Designing the game

 

Game development is a challenge – from thinking about every aspect to programming the various components. Even in the drafting stages, games are complex The game you’ll be making with this tutorial, Shooter, is a particular type of game with a set of well-defined limits around what it does when the user interacts with it. This conceptual map is called the game design.

questions to ask

When you design a game, there’s a set of questions you should ask yourself to begin to build the game’s design map in your mind.

• What kind of game is it?
• What is the game objective?
• What are the gameplay elements?
• What are the engineering elements?
• What art assets do you need?

This is a good starting list of considerations. You’ll find out more as we build Shooter together, but in general, if you don’t have at least the start of a design when you begin developing your game, you’ll likely find yourself completely overhauling your game during development, and that can be very expensive from a time standpoint; even more so if you’re paying someone to help you make your game or you’ve purchased art or tools you no longer need.

game design flowcharts

Creating a game design document helps alleviate potential pitfalls when developing your game; it standardizes the questions above and gets your answers out in front of others to better illustrate how your game works. There are many different ways to design a game, and the amount of content in the design varies greatly from game to game. Generally, the more fully you have the game designed, the better prepared you’ll be to understand and deal with changes to the game during development.
One potential way to design a game is to flowchart it, highlighting all the different paths through the game’s components a player would take. What can the player see, and what can they choose to do? When they choose something, what happens next?

This is the flowchart for Shooter – it starts at the top with “Launch Game”, and follows all the way down through the various components the player can choose.
A flowchart design is good for limited games. You can see how even for a small game like Shooter, the flowchart is getting big. However, the detail can be helpful in describing your game to others – to artists, programmers, and testers so they know what to expect and can work against the same expectations.
The flowchart above is a rough map of how we’ll create Shooter together. We won’t go exactly in order of how it’s flowcharted above, but you’ll see the various pieces being filled in as we work.
All that’s left now is to jump in and start building. Let’s go!