Conclusion

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Most beginning game designers simply borrow elements from successful games and adapt them to their own purposes. This is fine, and many experienced game designers make a career out of doing the same. Our goal, however, is to enable you to go beyond borrowing and begin innovating.

The game designers we admire are the ones who break conventions and go where other designers dared not tread. The advantage of computers is that improvements in technology often allow us to do things that were previously impossible. This gives the designer a unique chance to experiment with novel types of gameplay.

But don’t rely solely on technical advancements to open up new avenues of design. Many of the greatest designs come about through tireless experimentation. For example, take boardgames. Technically, they haven’t advanced much in the past two hundred years, but every so often, the top designers come up with games that break all the old rules or push the envelope in terms of creativity and gameplay. Look at interesting new boardgames like Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne for inspiration.

The same is true in the computer world. You’ll find that some of the most inventive games were designed on primitive systems. Sometimes limiting yourself to the basics helps you focus your ideas more clearly. With that in mind, it’s time to see if those ideas you generated actually work. This is called prototyping and playtesting—the subjects of our next two chapters.



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Game Design Workshop. Designing, Prototyping, and Playtesting Games
Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, & Playtesting Games (Gama Network Series)
ISBN: 1578202221
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 162

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