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The Nature of Game Design in a Collaborative Environment

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Game design is one of those peculiar activities that are both inherently self-ish and self-less at the same time. On the one hand, there is the idea at the core of the design, the concept in its purest form. It’s not surprising, it’s an old friend, a fond memory that you cleave to; it’s been with you from the start after all. And then there’s the Player, the other to your self that you will be sharing this experience with. They’re an elusive bunch, surmised through testing and archetyping, but in the end, it’s really for them that you’re creating this for. There will be progress and false steps along the way, but you make things as ready as you can, preparing the game to face the world. In the end, a game lives or dies depending on how well you’ve sussed out your Players, and really gotten to know them.

But we, as designers, don’t often get out in front of our audience until the playtest phase, so having someone else as part of the discussion as early as possible, is a great resource to take advantage of. One beautiful thing about collaboration is that it’s like having this conversation before you engage with players; it’s a talk before the talk.

Now, this is not to say that collaborations are always a sure-fire way of hitting the sweet spot of game design; there’s always going to be pluses and minuses to any shared development process. But what does make or break a project is the environment in which the game is created. This is certainly true for any team, but even more so when groups of designers come together for a project. If we’re lucky, we get to work with the same folks on a regular basis, establish an easy communicative and stylistic rapport, and work towards a singular vision from the start of a new project. But in a collaboration, the method is in itself a mirror of the design process; balancing and playtesting lines of communication and style to find what works.

For myself as a designer, I prefer to start from a point of narrative certainty. If I’ve spun enough of the thematic threads before I begin, I feel as though I can weave together a more cohesive set of game mechanics right from the start. But if nothing else, there has to be a mood, or feel to the gameplay itself. When Alex and I first started on Grave Error, it was little more than a hidden-movement mechanic. But it was mechanic that was meant to live in an environment of paranoia and unspeakable alien horrors. So, right from the start there was a sense of the world that the Players would inhabit.  Now, there was no hint at that moment that the game would lean so heavily into storytelling. In fact, the game as originally sketched out, was fairly dense with mechanics. It quickly became apparent that in order to keep the design from collapsing under the weight of our separate design philosophies, we needed to take a step back and identify commonalities and tonal overlap that would allow the project to thrive. 

Part 2 will explore how we worked to achieve this.