Game Design

"Thoughtfulness"

If there's one word that describes how I am trying to think about designing this game, it is just "thoughtfulness".

Think about how it feels to enter a given scene. 

Think about whether Bunny/Sonic/Sally feel fun to play.

Think about whether Bunny/Sonic/Sally have enough things to use their abilities on. 

Think about whether the player "gets" what you are trying to show them. 

Think about how you can teach the player about controls, exploration, story. 

Think about auditory feedback, visual feedback, feeling of progression. 

Think about whether menus feel responsive or "fun to navigate" (*).

There's so much to think about when it comes to game design that it may seem overwhelming. Because I have a very iterative personality, I tend to think of each of these "think about" ideas as a "pass". It doesn't always have to result in changes, but it at least gives me the opportunity to make some, if appropriate.

Each "pass" you do over your level or content, try to think about it as though you are a player who's experiencing it for the first time. This is easier to do if you have lots and lots of metrics of success, because each metric forces you to think about whether the design is "good", from a different perspective.

If you never consider anything "done", it makes it easier for you to feel comfortable going over things again and again and again, and improving little things more and more and more. If I were somehow not allowed to work this way, I think I would lose my mind.

(*) Try going back and playing FF7. I find these menus just incredibly satisfying. They are what largely inspired my own menu design.

Quality > Quantity

I guess another thing that I have learned about game design is that it's always better to have a game that is simple and doesn't have a ton of content, but where all of your content is polished, than it is to have a game with a ton of unpolished content. This may seem obvious when stated, but I feel like even professional developers don't follow this rule very well.

Modern games seem to have inflated enormously, with hundreds of hours of gameplay and DLC. Many modern RPGs seem to unironically demand that you grind for hours before feeling any joy or sense of accomplishment. Suffice to say, that's not my jam.

Besides breadth of content or hours of gameplay though, I believe that this philosophy of "quality over quantity" should also apply to game mechanics. I know how easy and commonplace it is for RPGs to overly focus on skill trees and complex battle systems, with all kinds of configurable systems for people to spend hours min maxing on. Call me a crotchety old man, but I want no part of that.

But, you might say: "Hey, didn't you add special mechanics per character? Isn't that adding complexity?"

What I started to realize before adding per-character mechanics was that your party's only method of interacting in the game world was via the battle system. Even if you could swap your walking sprite to Sally, for instance, it was effectively meaningless and had no real impact on the experience. This may result in characters becoming tokenized based on their battle stats (e.g. "This person is the tank, this person is the healer"), and would seemingly contribute to the dehumanizing, stat-obsessing JRPG clichè that I wanted to avoid in Sonic RPG.

For me, RPGs are about story, characters, and exploration. There's a reason why my inspiration for Sonic RPG was Super Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger, and not Final Fantasy XII or Morrowind-- I want a player's time being spent immersed in story and world exploration, not number crunching. Again, "thoughtfulness" applies here. I don't want to just mindlessly create a cookie-cutter JRPG experience. I want to carefully craft an interactive experience, and put clear intention into each part of that experience.

Learning Design

I have the benefit of having known and worked with a lot of really smart game designers. Thankfully, many of them are generous with their time and knowledge and contribute to amazing resources, like the  Extra Credits youtube series, which I highly recommend.

Check out this breakdown of how the original Super Mario Brothers level design works, it's life changing.

And when it comes to RPGs, which requires an even greater degree of exploration from the player, Extra Credits has a great video on this as well.

There's so much theory you can deep dive on when it comes to game design, and I think it helps give you the ability to think more about how you approach designing levels and content and how you present that content to players. That said, I suggest you try not to think about game design theory as informing you with "the correct approach" to game development. It's just another tool in your toolbox, and can help give you new and exciting ideas.

That covers design for now!