a designer who is not actively working on the game during that period can truly be con-
sidered to have designed it. If this so-called designer simply typed up a 200-page design
document and handed it to the lead programmer to implement while the designer frol-
icked in Bora-Bora, the lead programmer was then responsible for making the
fundamental decisions that made the game fun or dull, stimulating or insipid, enjoyable
or tedious. When the designer is AWOL during the implementation process, the lead
programmer is probably the one who is actually designing the game.
So much of implementing your game design relies on personal “gut” reactions that
it is no wonder people have great difficulty designing games for people other than them-
selves. This is why so many games that are aimed at the “mass market” but which are
designed by people who are hard-core gamers turn out to be so terrible. The hard-core
gamer doing the design wishes she was working onGrim Fandangobut instead is stuck
working onAdvanced Squirrel Hunting. Even if she can overcome her contempt for the
project itself, she will probably have no idea what the audience who may be interested
in playingAdvanced Squirrel Huntingwants in its games. Often features will be added
to a game at the behest of marketing, over the protests of the development team. These
features are always the worst in the game, not necessarily because they are bad ideas,
but because the development team does not understand why they need to be added to
the game or how they might improve the gameplay experience. In the end, it is very
hard to design a good game that you yourself do not enjoy playing. If you do not like
playing it, it is unlikely that others will either, even if they technically fall into the demo-
graphic you were so carefully targeting.
The first step in designing a game is to get some portion of the gameplay working
and playable. Once you have a prototype that you can play and find to be compelling and
fun in the right quantities, you should step back and make sure that you have a firm
grasp on what makes it fun and how that can be extended to the rest of the game. With
that prototype as a model, you can now move on to make the rest of the content for the
game, replicating the fundamental nature of the gameplay while keeping the additional
294 Chapter 15: Getting the Gameplay Working
Game developers do
their best work when
working on games they
care about and enjoy.
The excellentGrim
Fandangoappears to be
a perfect example.