Daria Geagăn reflects on her first year at EA, balancing her game design studies with her role as an Associate Quality Designer on the EA SPORTS FC Career Mode, and shares her key takeaways.
Always think of the players’ experience. Yes, you design the fun, but what is the feeling your intended audience is experiencing? Always try to write down your game ideas’ player segmentation, engagement, and desired experience. Who is this game for? What should the players experience as designed by you? What is their emotional journey?
There are finite and infinite games. Finite games are those we play to win, and infinite games are those we play to keep playing as long as possible.
Players love failing at the game they're playing. Yes, you read that right. Well, at least our brains do - as our brain activity is at its highest when we fail at a game. Here I’d like to insert a paragraph from a book I'm currently reading: “Positive failure feedback reinforces our sense of control over the game’s outcome. And a feeling of control in a goal-oriented environment can create a powerful drive to succeed. But without positive failure feedback, this belief is easily undermined. If failure feels random or passive, we lose our sense of agency—and optimism goes down the drain” (Reality Is Broken by Jane McGonigal)
Games, regardless of genre, at the very core are comprised of these main traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. Anything else is just a bonus. Set out your amazingly great idea of a game by starting from these pillars, upon which you add the rest.
Intrinsic reward is so much more satisfying and effective in boosting our happiness than extrinsic reward. Intrinsic reward is understood by us craving satisfying work, the experience of being successful, social connection and meaning. "Good games help us experience the four things we crave most—and they do it safely, cheaply, and reliably. Good games are productive. They’re producing a higher quality of life."
Play lots of games! Even play games that are outside of your comfort zone. I think that the most important thing you can do to become a good game designer is to work on your mindset: play lots of games and try to analyze them every time. What was a mechanic that evolved over time in that game? What were the outcomes and why? How was the main theme of the game supported by the gameplay? Do the puzzles in the game require a more seasoned player to solve them or not? Critical thinking while playing is essential.
Be careful when projecting your own personal needs and wants from a game onto your project. It's good to be very aware of the players’ needs and wants, but when you begin to insert your own into the game you’re making, you might enter a trap. Sometimes you might end up working on games that are a totally different genre that what you’d normally play, and while it's good to come up with ideas from a fresh-eyes perspective, you might end up fooling yourself by designing too much for yourself and not that genre’s player base.
It’s okay to borrow game mechanics. Going back to playing and analyzing lots of games, you need to understand that a game designer's main function is to invent, borrow, and assemble game mechanics to design the FUN. You enjoyed a game mechanic and thought it was amazing, and wish to use it in your project too, and that's okay too! But if you add to it and improve it with your own ideas, then you improve as a designer because you understand their rules and parameters. Yay to learning!
You need to be able to give and take feedback regardless of if your feelings are hurt. You will never know if your ideas are good or not if you never share them. You might think you have the best game idea floating inside your head, and so you spend resources and slave away working on your game, putting your blood, sweat, and tears into it. And when it releases not a single soul plays it. Put yourself and your ideas out there and be open to people ripping into them. This brings me to my next point:
You will fail a thousand, million, or even a billion times before you make ONE good game. This is something that has really stuck with me after a chat with Rami Ismail at Dev Talks this year. So, create, try to make games, and put them out there for everyone to play. Most of them will suck, but that just means that with each one of them, you are improving. One good example is the Five Nights at Freddy’s dev Scott Cawthon’s journey - before he made the successful franchise, he had about 70 failed games. (I recommend watching “Before FNAF: The Strange Beauty of Scott Cawthon's Other Games” by Solar Sands on YouTube)
To wrap up, I more than likely could have gone on to write even more, but I decided to share these few things that have truly fascinated me and improved the way I think and design. I am in no way a game design guru, but I do hope these things help you in your journeys.
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