Welcome to your Saturday afternoon nap.

This week: The 'design' of game design.

How do you design a game?

After you have an idea and before you program it, this is the design.

Taking the idea, pushing it, pulling it, testing it, improving it; this phase is crucial and oft-overlooked by beginning designers.

The ability to develop a model to test out the parameters of the game is faster and infinitely cheaper than actually programming the game and then having to make major changes. And then program it again…and again…

But what to do instead?

In the old days (before last Wednesday), I spent a lot of time with paper and pencil.

Last Wednesday, learning about the power of modeling using system dynamics tools profoundly changed the way I will personally design, and the way I will teach design.

I’m talking about the modeling tool: STELLA.

About 4 years ago, I wrote a game that could best be described as a cross between Tetris and Scrabble. Blocks with letters in them are added to a playing area, and the player is responsible for deleting and rearranging them so that words from a list were formed. When a word is formed, the letters that made up that word were removed from the play area. Note: that the game has serious design issues, and I am working on fixing them as we speak.

Ultimately it will be an educational game. All the words are from the spelling bee word list and includes a lot of synonyms, antonyms, etc. And eventually will include, when a word is completed, a pop-up requiring selecting the proper definition of the word in order to remove it from the list.

Blocks are added at a specified rate, and the rate is sped up as the player makes moves, so that making lots of bad moves ends up being counter-productive. Forcing the player to quickly make the best moves possible.

The amount of time I spent trying to find the right mixture of rates would have been much easier with STELLA.

Please check out the first draft version of the game. Note that this was made before I studied graphic design, so I apologize if looking at it causes you to have seizures. Due to a computer crash, I also lost the instructions and support file, and since I am making version 2, I will not be replacing them. So, basically, jump in and try and figure it out if you want to play it.

Alphabricks


And check out the instructional video on how I will be designing the flow of pieces in version 2.

STELLA Game Design Instructional Video