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to the best of my understanding—but please correct me if I'm mistaken—Miyamoto is not, and never really has been, what we would traditionally call a "game desig

to the best of my understanding—but please correct me if I'm mistaken—Miyamoto is not, and never really has been, what we would traditionally call a "game designer"—from what I can tell from reading numerous interviews, both with him and others who worked with him over the years, he's more like a Steve Jobs-type figure. he comes up with a broad interesting idea or set of ideas or even just general vibe, and then it's up to the programmers (and probably game designers nowadays) to figure out how to turn those ideas into an actual game. then he sees what they've come up with and gives feedback; rinse and repeat until the game ships. with regards to paper prototyping though, while I believe it can be a useful tool in certain situations, I pretty strongly believe that its usefulness is being vastly oversold to aspiring video game designers, these days. the best use for paper prototyping is when the game you're setting out to make strongly resembles an analog game—like a roguelite deckbuilder, or Fortune Street. but if you're looking to create a design for a video game that truly embraces what's unique about the medium—instead of just making a computer-adjudicated board game—then there really isn't a better way to do it than just biting the bullet and prototyping the gameplay with code. in my opinion, the best-designed video games are not ones where the design was thought through to completion ahead of time before implementation began, but rather, ones where someone had an idea or two and sat down and started programming its implementation—prototype or otherwise—and the eventual design of the end product was discovered through playing around with the combinatoric outcomes of interesting rules and mechanics that interact in nontrivial and often unforeseeable ways, seeing what works and what doesn't, seeing what's interesting and what isn't, and gradually arriving at something special and unique. many people disagree with my assessment here, because they want to believe that it's possible to create a design for a video game that is unique and interesting and special, whole-cloth, without ever writing a single line of code. but how can that even be possible? the main things that separate video game design from analog game design are 1.) the computer adjudicating the rules, and 2.) the much faster feedback loop between action taken action and observed outcome, from the perspective of the player. these are qualities inherent to the medium. you can choose to ignore them and design a more or less perfectly paper-prototypable game... but, if that's the case, perhaps you'd be better off designing a board game instead. just like how many AAA linear-narrative-focused games' narratives really would just work a lot better as a movie or TV series. now this isn't always strictly true of course—roguelite deckbuilders are fun as hell, even though they're generally very straightforward to paper-prototype. but again, of course these kinds of games lend themselves to paper prototyping, because they're really just essentially digital board games. and if that's all you ever want to make, then sure, go on ahead. but if you want to make something that embraces the qualities of the medium that make it stand apart from its contemporaries, then really, making a digital prototype is the only way to go. as a hackneyed example, consider Braid: its initial prototype had a functioning "infinite rewind" system, and its designer/programmer implemented more or less every idea he had (including World 1, the final level)... but much of the rest of the mechanics (such as World 4's "current point in time for all other entities in the level = the player character's x-position") only came about—were arguably discovered—through the act of implementation, as opposed being done in advance of implementation. if whether or not Braid was made hinged upon the perceived success or failure of preliminary paper prototyping, then it's quite likely it would never have been made. moreover, it is entirely possible to design a game through paper prototyping, and be reasonably satisfied with the design... only for you to then implement it and actually play it in the form of an actual video game, and find it to be underwhelming, unengaging, or otherwise completely unlike how you envisioned it with your abstracted paper prototype. for example, that page of 300 video game design ideas are likely mostly or entirely interesting at face value—but without being tested, are basically entirely meaningless. I just clicked on a random one: https://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=224 https://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=224 this is a cute idea, but without even testing it out myself at all I doubt it's actually very good at all. but hey, maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's the next Angry Birds, or something! I'm not faulting the author for posting it on their personal website, but really, it's nothing more than just a wholly untested, spontaneous idea jotted down in a notebook. until said idea is put into practice in the form of a playable video game prototype, there's no way of knowing whether it would actually be fun at all, or worthwhile to pursue developing further. but, to my point above: perhaps in building and testing a prototypical two-button FPS game, the designer might realize that their idea was utter garbage... except for some small aspect that they did not and could not foresee. perhaps it's entirely incidental to the "two-button FPS" game idea. maybe it's even just something as trivial as a bugged shader that produces undesired yet unexpectedly visually interesting output, or improperly-implemented movement mechanics that inspire a completely different, first-person-shooting-less idea for a game. conversely: if Vampire Survivors never existed, and you came to me with an idea for a single-stick no-button roguelite top-down shooter with barely-animated 2D sprites that look like they should be in a side-scroller instead, I would've thought your idea was mediocre at best, and not worth pursuing. but as it turns out, it's a great idea for a game, one that ended up spawning a whole subgenre—and anyone can see the appeal for themselves, just by playing it for only a few short minutes! paper prototypes can be useful for designing certain parts of certain types of games, but I completely and vehemently disagree that they're a useful tool for determining whether or not a broad, abstract video game design idea is worth pursuing further.

