thread: 2009-09-14 : Subsystems
On 2009-09-15, Simon C wrote:
I like how you talk about games "calling for" mechanics. There's this thing that happens when I'm designing a game, and it happened especially strongly during writing "On Mighty Thews", where I can just kind of "see" the shape of the game in my head, and writing it down is the easy part. There's just one way that the game has to be in order for it to work, and you've just got to get it down and you're done. Sometimes different parts are harder to see than others, but usually when you see them you're like "Oh, of course it has to go like this", and then it's easy again.
That's the fun, easy, early part of design. The hard part is the later part where you're faced with all kinds of decisions like "do you get five traits, or six?" and there's an answer that's objectively better, but you won't know until you've played half a dozen times. Or worse, you find out that bits that in abstract seemed just right in practice conflict with each other, and you've got to make hard choices where the answers aren't obvious.
I'm good at the first part of game design, but because I'm lazy I really struggle with the second part.
