More On Design From Feelings & A Look At Adaptation

Recently, I wrote on my blog about how I like to approach a game design - by focussing on a "feeling" of an "experience" that I want to communicate to the player - and I thought perhaps I should expand on some of those points.

Firstly, on reflection, I do rarely begin with just that "feeling". Often, I'll begin from a mechanic or narrative concept, like most other designers. When I do, however, the first thing I do is pare that thought down to its core feeling, what it is that makes that experience feel the way it does, and ask "how should the player feel right now?".

Once I have a handle on that, the next step is to ask "Why does the player feel this way?", which leads into "what can the game do to enhance/promote this feeling?". This is where this particular design methodology becomes a little flimsy, because I then have to begin building a game mechanic without anything to go on but a feeling - which, most of the time, means borrowing game mechanics from other games.

For an example of how this can turn out, check out the prototype I produced a few months back, "Balloon Balloon". (I swear, I will get back to work on it in a month or two!). This began, as you can tell from the blog entry, as a picture, then a poem, before finally becoming a game concept.

What makes this system both advantageous and challenging in development is in communication to the team. While I developed Balloon Balloon by myself, I have since spoken to an artist about it - and without a core "this is what happens" pitch, I just had to show them the picture & poem and explain my choices for the design mechanic and hope that they could get on board - but art history is filled with examples of multiple interpretations of a piece. Getting an entire team rallied around a single "feeling" is something I wouldn't want to have to do.

The idea to try developing a concept in this way wasn't entirely born from the Balloon Balloon experience. I also took a stab at one point at attempting to adapt a short story - in my case, HP Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" - into a game. I realised that, while adaptation from paper to cinema might be as simple as working out what bits of the story work visually and what bits don't, then reworking appropriately, history has proven that taking a single, solid narrative and inserting interactive sequences doesn't make for a proper adaptation. For this project, I took the approach of imagining what the protagonist/narrator of the story was feeling during the story, under the assumption that the author would expect us to feel something similar to this in the reading. By doing this, I ended up with a concept that was entirely different to what might have come about from directly translating the events of the story.

(for those interested, the design itself was lost - along with my 4th year dissertation - when I lost my precious USB pen, but it was roughly thus:

Entitled "Shadows Of Innsmouth", the game is set in the late 70s, when the player plays a young aspiring architect on his way to his first major pitch without any grand inspiration. Due to a travelling issue, he is forced to make a 24 hour stopover in the town of Innsmouth, a fishing town frozen in time for 50 years, and which hides a disturbing secret behinds its odd and unique architecture. The player was tasked with wandering the town for a day and a night, searching for inspiration for his project - but with every revelation (he could speak to townsfolk to get more information on the strange architecture around the town) he risked losing his sanity. The player's progress was marked by the main character's sketch pad, which would fill with ideas as the player collected inspiration.

I felt the experiment was a failure - although I was proud of the design, and thought it would be fun, it represented more of an interactive story experience than an actual game, mostly due to the linear nature of the narrative. I'll post on interactive stories vs games at a later date.)

I would think that game designs need not begin from a feeling as such, but if there is a point to take from this concept, it is this - at some point, the aim of a game is to deliver an experience of some kind to the player. When considering your core mechanic, it pays to sit and consider what the primary emotions involved in that experience are. You then have to do what people in almost every great creative enviroment do - what William Goldman called "killing your darlings". You have to look objectively at everything you're adding to the game and ask "does this promote or stand in the way of the core concept I am trying to communicate?". If the answer is that it stands in its way, acts as a distraction, or effectively works against that feeling, then - even if it is fun, even if people enjoy it, you have to question its effectiveness and worth to the game. After all, I like zombies, but do I need them in a romantic comedy? Perhaps, but you wouldn't add pirates to that film, or a terminator, even though those things are cool to see in a film. You only add what contributes to the pure experience you are trying to convey to the player.