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Starting Practices for Game Design

Jan 25, 2016

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This chapter is from the book 

Players Making Decisions: Game Design Essentials and the Art of Understanding Your Players

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Summary

Analog games such as board and card games offer the interactivity that makes games compelling in a medium that offers easier prototyping and development than digital games.
A fertile place to start from when considering a game’s problem statement is to examine whether you want to start building around a theme or around specific mechanics.
It is important to try and understand the positive qualities of games you do not like along with the negative qualities of games you do like. You will rarely be making games for an audience that directly aligns with your tastes.
Whether you start with theme or mechanics, you need to start by determining some basic rules for your game in order to be able to create something that is testable. A great backstory is fine, but it does not help to create something testable.
By going through a battery of generalized opening questions, you can begin to narrow down your idea into a form that will allow you to construct a prototype that you can use to run playtests.

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