Slackful Thoughts
9 July, 2004:
I've mostly written thus far about the taxonomy and characteristics of games thus far, topics which I find endlessly fascinating but which I suspect wear thin for most people pretty quickly. The temptation to continue writing about those subjects is strong, despite that, but I think it might be time to move on. I did promise a friend to write out my thoughts on chess in greater detail at some point, but not today. Perhaps it could even turn into my very own Phil Foglio "Sex in D&D" style running joke.
Instead, I'd like to examine the game creation process today. I've now been developer on two published games (Ascension at Firepeak and Prussia's Glory, published by GMT Games), and I've designed a game that will hopefully be published soon (Foresight) as well as developing another wargame for GMT that should see publication soon (Unhappy King Charles, a game on the English Civil War from 1642-5). In addition, I've designed several other games in various stages of completion, playtested games at many stages of development, discussed games in development with Cory and others and read as much as possible. During all of that, some patterns have emerged, particularly from the design work that Cory and I have done.
There seem to be two major directions that game development can take. I think of these as top-down and bottom-up. In the top-down approach, the theme is paramount. The theme is selected and drivers the mechanics of the game and the design process from above. The theme suggests a broad approach, which is them filled out with more specific categories of mechanics, which are then filled in with more details, all to better illustrate and keep to the theme.
For the bottom-up approach, a central game mechanic is selected first. That game mechanic is then surrounded with additional game mechanics to form a more complete game. A theme is usually selected at some point, in an effort to further guide the design and development of the game, but the theme is a guide and not the raison d'être. The theme simply provides a framework to continue filling in the mechanics, and is discarded or modified freely if it loses touch with the mechanics.
An excellent example of the top-down approach was the development process of Prussia's Glory, or any other serious wargame. Bob Kalinowski, the designer, set about to create a game that could recreate battles of the Seven Years War. He had a number of design parameters that further refined that theme: it had to be playable in an evening (he has seven children, so any game couldn't be left set up) and each battle had to take up no more than one map (22" x 34") of space. Once he had those parameters, some other aspects of the design immediately suggested themselves. The size of the maps and time constraints suggested the scale of the map (500 yards per hex) and the size of units that the counters would represent (mostly brigades). As he unrolled the design, more and more aspects of the mechanics suggested themselves from previous aspects of the game, all of them springing from the ultimate wellspring of the guiding theme.
Even when I took over the development with a game that was well along the path to publication, the guiding theme was still the touchstone. When we examined army morale issues, unit morale, artillery rules, line of sight, army activation and other aspects of the game, we always had to ask ourselves how the mechanic helped capture the realities of the battlefield, or helped us keep to the time and space requirements of the game. The theme guided the design of the game. The process was dictated from the top-down.
In my next column, I'll take a look at how a bottom-up game design process operates, and also how games can have aspects of both types of development.
~ Joshua Buergel