GAMES DESIGN PILLARS AND ESSENTIAL EXPERIENCES

DEFINE the essential experience of your game in one sentence

EXPLAIN how design intention aligns with mechanics and storytelling components

DEVELOP 3-4 game design pillars to guide your GDD and further prototyping

REFLECT critically how emotional responses shape design

In video game development there tends to be multiple documents as opposed to just one, in order to express a wider array of information to separate roles in the development teams. Our game will revolve around certain rules, or pillars, that must remain consistent throughout the experience of the game. For sake of simplicity it’ll just be one document but conveying these pillars will still be important.  This means I’ll have to think about the game in its entirety and how I want its final result to be before I’ve started working on the concept. The pillars stem from the original design intention and aim to compound the latter with its usage. Pillars is just a more evocative term for design rules.

In my previous entry I outlined what the bitsy project had refined for the game’s scope. That would be a game where movement is used as a metaphor for a personal struggle. I want to use hiking for that metaphor to be expressed with the natural world for its aesthetic and symbolic value.

1- Define your game’s intention

“I want players to feel connected to the world they inhabit.”

I want a cohesive experience where the narrative, setting, characters and design are all expressed in the environment that the players navigate. The intention is a double entendre in the sense that the players are connected to the game’s world but hopefully they will also reflect that experience into their own personal worlds. 

2- Identify the essential experience

What emotion or behaviour is essential?

I have not quite worked out what it could be. I think many different emotions could work with the game’s intention but ideally they should be stronger emotions where the audience can insert themselves. Since a lot of my work leans towards the more sombre range of moods, it could be something like sadness, trepidation or horror. As I refine my concept more this will reveal itself.

How might the player encounter it during play?

As I iterated earlier I haven’t decided on the specificities. 

What does the emotion look like in your world?

The emotion would be something I want to put the most amount of thought into its aesthetic execution. Especially with symbolism, I want to create something that has a lot of meaning. Pathetic fallacy, utilising the weather, could work quite well just to list one possible example. I really like the colour grading in vintage film photography, the deep shadows and saturated tones so I want to utilise that in my palette. 

3- Draft design pillars

I sketched out what I was thinking with a rough tetrad idea, an emphasis on the narrative over the aesthetics and mechanics. I still will put my full effort into the latter two, i just want the most meaning to come out of the narrative.

POWERPOINT

I created my powerpoint design on Photoshop as I have really been delving into the program since I realised I could use my samsung s10 as a second monitor. Not only that, I can draw perfectly with the stylus. The background photo is from an upcoming mini-project within this project regarding autumnal photography. I edited it to make it look like a grainy, dated photograph.