Nick Gravelyn

While reading through the XNA forums, I noticed this quote. I decided to respond partly because they’re talking about my game, but also because I see two design “philosophies” that I rather disagree with:

I was really wanting more to be going on in Bloc, like the different colors doing different things. I’ve done enough design to know it’s not hard having something come in from one side of the screen and leave on the other, so there is obvious room for improvement there, if for no other reason than to force more of a reaction from the player.

To me this sentiment oozes of a couple design philosophies I can’t stand:

1) Design to design.
2) If the design is easy to implement, it must be bad.

Now those are simplified a tad, but let me explain what each of these means to me:

1) Design to design. All too often I see people who cram more and more stuff into games. They try and over-analyze and over-design everything. The more that goes in the better. In their mind if you can do something, you should.

To me this is just a bad way to go. Putting things in just to have more things doesn’t make a game better. To the contrary it often makes the game a convoluted mess. The key phrase that tips this to me is when someone justifies their criticism with “if for no other reason than X”. If you have no good reason to implement the idea, then don’t implement the idea. If the idea fit well with the rest of the design, you wouldn’t need that clause as you would have a solid justification for adding the idea to the overall design.

To personalize this for Bloc, Bloc is a simple game. It was intended to be simple. We had ideas for blocks that rotated, did little waves across the screen, changed colors, and all mess of other things. But at the end of the day, all of those things just made the game frustrating. So we opted for simplicity.

2) If the design is easy to implement, it must be bad. If it didn’t take you days to figure out how to implement the design, you have room for improvement. If it looks technically simple, your design is flawed.

This is even more frustrating to me because, to me, the difficulty of implementation has nothing to do with the quality of design. You can have great designs that are easy to implement and you can have horrible designs that take ages to implement. Being a simple implementation is not an indication of a flawed design.

Again to personalize this, moving blocks across the screen is dead simple. It was the easiest part of making Bloc. But that’s how the game is supposed to be. That is the design. It’s ok if you don’t like it, but that doesn’t mean the design is inherently flawed; it just means the design didn’t resonate with you.

As mentioned above, we had all sorts of ideas that would complicate the movement patterns and make the blocks more erradic, but given the nature of the game and the already decently high learning curve of the controls, we decided that it was best for the design if we kept the gameplay itself decently simple.

Ultimately I think design means a little something different to each person out there. To me game design is all about finding those one or two great ideas you want to implement and building a design to emphasize those. For Bloc it was the color matching, both in game and on the game pad, that was our chief focus. So to not distract from that we chose to stick with a more basic implementation of the gameplay itself.