by firmly establishing the vision of the game early on will you have any chance of seeing
it carried out.
If you do not have too much trouble divining answers to these questions, you may
have written an entire page or more delineating the game’s points of differentiation.
But a page is too much. The focus that we are striving for needs to be succinct — a few
sentences, a short paragraph at the most. Some would go so far as to say it should be a
single sentence, though I personally prefer something slightly longer than that. What is
most important is that it be something you can quickly read to your colleagues without
their eyes glazing over. You should take whatever notes you have in answer to these
questions and whittle them down until they are short enough to fill only a few sen-
tences, a mid-sized paragraph. Keep only your most compelling ideas. You do not need
to list every single feature of the game, or even everything it does differently from
other games. Keep only what is most important to your vision of the game, only those
points which, if you took them away, would irreparably weaken the game.
You do not need to include the fictional setting of your game if that is not inherent
to the actual focus of the project. It may not matter if your game has a fantasy, science
fiction, or 1920s crime fiction setting if what is really at the heart of your game is
exploring the relationships between characters in a stressful situation or the subtleties
of siege warfare. If the setting is not vital to what you want to do with the game, leave it
out. Of course, your primary motivation for working on a project may be hopelessly
intertwined with the setting. If you actually started with a setting you wanted to
explore in a game, such as costumed superheroes in small-town America, and your
vision of the gameplay formed around the idea of these characters in a certain environ-
ment, then you will want to include it in your focus. The focus is exclusively for the
concepts that are most central to the game you are hoping to develop. All that should
remain in your focus are the elements without which the game would no longer exist.
Your focus should be something that grabs you viscerally, stirs your creative juices,
and makes you feel absolutely exhilarated. If it is not something that thrills you, even at
this early stage, it is going to be hard for you to muster enthusiasm when your deadlines
are slipping, your budget is skyrocketing, you still have three levels to create, and your
lead artist just left for another company. Chris Crawford touched on the idea of a game’s
focus in his book,The Art of Computer Game Design, as he was discussing what he called
a game’s goal: “This is your opportunity to express yourself; choose a goal in which you
believe, a goal that expresses your sense of aesthetic, your world view... It matters not
what your goal is, so long as it is congruent with your own interests, beliefs, and pas-
sions.” If you do not believe in your game, it is not going to be the best game you can
make.
Even if you are working under the constraints of a license, a domineering pub-
lisher, or a prima donna lead programmer, make your own goals for the project. If the
game you have been assigned to work on is not one in which you are interested, figure
out some way to transform it into something you can get excited about. No situation is
so bad that, given enough time, you cannot make something out of it that you find per-
sonally compelling. You want your focus to be something you will fight for intensely
until the game finally ships.
Much of this chapter is written in a fashion that implies that you are in charge of
your project, at least from a game design standpoint. Of course, this may not be the
Chapter 5: Focus 71