Stamp Sized Game Design
Before dropping into software I visited a school for interior design and architecture. I learned schemes for planing homes, restaurants and stores which all start the same way. First you have to come up with a rough design of the whole. In interior construction language this means checking out where the walls are, where doors and windows are located, measuring room heights, etc. After gathering these limits you start designing the room segmentation and dedications like living room, bath or kitchen. The most important hint our teacher gave us for this step was to limit our sketches to the size of stamps. The advantage of this limitation is that there is no chance to get lost in details. The focus is forced on splitting up space into rooms and their interconnections. Positioning furniture or installations is hardly possible and senseless anyway.
I'm currently working on Nordenfelt's level design. Yesterday I forgot my stamp size focus and got lost in details - again. Completing the level intro - a flight over corn fields through cloud bulks - was just too much fun to quit. It's a bad habit of mine to get too narrow while other parts are not fleshed out enough. That's waste of time in many cases. When the overall design changes detailing effort in affected areas will become worthless. Nobody would buy a fitted kitchen as long as there is no set up room for it. So don't work within estimated limits. Define them first.
Sometimes it's hard to keep away from pleasing detail work like drawing sprites, improving enemy behaviour or fiddling around with special effects. Boring work like specifying core mechanics (you already have fleshed out in mind... almost) becomes stale quickly and focus drops down to narrow, more fun details. I think that's what people call hard work: staying focused on uninteresting tasks.
The stamp size limit can be used in several tiers of a design process. After figuring out the room segmentation each room can be roughly designed with stamp sized sketches. Game design has similar tiers. The following tiers are used for Nordenfelt:
- core mechanics (shooting, dodging, etc.)
- emerging behaviour (scoring techniques, equipment strategies, etc.)
- level focus (e.g. first level introduces important mechanics)
- level scenarios (rural, urban, sea, sky, etc.)
- level flow (scroll speed, background design, positioning swarms, etc.)
- level details (defining formations, positioning turrets, tweaking difficulty, etc.)
But what is the stamp size in game design? The flow of Nordenfelt's first level gives you an example of a stamp-sized definition:
descent over corn fields > meadow & trees > farms > lake > dam > boss fight
If you can't do it graphically simply use limited sentences, term chains or keywords. Or sounds. Or gestures. Any token small enough to "fit onto a stamp".
Cheers,
Thomas