derefr 3y ago
> for example, that page of 300 video game design ideas are likely mostly or entirely interesting at face value—but without being tested, are basically entirely meaningless. You happened to pick one of the much less worked examples; and also one that I would argue really isn't a "game mechanic" in the way it's traditionally meant. Try https://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=131 https://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=131 or https://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=124 https://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=124. These are examples of game-mechanical systems — conceptual systems or rulesets from which derive a combinatoric flood of inspiration for possible challenges (as the application of those systems or rules), that in turn inform the entire scenario design of the game. The two-button thing is an interaction mechanic — which obviously isn't something you can paper prototype. Which is probably why it's just notes rather than a worked example. A worked example of an interaction mechanic would be interactive! > many people disagree with my assessment here, because they want to believe that it's possible to create a design for a video game that is unique and interesting and special, whole-cloth, without ever writing a single line of code. I don't know who believes this. I certainly don't. My argument is that you can discover novel, dense, combinatoric challenge spaces that arise from systems of rules, without writing a line of code. Spaces of scenario-element design. (These aren't games, though. They're the potential for games. Or rather, potentials for novel game [sub-]genres — novel kinds of challenges. You still have to actually build them to see whether it's possible to find interaction-mechanics that translate these conceptual challenges into fun real challenges.) And maybe you can't discover the challenge-space inherent to something like Braid, but like I said in my previous post, Braid is an "art game" — not the kind of thing that works well with paper prototyping. (More specifically, Braid is a modern art game: a game that is as much about the medium and its constraints as it is about some objective concept. Braid is to the computer platformer genre as Mondrian's works are to paintings.) Inexperienced game designers should not be attempting to make "art games" — as they don't yet understand the constraints of the medium they're operating under. My argument is that an inexperienced game designer who wants to really do game design, should do paper prototyping when doing initial ideation of game mechanics, because this will force them out of the rut of tinkering around inside Blender or Game Maker or RPG Maker or whatever — i.e. the thing that "game designer/developers" would do by default, which tends to lock them into genre and makes certain parts of game-mechanics-space more "available" than others (because those parts are available wholesale as libraries or as part of the runtime/framework; or because other people have already done things like that and so produced assets for something like that available in an asset store, etc.) Even though this prevents them from exploring some parts of game-mechanics space (e.g. the art-game parts), the parts that will be accessible to them through paper prototyping, will be parts less explored by most game designers, with much low-hanging fruit still left to pluck. And the fact that these parts of game-mechanics space are unexplored, will keep away the automatic bias that "designer/developers" have toward mechanics that are easy to implement. An experienced game designer doesn't need paper prototyping — they understand well the strengths and limitations of the greater "digital interactive medium", and so they can just imagine game mechanics into existence, and then go implement them. They have all the tools in their mental toolkit to know what it would look and play like, to implement something like Braid. So they can and should just go do that. Experienced designers would be wasting their talents on anything less! But nobody starts experienced. You have to get that experience somehow. And IMHO the fastest method is to sit down with arts-and-crafts stuff to generate some truly "outsider art" game-mechanics, and then turn around and push the medium as hard as you can to implement those mechanics. Maybe they'll be fun, maybe they won't; but you'll certainly learn a lot more about both the medium and about "what's fun" than if you were just exploring the part of game-mechanical challenge-space lit by the streetlight of your game-runtime of choice. > Miyamoto is not, and never really has been, what we would traditionally call a "game designer"—from what I can tell from reading numerous interviews, both with him and others who worked with him over the years, he's more like a Steve Jobs-type figure. he comes up with a broad interesting idea or set of ideas or even just general vibe, and then it's up to the programmers (and probably game designers nowadays) to figure out how to turn those ideas into an actual game. I mean, "coming up with a broad interesting idea or set of ideas" is exactly what I've been talking about here — designing the game mechanics, coming up with the systems that both define and constrain the game-elements. I'm not talking about "game design" as in writing a design document, defining the whole game on a top-down level. I'm talking about finding a thing that makes the game into the game that it is; ideating the concept or system that can end up defining a new game series, or a whole new game genre. Miyamoto does that. And I don't think he does it at a computer. (He probably mostly does it with his feet up on his desk, these days, since he's a very experienced designer at this point. But back when he designed Donkey Kong, he almost certainly designed it on paper. Especially because, for an arcade machine, the hardware to make the game possible to implement is designed in response to the game design!) The other thing Miyamoto is, though, is a product manager. He says "no" to things. And so the ideas of the developers and game designers working below a Miyamoto-led (or Miyamoto-produced!) project, go through this veto filter — the output of which is almost always a very Miyamoto-esque game design, however much or little micromanagement he did of it.

