Games, oh really?

This article is about having a goal and a vision for your games and how that influences you as a game designer. Having goals and a vision for your game can have a huge impact on your final product. Why are these useful? It gives the game a direction and adds constraints to the product if used well. How to create these goals and visions is a tough and long process, it requires a great deal of research in what you like to do and in what you can do… So will they pay-off?

First of all, is there a difference between a vision and a goal? I think there is, and it can be found in the fact that a vision is much more general and can be interpreted in many, many ways. This is what sets the direction to your designs. The goal, on the other hand, is what narrows your vision, adds constraints to them. For example, if the vision of your next game would be ‘to create a multiplayer game with high dependency on each other’ it would be very broad. The concept could be used in a whole lot of of totally different games. To narrow it down, your goals could be ‘to create a story-intense game’, ‘to give the player interesting destructive choices’, ‘to let the player fully customize the characters’, etc.

Bear in mind that a game does not need a vision and a goal, but it does make it a lot easier for the team and the designers to have such for your game. Why, you ask? Let’s start with a direction for your game:

Imagine yourself working in a big team: everyone has his responsibilities for the parts that have to be done. Most of these parts require you to temporarily ‘narrow’ your vision, and a dangerous pitfall is forget what the product that you are working on has to achieve – and maybe you come up with things that do not fit that idea. A general vision or goal can bring you back to the level which tells you what you want to achieve. And this doesn’t just count for individuals, but for smaller parts of a team too. The different departments in a game studio, for example, are often specialized and focused on one aspect of the game, and what brings all these different focus points together is the direction and the vision of the complete game.

What this last thing means for a game studio is that everybody has his expectations of the final game, and this can be positive or negative for your final product. Positive if the vision of the game inspires the studio and is a little ambitious but achievable, negative if your vision is not challenging your studio in any way.

So having a direction for your game can help a lot, but how can constraints help you or your team to create better games?

A good example would be the indie games industry. Independent game studios have a sh*tload of constraints: time, money, resources, no business relations, marketing skills, you name it. But still every month, indie game developers manage to create games that reach the mainstream audience and sell thousands of them, some of them comparable to AAA titles. So how do they do it? How do they manage to create wonderful games with so much constraints?

I think the answer lies in the solutions of these problems: studios must come up with creative solutions to do ‘more with less’, to use everything they have got in the most optimal way. And that optimal way does not have to be the most straight forward way. Although constraints might sound like an inability at first, if you think again, it can also be used the other way around too: constraints can be used to help you focus on what is really, really, really important for your game. If you have no time and no money, but still want to make a great game, it has to be cheap and easy – and now that you know that you can use this inability to create a better game, you could even see it as an enormous challenge!

Once you realize that constraints can also help you instead of just blocking you, it’s like a new dimension opening to you. Now that you know where to focus on, you can see the bigger picture much easier and directly know what you can and can not do. If something doesn’t fully support your vision, leave it out! If something blurs the vision of your game, leave it out! If an adorable extra feature takes too much time for your programmers to make, leave – it – out!

The goals and vision of your game can simply be tools that you can use in your team. These tools give your team a direction and constraints. And if used well, these two small things might make the difference between being successful or not. So think about it: do you want to be successful?