The "One page game design philosophy"

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about methods of game design for more interesting, simple flash games, and this is when I had a moment of inspiration after sitting around in the hot sun of a car par for an hour. I opened the back of a work book and decided to break the boredom ice by designing a game fundamentally simple in nature, in light of a lot of stuff I had played recently, but most of all, Noitu Love 2 by Joakim Sandberg. In a recent interview I watched with Sandberg, he discussed that his primary goal was to reduce the game down to its most basic, fun points, discarding extraneous features that he felt detracted from the ultimate goal of fun. In this instance, however, my goal wasn’t to create so much a game of the calibre of Noitu Love 2, but to reflect Sandberg’s principles of well implemented, integral features as a primary drive. My method proceeded thusly.

I limited myself to a single, ruled A4 page, not as a means to limit my creativity, but to reduce my design to its most important and central features. From there on I wrote whatever I felt was necessary, whether that be descriptions, lists or drawings; this should be whatever you consider important. I began with a brief statement of purpose since at this stage I hadn’t developed this style completely, but you may find some individual value in doing so. From there on I developed my ideas in a sort of systematic style where I took time to cement a central idea on paper, and then I worked out how it could be presented. My product was a sort of platformer where the character had a grappling hook that they could both use to swing on things, and to spring themselves off the ground, presumably there would be areas in which you were limited to either one of the abilities in an environment of perpetually increasing challenge, akin to that game where you played the stickman with the long, rope like arms that you swang off the jagged ceiling with, whatever it was called.

In hindsight, I don’t really have a lot to say about this particular technique since it is such a free, open style, all that must be involved is your ability to come up with a reasonable design brief on a single page. It will be rough at first, and you will often find yourself running out of space, but practice will be necessary, both for your ability to come up with an idea that will fit onto a page, and for the quality of the game idea itself.

In honour of this style, I didn’t write a blog entry longer than Atlas Shrugged this week.

Miles Newton – The Machination, creative director

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