derefr 3y ago

> for example, that page of 300 video game design ideas are likely mostly or entirely interesting at face value—but without being tested, are basically entirely meaningless. You happened to pick one of the much less worked examples; and also one that I would argue really isn't a "game mechanic" in the way it's traditionally meant. Try https://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=131 https://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=131 or https://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=124 https://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=124. These are examples of game-mechanical systems — conceptual systems or rulesets from which derive a combinatoric flood of inspiration for possible challenges (as the application of those systems or rules), that in turn inform the entire scenario design of the game. The two-button thing is an interaction mechanic — which obviously isn't something you can paper prototype. Which is probably why it's just notes rather than a worked example. A worked example of an interaction mechanic would be interactive! > many people disagree with my assessment here, because they want to believe that it's possible to create a design for a video game that is unique and interesting and special, whole-cloth, without ever writing a single line of code. I don't know who believes this. I certainly don't. My argument is that you can discover novel, dense, combinatoric challenge spaces that arise from systems of rules, without writing a line of code. Spaces of scenario-element design. (These aren't games, though. They're the potential for games. Or rather, potentials for novel game [sub-]genres — novel kinds of challenges. You still have to actually build them to see whether it's possible to find interaction-mechanics that translate these conceptual challenges into fun real challenges.) And maybe you can't discover the challenge-space inherent to something like Braid, but like I said in my previous post, Braid is an "art game" — not the kind of thing that works well with paper prototyping. (More specifically, Braid is a modern art game: a game that is as much about the medium and its constraints as it is about some objective concept. Braid is to the computer platformer genre as Mondrian's works are to paintings.) Inexperienced game designers should not be attempting to make "art games" — as they don't yet understand the constraints of the medium they're operating under. My argument is that an inexperienced game designer who wants to really do game design, should do paper prototyping when doing initial ideation of game mechanics, because this will force them out of the rut of tinkering around inside Blender or Game Maker or RPG Maker or whatever — i.e. the thing that "game designer/developers" would do by default, which tends to lock them into genre and makes certain parts of game-mechanics-space more "available" than others (because those parts are available wholesale as libraries or as part of the runtime/framework; or because other people have already done things like that and so produced assets for something like that available in an asset store, etc.) Even though this prevents them from exploring some parts of game-mechanics space (e.g. the art-game parts), the parts that will be accessible to them through paper prototyping, will be parts less explored by most game designers, with much low-hanging fruit still left to pluck. And the fact that these parts of game-mechanics space are unexplored, will keep away the automatic bias that "designer/developers" have toward mechanics that are easy to implement. An experienced game designer doesn't need paper prototyping — they understand well the strengths and limitations of the greater "digital interactive medium", and so they can just imagine game mechanics into existence, and then go implement them. They have all the tools in their mental toolkit to know what it would look and play like, to implement something like Braid. So they can and should just go do that. Experienced designers would be wasting their talents on anything less! But nobody starts experienced. You have to get that experience somehow. And IMHO the fastest method is to sit down with arts-and-crafts stuff to generate some truly "outsider art" game-mechanics, and then turn around and push the medium as hard as you can to implement those mechanics. Maybe they'll be fun, maybe they won't; but you'll certainly learn a lot more about both the medium and about "what's fun" than if you were just exploring the part of game-mechanical challenge-space lit by the streetlight of your game-runtime of choice. > Miyamoto is not, and never really has been, what we would traditionally call a "game designer"—from what I can tell from reading numerous interviews, both with him and others who worked with him over the years, he's more like a Steve Jobs-type figure. he comes up with a broad interesting idea or set of ideas or even just general vibe, and then it's up to the programmers (and probably game designers nowadays) to figure out how to turn those ideas into an actual game. I mean, "coming up with a broad interesting idea or set of ideas" is exactly what I've been talking about here — designing the game mechanics, coming up with the systems that both define and constrain the game-elements. I'm not talking about "game design" as in writing a design document, defining the whole game on a top-down level. I'm talking about finding a thing that makes the game into the game that it is; ideating the concept or system that can end up defining a new game series, or a whole new game genre. Miyamoto does that. And I don't think he does it at a computer. (He probably mostly does it with his feet up on his desk, these days, since he's a very experienced designer at this point. But back when he designed Donkey Kong, he almost certainly designed it on paper. Especially because, for an arcade machine, the hardware to make the game possible to implement is designed in response to the game design!) The other thing Miyamoto is, though, is a product manager. He says "no" to things. And so the ideas of the developers and game designers working below a Miyamoto-led (or Miyamoto-produced!) project, go through this veto filter — the output of which is almost always a very Miyamoto-esque game design, however much or little micromanagement he did of it.