through many overlapping systems all working in harmony. Other times it’s because the game is coming from a larger team with a lot of different cool ideas mashed together, or it’s based on a really cool story/visual aesthetic that shows really well on social media but doesn’t easily lend itself to generating player experiences. As powerful hardware and game making tools have gotten more accessible, games have gotten bigger over the years, and I think that’s had a negative effect on creators’ ability to hone in on what the goal of their project is. It’s easy for a project to spend years going in circles as it picks up ideas like a Katamari ball, only to drop most of those ideas once it finds its core and starts going towards an end point. (Or, worse, never finishes. Or carries all those ideas to the finish line, resulting in a bloated end product).

For games that are based on a really broad idea or feeling, it can be really hard to hone in on what you’re making, and that can have disastrous effects if you let the problem fester. In the past, I’ve found it useful to hone in on one specific cool idea or interaction that inspired me to want to make the game in the first place - and then decontruct why that idea is cool to me, which aspects of it are interchangable, and which are not.

One way or another, if you ever want people to play your game, you need to finish it; to finish it, you need to have a plan to get there; and to form a plan, you need to know where you’re going.