This won’t be a long post, but I’d like to quickly share Rob
the Sky’s design motto and explain how that motto influences our day-to-day
design choices. We’re still working on our first published game, and we want to
make sure that this game and all our future games possess a consistent design
that fulfills our goals as developers. For this reason, all our game design
choices will refer back to one essential question: how do we empower our
players?
Empowering our players affects all aspects of design, from
the narrative to the gameplay to the user interface. So we’ve developed a few
key “pillars” that will support our overarching motto.
Meaningful Gameplay
We don’t think it’s fair to our players to limit them to
only gameplay or only narrative. We don’t subscribe to that kind of binary
thinking, and we believe that games can be an excellent vehicle for both meaningful
narrative and engaging gameplay. We feel that the best games use gameplay to
enhance and inform the narrative, and vice versa.
Strong Characters
We want our characters to feel real, to feel “human” (assuming
the character is human, of course). Helping our players suspend their disbelief
will give their actions and choices weight and meaning. An assembly of flat, boring characters won’t
allow our players to dive into the story like they want to. We also want to
keep our cast of characters diverse so that all our potential players may feel
represented.
Consequential Choice
We think a good game provides tradeoffs and significant
decisions. Consequential gameplay choices allow a player to express themselves
through their gameplay. However, we don’t believe in overloading our playerbase
with choices simply for the sake of “choice.” We strive to have every gameplay
decision offer competitive choices, instead of one clear path to victory.
Clear Design
If our players don’t know where to click, what to do, or why
their character just died, that’s on us. We want to ensure that we provide
clear feedback throughout the gameplay experience. That way our players will
know precisely what happened and what they need to do next. When feasible, we
want to give user interface choices to the player so that they can have a
comfortable amount of input.
Of course, these four pillars don’t cover every aspect of
design. But working toward them will help our games empower players and will
help us make the kind of games that we always enjoyed playing. Have you ever
played a game that exemplified one of these four pillars of design? Let us know
in the comments!
